JD Salinger was standing at the kitchen window when I called at his remote farmhouse in the hills of New Hampshire almost exactly a year ago.
He had just turned 90 and the question as to whether his famous reclusiveness might finally have "mellowed with age" had proven irresistible.
It had not, although his outburst upon seeing me - it sounded like "Oh, no!" - was possibly his last, and strangely fitting, remark to the media.
He was replaced at the window by his wife, Colleen, an attractive blonde who was 40 years his junior. We chatted briefly about my journey up there - she somehow knew my car had got stuck in the snow the previous night - before politely informing me, with apologies for a wasted trip, that the author's desire for privacy was not about to end now. So goodbye.
In an email to the local newsletter on Thursday, one day after he died at the age of 91, Mrs Salinger thanked her neighbours in the 1,600-strong community of Cornish for the "protective envelope" they gave her husband after he moved there in 1953, adding that she hoped they would continue to do the same for her.
She is not wrong in speculating that the interest in the Salinger household is unlikely to wither with her husband's death.
It is more likely to grow as Salinger watchers look for answers to the great mystery of his later years: what lies in his safe, waiting to be published.
A former girlfriend said Salinger, who last had a book published in 1963, wrote regularly every morning and that she had seen manuscripts of two finished novels and stacks of full notebooks. A neighbour said Salinger, who once admitted he wrote simply for writing's sake, had told him he had written 15 unpublished novels.
The author's daughter, Margaret, said he kept a detailed filing system of his writing, with red marks for work that could be published "as is" and blue for copy that needed editing.
Some question whether any of it will be worth publishing. The novelist Jay McInerny said he feared it might be like Salinger's last published piece - a 1965 short story for the New Yorker magazine - which he described as "an insane epistolary monologue, virtually shapeless and formless".
Salinger's literary representatives have so far said nothing but disagreements between Margaret and her brother, Matt, are unlikely to expedite matters. The latter attacked his sister's memoir, in which she revealed that their father drank his own urine, spoke in tongues and had a frightening control over their mother, insisting that he "grew up in a very different house".
Predictably, the writer's neighbours have little to contribute on the literary mystery. Salinger continued to appear around town - at the supermarket, the library and the local coffee shop - but there was a strict understanding that nobody was to acknowledge his fame.
In return for the town's protectiveness, Salinger would invite high school pupils to his house once a week, according to a local restaurant waitress.
But when I visited, the code of silence was clearly disintegrating, with neighbours happy to supply anecdotes and theories about "JD". He was - it was commonly agreed - respected rather than liked. Local tolerance for his famous brusqueness was clearly wearing thin.
As for socialising, the only event he appeared still to patronise regularly in later years was a monthly turkey dinner at the local Universalist Unitarian church - a multi-religion denomination which would have appealed to a man who tried out various faiths.
"Nobody is supposed to acknowledge that he's there. You just treat him like he's just another normal person," said Kay Cavendish, a regular church goer.
Robert Dean, who runs Salinger's favourite café, confirmed that even the locals had to be careful how they treated him.
"The rule is that if you have to talk to him, make sure you never acknowledge that he is famous," he said. "If you see him, you know not to talk to him unless he talks to you. He's not one for chitchat."
To read The Catcher in the Rye
To read about more him
source./www.telegraph.co.uk//wikipedia.org
