Salinger

by Paul Alexander

  Under normal conditions, when a book is about to come out, a standard prepublication procedure occurs. The publisher packages the book, which is given a jacket design featuring a photograph and short biography of the author on the back cover. At the same time, galleys of the book are mailed out to magazines and newspapers for review, and journalists are approached to write about the book and its author. In the case of The Catcher in the Rye, the prepublication process did not proceed as it does with most books. First, Salinger demanded that Little, Brown not send out any advance galleys of the book, an unheard-of request for a fiction writer to make. Since the galleys had already been shipped, Salinger ordered the publisher not to forward him any of the book’s reviews. In addition, Salinger decided he would not do any publicity. In fact, the only interview he gave concerning the publication of The Catcher in the Rye was to a small trade magazine called the Book-of-the-Month Club News.

  The Book-of-the-Month Club had chosen The Catcher in the Rye as the main selection for its midsummer list, which itself was a coup since first novels are rarely chosen to be main selections. As a part of the arrangement between Little, Brown and the Book-of-the-Month Club, Salinger agreed to give an interview to the BMOC News. No doubt the reason Salinger consented to do this was because the BMOC News had commissioned William Maxwell, the New Yorker editor and a friend of Salinger’s, to write the piece.

  Maxwell’s profile appeared in the midsummer edition. Maxwell painted a vivid and lively picture of Salinger. He was not ashamed to compare him with very great novelists noting that it would be too easy to say Salinger wrote like Flaubert, since “Flaubert invented the modern novel with Madame Bovary.” Maxwell believed Salinger worked like Flaubert “with infinite labor, infinite patience, and infinite thought for the technical aspects of what he is writing, none of which must show in the final draft.” It was writers like Flaubert and Salinger, Maxwell declared, who “go straight to heaven when they die, and their books are not forgotten.”

  At the beginning of the book club’s newsletter, the editorial board summarized their opinion of the novel. “This book,” the board said, “will recall to many the comedies and tragedies of Booth Tarkington’s Seventeen, but The Catcher in the Rye reaches far deeper into reality. To anyone who has ever brought up a son, every page of Mr. Salinger’s novel will be a source of wonder and delight—and concern.” However, the Book-of-the-Month Club News’s most impassioned praise came from Clifton Fadiman who offered a somewhat longer statement on behalf of the Book-of-the-Month Club’s board. Praising Salinger as a skilled, thoughtful writer, Fadiman stated that The Catcher in the Rye “arouses our admiration—but, more to the point, it starts flowing in us the clear springs of pity, understanding, and affectionate laughter.” Fadiman could hardly control his admiration. “Read five pages,” he ordered, and “you are inside Holden’s mind, almost as incapable of escaping from it as Holden is himself.” Finally Fadiman gushed: “That rare miracle of fiction has again come to pass: a human being has been created out of ink, paper, and the imagination.”

  “I think writing is a hard life,” Salinger was quoted by Maxwell as saying in the Book-of-the-Month Club News. He began to see the spoils of that hard life on July 16, when Little, Brown released the hardback edition of The Catcher in the Rye. Priced at three dollars, the book featured a dust jacket with flap copy that seemed to be struggling to make sense of the book—a sign that the work was unique. Salinger did allow a brief biography of himself to appear on the dust jacket, but it gave only a bare-bones outline of Salinger’s life.

  The critical reaction to The Catcher in the Rye began even before its official publication date of July 16. On the fifteenth, the New York Times Book Review ran a review by James Stern called “Aw, the World’s a Crumby Place.” Written as if it were spoken by Holden himself, the article was meant to be serious if ironic. Stern wrote: “This Salinger, he’s a short-story guy. And he knows how to write about kids. This book though, it’s too long. Gets kind of monotonous. And he should’ve cut out a lot about those jerks and all at that crumby school.” Hardly praise from the newspaper of record. Stern even seemed to be making fun of the novel’s distinctive voice. However, as if to make up for the attack, the next day in its daily edition the paper ran a review by Nash K. Burger. Saying that “Holden’s story is told in Holden’s own strange, wonderful language,” Burger deemed Catcher “an unusually brilliant first novel.” Burger particularly enjoyed Phoebe—“a wonderful creation”—and predicted that Holden would grow up to write a novel like The Catcher in the Rye.

  On that same day, Time weighed in with an extremely positive review. “In his tough-tender first novel, The Catcher in the Rye,” the unnamed critic said, “[Salinger] charts the miseries and ecstasies of an adolescent rebel, and deals out some of the most acidly humorous deadpan satire since the late great Ring Lardner. . . . For U.S. readers, the prize catch in The Catcher in the Rye may well be Novelist Salinger himself. He can understand an adolescent mind without displaying one.”

  Most of the reviews, however, were not as good as Time’s. Writing in the New Republic, Anne L. Goodman attacked the book even as she praised it. “The Catcher in the Rye is a brilliant tour de force,” she wrote, “but in a writer of Salinger’s undeniable talent one expects something more.” This made her conclude Catcher was “disappointing.” Three days later, in the Christian Science Monitor, T. Morris Longstreth was more direct in his criticism. Longstreth said that the novel was “not fit for children to read” and that “one finds it hard to believe that a true lover of children could further this tale.” Next, in the Atlantic Monthly, Harvey Breit called the novel a flawed but “brilliant tour de force,” and, in the Nation, Ernest Jones dismissed it as “predictable and boring.” On August 11, in the longest review of the book published to date, the New Yorker finally offered some unrelentingly positive praise, in a piece by S. N. Behrman called “The Vision of the Innocent.” Behrman thought that Phoebe was “one of the most exquisitely created and engaging children in any novel,” while Holden’s innocence “in the face of the tremendously complicated and often depraved facts of life makes for the humor of this novel . . . one of the funniest, expeditious, surely, in the history of juvenilia.” “I loved this novel,” Behrman said at the end of his review. “I mean it—I really did.” Perhaps the review was the New Yorker editors’ way of compensating for not running excerpts from the novel.

  Despite the book’s mixed critical reception, after being in print just two weeks, The Catcher in the Rye appeared on the New York Times best-seller list. It would remain there for the next thirty weeks, rising as high as the number 4 position. Not surprisingly, Salinger began to receive an onslaught of fan mail. All of this—the reviews, the letters, the unavoidable buzz publishing a best-seller creates—proved too much for Salinger, who felt uneasy about getting any attention in the first place. Without a doubt, this was one reason he told his publisher he wanted his picture removed from the dust jacket on all future editions and reprints of the book; it was a demand Little, Brown accommodated when the house released Catcher’s third printing in hardback—without Salinger’s photograph. As for the acclaim Catcher received, Salinger would one day tell a friend he “enjoyed a small part of it” but felt most of it was “hectic and progressively and personally demoralizing.” This would explain why, some weeks before the publication of Catcher in the United States, almost as if he were able to predict the public reaction to the novel and how he was going to feel about it, Salinger set sail for a vacation in England. As it happened, it was a vacation that had him coming back to America right at the time the initial interest in The Catcher in the Rye hit its peak.

  2

  In late April, as he was getting ready for his trip, Salinger and Hamish Hamilton were trying to decide when to bring out The Catcher in the Rye in England. At first, when the Book-of-the-Month Club chose the novel as a main selection, it looked as if Little, Brown might delay the American publication until the fall. Ultimatel
y, Little, Brown went ahead and released the book in July, which meant a British publication should have followed soon afterward. So, on April 17, Hamilton wrote to Salinger to tell him that, now that it was clear the novel’s U.S. publication would not be delayed until the fall, Hamilton was putting pressure on the printers in England to get the book ready for a summer release. Ten days later, Hamilton wrote to Salinger again, informing him that the book’s proofs had just been airmailed to him and that he needed Salinger to correct the proofs and return them to him by airmail before he set out for England by sea. Salinger followed Hamilton’s instructions, so the book’s publication could proceed on schedule.

  In mid-May, Salinger had sailed to England. Meeting in London, Salinger and Hamilton discussed the pending publication of The Catcher in the Rye. On this trip Hamilton gave Salinger a copy of Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa, a book important to Holden Caulfield; then he took him to see Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in Antony and Cleopatra (the Oliviers, “Larry and Vivien,” as Hamilton called them, were friends of his), after which they all went to dinner. On June 7, Salinger was on his way to Hull. On his trip so far, he had seen and loved Scotland, especially the Ballachalish Ferry; the Lake Country, home to William Wordsworth; the Cotswolds; and Oxford, where he visited the university. Of all of the sights, the one Salinger liked best was West Riding, mostly because of the moors. After visiting there, Salinger wrote to Roger Machell in Hamish Hamilton’s office to say he could almost see the three Brontë sisters in their beautiful white flowing dresses running across the green rolling moors that are divided by a seemingly never ending crisscrossing of rock fences. Salinger did not feel the same sort of connection with Shakespeare when he visited Stratford-on-Avon; in fact, he was so put off by the place he didn’t even go to the Globe Theatre, which seemed too much like a shrine. Instead, he went to two of the colleges and then to Christ Church for Evensong.

  By late July, Salinger had completed his European trip. Back in America, he did not return Westport, but, after looking around the city, decided to take a lease on an apartment at 300 East 57th Street. There, he settled into his new life. He was just beginning to absorb Catcher’s American reviews, which he seems to have read even though he ordered his publisher not to send them to him, when a second wave of reviews started to appear following Hamish Hamilton’s release of the novel in England in August. Overall, the British reviews were more negative than the American ones. “[W]e are asked to believe,” R. D. Charques wrote in the Spectator on August 17, “that [Holden] discovers how mean the world is and falls straight on the psychiatrist’s sofa. Intelligent, humorous, acute, and sympathetic in observation, the tale is rather too formless to do quite the sort of thing it was evidently intended to do.”

  On September 7, the Times Literary Supplement was no more positive. “Mr. Salinger . . . has not achieved sufficient variety in this book for a full-length novel,” the unnamed reviewer wrote. “The boy is really very touching; but the endless stream of blasphemy and obscenity in which he thinks, credible as it is, palls after the first chapter. One would like to hear more of what his parents and teachers have to say about him.”

  On July 14, in the middle of the hoopla surrounding the release of The Catcher in the Rye, the New Yorker published Salinger’s short story, “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes.” One of the few stories Salinger wrote that did not have as one of its characters a “very young” person, it centers around an adult love triangle: Arthur, Lee, and Arthur’s wife, who is having an affair with Lee.

  In the fall of 1951, as The Catcher in the Rye remained on the New York Times best-seller list, Salinger tried to get his life back to normal. In his pleasant East Side apartment, he worked on another story, this one a long and unusual piece called “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period.” Understated and academic, it was not like the other stories he had been writing.

  When he was not working, Salinger kept up with the worsening health of Harold Ross. In early September, Salinger wrote to Ross, saying he hoped Ross would come back to work soon at the New Yorker; by mid-September, after being away for five months, Ross did. His return was short-lived. As the weeks passed during the fall, Ross became worse. On October 6, Salinger wrote to Ross to cancel plans for an upcoming weekend visit to Ross’s country home. In the letter Salinger mentioned his own illness, not Ross’s. At the time, Salinger was suffering from a horrendous case of shingles, which made him nervous and jumpy. On October 23, Ross wrote back. “I’ll put you down for the spring,” he said optimistically.

  In mid-November, before Salinger answered Ross, Lobrano wrote to Salinger with alarming news. The New Yorker editors were rejecting “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period,” which Olding had recently submitted to them. Deciding not to buy the story had turned into a terrible ordeal for them, Lobrano said, but ultimately the editors did not feel the piece succeeded. The notion behind the story was too complicated, Lobrano believed; its events were “too compressed.” Finally, the piece seemed almost willfully strange, which Lobrano knew wasn’t true, but that was how it seemed. Salinger was affected by this rejection more than most, not only because he had worked so hard on the story, but because he had reached the point where the New Yorker accepted almost any story he submitted to them. On November 15, Salinger wrote to Lobrano to tell him he was profoundly disheartened by the rejection. It was a short letter.

  The rejection was still on his mind a month later when Salinger wrote to Roger Machell in Hamish Hamilton’s office on the eleventh. He was deeply disappointed by the New Yorker’s rejection, he said; even so, as a writer, he had the kind of drive that made him focus on the future, not the past. As proof of this, he had already started working on another story.

  Meanwhile, Harold Ross’s health continued to grow worse. Throughout October and on into November, as he tried to maintain his schedule at the magazine, Ross was sick. In early December, he traveled to Boston and checked into New England Baptist Hospital to undergo exploratory surgery so that doctors could determine once and for all what was wrong with him. On December 6, doctors performed the surgery. When they opened Ross up, they discovered a massive cancer on his right lung. In fact, the growth was so large Ross’s doctors were unsure about how they could treat it. As Ross lay on the operating table, his system began to fail. Ross died having never regained consciousness.

  Four days later, a memorial service was held for Ross at Frank Campbell’s Funeral Home in Manhattan. Salinger attended the service, as did the entire New Yorker “family,” most of whom were deeply saddened by the death and more than a little concerned about the magazine’s future. Lobrano was rumored to be a potential successor to Ross. Another editor was also being mentioned—William Shawn. A mysterious figure in the publishing world, mostly because of his obsession with strictly maintaining his privacy, Shawn was a character in his own right. For years, when he ate lunch in the dining room of the Algonquin Hotel, which was located near the New Yorker offices, then at 25 West 43rd Street, he ordered cornflakes. But a cornflakes lunch was just one idiosyncrasy; Shawn had many.

  “He wouldn’t live above the second floor,” says Mary D. Kierstead, who worked for Shawn for years as his secretary before she joined the magazine’s fiction department. “At the theater he had to sit way back in the orchestra because he wouldn’t sit down near the stage in case of fire. What do we call this? He was neurotic. There was always the rumor, totally unverified, that he was supposed to have been the child who was going to be kidnapped in a famous kidnapping in Chicago but another child was taken instead. There were also things like, he didn’t like air-conditioning and he was always dressed too warmly. Then there was the business with the tunnels. He didn’t like to go through tunnels. And elevators—at the New Yorker offices the elevators were automated but one was kept with a human just to take Mr. Shawn up and down because he had a phobia about being stuck in an elevator. He had other charming idiosyncrasies. On the phone he always sounded like a little boy—he had a child’s voice.” As for those phobi
as—such as his elevator phobia—there were many rumors circulating in the New York literary circles at the time. “The gossip was he carried a hatchet in his briefcase in case he got stuck in an elevator,” says Tom Wolfe. “That’s just how powerful his elevator phobia was.”

  The year 1951 had been a good one for Salinger. After working on it for a decade, he had finally published The Catcher in the Rye. Much to his surprise, it stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for the last half of 1951. The book was not a best-seller in England.

  Nine Stories

  In late January, William Shawn was named as Ross’s replacement at the New Yorker, a development Salinger watched with great interest. Suspicious of academics yet intellectual, dry-witted yet capable of appreciating slapstick humor—Shawn, who had been at the magazine since the late 1930s, had a sense of where the New Yorker had been in its past and where it needed to go in its future in order to survive. Years later, it would be said that, as the publisher was trying to make up his mind about a successor to Ross, Shawn typed up an announcement saying he, Shawn, was the replacement and anonymously posted the memorandum on a bulletin board—that was how the selection of Shawn was made. Another piece of New Yorker folklore, the story was made up; more than likely, Ross’s replacement was merely picked by a hiring committee, the same way editorial positions are filled at most magazines.