Salinger (20 page)

On January 31, as Salinger was dealing with issues concerning his new property in Cornish, the
New Yorker
published “Teddy,” a story on which he had worked
intermittently for some time. Because of its plot and subject matter, it would be one of the most controversial stories Salinger ever published. The story centers around Teddy, a ten-year-old
genius who is on a cruise with his parents and his six-year-old sister Booper. On board the ship, Teddy meets a young man named Bob Nicholson with whom he has a long, philosophical conversation, a
highlight of which occurs when Teddy talks about his lack of emotions. “I take it you have no emotions?” Nicholson asks. “If I do, I don’t remember when I ever used
them,” Teddy answers. “I don’t see what they’re good for.” Later, Teddy reveals to Nicholson that he can see in his mind both when and how certain people are going to
die. “All you do is get the heck out of your body when you die,” Teddy says. “My gosh, everybody’s done it thousands and thousands of times. Just because they don’t
remember it doesn’t mean they haven’t done it. It’s so silly. . . . For example, I have a swimming lesson in about five minutes. I could go downstairs to the pool, and there might
not be any water in it. This might be the day they change the water or something. What might happen, though, I might walk up to the edge of it, just to have a look at the bottom, for instance, and
my sister might come up and sort of push me in. I could fracture my skull and die instantaneously.”

With this, Teddy heads for his swimming lesson, leaving behind Nicholson, who soon decides to follow him. Once Nicholson arrives
at the deck that goes to the swimming
pool, he stops. “He was a little more than halfway down the staircase,” Salinger wrote at the end of the story, “when he heard an all-piercing, sustained scream—clearly
coming from a small, female child. It was highly acoustical, as though it were reverberating within four tiled walls.”

That’s how the story concludes, too—as abrupt and unexpected as a sudden death. In this way “Teddy” was similar in structure to “A Perfect Day for
Bananafish,” which also ended with a startling event. In the case of “Teddy,” the
New Yorker
audience was stunned. For here, in the pages of this staid magazine, they had
encountered a story about a young boy who, for reasons that are never fully explained, apparently kills his sister by shoving her into an empty swimming pool. Nothing is more disturbing than the
destruction of innocence, and that was what Salinger was writing about in this story. Teddy, the picture of innocence, is capable of cold-blooded murder. The only possible contributing factor
behind this action, at least in terms of the material provided in the story, is Teddy’s genius. As Teddy gained knowledge, he lost his ability to feel human emotions, which allows him to
commit the act of murdering his sister. Perhaps he kills her—just perhaps—for no other reason than because he wants to.

Salinger received as much mail for “Teddy” as he had for “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor,” mostly from readers disturbed by the ending. In
early February, weathering response to the story, Salinger continued to deal with the problems he had incurred moving to Cornish. On the second, a Saturday, he was preparing for workers to come on
Monday to build a
bulkhead on the property and to outfit the house with storm windows. Next Salinger canceled a trip to New York to see Hamish Hamilton, who had come over
from England with his wife Yvonne, because he needed to stay in Cornish and work on the house. A month later, he canceled another proposed trip to New York, most probably because he was still
focusing all of his attention on his new life in the country.

In March, Signet published
The Catcher in the Rye
in paperback. Priced at fifty cents, the book had a front cover showing a picture of a boy, with a magazine-style picture of Holden,
who carries a suitcase and wears an overcoat, a scarf, and a red baseball cap turned backward on his head. The boy stares into a club that features women in “3 Shows.” On the back
cover, a brief biography of Salinger also appeared. It would be among the last biographies Salinger would allow to appear on the cover of one of his books.

On April 6, in the wake of the publication of
The Catcher in the Rye
in paperback, Little, Brown released Salinger’s collection,
Nine Stories.
The dual release of the
books was planned to maximize the publicity value of both publications. Of all the stories he had published so far, Salinger chose to include in the collection “A Perfect Day for
Bananafish,” “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” “The Laughing Man,” “Down at the Dinghy,” “Just Before the War with the Eskimos,” “For
Esmé—With Love and Squalor,” “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes,” “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period,” and “Teddy.”

Nine Stories
received a burst of reviews, most of them careful to qualify their praise. Under the title “Youthful Horrors,” Alan Barth reviewed the collection in the
Nation.
Saying that these
“accomplished and effective” stories “range from the macabre to the psychopathic . . . including the much-discussed
New Yorker
tale of the child prodigy who pushes his sister, we think, into the empty swimming pool,” Barth writes that Salinger “is a fiction writer of great brilliance”
who is nevertheless in danger of becoming “one of definite and ultimately disappointing limitations.” Later Barth continued: “Just as Saroyan has succumbed to the glamour of a
happy childhood, it is possible to be infatuated by the charms of juvenile diseases at the expense of a larger and more complex area of human suffering. This is a sickness of mind in a very small
world for a writer of large gifts.”

Gilbert Highet reviewed the book for
Harper’s.
In “Always Roaming with a Hungry Heart,” Highet said that “a year or so ago J. D. Salinger published one of the
best novels of adolescent distress which have appeared in our time:
The Catcher in the Rye.
” He had “produced a splendid set of
Nine Stories,
” the last of which,
“Teddy,” “staggered its readers when it came out in the
New Yorker,
and is absolutely unforgettable.” Although he believed there was “not a failure in the
book,” Highet feared Salinger was in danger of writing about the same character in story after story. “There is a thin, nervous, intelligent being who is on the verge of a breakdown: we
see him at various stages of his life, as a child, as an adolescent, as an aimless young man in his twenties worried about homosexuality. One of his chief troubles is that one of his parents is
Jewish and the other Gentile. The male parent is always powerful but rarely understanding. The mother is jittery and unreliable.”

But none of the reviews compared in scope and content to Eudora Welty’s, which appeared in the
New York Times Book Review
on
April 5. One of the most
accomplished and respected short-story writers of the twentieth century, Welty praised Salinger’s writing as being “original, first rate, serious, and beautiful.” Obviously a
“born writer,” Welty said, Salinger had “a sensitive eye . . . an incredibly great ear, and something I can think of no word for but grace.” Welty continued with her praise.
“Mr. Salinger is a very serious artist, and it is likely that what he has to say will find many forms as time goes by—interesting forms too. His novel,
The Catcher in the Rye,
was good and extremely moving, although—for this reader—all its virtues can be had in a short story by the same author, where they are somehow more at home.”

Based in part on the good reviews and in part on the fact that it was the follow-up book to
The Catcher in the Rye,
Nine Stories
soon made its way onto the
New York
Times
best-seller list. It remained among the top fifteen books for the next three months—an almost unheard of feat for a collection of stories published by a new author. Interestingly,
Salinger saw little of the coverage of
Nine Stories,
or at least that was what he wanted people to believe. In early April he wrote the
New Yorker
and his publisher to inform them
that he did not want to see any reviews of the story collection. He could not work if he believed he was in the news, he said, and at the moment he was in the middle of doing excellent work, which
only made him want to write more.

Two months after Little, Brown published
Nine Stories,
Hamish Hamilton released the book in England. There was, however, one major difference between the American and
British versions. Hamilton
felt strongly that the generic name
Nine Stories
would have been the worst possible title to put on the book and he somehow convinced
Salinger to let him use as the title for the collection
For Esmé—With Love and Squalor,
the story that was perhaps Salinger’s most famous in England if not the United
States as well. To the public, Hamilton also finessed the fact that the book was a collection of stories by emphasizing in the advertising copy the idea that
For Esmé
was the next
book from the author of
The Catcher in the Rye.
Hamilton wanted to downplay the truth, since story collections never sell as well as novels.

No matter how Hamilton packaged the book, the critics still wrote about it as a story collection. Most reviews described the book for what it was—a volume of well-written stories that
often deal with the same issues. This was seen as either an asset or a detriment, depending on the publication. Mostly, the reviews were favorable. On April 8, the
Times Literary
Supplement
praised the book. “Not since F. Scott Fitzgerald has an American writer shown a similar grace, originality and tenderness, and managed to squeeze out of the relationship
between children and grown-ups such grave wistful amusement.” The
Observer
concurred, saying that Salinger “seems to understand children as no English-speaking writer has done
since Lewis Carroll.”

1

When he moved to Cornish, the first people Salinger made friends with were the teenagers living in the area. Maybe his overwhelming desire to
write about “very young people” impelled him to be friendly with young people in his everyday life. Maybe he even saw the teenagers as source material for the characters he was creating
in his fiction. Whatever the reason, seeking out the friendship of teenagers rather than adults, especially teenage girls, is not something most well-adjusted grown men do. The attraction of an
adult man to a teenage girl was about to be offered to the world in the form of a novel in September 1955 when Vladimir Nabokov published the first edition of
Lolita,
a book whose
narrator, Humbert Humbert, plays out his obsession for a teenage girl. In the future Nabokov himself would praise “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” as being “a great story,”
one he had more than likely read around the
time he wrote
Lolita.
Perhaps Nabokov identified with Seymour Glass’s unusual fondness for a young girl he meets
on the beach—she’s actually not even a teenager yet—before he goes into his hotel room and shoots himself.