Salinger

by Paul Alexander

  Salinger had not been in a creative-writing class since he had finished Burnett’s course at Columbia University, until one day in 1949 when, as a favor to a friend, he found himself sitting in a classroom as a guest lecturer at Sarah Lawrence College, then an all-girls school located twenty minutes by train north of Manhattan in the wealthy “bedroom” community of Bronxville, New York. Perhaps he had gone there because the Columbia experience had been so positive for him. Sitting in the classroom, he knew he had made a mistake.

  He looked out at the faces of the girls, who were bright and energetic and full of questions. He was the one who felt uncomfortable about what he was having to say in his role as guest lecturer. How different it was for Salinger to be the teacher instead of the student. The longer he sat there the more he decided that, in place of teaching, which required him to “label” writers, what he should do was simply stand up before the class and shout at the top of his lungs the names—and just the names—of the writers he loved. For Salinger, that list would have included Kafka, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Proust, O’Casey, Rilke, Lorca, Keats, Rimbaud, Burns, Emily Brontë, Jane Austen, Henry James, Blake, and Coleridge. And these were just the names of the dead writers he admired.

  But he didn’t stand up and shout any names. He agonized through the class, then left. Needless to say, he never went back to Sarah Lawrence, or any other college or university, for that matter. In fact, after this episode, Salinger refused ever to appear in a similar setting again. As a result, Salinger’s career as a guest lecturer, something most writers do either to make money or build an audience or both, consisted of one appearance only.

  In Westport, Salinger focused on writing his novel, which he had decided to call The Catcher in the Rye. He did leave his work long enough to make a few friends, who knew all about the novel. “During Salinger’s brief stay in Westport, we became fast friends,” said Peter DeVries, a friend and New Yorker colleague of Salinger’s. “I knew at the time that he was writing the book, and I was enormously interested in the idea, without ever dreaming that I was being made privy to the early workings-out of a classic. I remember saying that it all sounded very wonderful, but couldn’t he think up a more catchy title?”

  These days, however, Salinger had more on his mind than literature. Earlier in the year, not long after “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” appeared in the New Yorker, Samuel Goldwyn bought the story’s film rights—the first time a Hollywood producer had purchased the rights to one of Salinger’s stories. For much of 1949, Goldwyn and his creative team in Hollywood had worked on the picture, which was scheduled to be released in early 1950.

  1950

  1

  On January 21, 1950, Samuel Goldwyn Studios released My Foolish Heart, the motion picture based on “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut.” To qualify it for Academy Award consideration, the picture had been shown on screens in New York and Los Angeles during late December 1949, and was being released nationwide.

  During the entire creative process that resulted in a finished picture, Salinger had no input whatsoever. Goldwyn’s creative team took his story and turned it into a picture that ended up having almost nothing to do with the original short story on which it was based. That creative team was headed by Goldwyn himself, the legendary independent producer who went on to have his own studio. Goldwyn had bought the rights to “Uncle Wiggily” at the suggestion of Julius and Philip Epstein, the team (they were twins) who had written the screenplays for, among other pictures, Mr. Skeffington and Casablanca. Once the Epsteins had finished the script for My Foolish Heart, Goldwyn hired Edith Head to design the picture’s wardrobe, and Mark Robson, then known for Home of the Brave, to direct a cast that would include Susan Hayward, whom Goldwyn got on loan from Universal, and Dana Andrews, whom he had used in previous pictures. Finally, Goldwyn commissioned Victor Young to compose a theme song to be entitled, appropriately enough, “My Foolish Heart.” Lilting and lovely, the song was a quintessential movie ballad and, after the picture’s release, would eventually become an American popular standard.

  As soon as Salinger saw the finished picture, he hated it. In his short story, the action takes place mostly in the living room of a house in Connecticut with two old college roommates—Eloise and Mary Jane—sitting around drinking highballs and smoking cigarettes. What action there is focuses on the comings and goings of Eloise’s young daughter, Ramona, whose presence forces Eloise to realize she is in a loveless marriage to a man she doesn’t like. There is an air of quiet despair about the story as Salinger criticizes the very lifestyle—that of the Eastern WASP—he, in some ways, had become a part of. However, motion pictures being what they are, even Goldwyn’s team, composed of some of the top talent in Hollywood, could not have gotten much more than a short film out of Salinger’s story. What had to happen was the inevitable: characters, scenes, subplots, and dialogue had to be added. To Salinger’s story Goldwyn’s team added flashbacks to, among other times, Eloise’s boarding-school years, the months Eloise dated her true love Walt, and the day Walt died in an airplane crash—the event that caused her to enter her unhappy marriage. Beyond this, Goldwyn’s team created new characters, most notably those of Eloise’s mother and father, characters who are not even mentioned in Salinger’s story. But what was most egregious was this: Manipulating tone and emotional content, Goldwyn’s team somehow turned Salinger’s bitter indictment of the Connecticut WASP into a picture that was so sentimental, so unabashedly maudlin, that one critic called it a “four handkerchief” tearjerker.

  In fact, most if not all of the critics attacked My Foolish Heart. “Every so often there comes a picture which is obviously designed to pull the plugs out of the tear glands and cause the ducts to overflow,” Bosley Crowther wrote in an unfavorable review in the New York Times. “Such a picture is Samuel Goldwyn’s latest romance, My Foolish Heart.” In the New Yorker, John McCarten was even more biting. McCarten contended that the picture was so “full of soap-opera clichés” it was “hard to believe that it was wrung out of a short story . . . that appeared in this austere magazine a couple of years ago.” However, no one could have despised the picture as much as Salinger did, which was ironic since, early on in his career, he had dreamed of selling his stories to Hollywood, even going so far as to write one, “The Varioni Brothers,” to attract the interest of a particular star. But My Foolish Heart ended that. Salinger detested the picture so much he never had anything to do with Hollywood again. “In the future,” says A. Scott Berg, the author of the definitive biography of Samuel Goldwyn, “people would try to get the film rights to The Catcher in the Rye for years, and the answer from Salinger was always the same. ‘No, no, no,’ he would say through his agent, ‘I had a bad experience in Hollywood once.’”

  2

  In the career of J. D. Salinger, 1950 would be a pivotal year. It was during this year that Salinger brought into its final stages his novel about Holden Caulfield. He had been talking and thinking about the book for much of the decade of the 1940s; he had even written and published stories about Holden. In 1950, however, he finally finished the book.

  In February, while he was still reeling from what he considered to be the humiliation of My Foolish Heart, Salinger wrote to Lobrano to tell him he had cut six pages from a story on which he was working for the New Yorker. “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor” was longish, passionate, unique, and it would become one of Salinger’s most enduring stories. Indeed, some readers sensed its importance as soon as it appeared in the magazine on April 8, 1950. Sometimes, as was the case here, a writer produces a “signature” story, one that crystallizes exactly what the writer is trying to say in his work even as it stands as a perfect blending of that author’s style and subject matter. For Salinger, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” had been such a story. In it, he invented a compelling and original character in Seymour Glass; he also created a young female character, Sybil, on whom the story’s main character lavishes attention so intensely one comes to quest
ion the very nature of that affection. Through these characters, Salinger dealt with a topic that had singular meaning to him—the devastating emotional effect war can have on a person. This particular combination of ingredients for a story was obviously too appealing for Salinger not to use again as he did in “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor.”

  The story begins with suggestions that it may be autobiographical. The story’s narrator—a first-person narrator—thinks back to April 1944 when he was stationed in Devon, England, as an intelligence officer in a regiment that was preparing to be a part of the Allied invasion of Europe. Then, one day, he happens into a church (Salinger often went to the Methodist church in Tiverton) and watches the choir practice of a group of children, one of whom catches his eye. She is “about thirteen” with “straight ash-blonde hair of ear lobe length,” “blasé eyes,” and a voice that is “distinctly separate from the other children’s voices.” Later, when the girl and her younger brother go across the street to a tearoom where the narrator has gone as well, the girl, for no apparent reason, joins the narrator at his table. While they speak, the girl asks the narrator questions that are unusual for a thirteen-year-old. “Are you married?” is one. “Are you deeply in love with your wife?” is another. When the narrator remains silent, the young girl speaks instead. “I purely came over because I thought you looked extremely lonely,” she says. “You have an extremely sensitive face.” Then the young girl reveals her name—Esmé. When the narrator tells her he is a writer, she asks him to write a story for her—a story about squalor. Finally, after Esmé leaves with her brother, the narrator becomes inexplicably moved. “It was a strangely emotional moment for me,” he observes, without ever saying why.

  Next, Salinger shifts forward in time to recount an episode involving a sergeant—the unnamed narrator called Sergeant X. It is strongly implied that the unnamed narrator is Sergeant X, and, because there are so many details similar to Salinger’s life, the further implication is that Sergeant X is Salinger himself. We’re introduced to Sergeant X in Bavaria only weeks after the war ended in Europe. Because Sergeant X is “a young man who had not come through the war with all his faculties intact,” he has been interned in a hospital (as Salinger himself had been); now, released, he is staying in a room where he is visited by Corporal Z, his “jeep partner and constant companion from D-Day straight through five campaigns in the war.” (Sergeant X’s tour of duty is distinctly similar to Salinger’s.) “Did you know the goddam side of your face is jumping all over the place?” Z says to X. He goes on to mention a curious incident, a day in Valognes when X shot a cat. Furious, X insists that he killed the animal because “that cat was a spy.” The episode ends with X sitting in the room alone looking at a letter Esmé sent him thirty-eight days after they met. Finally, as he peers at the letter, X suddenly feels sleepy. “You take a really sleepy man, Esmé,” the episode (and story) concludes, “and he always stands a chance of again becoming a man with all his fac- with all his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s in tact.” Of course, it is obvious that “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor” is the story the narrator wrote for Esmé.

  As soon as the New Yorker published “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor,” Salinger began to hear from readers. On April 20, he wrote to Lobrano from Westport to tell him he had already gotten more letters about “For Esmé” than he had for any story he had published. The reason the story would be perceived as being so successful, the reason it would soon be thought of as a minor masterpiece, had to do with how the story was told and what the story was about. Simply put, “For Esmé” is an ideal fusion of innovative narrative technique and provocative subject matter. The reader is fascinated by what he is being told even as he is caught up in the way Salinger is telling it.

  3

  Salinger had spent much of the summer working on his novel in a variety of locations. In one scenario, he was locked away in the Westport house grinding out chapter after chapter. In another scenario, offered years later by a friend, he was holed up in a Manhattan hotel room diligently rewriting sections of the book. On August 2, Salinger did spend time in the office of Carol Montgomery Newman at the New Yorker, probably working on the novel, for on that day on Newman’s desk calendar Salinger wrote a note thanking Newman for the use of his office. “One summer while I was on vacation,” Newman later recalled, “Salinger used my office.” More than likely, Salinger worked on the novel in these and other places—wherever he could shut himself away to get the book done. For there is no doubt the book then weighed heavily on his mind. Now thirty-one years old, he had been either contemplating or writing this novel for much of his adult life. It was time to finish it.

  When “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor” appeared in World Review in London in August, Salinger continued to get a unique response to the story. One British publisher, Hamish Hamilton, the owner of a mid-sized firm that specialized in literary fiction, approached him after reading the story. On the eighteenth, Hamilton, whose firm bore his name, sent Salinger a telegram which read, “MOST ANXIOUS PUBLISH ANYTHING YOU HAVE AVAILABLE. WRITING.” On the twenty-first, writing on New Yorker stationery, Salinger responded to Hamilton’s telegram and follow-up letter by saying that he did not want to publish a collection of stories, as Hamilton had suggested he should, but that he would forward Hamilton’s letter to his agent in case he changed his mind. Four days later, Hamilton responded, telling Salinger he would be willing to discuss publishing his work whenever Salinger was ready to talk.

  Salinger was not interested in discussing a story collection with Hamilton because, after working on it for much of 1950, he was almost finished with The Catcher in the Rye. By the fall, the book was done. It was then that, following up on the meeting he had had with Robert Giroux at Harcourt Brace, Salinger submitted the book to Giroux. As soon as he read it, Giroux wanted to publish it, and he and Salinger agreed informally that Harcourt Brace would acquire the book. However, when Giroux gave the novel to his superior, Eugene Reynal, problems arose. “Is Holden Caulfield supposed to be crazy?” Reynal asked Giroux. It was a comment that, for all practical purposes, ended the possibility of Giroux entering into negotiations to buy the book. By misreading the novel as he had, Reynal passed up the opportunity to buy a book that would go on to become one of the most successful ever published in America. When a book becomes phenomenally successful, there is always a list of potential publishers who, for one reason or another, could have bought the rights but didn’t. In the case of The Catcher in the Rye, that list would have only one name on it—Eugene Reynal’s. For as soon as Salinger’s agent submitted the novel to John Woodburn at Little, Brown, Woodburn snapped it up. Not too long after that, Olding also sold the novel to Hamish Hamilton in England.

  Toward the end of 1950, with two different publishers for the novel secured, Salinger instructed Olding to submit The Catcher in the Rye in manuscript form to the New Yorker. Obviously, Salinger hoped the magazine would publish excerpts of the novel, especially since “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” which had become the basis of one of the book’s chapters, had appeared there five years ago. Astonishingly, the editors did not like the novel and refused to publish any excerpts. On January 25, 1951, Lobrano wrote to Salinger to smooth over hurt feelings since Salinger was irate about the magazine’s decision. At least two editors had read the novel, Lobrano said, and their main problems with the book were simple. They did not believe the Caulfield family could have four children who were so “extraordinary.” Nor did they believe the two sibling relationships (Phoebe-Holden and Allie-D. B.) were “tenable”; those relationships were too similar. What’s more, Lobrano himself, or so he said, felt Salinger was not ready to write the novel; to him, Salinger seemed “imprisoned” by the novel’s mood and scenes. Lobrano ended his letter by reiterating to Salinger what he had apparently told him on occasion in the past. The reaction to Catcher at the New Yorker—an unquestionably negative one—grew out of the fact that the magazine’s editors had an unwavering bias against what they called
the “writer-consciousness.” This was considered “showy”—what the slicks let their writers do. (For almost all its history, for example, the New Yorker was published without contributors’ notes.) If the New Yorker published a writer, he was known first and foremost as a “New Yorker writer,” always keeping the attention focused on the magazine, where the editorship thought it belonged.

  In the last part of 1950, as friends would later report, Salinger seems to have become more and more fascinated by alternative religions. Specifically, Salinger started to study Advaita Vedanta, a type of Indian thought that promotes “nonduality.” To learn about this, he took lessons from Swami Nikhilananda at the Sumitra Paniter Ramakrishna Vinekananda Center in New York City. This led Salinger into a more general study of Eastern religions, something he would pursue for the rest of his life. It was probably not coincidental that at the very time he was becoming involved in a religion that opened up his consciousness as both a person and an artist, he finally completed the book he had been working on for a decade.

  The Catcher in the Rye

  1

  In March 1951, as Salinger was getting ready for the American release of The Catcher in the Rye, Hamish Hamilton came over from England to New York to meet with American editors and some of his authors. One night, Salinger saw Hamilton and his wife Yvonne. In their first face-to-face meeting, Salinger and Hamilton seemed to have an instant rapport. Salinger appeared to trust that Hamilton would publish his novel well in England—as much as he trusted any publisher.

  The only publisher or editor Salinger trusted completely was Harold Ross, the New Yorker’s editor-in-chief. After he had founded the magazine in 1925, Ross made a reputation for himself as being a stylish and tasteful man blessed with a profound editorial brilliance. Over the years, Ross took a personal interest in a few of his writers, and Salinger was one of them. Similarly, Salinger not only admired the New Yorker, even though the editors did not accept every story Salinger submitted to them, but he also liked Ross as a person. Consequently, like many of Ross’s friends, Salinger was deeply troubled in May and June of 1951 when Ross became ill. At first, doctors thought Ross was suffering from pleurisy. By the end of June, he was diagnosed with something much more serious—cancer of the windpipe. On July 11, Ross had checked himself into a Boston hospital where over the next eight weeks he underwent thirty-nine radiation treatments. During this time, Salinger kept track of Ross’s medical condition as best he could, but in July he had more than a few distractions. That was the month The Catcher in the Rye was finally published.