Salinger

by Paul Alexander

  As they acclimated themselves to married life, the Salingers often went to town meetings and movie screenings put on by the film society of Dartmouth College, located nearby. They also visited neighbors such as Learned Hand, a nationally renowned judge who lived in Boston but who had a summer home in Cornish. Salinger and Hand formed a close friendship; in fact, Salinger came to admire Hand so much he decided the judge was a “true Karma yogi.”

  Despite this activity, Salinger still devoted himself to his writing. Building on the success of “Franny,” he decided to write another long story about a member of the Glass family. During the spring and summer of 1955, secluded in Cornish and happy in his new marriage, Salinger labored on a piece—he came to call it “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters”—that ended up being the length of a novella. He worked with a determination rare among writers, even professionals who grind out book after book. Up at six-thirty or seven each morning, he would eat a quick breakfast, then retire to a cement-block bunker behind his house that he had built to use as an office in which to write.

  There, pausing only to eat lunch, which he packed in the morning and brought with him from the house, Salinger worked from the early morning until dinnertime. Many nights, he returned to the bunker after dinner. Eventually, Salinger installed a telephone in the bunker but instructed Claire and others to disturb him only—and he did mean only—in an absolute emergency. In this setting Salinger took his novella through draft after draft, endlessly rewriting the prose until it had the smooth, flawless surface that had come to be associated with his fiction.

  Salinger worked on “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” until early July when the New Yorker bought it for publication. That, of course, was a blessing, since Salinger had reached the point where he could not imagine publishing his fiction in any other magazine. It was also a curse since, in order for the New Yorker to publish the piece, Salinger had to edit it down to a manageable length. Even though the magazine gave him more editorial space than any other magazine would have, the New Yorker still had limits.

  Throughout the summer and on into the fall, Salinger labored over “Raise.” During this time, he began to work more closely with William Shawn. The two would soon end up being best friends. “Mr. Shawn was a wonderful man,” says Mary Kierstead, Shawn’s secretary. “Writers thought it was a privilege to have him as an editor. He could change a sentence with a comma or with one word. He was always on the writer’s side. He was courteous and pleasant and he was great fun to talk to. He wasn’t extremely witty, but just to be able to listen to him talk about any subject, one felt honored. Salinger thought Mr. Shawn was a marvelous editor and, God knows, Mr. Shawn helped Salinger with his stories. Shawn could take a whole messy book and turn it into something brilliant. He had that kind of relationship with Salinger—very, very close. When Salinger came to New York, they worked in Mr. Shawn’s office at his desk, which was a big table. They were always very amicable with one another.”

  Others also observed their author-editor relationship. “When he first came to the magazine, Salinger worked with Gus Lobrano, but Shawn took over,” says Roger Angell, who arrived at the New Yorker around this time. “After that, Salinger didn’t work with anyone but Shawn. When I came to the fiction department, none of the editors in the department dealt with Salinger—only Shawn. The stories weren’t even shown around in the fiction department for opinion as everyone else’s were. That was the deal Shawn had with Salinger. For his part, Shawn was a great editor—a great, great editor. He was an especially good fiction editor, but he edited almost nobody exclusively. The only other fiction writer he edited by himself was Perelman. This was true because as the editor of the magazine he read everything. His hand was on every part of the magazine. He read everything two or three times before it appeared. He edited a great deal of the magazine line by line. It’s beyond comprehension how he could do this on a week-to-week basis but he did.”

  Finally, Shawn and Salinger arrived at an acceptable version of “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” which appeared in the magazine on November 19, 1955.

  “What directly follows,” Buddy Glass says near the beginning of “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” “is an account of a wedding day in 1942.” The wedding in question is that of Seymour Glass, the oldest of the seven children born to Les and Bessie (Gallagher) Glass, “retired Pantages Circuit vaudevillians.” The children after Seymour, according to the story, were Buddy, a writer whose resemblance to Salinger seems obvious; twins Walt and Waker, the latter having become a conscientious objector during the war and then a priest, the former having joined the Army only to be killed “in an unspeakably absurd GI accident in late autumn of 1945, in Japan”; Boo Boo, a sister who, chronologically, fell between the twins and Buddy; Zooey, the youngest brother, who would become a successful actor probably because of his superior intelligence and strikingly beautiful face; and Franny, the baby. All of the Glass children, at one time or another, had appeared on a popular radio quiz program called It’s a Wise Child. Going on the show under the pseudonym Black, the children made a tremendous amount of money for the family over the years.

  The plot to “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” is not complicated. Because the Glass family is either stationed around the world for the war or stuck in Los Angeles for It’s a Wise Child, Buddy is the only Glass who can represent the clan at the wedding of Seymour to his fiancée Muriel. However, after he travels to New York from Georgia, where he is stationed in the Army (as Salinger himself was), Buddy gets to the church just in time to learn, as does everyone else who has assembled for the event, that Seymour has gotten cold feet and backed out. What follows is an odd sequence of events that ends with Buddy arriving at Seymour’s apartment accompanied by members of the bride’s wedding party including the matron of honor, who is especially hostile toward him. Eventually, after drinks, someone puts in a call to the bride’s house only to discover that Seymour and Muriel eloped after all. With this, all of the guests head out for the wedding reception, leaving Buddy, who has gone into a bedroom and fallen asleep, in his apartment alone. When he awakes, he walks into the living room and sees the empty glasses the guests have left behind. Finally, he spots a cigar end. “I still think that cigar end should have been forwarded on to Seymour,” Buddy says at the story’s conclusion, “the usual run of wedding gifts being what it is. Just the cigar, in a small, nice box. Possibly with a blank sheet of paper enclosed, by way of explanation.”

  For a lengthy piece of fiction, little happens in “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.” Instead, Salinger draws out scenes for atmospheric effect while he pays an even greater amount of attention than usual to character development and voice. In lieu of a plot, Salinger seems most interested in offering long, detailed descriptions of the Glass family, as if the whole point behind this exercise was to create a family around which he could build a saga, in the same way William Faulkner created a fictional county in Mississippi from which he could spin various novels and short stories. First with “Franny” and then with “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” Salinger had begun to establish for his audience just who the Glass family was. What was not clear at this point in 1955 was just how much the Glass family would dominate Salinger’s creative thinking for the next ten years, and beyond.

  2

  On December 10, 1955, at the age of thirty-six, Salinger became a father, when Claire gave birth to a daughter, whom the couple named Margaret Ann. This meant that Claire had become pregnant a mere handful of weeks after marrying Salinger. She had been pregnant, then, for much of the first year of their marriage. No doubt this must have been hard on a young woman of twenty-two—having to deal with the traumas inherent in being pregnant at the same time she was adjusting to her first year of marriage. What’s more, none of Claire’s problems could have been made easier by the fact that Salinger was unwaveringly protective of the time he spent away from her, locked in his bunker, writing.

  There were othe
r problems too. As an outgrowth of his practice of Zen Buddhism, Salinger had begun to develop a new obsession that would increasingly dominate the way he lived his life: eating only organically-grown food prepared in special kinds of cooking oils. But if both parties are not interested in eating this kind of food prepared this sort of way—and later it was reported Claire was not—it can lead to trouble. Claire became resentful, as she would later reveal to others, that Salinger expected her to prepare and eat food in a manner she did not find appealing—a conflict that over the years would end up having a negative effect on their marriage.

  In the year after Margaret Ann was born—she would be called Peggy by family and friends—Salinger focused as much attention as he could on being a father. Because Sol Salinger was, according to Richard Gonder and other friends, an emotionally distant man who did not accept his son for who he was, Salinger made a concerted effort to be a different kind of father, one who would be proud, doting, accepting. In addition, Salinger had to deal with the reality that now, with the birth of their daughter, his relationship with Claire was different. She was no longer the virginal teenager she had been when they first met; now she was a mother, which surely affected the way he regarded her. In the midst of all of these personal changes, Salinger continued to write. In 1956, he began yet another long story about a member of the Glass family—a piece that would approach the length of “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.” This novella would be called “Zooey.”

  In 1956, something happened in Salinger’s career that most writers never see. With the appearance here and there in small literary magazines of essays about his fiction, Salinger looked to become the darling of the academic community, a phenomenon he surely distrusted given his portrayal of the academic world in “Franny.” A character like Lane Coutell, the ultimate “section” man right out of an Ivy League English department, could not have been more buffoonlike, what with all of his yammering about which literary figure was important and which was not. Paradoxically, these very “section” men Salinger had parodied in “Franny” started to write about him. One particular essay, “J. D. Salinger: Some Crazy Cliff” by Arthur Heiserman and James E. Miller, Jr., which appeared in the Western Humanities Review, epitomized the early academic essays that were beginning to appear. “It is clear that J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye belongs to an ancient and honorable tradition, perhaps the most profound in Western fiction,” Heiserman and Miller wrote, forming a thought that was apparently so deep it took two people to conjure it up. “It is, of course, the tradition of the Quest.” And the essay, as dull and listless as Salinger’s prose was energetic and full of life, went on from there.

  Over the next few years, and on into the 1960s, countless essays such as this one appeared in academic journals all across the country. Before Salinger knew it, a kind of Salinger cottage industry had sprung up in the academic community, with scholar upon scholar contributing to a never-ending stream of critical essays published about Salinger’s work.

  In March 1956, Cosmopolitan decided to reprint “The Inverted Forest” in the magazine’s Diamond Jubilee Issue, even though Salinger had protested to the editors that he never wanted the story published again. The magazine owned the rights to the piece, however, so the editors could run it with or without his permission. In the issue, on the first page devoted to the story, the reader saw the word SALINGER spelled out in large, block letters. Then, above the word, a half-page black-and-white freehand drawing of Salinger appeared; his face, white with dark streaks around his round, soulful eyes, was bright against a black backdrop. At the bottom of the page, the editors ran a brief preface detailing why the story was being reprinted in their anniversary edition:

  Jerome David Salinger was born in 1919 in New York City. After a period spent in Manhattan public schools and a military academy in Pennsylvania, he attended three colleges (no degrees). He spent four years in the Army, two and a half of them in Europe. At present, he lives with his wife, Claire, and their daughter in a small town near Burlington, Vermont. . . . Before his brilliant Catcher in the Rye became an instantaneous bestseller in 1951, J. D. Salinger had written several stories. Two of them, “The Inverted Forest” (1947) and “Blue Melody” (1948), were purchased by Cosmopolitan. Though they are not typical of Salinger’s later work, the editors of Cosmopolitan believe they are fine examples of the best literary tradition. It is with this view that “The Inverted Forest” was selected for republication in our Diamond Jubilee Issue.

  3

  Throughout the end of 1956 and on into 1957, Salinger was hard at work on “Zooey,” which had been bought by the New Yorker. He labored on the novella as diligently as he had on any other piece of fiction, keeping himself locked away in his bunker for endless hours at a time. One of the main problems Salinger was having with “Zooey” was editing it down to a length the New Yorker could publish, the same problem he had had with “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.” Cutting his own work had never been an easy task for Salinger, so on January 2 Katherine White, another editor at the magazine, wrote to him to sympathize with his attempt at shortening the novella. “I realize what an agonizing process it must be for you,” she wrote, “and I do very much hope that it is going all right and is not taking too much out of you or slowing up too much the progress of the novel that we all wait for so eagerly.”

  By the end of the month, Salinger must have finished enough of the editing to plan a trip to New York City to see Hamish Hamilton and his wife Yvonne, who were over from London. Eager to visit with Hamilton, Salinger told him in a letter that he and Claire were bringing Peggy along. They would whisk her down from the hotel in a taxi so Hamilton and Yvonne could see her. When he traveled to the city, Salinger probably had not finished “Zooey,” for it was some time later, not until May 4, that the novella appeared in the New Yorker. When it did, at a length of 41,130 words, it was the longest piece of fiction ever published in the magazine. It must have thrilled Salinger no end to have set a standard all his own at the magazine he had loved and admired for so many years.

  The narrator of “Zooey,” Buddy Glass, announces at the start of the novella that the reader is about to encounter something that isn’t “really a short story at all but a sort of prose home movie” about the Glass family. The first significant device Salinger used was the reproduction, in full, as Buddy is happy to point out, of a letter from Buddy to Zooey that addresses, among other topics, Seymour, Zen and Mahayana Buddhism, religion, and acting. In the letter, which Zooey rereads while he sits in a tub full of water in the bathroom of the Glass family apartment in the East 70s in New York City, Buddy encourages Zooey to continue to act, a line of business he has pursued successfully for some time. Zooey is interrupted in his bath-taking by his mother, who, after having her son pull the curtain around the tub so she can’t see him naked, comes into the bathroom to discuss Franny who is, according to the mother, “determined to have a nervous breakdown.” Ultimately, Zooey dresses so he can go out to talk to Franny, who lies on the sofa unable to function. After an odd episode that includes Zooey sneaking into Seymour’s room to phone Franny, pretending to be Buddy, Franny and Zooey finish their conversation by talking about what makes an actor keep on acting and, by implication, what makes a person keep on living. Once, when Zooey asked Seymour why he—Zooey—should shine his shoes to go on a radio program, Seymour told him that he should “shine them for the Fat Lady.”

  “He never did tell me who the Fat Lady was,” Zooey says to Franny, “but I shined my shoes for the Fat Lady every time I ever went on the air again—all the years you and I were on the program together, if you remember. . . . This terribly clear, clear picture of the Fat Lady formed in my mind. I had her sitting on her porch all day, swatting flies, with her radio going full blast from morning till night.” Then Zooey speculates who the Fat Lady is. “There isn’t anyone anywhere that isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. Don’t you know that? Don’t you know that goddam secret yet? And don’t you know—listen t
o me, now—don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is? . . . Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It’s Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.”

  With this, Salinger ends the story, as Franny and Zooey hang the telephone up, and Franny, who had taken the call in a bedroom, lies down on a bed. “For some minutes,” Salinger wrote, “before she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, she just lay quiet, smiling at the ceiling.”

  4

  On May 21, 1957, Signet, the company that had acquired the paperback rights to The Catcher in the Rye and Nine Stories, ran an advertisement in the New York Times that compared “Zooey,” which had just been published in the New Yorker, with the two books released by Signet. Obviously the paperback house hoped to help the sales of those books by linking them with “Zooey,” one of the most talked-about pieces of fiction to come out in recent years. What the publishing company had done might have been acceptable to Salinger had he not believed, as he contended later, that the sale of his two books to Signet—a deal controlled by Little, Brown, who technically owned the paperback rights—was among the “most unprofitable things” that had happened in his career. Furious, Salinger shot off a telegram to Little, Brown proclaiming his outrage and anger. Salinger must have gotten more than one letter back from the publishing house’s Ned Brown apologizing for the advertisement, for when Salinger wrote to Ned Bradford at the company on May 29, he was much more in control of his emotions than he had been when he sent his telegram. In his letter Salinger explained to Bradford the reason he was so mad. It came down to the simple fact that he felt there was “something very unattractively timely” about his paperback publisher choosing to run an ad in the Times at this moment. It felt unseemly to him.