Salinger

by Paul Alexander

  At present, this was not the only career problem Salinger had to deal with. He had come to enjoy—and no doubt appreciate—the process of publishing a piece of fiction in the New Yorker. Even when the editors rejected stories, they did so with as much grace and sensitivity as they could. Once the magazine had accepted a story, the editors’ work was impeccable. Then the story was published with class and taste, after which the writer was paid better than he would have been by any other magazine. All of this, and the New Yorker was run by William Shawn, then perhaps the most respected magazine editor in the business.

  Unfortunately, as evidenced by his distaste for Little, Brown, Salinger did not have the same opinion of book publishers and editors. By and large, they did not care about the wishes of the writers they published, and, for the amount of work they put into a book, publishers kept an inordinate amount of the profits. Because of these grievances, Salinger had come to dislike book publishers and editors. At some point in 1957, Salinger’s contempt seemed to become more than justified, at least as far as Hamish Hamilton was concerned, when Salinger learned of a deal Hamilton had made involving the British edition of Nine Stories titled For Esmé—With Love and Squalor.

  The episode had unfolded this way: The Catcher in the Rye was published by Hamilton in England in August 1951; the book posted modest, even poor, sales. In 1953, Hamilton brought out the anthology For Esmé—With Love and Squalor, which sold even fewer copies than Catcher. Then, over the next couple of years, mostly because of the success of Catcher in the United States and in several countries around the world, a new interest in Salinger started to build in England. It was not tremendous, compared to other authors, but it was enough to convince Ace Books, a new division of a company called Harborough Publishing, to buy the paperback rights to For Esmé from Hamilton. While Hamilton was one of the most highly respected literary publishers in Britain, Harborough Publishing, or at least Ace Books, was aimed at a mass market. Those who didn’t like the inexpensive volumes produced on cheap paper with bright covers considered them trashy, even sleazy. Hamilton’s decision to sell to Ace the rights to highly literary properties like Salinger’s book was a little odd. Perhaps he simply saw the chance to make some money off an author who had not been profitable up until then—and he seized it. He was a good businessman.

  Whatever the reason, Hamilton did sell For Esmé to Ace; soon, in Ace fashion, the house published the book, with a truly appalling cover. A sweet-looking, alluring young woman with blonde hair took up much of the front jacket; above the young woman’s head, Ace’s art department had selected a line of copy that could not have been more tawdry and misleading: “Explosive and Absorbing—A Painful and Pitiable Gallery of Men, Woman, Adolescents, and Children.” The lurid tag line did not even identify the book as a story collection. What was never implied was the fact that these were finely crafted pieces of literature that the author wanted read as such. Hamilton never alerted Salinger of the sale of For Esmé’s paperback rights to Ace, nor did he tell him about the paperback’s release. Salinger found out about the sale when a Hamilton staff member mentioned it to him by mistake.

  In the end it was one of the most costly decisions Hamilton ever made. When Salinger learned that For Esmé had been published in such a lurid and inappropriate way, he refused to allow Hamilton to release any of his future books, even though Hamilton had a contract with Salinger giving him the right of first refusal on additional books Salinger might write. He didn’t care about contracts, Salinger said; he would never let Hamilton publish another one of his books. He’d rather the book not come out in England than for Hamish Hamilton to do it. Salinger was not content merely to sever his professional ties to Hamilton, however; he ended his personal relationship with him as well. After the Ace debacle, Salinger never had anything to do with Hamilton again.

  5

  During 1958, Salinger had begun work on “Seymour: An Introduction,” yet another novella about the Glass family. This novella looked to be the most densely written piece of fiction Salinger had produced about the Glasses so far. As a result, he found the work on “Seymour” to be unusually difficult, much more so than almost anything he had written up until then. Throughout the fall of 1958, his work in Cornish was hampered by minor illnesses and the unavoidable distractions caused by Claire and the baby. Finally, in the spring of 1959, Salinger realized that if he was going to finish the novella, which the New Yorker was pressuring him to do, he needed to spend a stretch of time during which he could focus only on his work. So he went to New York to work in the New Yorker offices, something writers did when they needed to devote large blocks of intense, uninterrupted work to a piece of prose. He had tried writing several days in an Atlantic City hotel room, but he had not been able to accomplish what he had hoped to.

  While he was there, he rewrote and edited compulsively. “He was in New York working on ‘Seymour,’” remembered a college student who was interning at the New Yorker at the time. “He’d come up to the office at night and there’d be just the two of us in this big dark building. He was working seven days a week and it was the hardest work I’ve ever seen anyone do. But he was never too busy to stop, light a cigarette, and have a cup of coffee and talk with me.” In fact, one night while Salinger and the college student were standing around talking about such subjects as Billie Holiday, Salinger autographed a copy of The Catcher in the Rye for him. It was a gesture he rarely ever made.

  Eventually Salinger worked so hard he made himself sick. Returning to Cornish, he stayed there long enough to get well; then he returned to New York for another several-days-long editing session in the New Yorker offices to finish the piece. Finally, at a length of almost thirty thousand words, “Seymour: An Introduction” appeared in the magazine on June 6.

  By the time Salinger wrote “Seymour: An Introduction,” he had lost any impulse to create a narrative on which to hinge the movement of the novella. Again, this piece was narrated by Buddy, who now resembled Salinger even more closely, and the subject of the piece—once again—was Seymour. The reader learns about Buddy’s opinions of literary critics and university professors, the various members of the Glass family, details of Seymour’s life and suicide, and the benefits of Japanese poetry, Zen Buddhism, and yoga. In the entire fiction piece, however, Salinger never slips into anything even resembling a plot. It was as if by becoming consumed with the lives and the loves of the Glasses, he had forgotten the need to fashion a narrative. Upon finishing “Seymour: An Introduction,” the reader could not help but feel Salinger was on the verge of losing himself completely in the obsessions of his own writing.

  Even some of Salinger’s devotees were beginning to be bothered by his new tendency to fixate on voice instead of plot. In the late 1950s, Salinger had no greater admirer than Sylvia Plath, who would craft her novel The Bell Jar so carefully after The Catcher in the Rye that the two books would be compared for years. “Read J. D. Salinger’s long ‘Seymour: An Introduction’ last night and today,” Plath wrote in her journal, “put off at first by the rant at the beginning about Kafka, Kierkegaard, etc., but increasingly enchanted.” This was not exactly praise from one reader who had adored much of what Salinger had written up until that point. It was, however, the response many readers had.

  Finally, in 1959, Salinger, who had never gotten over The Young Folks ordeal and who still held Whit Burnett responsible for Lippincott’s refusal to publish his book, was able to exact more revenge. Burnett wrote to ask if he could buy two stories Salinger had once submitted to Story magazine. After several years on hiatus, Story was coming back and Burnett wanted to assemble an issue that was sure to get attention. What better way than to include one—or maybe even two—Salinger stories? The stories, which Burnett had in his possession, were “The Young Man in the Stuffed Shirt” and “The Daughters of the Late Great Man.”

  Burnett made his request in a straightforward business letter to Salinger. He didn’t expect what he got back—a letter from Olding telling him Salin
ger did not want to sell the stories under any conditions. Burnett was devastated; he felt Salinger was turning his back on him at a time when he needed him most. Had Salinger forgotten who was the first editor to buy his stories? Did Salinger have so little loyalty that the reemergence of Story meant nothing to him? But Salinger’s decision was final. He would not even communicate with Burnett; instead he had Olding write to him, demanding the return of the stories. On November 18, Burnett mailed the stories back, along with a cover letter. “I’m sorry not to have had a little note from you personally,” Burnett wrote to Salinger in a letter that was addressed to “Jerry” even though Burnett sent it in care of Olding, “but I understand you do not write notes anymore.” Burnett’s contempt over what he considered to be Salinger’s arrogance—and abandonment—was hardly hidden. Still, Burnett ended his letter by telling Salinger he hoped he would reconsider and let him publish at least “A Young Man in a Stuffed Shirt.” Salinger never changed his mind.

  Near the end of 1959, Salinger wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Post. The subject of that letter was the unjust treatment, at least as far as their legal rights were concerned, of inmates sentenced to life in prison. Ostensibly, Salinger was responding to an article about the prison system published in the Post. In his letter he argued it was unfair for a person sentenced to life in prison to be ineligible for parole. “Justice,” Salinger wrote, “is at best one of those words that makes us look away or turn up our coat collars, and justice—without mercy—must easily be the bleakest, coldest combination of words in the language.” What was never clear was what had inspired him to sit down and write the letter in the first place.

  During 1959, while he was dealing with his writing career and his fame, which was growing whether he wanted it to or not, Salinger experienced major developments in his personal life. In the late spring, Claire had gotten pregnant once again. Throughout much of 1959, she had carried the baby without complications, so as they approached Christmas the Salingers were looking forward to the imminent arrival of their second child. The baby was born on February 13, 1960. A boy, he was named Matthew Robert.

  Heroes and Villains

  1

  For Salinger, the year 1960 may have begun on a wonderful note—the birth of his son—but it soon slipped into a precipitous decline. As the spring passed, he heard continued rumblings that a major article on him was going to appear in Newsweek. In a way it made sense Newsweek would do such an article. Even though Nine Stories had been out for seven years and The Catcher in the Rye ten, Salinger was as popular in 1960 as he ever had been, maybe even more so. Both books were selling well. He had become an idol in the academic world, with scholars generating a constant flow of essays about him. Academic journals as obscure as Mainstream and Iowa English Yearbook, and as significant as College English and New World Writing, had already run major articles on him. Beyond this, Salinger had taken the unquestionably eccentric step of secluding himself from the public, which only served to make him into a unique character about whom people wanted to know more. Finally, there was talk another Salinger book was in the works, though details of its rumored publication were vague.

  In other words, Salinger made good copy. The fact that he had never been profiled made him even more appealing. Determined to break Salinger’s wall of silence, Newsweek sent Mel Elfin to Cornish to investigate. Once there, Elfin interviewed as many friends and neighbors of Salinger as he could. He even tried to talk to Salinger himself but, not surprisingly, Salinger eluded him. The resulting article ran in the magazine on May 30, 1960. It was near the beginning of the article that friends told Elfin how Salinger could talk for hours about subjects like music, detective novels, Japanese poetry, Zen Buddhism, and yoga. “There was a time when he would go home and stand on his head,” one friend revealed, “but that was before he got married.”

  Later in the article, Elfin painted a picture of Salinger’s work routine, which was much different—and significantly more intense—than the one reported by friends when he had originally moved to Cornish. Friends who knew him in 1960 said that Salinger began his day at five or six in the morning when he would walk down from his house to his studio out back—“a tiny concrete shelter with a translucent roof.” Inside, as he chain-smoked cigarettes while he worked, it was not unusual for Salinger to “put in as many as fifteen or sixteen hours a day at his typewriter.”

  As a witness to this schedule, Elfin found Bertrand Yeaton, an artist who was a friend of Salinger’s. “Jerry works like a dog,” said Yeaton, one of the few people who had actually been in Salinger’s study. “He’s a meticulous craftsman who constantly revises, polishes, and rewrites. On the wall of the studio, Jerry has a series of cup hooks to which he clips sheaves of notes. They must deal with various characters and situations, because when an idea occurs to him he takes down the clip, makes the appropriate notation, and places it back on the proper hook. He also has a ledger in which he has pasted sheets of typewritten manuscripts on one page and on the opposite one has arrows, memos, and other notes for revisions.”

  Naturally, Newsweek assigned a photographer to go to Cornish. Oddly enough, on the day the photographer was there, he ran across Salinger right away as Salinger was walking along the road near his house with his daughter, who was then four and a half years old. The photographer approached Salinger, who was so polite the photographer felt shamed into telling him why he was in Cornish—to take a picture of him for Newsweek. Salinger thanked the photographer for not trying to “sneak” a picture; then he said to him a line that was supposed to explain why he had turned into the recluse he was. “My method of work is such that any interruption throws me off,” Salinger said. “I can’t have my picture taken or have an interview until I’ve completed what I’ve set out to do.”

  What exactly Salinger meant by that comment was unclear. What was clear was this: Whether or not his intentions behind becoming a recluse were pure, the more Salinger said he didn’t want any press coverage, the more the media wanted to cover him. A simple concept may have been at work here: If one tells a person he can’t know about something, the person only wants to know about it more. On some level, then, the public was interested in Salinger because he didn’t want them to know anything about him. So by doing nothing—nothing but selling substantial quantities of books—Salinger had become the subject of a profile in one of the country’s two major newsmagazines. As it turned out, it was just the beginning of the press attention Salinger would receive over the next year or so. For an author who didn’t want to be written about, few authors would be written about more.

  2

  The years 1961 and 1962 would mark the high point of Salinger’s career to date. By early 1961, The Catcher in the Rye had sold 1.25 million copies—an astonishing quantity for a serious novel about a teenage boy’s coming-of-age. This meant the novel was selling over 100,000 copies a year. Of course, most of the sales resulted from the novel becoming a staple of reading lists in colleges and prep schools and from university English departments making Salinger one of the contemporary authors academics were taking seriously. There were other indicators of Salinger’s appeal. For example, so many fans had written to the New Yorker for copies of back issues containing Salinger’s stories that the magazine’s supply of those issues was exhausted.

  Because of this success, because of the subject matter of his fiction, and because he had chosen to live his life in seclusion, a legend was growing around Salinger. Rumors filtered through his body of fans as one told another what was being said about him. One rumor had Salinger posting a notice on the bulletin board in the offices of the New Yorker, asking for an apartment in a “quiet Buddhist neighborhood.” Another had him and Claire, so much like Franny anyway, going into restaurants, where they would sit silently at their table moving their lips but not speaking, as if they were soundlessly mouthing the Jesus Prayer.

  These and other rumors were addressed in an article written by Edward Kosner that appeared in the New York
Post on April 30, 1961. The piece was a follow-up to the Newsweek article that ran the year before, and it predicted what was going to happen when Salinger published his new book. In his article Kosner mentioned just some of the people he had approached who would not talk about Salinger. At the New Yorker, William Shawn said, “Salinger simply does not want to be written about,” while an insider at the Harold Ober Agency said, “This man wants his privacy.” Regardless, Kosner tried to paint some semblance of a portrait of Salinger, even though no one, not even Salinger’s neighbors in Cornish, would talk to him on or off the record. Naturally, the portrait Kosner painted was sketchy: Salinger lived on one hundred acres in a five-room house designed by the architect and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who was famous for creating the statue of Abraham Lincoln that had supposedly inspired the president’s memorial in Washington, D.C. Set on a hill overlooking the Connecticut River and the Green Mountains in Vermont, the house seemed ideal for Salinger’s family—Claire, now twenty-seven; Peggy, five; and Matthew, fifteen months. Salinger regularly attended town meetings with his wife, Kosner said, but mostly what he did, the one thing he loved to do more than anything else, was write.

  After the hoopla over Kosner’s Post piece died down, Salinger spent the summer, when he was not working on new material, getting ready for the publication of his next book. Salinger had decided to take two pieces of fiction that had appeared in the New Yorker, put them together, and release them as a book on their own. The pieces he had chosen were related in that they both dealt with the Glass family, One was “Franny,” which was still being discussed even though it had appeared in the magazine years ago, and “Zooey,” which seemed to Salinger to be the perfect companion piece. The book, to be called simply Franny and Zooey, was sold by Olding to Little, Brown, who scheduled it for release in the early fall of 1961.