My Salinger Year (25 page)

After I hung up, though, I thought about Holden, of course. Like the boy from Winston-Salem, I was starting to think about Holden a lot. Holden loved the Museum of Natural History, too, the Indians and the deer drinking from the artificial pond and the birds migrating south in a V. “The best thing, though,” he says, “…  was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move.” Those Indians, that deer, the birds in flight, they remain utterly the same. “The only thing that would be different would be
you
.”

One day my boss handed me a story by a client of hers of whom I’d heard nothing. He was elderly, I gathered, and had published a few acclaimed novels in the distant past, but these novels were long out of print and his name was all but lost to the channels of history. Certainly, it rang no bells with me. Later, I would look for his novels on the Agency’s shelves but find none. “Why don’t you send this out?” she said.

“Under my own name?” I asked tentatively, certain she would say no. Uncertain as to whether I even wanted her to say yes.

“Yes,” she said. “Of course.”

The story was good. Good, but quiet, in the parlance of the Agency—which also favored the term “edgy” to describe
anything, it seemed, with graphic sex, like the work of some of Max’s clients—in that it wasn’t particularly plot-driven. But neither were many stories, including Salinger’s. It read more like a visitation with a character.

In this day and age, I knew, this story was not, most likely, for the big magazines. But sometimes the unlikely occurred. Sometimes
The New Yorker
ran stories translated from Urdu or written entirely without the letter
e
. Sometimes it, too, ran stories that were merely quiet. The magazine had a new fiction editor, I knew, and he would surely be looking for new writers. I typed up a cover letter, clipped it to the story, and sent it off, into the world.

That afternoon, James sent Don’s novel out. He was, of course, an Agency Type of Person, so he would not be holding an auction for the book, but would instead send it to one editor at a time. “If it were a
big
book,” he told me, “I’d do an auction.” Maybe James was right. We just needed one person to see the strange grandeur in Don’s writing, to see, too, how it might be unpacked, loosened, lightened, his story ordered and trimmed. Just one person.

I wondered, though, if holding an auction might signal to editors that this was an important novel. If an auction might
make
it a big book.

No, I thought, as I watched Izzy, the messenger, depart with the manuscript, his slicker ballooning over his gaunt form, no, that had been up to Don.

I’d grown used to the quiet of our wing without my boss, grown used to mapping out my own time, and for those first few days following her return I had to force myself not to regard her as an interloper, an intrusion on my calm, peaceful workday. All the more so when the shouting began. We
had all been treading delicately around her—with good reason—so I was shocked when, one afternoon, I heard Max raise his voice in her office. The door was closed, so I had no idea what he was yelling about—something he regarded as “bullshit” and “not acceptable”—and I froze in my chair, unable even to type.

I was saved by the phone, out of which emanated a pleasant English accent. “Is this Joanne?” it asked.

“It is,” I confirmed.

The caller explained that she was the assistant to
The New Yorker
’s new fiction editor and she was calling about the story I’d sent. My heart began to beat faster. I’d been expecting a note. This was how rejections usually came. Perhaps they were going to take it? Could this be possible?

“We’re going to have to pass on it, I’m afraid,” she said with a huge yawn. “Sorry, I have terrible jet lag. I can’t get used to the time change. I’ve been here for ages, but I still wake up ridiculously early and fall asleep at six o’clock.”

From my boss’s office, the shouting had subsided. Max burst out the door. “All right,” he said, shaking his head in exasperation, as he walked away, studiedly not glancing in my direction. My boss sighed and slowly followed him, surely going off to talk to Carolyn.

“Listen, the reason I’m calling is because we really liked this story. If the author has any others, please send them. And please do stay in touch. Send us more.” She yawned again, less dramatically. “It was close.”

This pleased me more than it should have. I was close. I had aimed high and almost made it.

Don was close, too. Sort of. A few days later, James strolled over to my desk and held a letter up to me. “First rejection,” he explained with a huge grin. “And it’s a really great one.” I had worked at the Agency long enough to understand that
there were rejections and there were rejections. There was
not for me
and
I just didn’t find these characters sympathetic
and
the story struck me as improbable at best
, and also simply
I’m afraid this is too similar to a novel we’re publishing next fall
or
too similar to a writer already on our list
. And then there was
I truly loved the writing but I just didn’t feel the story hung together
and
I’m so torn about this novel
and
I’d love to see this writer’s next novel
, which was essentially the gist of the note James held in his hand.

I was wrong
, I thought, as he walked off to make a Xerox of it for Don.

Walking home through the chilly wind, I remembered that the editor had actually said no. A good rejection letter was still a rejection letter. Perhaps I had been right.

I would’ve preferred, I supposed, to be wrong. Though I wasn’t at all sure.

I thought and thought about the fiction editor’s assistant. She had said to send more, and I felt, somehow, that we must send something immediately. I thought about the writer I’d pulled from the slush, the lovely novella about the girl and her alcoholic father. I’d been waiting for the right moment to present this potential client to my boss.

At the end of the day, I rapped softly at my boss’s door.

“So, I normally just send form letters back to the slush,” I said awkwardly. “But there was one query this summer that seemed interesting. So, I, um, asked for her novel. It’s actually a novella.” Suddenly I realized that I had potentially broken various rules. I should have brought the query letter to my boss first and asked permission to contact the writer. Seemingly all the blood in my body rushed to my face. “I don’t know if it’s to your taste. It’s quiet. And small in scale. But I think it’s good. I think it could sell.”

My boss smiled. “You know,” she said, “you should have talked to me before you asked to see her work. When you contact an author, you’re representing the Agency.”
I understand
, I started to say, but before I could make a sound, she’d held out her hand. “Let me see it,” she said.

That Friday, the mail contained a bundle of Salinger letters sent over from Little, Brown and several letters for me: the Salinger fans, writing back. I opened one, neatly typed on an ancient typewriter, smiling with delight, for reasons I couldn’t quite pinpoint. “Dear Miss Rakoff,” the note began, “if that’s who you really are.” My smile quickly disappeared. “Your name is so ridiculous that I am pretty certain it’s fake. I don’t know who you really are, but I’m assuming you’re using a pseudonym to protect yourself.” I laughed so loudly that Hugh shuffled in his chair, disrupted from whatever minutiae occupied him at that moment. “Well, whoever you are, I’m writing to tell you that you have no right to keep my letter, or anyone’s letter, from J. D. Salinger. I didn’t write to you. I wrote to him. If you think you can keep my letter, you’re wrong. Please send it to J. D. Salinger immediately.” I had no recollection of this person’s name, which probably meant I’d sent him a standard form letter, but I wasn’t sure. By this point I’d answered, God, hundreds of—a thousand?—fan letters.

I opened the next, which was addressed in bubbly, girlish script: the girl seeking an A via a response from Salinger. What was I expecting? An expression of gratitude for my harsh but helpful words? What I found instead were two pages filled with expletives, fired off in a bout of rage. “Who are you to judge me?” she asked. “You don’t know anything about me. I bet you’re some dried-up bitch who doesn’t even remember what it’s like to be young, just like all my teachers.
I didn’t ask you for advice. I didn’t write to YOU. I wrote to J. D. Salinger. Probably you’re just jealous that you’re not young anymore, so you feel like you have to punish kids like me. Or you’re jealous of Salinger because he’s famous and you’re just some person.” There was a sort of beautiful truth to her note. I was, indeed, just some person.

Some person who was now beginning to understand why Hugh had handed me that form letter. To save me from myself.

“I’m talking to bigger printers,” Roger told me one day in October. There was a slight swagger in his voice that I’d not detected before. The enormity of this project was, it seemed, affecting him. Until now, he had been a publisher of small books, below-the-radar books, books that sold in hundreds rather than thousands. Now—it had hit him—he was publishing Salinger.
Salinger
. Whose books sold in the
millions
. Back in June, Roger had planned an initial print run of ten thousand: larger than any book in his catalog, but still quite modest. My boss had gone a ways toward convincing him that, as Hugh said, collectors could buy up ten thousand books before they even arrived in stores.

“If we go with a bigger print run, I run into another problem as well,” he said. “Where to store the books. Now, normally, I stash them in my father-in-law’s basement—”

“Wait, what?” I asked, laughing. The situation had now officially crossed the line into the absurd. J. D. Salinger was publishing with a press
that stored books in someone’s basement
.

“Yes, well, I store them in
my
basement, too, but it fills up pretty quickly …” his voice trailed off. “So if we’re talking a print run of thirty, forty, fifty thousand, I’d need to rent a storage facility, so that’s next on my list.” He sounded troubled,
exhausted, as if these calculations were keeping him awake at night. Surely a larger print run meant a larger outlay of cash for Roger, who taught at a state university. Could he even afford any of this?

But there was another problem with the bigger printers, the printers who could handle Salinger-appropriate print runs. “Their bindings look
cheap
,” he explained, disgustedly. “Perfect binding, rather than a true sewn binding. They’re essentially gluing the book instead of sewing it. I know Jerry won’t like it. I remember the contretemps over
For Esmé
years back.” Apparently, Jerry had been horrified by the quality of the British paperback of
Nine Stories
—called
For Esmé—with Love and Squalor, and Other Stories
in the U.K.—so horrified that he’d raised a huge fuss and broken with his longtime publisher, a close friend. Roger could endlessly spout this sort of Salingeriana. With each phone call he inched a little closer—in my mind—to the territory occupied by the fans. “I don’t want anything like that to happen. It’s too dangerous,” he said. “I just have to make a decision.”

“Why,” I asked Roger suddenly, “why do you think Jerry responded to your note?”

“Well, I used a typewriter—” he began.

“I remember,” I interrupted, as gently as I could.

“And I know he liked that. But—” He paused for a moment, and I could hear him breathing. He had a slight cold. “I suppose”—he paused again—“well, I didn’t tell him how much I loved his stories. I didn’t say, ‘Oh,
The Catcher in the Rye
is my favorite novel,’ or anything like that. Some instinct, something, told me not to fawn over him, not to tell him he was a genius or”—he adopted a stentorian, professorial tone here—“
an important American writer
, or that kind of thing. I mean, I suppose that’s why he lives in Cornish, isn’t it?” I nodded, forgetting for a moment that I was on the phone, that Roger couldn’t see this gesture. “So that he
doesn’t have people constantly telling him that he’s a genius. So that he can just be himself.”

“Yes,” I agreed.
How lucky
, I thought,
that he knew exactly who that self was
.

Harper’s
turned down the story, too, as I knew it would, for their editor favored the ironic, the young, the “edgy.”
The Atlantic
declined, too. And so I began thinking about small magazines, small
prestigious
magazines, the magazines that would pay less—or little, or nothing—but would draw attention to my boss’s client. There was
The Paris Review
and
Story
, where Salinger had gotten his start, and a host of others. But there was one, in particular, that I thought might like this writer’s elegant precision. Before I could change my mind, I typed up a cover letter, clipped it to the story, and slipped the sheaf into a mailer.
Done
, I thought, smiling to myself. As I closed the thick
Literary Market Place
, my eye fell on the name of another magazine, a magazine that ran poetry with both rigor and heart, and fiction that was unlike anything one could read elsewhere. There on the page in front of me was the name of the poetry editor. Before I could think better of it, I plopped down in my seat again, pulled a sheet of plain bond out of my drawer, and pounded out a brief letter to him. Then I pulled from my drawer three of my own poems, poems I’d typed in the early hours before my boss arrived, the rest of the office consolingly dark. I clipped the letter to them and slipped them in a manila envelope, just as I did for Agency clients.

The first freeze came quickly, more quickly than I remembered from my youth, when summer seemed to stretch through October. It was now November, but it felt like February: icy winds, icy rain. “We need to ask Kristina to fix the
heat,” I said one night, huddled in a blanket on the couch, still in the wool skirt and sweater I’d worn to work, contemplating putting my coat back on.