Salinger (14 page)

When Burnett submitted
The Young Folks
to Lippincott, however, Lippincott turned it down, even though Burnett had already made an implicit commitment to Salinger to publish the book.
Since Burnett could not do the book without Lippincott’s approval, he had no choice but to reject it. To inform him of this, Burnett set up a meeting with Salinger, which took place at the
Vanderbilt Hotel in Manhattan. It was not a pleasant occasion. As soon as Burnett broke the news, Salinger got furious that he had been led to believe
The Young Folks
was going to be
published when, as it turned out, it wasn’t. “Lippincott had the final veto on any book we brought in,” Burnett later wrote about the ordeal. “They put up the publishing
money, and all we could do was take their final judgement if they turned the book down.”

That was the line of reasoning Burnett offered to Salinger that day at the Vanderbilt. It did no good. Salinger was livid over being misled, and for that he blamed Burnett. Naturally, this
misunderstanding changed the nature of Salinger and Burnett’s relationship permanently. Salinger had trusted Burnett in the past; after the
Young Folks
disaster, he could not trust
him anymore. Sadly, Salinger would ultimately conclude the actions Burnett and Lippincott took were representative of those that publishers and editors take every day. While most writers learn to
accept those practices, Salinger never would. Eventually, unable to deal with them any longer, he would turn his back on publishing altogether.

In January 1947, not long after “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” appeared in print, Salinger decided to leave his parents’ apartment once and for all. He moved
from Manhattan to Tarrytown, an upper-middle-class community in Westchester County, where he rented a small garage apartment. The living arrangements in Tarrytown were far different from his
parents’ ritzy Park Avenue apartment, but at least he was on his own and not living under his father’s influence. Salinger remained in the garage apartment for much of 1947—a year
when he wrote a great deal but published very little, only two stories, as few as in any year before.

The first was “A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All,” which came out in
Mademoiselle
in May after the
New Yorker
turned it down. At the time,
Mademoiselle,
while it had as its target audience college-age young women, was known both for publishing quality writing and for discovering the early work of such writers as Truman
Capote, Sylvia Plath, and Carson McCullers. So, even though the story was not in the
New Yorker
—the magazine in which Salinger wanted
all
of his work to appear—it
still had a home that would let it reach a large and admiring audience. In addition, this publication marked one of the last times Salinger provided a contributors’ note to a magazine.
“J. D. Salinger does not believe in contributors’ columns,” the note read. “He did say, however, that he started to write at eight and never stopped, that he was with the
Fourth Division and that he almost always writes of very young people—as in his story [on] page 222.”

Set in early December in 1941, just before the start of World War II, the story features Barbara, an eighteen-year-old young woman who, at the suggestion of her
fiancé who wants her to go away for a rest, takes a cruise on a ship named the
Kungsholm.
(That was the name of the ship on which Salinger had worked just before entering military
service, a clue that much of the information in the story, and maybe even the plot itself, is autobiographical.) On the cruise Barbara meets a twenty-two-year-old young man, Ray Kinsella. He has
recently dropped out of college, he is now waiting to join the Army, and he currently works as the cruise’s tournament director—all unmistakable references to Salinger’s own life.
When Ray and Barbara go on shore one night in Havana, they fall in love, which complicates Barbara’s life since she’s engaged. The story ends with Barbara standing in her pajamas and
bathrobe in the early-morning darkness near the port-side rail as she looks out onto the water below and tries to decide what to do. “The fragile hour was a carrier of many things,”
Salinger wrote, “but Barbara was now exclusively susceptible to the difficult counterpoint sounding just past the last minutes of her girlhood.”

Sometimes in the work of a writer, especially one who relies on his own life for source material, the truth
is
obvious. Ray is a character clearly based on Salinger. He falls in love
with Barbara, a young woman who is beautiful, sensitive, and intelligent. Beyond that, Ray is attracted to her, it is implied, in part because she is “just past the last minutes of her
girlhood.” Judging by the subject matter of his stories, this seems to be the life stage of young women that most appealed to Salinger—that juncture where the young woman is passing
from
adolescence into womanhood. There was something about a young woman making that passage that Salinger found endlessly engaging—on an emotional, spiritual, and
sexual level.

(This particular story, based on an obscure incident in the writer’s life, had literary repercussions years later. The novelist W. P. Kinsella, in his most famous work,
Shoeless
Joe,
names his central character Ray Kinsella, joining the Salinger character to himself. In the novel, Ray kidnaps J. D. Salinger and takes him to a baseball game. When the book was turned
into the film
Field of Dreams,
the Salinger character was replaced with a fictional reclusive novelist played by James Earl Jones.)

The second story Salinger published in 1947 was “The Inverted Forest,” which appeared in the December
Cosmopolitan.
The story concerns a genius poet who, after he falls in
love with and then marries a young woman, loses himself in “the inverted forest”—his imagination. “To say that this short novel is unusual magazine fare is, we think, a wild
understatement,” the
Cosmopolitan
editors said in a disclaimer they ran before the story. “We’re not going to tell you what it’s about. We merely predict you will
find it the most original story you’ve read in a long time—and the most fascinating.” As things turned out, because it was long on meaning and short on plot, “The Inverted
Forest” was perhaps the first example of what would happen to Salinger’s fiction in the future when he came to rely more on insight than he did on action.

At about this same time, Salinger wrote a story that would prove to be one of his best. He had recently moved from his garage
apartment in Westchester County to a studio
in a barn in Stamford, Connecticut. Perhaps it was the move that gave him a new energy that came through in this story, or perhaps it was the fact that in his work he had become willing to deal
with the nervous breakdown he had had following the war. No matter what the catalyst was, the end result for Salinger was an exceptional piece of short fiction. Salinger knew he had written an
extraordinary story as soon as he finished it. So did his agent, who sent it to the
New Yorker,
where the editors, impressed with the vividness of the writing and the inventiveness of the
story’s plot, accepted it at once. In fact, because of the singular quality of the story and because Salinger had published so much in such a short time he was coming to be known as one of
the up-and-coming short-story writers of his generation, the
New Yorker
gave him something the magazine called a first-rejection contract. This meant Salinger was paid a yearly retainer of
several hundred dollars to submit each new story to the magazine; for those stories the editors accepted Salinger would be paid a higher rate than he had been paid in the past. In exchange for this
financial consideration, the
New Yorker
had the right of first refusal on any story Salinger wrote; only after the magazine rejected a story could Salinger submit it elsewhere. The story
that got Salinger his first-rejection contract, the story that would permanently change his standing in the literary community, was a peculiar, upsetting piece he had originally called “A
Fine Day For Bananafish” before he changed the title to “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” And it had as its narrator a complex, unusual, and unquestionably disturbed young man by
the name of Seymour Glass.

2

At the
New Yorker,
there had been some discussion among the editors about whether the word
“bananafish,” a word Salinger made up, should be printed as one word or as two. On January 13, Salinger wrote to Gus Lobrano, a highly respected rising star at the magazine who edited
the story, to tell him that it should be spelled as one word because it looked more nonsensical that way. These and other minor queries were decided on, all with Salinger’s absolute approval,
as was the policy at the
New Yorker,
and “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” appeared in the magazine on January 31, 1948.

The story concerns a young woman named Muriel (a name suggestive of Salinger’s mother’s name), who is honeymooning in a hotel in Miami with her new husband, Seymour Glass. Before the
wedding, there had been, to quote from a telephone conversation Muriel has with her mother back in New York, some “funny business” involving Seymour, Muriel’s father’s car,
and a tree; there had been “those horrible things [Seymour] said to Granny about her plans for passing away”; and there had been the incident where Seymour had done something with
“those lovely pictures from Bermuda.” Seymour was acting this way, Muriel implies, because of what had happened to him during the war. The reader glimpses this behavior firsthand.
Seymour is lying on the beach near the hotel, supposedly sunbathing but still wearing his bathrobe. While he talks to his beach companion, Sybil Carpenter, who seems to be about five or six years
old, Seymour puts his hand on Sybil’s ankle, then takes “both of Sybil’s ankles in his hands.” When Sybil mentions Sharon Lipschutz, a young girl who sat next to Seymour one
night as he played the piano after hours in the
hotel’s Ocean Room, Seymour gushes: “Ah, Sharon Lipschutz. How that name comes up. Mixing memory and
desire.” This line seems pivotal to the ensuing action that would make “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” one of the most notorious stories written after World War II. Kissing Sybil
on the foot and telling her good-bye, Seymour goes inside the hotel, takes the elevator to his floor, and, finding his wife asleep on one of the twin beds in their hotel room, retrieves a revolver
from a piece of his luggage. He then sits on the empty bed and shoots himself in the right temple.

“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is an alarming story. Naturally, the ending is shocking, but, once the finality of what has happened sinks in, the ending seems to be a logical
conclusion to the events preceding it. Beyond its technical skills, the story is successful because it captures what it is like to be a soldier so emotionally damaged by the war he can no longer
function in ordinary society. Just as disturbing, though, is an element in the story Salinger may not even have intended to be disturbing. This has to do with Seymour’s apparent fascination
with Sybil. Throughout the story, Seymour’s behavior toward Sybil comes dangerously close to being inappropriate; then Seymour actually crosses the line by saying that contemplating
Sybil’s friend Sharon makes him mix “memory and desire.”

In February, Salinger published “A Girl I Knew” in
Good Housekeeping.
Originally entitled “Wien, Wien” (“Wien” is German for
“Vienna”), the story was based on the months Salinger lived in Vienna in his
early twenties. The narrator is a college dropout named John. “My father
informed me quietly that my formal education was formally over,” John says about his father, who then goes on to tell him that, because he—John—is going to enter the family
business, whether he wants to or not, he has to spend time in Paris and Vienna to learn “a couple of languages the firm could use.” In Vienna, where he stays for five months, John falls
in love with a young girl named Leah. This is how Salinger describes her: “Leah was the daughter of the Viennese-Jewish family who lived in the apartment below mine. . . . She was sixteen and
beautiful in an immediate yet perfectly slow way. She had very dark hair that fell away from the most exquisite pair of ears I have ever seen. She had immense eyes that always seemed in danger of
capsizing in their own innocence. . . . In brief, she was probably the first appreciable thing of beauty I had seen that struck me as being wholly legitimate.”