Salinger (24 page)

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 Salinger 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.

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.