The last story Salinger published in 1945 was “I’m Crazy,” which ran in Collier’s on December 22. For the story, Salinger used as narrator Holden Caulfield himself, the same Holden Caulfield he had invented for “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” the story that the New Yorker had bought but still not published. It never becomes clear in the canon of Salinger’s work if the Holden of these two stories is the same Holden who is missing in action in the Babe Gladwaller stories. In fact, there is some evidence the Holdens are so different Salinger may have rethought the character when he took him out of the Gladwaller stories to make him into a character who could stand on his own. Even so, in “I’m Crazy,” Holden recounts how he was kicked out of boarding school, and, in doing so, he gives some brief insights into his personality. “Only a crazy guy would have stood there”—on a hilltop in the cold with a thin jacket on, what he’s doing at the start of the story. “That’s me. Crazy. No kidding, I have a screw loose.” From there, he goes home unannounced to his parents’ apartment in New York; when he arrives, he wakes his younger sister Phoebe from a dead sleep. The brief ensuing conversation recalls the one Babe has with his younger sister Mattie when he wakes her in “Last Day of the Last Furlough.” The parallel between Mattie and Phoebe is too obvious to miss. In fact, they are one and the same—prepubescent girls on whom Salinger’s mature narrators fix their unaltered, and perhaps even excessive, attentions.
Salinger returned to New York in May 1946 at just about the time he finished his Defense Department job. Of course, Salinger brought with him Sylvia—the young woman with whom he had sought solace and had married in the throes of a post-combat nervous collapse. Whatever had brought them together in Europe, however, was apparently not enough to keep them together in America. Shortly after Salinger and his new wife traveled to New York, Sylvia realized she could not live with him in the United States and abruptly returned to Europe. Later, when he tried to explain the various forces that brought them together, Salinger would say they had gotten married partially because the two of them had a telepathic connection. Indeed, they were so in tune with each other, Salinger later told a friend, that occasionally they knew at the same time when a particular event was about to take place.
In the end the connection between the two of them must have been weaker than what they had imagined, since no sooner had Sylvia gotten back to France than she filed for and was granted a divorce from the man to whom she had been married for barely eight months. After this, Salinger found himself once again living with his parents.
It must have seemed to him as if his life was never going to change. Here he was—one more time—living at home, unsure about what to do next. However, because he had gone to war, because he had seen what he had seen, he was different. There was no question that he had been affected by his years in the Army and his experiences in war. At night, instead of staying at home and reading or writing as he had done in the past, he started to go out, often ending up in Greenwich Village. Known for its funky bars and jazz clubs, the Village was the kind of place where aspiring writers, singers, and actors would while away the evening hours and meet other young people like themselves.
Perhaps because he was trying to make a new life for himself, Salinger did things he had never done before. He started to work out with barbells to beef up his lanky body, probably a carryover from the exercise program he had been forced to maintain in the Army. He started to study Zen Buddhism, a stark departure from the Jewish and Catholic religions he had been exposed to during his youth. Zen Buddhism would become a central part of his life and remain so for years to come. While he studied Zen, while he hung out in Greenwich Village, Salinger also dated a succession of young women, no doubt in an effort to forget about the brief marriage to Sylvia that had ended in disaster.
Salinger cultivated his nightlife. He often went out to clubs, especially the Blue Angel and the Reuben Bleu. He regularly had dinner at a variety of restaurants; one of his favorites was Renato’s, an Italian place where he routinely had clams and frogs’ legs. On Wednesday nights, he was part of a small-stakes poker group that met in the Charlton Street apartment of Don Congdon, a Collier’s editor. Mostly, though, Salinger enjoyed Village society. One friend he had during this period was A. E. Hotchner, a struggling writer who would go on to have a successful career as a journalist and novelist. A fellow member of the Congdon poker group, Hotchner frequently accompanied Salinger to a bar for a beer or two following the game.
“Jerry had written a short story, ‘Holden Caulfield on the Bus,’ which the New Yorker had rejected,” Hotchner later wrote, “but he talked endlessly about how he would rework it and how eventually they would realize that it was a new kind of writing and publish it. He had read ‘Candle in the Poolroom Window,’ and another short story of mine, ‘An Ocean Full of Bowling Balls,’ both of which he found amusing, but he was nevertheless appalled that I would waste my time writing about something that was not connected with my life. ‘There is no hidden emotion in these stories,’ he said. ‘No fire between the words.’” What impressed Hotchner, as he would write, was Salinger’s “complete confidence in his destiny as a writer—a writer he was and a writer he would always be, and, what’s more, an important writer.”
From what Hotchner reports, then, it seems fair to infer this: Much, if not all, of Salinger’s writing—at least after his return from the war—was, to a significant degree, autobiographical.
Seymour Glass, Etc.
1
On the morning of November 19, 1946, Salinger sat at his desk in his bedroom in his parents’ apartment and typed a note to William Maxwell at the New Yorker. As he composed the note, he was beside himself with joy. After holding “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” for five years—so long Salinger had concluded it was never going to run—the editors had suddenly changed their minds and decided to use it after all.
Salinger couldn’t believe it! His excitement suffuses the note he typed to Maxwell. He would promptly make all the minor editorial changes Maxwell wanted, Salinger said—there were not many of them—the instant he finished what he was doing. At present, he was in the middle of typing, in duplicate with carbon paper, a seventy-five-page story called “The Inverted Forest” he had been working on for the last three months. It was one of the longest stories Salinger had ever attempted, so he wanted to put it behind him—he could do that in the next day or so—before he moved on to “Slight Rebellion Off Madison.” Oddly enough, in his note to Maxwell, Salinger told him he was going to have his agent send along a new story to the magazine, but it was not “The Inverted Forest.” It was something called “A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All.”
As soon as he finished typing “The Inverted Forest,” Salinger made the changes to “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” which the New Yorker published on December 21. The story may have been slight—it ran only four pages in the magazine—but there it was in the one publication Salinger respected more than any other. Salinger’s work had appeared in some of the best periodicals in the country: Collier’s, Story, the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire. But it wasn’t until he saw a story of his in the pages of the New Yorker that he believed he had finally made it as a writer. What’s more, publishing “Slight Rebellion . . .” was particularly satisfying to Salinger since he felt a special connection to the story’s autobiographical material. After all, Salinger had once made just such a late-night telephone call from a bar to a girl like Sally when he was Holden’s age.
The appearance of “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” helped attract interest in another one of Salinger’s current enterprises, for Burnett and Salinger had decided that during 1946 they would finally do what they had been talking about for some time and publish a collection of Salinger’s stories. Burnett would release the book through Story Press’s Lippincott imprint. After much discussion, it was determined that the book’s content would be made up from the following stories: “The Daughter of the Late, Great Man”; “Elaine” (which had appeared in Story),
“The Last and the Best of the Peter Pans”; “Both Parties Concerned” (Saturday Evening Post); “The Long Debut of Lois Taggett” (Story); “Bitsy”; “The Young Folks” (Story); “I’m Crazy” (Collier’s); “Boy Standing in Tennessee”; “Once a Week Won’t Kill You” (Story); “Last Day of the Last Furlough” (Saturday Evening Post); “Soft-Boiled Sergeant” (Saturday Evening Post); “The Children’s Echelon”; “Two Lonely Men”; “A Boy in France” (Saturday Evening Post); “A Young Man in a Stuffed Shirt”; “The Magic Foxhole”; “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” (New Yorker); “What Got Into Curtis in the Woodshed”; and “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls.” (No mention was made that the last story had the same title as one written by A. E. Hotchner. Hotchner would later imply that he had come up with the title first.)
According to internal notes at Story Press, “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls” was supposed to appear in Harper’s Bazaar. Also, according to these same notes, an advance of one thousand dollars had been negotiated for the book, which was to be called The Young Folks. In addition, a list had been compiled of established authors Story Press would contact about providing endorsements for the book; that list included Jesse Stuart, Whit Burnett, Stuart Rose, William Maxwell, William Saroyan, and, maybe, Ernest Hemingway. Whoever was making these internal notes—and one assumes it was Burnett—offered this observation: Salinger had a “second book, novel, one third done.” The plan was simple, then. Story Press would publish The Young Folks, establishing Salinger’s name as a book author; after that, it would bring out his novel.
When Burnett submitted The Young Folks to Lippincott, however, Lippincott turned it down, even though Burnett had already made an implicit commitment to Salinger to publish the book. Since Burnett could not do the book without Lippincott’s approval, he had no choice but to reject it. To inform him of this, Burnett set up a meeting with Salinger, which took place at the Vanderbilt Hotel in Manhattan. It was not a pleasant occasion. As soon as Burnett broke the news, Salinger got furious that he had been led to believe The Young Folks was going to be published when, as it turned out, it wasn’t. “Lippincott had the final veto on any book we brought in,” Burnett later wrote about the ordeal. “They put up the publishing money, and all we could do was take their final judgement if they turned the book down.”
That was the line of reasoning Burnett offered to Salinger that day at the Vanderbilt. It did no good. Salinger was livid over being misled, and for that he blamed Burnett. Naturally, this misunderstanding changed the nature of Salinger and Burnett’s relationship permanently. Salinger had trusted Burnett in the past; after the Young Folks disaster, he could not trust him anymore. Sadly, Salinger would ultimately conclude the actions Burnett and Lippincott took were representative of those that publishers and editors take every day. While most writers learn to accept those practices, Salinger never would. Eventually, unable to deal with them any longer, he would turn his back on publishing altogether.
In January 1947, not long after “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” appeared in print, Salinger decided to leave his parents’ apartment once and for all. He moved from Manhattan to Tarrytown, an upper-middle-class community in Westchester County, where he rented a small garage apartment. The living arrangements in Tarrytown were far different from his parents’ ritzy Park Avenue apartment, but at least he was on his own and not living under his father’s influence. Salinger remained in the garage apartment for much of 1947—a year when he wrote a great deal but published very little, only two stories, as few as in any year before.
The first was “A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All,” which came out in Mademoiselle in May after the New Yorker turned it down. At the time, Mademoiselle, while it had as its target audience college-age young women, was known both for publishing quality writing and for discovering the early work of such writers as Truman Capote, Sylvia Plath, and Carson McCullers. So, even though the story was not in the New Yorker—the magazine in which Salinger wanted all of his work to appear—it still had a home that would let it reach a large and admiring audience. In addition, this publication marked one of the last times Salinger provided a contributors’ note to a magazine. “J. D. Salinger does not believe in contributors’ columns,” the note read. “He did say, however, that he started to write at eight and never stopped, that he was with the Fourth Division and that he almost always writes of very young people—as in his story [on] page 222.”
Set in early December in 1941, just before the start of World War II, the story features Barbara, an eighteen-year-old young woman who, at the suggestion of her fiancé who wants her to go away for a rest, takes a cruise on a ship named the Kungsholm. (That was the name of the ship on which Salinger had worked just before entering military service, a clue that much of the information in the story, and maybe even the plot itself, is autobiographical.) On the cruise Barbara meets a twenty-two-year-old young man, Ray Kinsella. He has recently dropped out of college, he is now waiting to join the Army, and he currently works as the cruise’s tournament director—all unmistakable references to Salinger’s own life. When Ray and Barbara go on shore one night in Havana, they fall in love, which complicates Barbara’s life since she’s engaged. The story ends with Barbara standing in her pajamas and bathrobe in the early-morning darkness near the port-side rail as she looks out onto the water below and tries to decide what to do. “The fragile hour was a carrier of many things,” Salinger wrote, “but Barbara was now exclusively susceptible to the difficult counterpoint sounding just past the last minutes of her girlhood.”
Sometimes in the work of a writer, especially one who relies on his own life for source material, the truth is obvious. Ray is a character clearly based on Salinger. He falls in love with Barbara, a young woman who is beautiful, sensitive, and intelligent. Beyond that, Ray is attracted to her, it is implied, in part because she is “just past the last minutes of her girlhood.” Judging by the subject matter of his stories, this seems to be the life stage of young women that most appealed to Salinger—that juncture where the young woman is passing from adolescence into womanhood. There was something about a young woman making that passage that Salinger found endlessly engaging—on an emotional, spiritual, and sexual level.
(This particular story, based on an obscure incident in the writer’s life, had literary repercussions years later. The novelist W. P. Kinsella, in his most famous work, Shoeless Joe, names his central character Ray Kinsella, joining the Salinger character to himself. In the novel, Ray kidnaps J. D. Salinger and takes him to a baseball game. When the book was turned into the film Field of Dreams, the Salinger character was replaced with a fictional reclusive novelist played by James Earl Jones.)
The second story Salinger published in 1947 was “The Inverted Forest,” which appeared in the December Cosmopolitan. The story concerns a genius poet who, after he falls in love with and then marries a young woman, loses himself in “the inverted forest”—his imagination. “To say that this short novel is unusual magazine fare is, we think, a wild understatement,” the Cosmopolitan editors said in a disclaimer they ran before the story. “We’re not going to tell you what it’s about. We merely predict you will find it the most original story you’ve read in a long time—and the most fascinating.” As things turned out, because it was long on meaning and short on plot, “The Inverted Forest” was perhaps the first example of what would happen to Salinger’s fiction in the future when he came to rely more on insight than he did on action.
At about this same time, Salinger wrote a story that would prove to be one of his best. He had recently moved from his garage apartment in Westchester County to a studio in a barn in Stamford, Connecticut. Perhaps it was the move that gave him a new energy that came through in this story, or perhaps it was the fact that in his work he had become willing to deal with the nervous breakdown he had had following the war. No matter what the catalyst was, the end result for Salinger was an exceptional piece of short fiction. Salinger knew he had written an extraordinary story as s
oon as he finished it. So did his agent, who sent it to the New Yorker, where the editors, impressed with the vividness of the writing and the inventiveness of the story’s plot, accepted it at once. In fact, because of the singular quality of the story and because Salinger had published so much in such a short time he was coming to be known as one of the up-and-coming short-story writers of his generation, the New Yorker gave him something the magazine called a first-rejection contract. This meant Salinger was paid a yearly retainer of several hundred dollars to submit each new story to the magazine; for those stories the editors accepted Salinger would be paid a higher rate than he had been paid in the past. In exchange for this financial consideration, the New Yorker had the right of first refusal on any story Salinger wrote; only after the magazine rejected a story could Salinger submit it elsewhere. The story that got Salinger his first-rejection contract, the story that would permanently change his standing in the literary community, was a peculiar, upsetting piece he had originally called “A Fine Day For Bananafish” before he changed the title to “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” And it had as its narrator a complex, unusual, and unquestionably disturbed young man by the name of Seymour Glass.
Salinger Page 9
