My Salinger Year

by Joanna Rakoff

  “Take care, Joanne,” he said.

  “Jerry,” I said. For the first time, his name felt comfortable coming out of my mouth. There was so much more I wanted to say. “Jerry, good-bye.”

  I never wrote back to the boy from Winston-Salem.

  I never wrote back to the veteran in Nebraska, for I could not bear to tell him that his friend was no relation to me. My father had confirmed this, with some disappointment—no one in his small family had served in Germany during World War II. Perhaps this was where I got it from—my belief in fate, in magic, in felicity, the mermaid lagoon. From my father.

  Nor did I write again to the high school girl. Her rage was too enormous for me to bear. And what could I say to her but Wait, wait, and you’ll see. It gets easier once you’re no longer graded, once you have to assess your actions for yourself.

  I should have, I suppose. I should have written and told her exactly that, though surely I would have only fanned her flames. But she’s haunted me all these years, as has the veteran, and the boy from Winston-Salem, whose letter I still have, its creases soft from wear. I keep it pinned to the cork-board above my desk, a talisman, a reminder. In some ways, I wish I’d taken them all. The thought of them, those letters, those documents of so many people’s lives, just tossed away, grows more and more unbearable as the years pass. I could have saved them and I didn’t.

  When I gave notice, my boss stared at me in disbelief. “But you were doing so well,” she said. “You sold that story and—” She didn’t finish. “I was so sure you were an Agency Type of Person.” The sadness in her pale eyes was too much for me, though I knew this sadness was not really to do with me. She had lost so much, so many, in the last year. Max had just left, too, in a storm of rancor, his office abandoned nearly overnight. Losing her assistant was nothing in comparison. I was eminently replaceable. The city was full of boys and girls like me, clamoring at the gates of literature. And yet—and yet—I wavered, as she tried to dissuade me. “Why?” she asked me.

  “I just—” Could I tell her I wanted to be a writer? I wasn’t sure that I could. “There are things I want to do. I love this”—I held my hands up, gesturing to the books, the very walls around me—“I love it here. But there are things that if I don’t do now, I’ll never do.”

  “I understand,” she said, and I truly believed she did.

  With Don, I wavered, too. Of course I did. James had not found that editor who would fall in love with his novel. I went home with him for Christmas, as planned. We returned to Brooklyn in time for New Year’s Eve. Another party at which I had nothing to say. The next morning I woke up and the first thing I thought was Jerry’s birthday. He would be turning seventy-eight. It was also the original publication date for the “Hapworth” book, the book that would never happen, the book that would always consist of one single case of sample covers, stored, I presumed, in Roger’s basement. He didn’t seem the type to throw such relics away. Around the time I left, a story about the book appeared in a paper we’d heard of: the Post. Salinger never officially told my boss that the deal was off. His silence told us all we needed to know. I had used the same trick with my college boyfriend, I supposed. He had recovered from it, or so he said, but I wasn’t sure I had. Would the same, I wondered, be true of Jerry and Roger?

  Regardless, with Don, I told the truth. “I feel like a different person from that girl you met,” I said.

  “It’s not you, it’s me,” said Don with a laugh. Not a cackle. Just a laugh.

  “Sort of,” I told him. This was true and not true. Maybe he was right. There was no one truth. Truth: a schoolgirl thing.

  When I left, I packed up a bag of clothing to drop off at Goodwill: my plaid skirts, my loafers. I was not a schoolgirl anymore.

  Thirteen years later, I tiptoed out of my children’s room and collapsed into my own bed, with a book. Through the bedroom window came the dull rush of traffic on the Williamsburg Bridge, the cars bound for Brooklyn, for my old neighborhood. Less than a year after I left the Agency, my grandmother died, leaving me her apartment on the Lower East Side. Like her, I was raising two children there, children who played in the same parks my father and his brother played in, and my grandmother and her sisters before him. Like my father, they walked across the Williamsburg Bridge to visit their friends, who were the children of my friends. And like Holden—and like me—their childhood played out against, was defined by, the city’s grand institutions. They, too, spent Saturdays passing under the great whale at the Museum of Natural History and inspecting the armor at the Met. They, too, rode the carousel in Central Park. They tossed crumbs to the ducks in the pond.

  From the hallway, I heard the pad of my husband’s feet. “You’re awake!” he said. All too often, I fell asleep with the children. Though I also rose hours before they woke to write in my closet-sized office, a lesson I’d learned all those years before, during my year at the Agency, from Salinger.

  “I know,” I said, with a yawn. “I don’t know how it happened.”

  Leaving his post by the doorjamb, he came over and sat down next to me. “I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

  I sat up, suddenly fully awake. Three thousand miles away, in the foothills of San Jose, my father lay dying. Within a few months of my parents’ retiring to California—also not long after I left the Agency—his doctors diagnosed a syndrome similar to Parkinson’s. A syndrome whose effects he’d, apparently, felt for years. “Some patients are experts at masking the symptoms,” one of his doctors told us. “Your father was an actor, wasn’t he?”

  “Is it my father?” I asked. I hadn’t heard the phone ring, but that didn’t mean anything.

  “No, no,” said my husband. “J. D. Salinger. Died.”

  “Oh.” I let out a long breath. “Oh.”

  “I know he was—” His hazel eyes blinked behind his glasses as he tried to formulate this thought. What was Salinger in the tableau of my life? In the twelve years he’d known me, I’d reread Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters annually, Catcher every two or three years. My Salinger paperbacks were falling apart, their pages yellow and crumbling, their covers taped together. I could buy new copies, but I didn’t. “I know he was important to you.”

  “He was,” I said, allowing myself to be embraced. “He was.”

  “You should go to sleep,” he said, finally. “It’s late.” Our two-year-old had taken forever to get to bed, a not-uncommon occurrence.

  “Yes,” I agreed. But a few minutes later I found myself in the living room, pulling Franny and Zooey off the shelf. Our edition was a hardback, actually, bequeathed to me—along with paperbacks of Catcher and Seymour—when my parents moved to California, the same edition I’d stared at, day in and day out, during my year at the Agency.

  Here’s the thing: People say you outgrow Salinger. That he’s a writer whose work speaks to the particular themes and frustrations of adolescence. The latter might be true. Certainly, I can attest to the fact that many of the people who wrote letters to him ranged in age from approximately twelve to twenty-two. I don’t know how I would have regarded Salinger had I read him in middle school. But I encountered Salinger as a grown-up or rather, someone who, like Franny, was just sloughing off my childhood, my received ideas about how to live in the world. And, thus, with each passing year—each rereading—his stories, his characters, have changed and deepened.

  At twenty-four, I identified so strongly with Franny—her exasperation with the world, with the men like Lane who dominated it—that the story’s structural perfection, its gorgeous precision and symbolism, its balance of social satire and psychological realism, its dead-on dialogue, eluded me. At twenty-four, I’d thought, I want to write like that. At thirty-seven, I still wanted to write like that, but I had a better understanding of why, a hope that someday that “why” would become a “how.”

  All these years later, I still—still—felt like Franny, overwhelmed by the suffering around me, by all those egos. Perhap
s, like Holden Caulfield, “I act quite young for my age.” Perhaps I’ll always be a person who gets “quiet emotional,” like the boy from Winston-Salem, who knows you can’t go around bleeding all over the world, but can’t manage to stanch myself. Perhaps I had married someone rather too much like Lane Coutell. Three years later, I would pack up my children and leave him for my college boyfriend.

  But now I equally love—my heart truly breaks for—Bessie Glass, who’s lost two of her seven children, one to his own hand. Bessie, who wanders through her apartment like a ghost, who fears—so much that she can’t think straight—that whatever demons plagued Seymour might plague Franny, too. There is a point in “Zooey” that is almost unbearable, a point at which I always have to put the book down and take a breath: Zooey is haranguing Bessie for not recognizing The Way of a Pilgrim as belonging to Seymour. Franny, you see, had told her mother that she happened upon the book at her college library. “You’re so stupid, Bessie,” Zooey says furiously. “She got [it] out of Seymour and Buddy’s old room, where [it’s] been sitting on Seymour’s desk for as long as I can remember.” And then Bessie says, “I don’t go in that room if I can help it, and you know it … I don’t look at Seymour’s old—at his things.”

  That was the point at which the tears arrived. A few pages later, Zooey asks Franny if she wants to talk to Buddy. “I want,” Franny says, “to talk to Seymour.”

  That was the point at which my husband found me sobbing, loudly, phlegmily, haplessly trying not to wet the pages of this book that had passed from my father’s hand to my mother’s and now to mine.

  Salinger’s stories, to a one, are anatomies of loss, every inch of them, from the start to the finish. Even Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters—one of the funniest stories in the English language—is soaked with the fact of Seymour’s death, Seymour’s suicide. Seven years later, Buddy is still mourning. Even Catcher is ultimately a portrait in grief: Holden’s madness has all to do with his brother Allie’s death. And Franny is not pregnant. She’s in mourning. As is the entire Glass family. A family in mourning, never to recover. A world in mourning, never to recover.

  My husband stared at me, shocked, from the doorjamb. “This is about your dad, isn’t it?” he said. “It’s making you think about your dad. About what’s going to happen.” My father, we knew, was not going to recover. He would grow worse and worse, until he couldn’t move and couldn’t talk, and then: the end. “It’s reminding you of your dad.”

  With the back of my hand, I wiped the tears from my face and swiped my nose. “No,” I said. “It’s just about Salinger.”

  Acknowledgments

  My most profound thanks to: Jordan Pavlin, Tina Bennett, Stephanie Koven, Kathy Zuckerman, Caroline Bleeke, Svetlana Katz, Nicholas Latimer, Brittany Morrongiello, Katie Burns, Sally Willcox. Thank you to everyone at Knopf, WME, and Janklow & Nesbit.

  Thank you to Allison Powell and Carolyn Murnick, to Joanna Hershon, Stacey Gottlieb, and Abby Rasminsky for such insightful early reads. To Lauren Sandler, for everything. To Kate Bolick, Evan Hughes, Adelle Waldman, Matthew Thomas, Dylan Landis, and, most of all, Charles Bock.

  Thank you, also, to the wonderful editors and producers with whom I worked on the pieces that evolved into this book: Jeffrey Frank, John Swansberg, James Crawford, David Krasnow. And thank you to Slate, BBC Radio 4, and Studio 360.

  Thank you, thank you to PEN for providing the funding that allowed me to finish this book. To Ledig House for a place to work, and to Ofri Cnaani and Claire Hughes for the same. To Paragraph, where most of this book was written, and to Joy, Lila, Sara, and Amy.

  Thank you to Kenneth Slawenski and Ian Hamilton, whose impeccable research filled holes in my knowledge of Salinger’s life.

  Thank you to Claire Dederer, Cheryl Strayed, and Carlene Bauer for examples of what a memoir can be, and straightforward guidance about writing one.

  I am enormously grateful, of course, to the Agency for giving me the best first job a girl could have, and to my boss and the person known in these pages as Hugh for teaching me more than I ever could have hoped to learn about books, business, literature, and, yes, life. Also thank you to the person known in these pages as Lucy.

  Thank you to Henry Dunow, Anne Edelstein, Jen Carlson, Corinna Snyder, and Chris Byrne. Thank you to Roger Lathbury, Robert Anasi, and Billy Bano.

  Thank you to Coleman and Pearl.

  This book would not exist were it not for the generosity, support, and editorial acumen of Amy Rosenberg. Thank you.

  Keeril: There are no words.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Joanna Smith Rakoff is the author of the novel A Fortunate Age, which won the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction by Emerging Writers and the Elle Readers’ Prize, and was a New York Times Editors’ Pick and a San Francisco Chronicle best seller. As a journalist and critic, she has written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post Book World, The Boston Globe, Vogue, Time Out New York, O: The Oprah Magazine, and numerous other publications. Her poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, Western Humanities Review, The Kenyon Review, and other journals. She has degrees from Columbia University; University College, London; and Oberlin College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.