Salinger (27 page)

During 1962, as he had looked at the phenomenal success of
Franny and Zooey,
Salinger decided to release his fourth book. It probably could not do as well, but, then
again, few books could. So, Salinger took “Seymour: An Introduction,” the last novella he had published in the
New Yorker,
and “Raise High the Roof Beam,
Carpenters,” another novella dealing with the Glass family, put them together, and released the two pieces as a book. The book’s title would simply be the names of the novellas. Olding
negotiated a deal with Little, Brown, who released the book on January 28, 1963. As he had with
Franny and Zooey,
Salinger made his standard demands: no publicity,
no book-club sales, no biographical information disseminated in the press materials, et cetera.

The only biographical material contained in or on the book would be whatever Salinger crafted himself. Once more, he included a provocative dedication. It read: “If there is an amateur
reader still left in the world—or anybody who just reads and runs—I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife
and children.” The fact that Salinger was dedicating the book to his readers, something many writers do, was undercut by his putting it in the conditional—“
if
there is an
amateur reader left” (emphasis added). Salinger seemed to be saying that people did not read his work merely for the sake of reading it; they read it with ulterior motives. It was a notion
that elevated him out of the status of being just “any” writer. As a result, the adjective “untellable” that he used to describe the gratitude he had for his readers sounded
affected. It did not leave the reader with Salinger’s desired effect; it was bothersome, off-putting. Then, the recluse who wanted his readers to know nothing about his private life, told
them he had a wife and two children. It was an oddly forthright thing to say, coming from a writer who claimed he wanted to protect his anonymity.

Next, again as he had done with
Franny and Zooey,
Salinger added an editorial note designed to attract attention to itself—and to Salinger. He began the note by giving a brief
description of “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” and “Seymour: An Introduction.”
“Whatever their differences in mood or effect,” he
wrote, “they are both very much concerned with Seymour Glass, who is the main character in my still-uncompleted series about the Glass family.” After this, he felt he had to explain why
these two novellas were being published so close to
Franny and Zooey,
but, naturally, he could not say he was doing it for the money. “It struck me that [‘Raise High’ and
‘Seymour’] had better be collected together, if not deliberately paired off, in something of a hurry, if I mean them to avoid unduly or undesirably close contact with new material in
the series. There is only my word for it, granted, but I have several new Glass stories coming along—waxing, dilating—each in its own way, but I suspect the less said about them, in
mixed company, the better.”

Here were more comments that beg questions. What exactly did he mean by “mixed company”? Why was it better to say less about the new stories than more? If that’s the case, why
did he bring up the new stories at all? Finally, why would Salinger presume the reader would automatically want to know more about new material?

What actually happened in the future—the “real” story, as it were—would ultimately make observers question the very accuracy of the statements made by Salinger in this
editorial note. First, the truth: After the release of this book, Salinger would publish only one additional story in the
New Yorker,
which would appear two years later. Following that,
Salinger published no new material, either in book form or in a magazine. So, if he did have “several new Glass stories coming along,” he apparently chose not to publish any of them,
except the one in the
New Yorker.
This being the case, qualifying words
and phrases like “there is only my word for it” and “granted” seem
insincere. Suddenly, that language sounds as if Salinger were trying to overcompensate for the fact that he
knew
he had no new publishable material in development but didn’t want his
readers
to know it.

Some reviews of
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
were as bad as any Salinger had received. “Hopelessly prolix, both of these
stories are marred by the self-indulgence of a writer flirting with depths of wisdom, yet coy and embarrassed in his advances,” Irving Howe wrote in the
New York Times Book Review
on
April 7. “With their cozy parentheses and clumsy footnotes, their careening mixture of Jewish Vaudeville humor and Buddhist prescription, they betray a loss of creative discipline, a
surrender to cherished mannerisms.” The most vicious attack came from
Newsweek.
The magazine started its assault by complaining, in unqualified terms, that the four stories that had
been published in two separate books—“Franny,” “Zooey,” “Raise High,” and “Seymour”—could have just as easily been brought out in one
volume, but that Salinger and his publisher had split the four stories up into two books to make more money. “These churlish sentiments are intensified, admittedly,” the magazine added,
“by the discovery that these two stories are nearly as great a gyp artistically as they are financially.”
Time
was just as hard on Salinger. “[T]he grown reader is
beginning to wonder whether the sphinxlike Seymour had a secret worth sharing,” the magazine said. “And if so, when Salinger is going to reveal it.”

Finally, the
Washington Post
ran a good review on January 27, 1963. However, even here, Glendy Culligan began by recalling Mary McCarthy’s attack on
Salinger in the
Observer,
which
Harper’s
had reprinted in October 1962. “As critic, Mary McCarthy operates with the tidy efficiency of a Waring blender,” Culligan
wrote. “What goes in as literature comes out as pulp, with only a slight gritty sound to betray the shredding process.” In fact, Culligan disagreed with McCarthy, for, Culligan argued,
Salinger did not strive to produce “great” literature, as McCarthy would want him to, but fairy tales. “Heroes and villains are both bigger than life size, and we gain stature by
putting ourselves in their shoes,” Culligan wrote. “So, if Seymour is wiser than any mortal could be, we take no exception.” Keeping this in mind, readers should look for the
Glass saga “not as Miss McCarthy’s indignation suggests, on the shelf between James and Joyce, but a little lower down, close to Jack the Giant Killer and Tilly the Toiler.”

Regardless of the bad reviews, by the sixth week of publication,
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
was number one on the
New York Times
best-seller list.

1

The one piece of fiction Salinger published after promising his readers “several new Glass stories” was “Hapworth 16,
1924,” a long story narrated by a seven-year-old Seymour Glass.

Salinger must have worked on “Hapworth” during 1964 and submitted it to the
New Yorker
near the end of that year, for by early 1965 the magazine had begun the lugubrious
process necessary to publish one of Salinger’s long stories. As they had before, the editors and Salinger completed the process successfully, and the story appeared in the magazine on June
19, 1965.

The story is a reproduction, supposedly typed by Buddy Glass, of a letter written by Seymour from summer camp. In the magazine the story ran from pages 32 to 113; many pages contained only one
column of copy, but still the story dominated the entire issue. Unfortunately, while there were countless pages of copy, “Hapworth”
did not have even a hint of a
plot. The story was, quite simply, the long-winded, seemingly unedited ramblings of seven-year-old Seymour, who speaks, for reasons that are never explained, as if he were an adult with profound
reasoning skills and a dazzling control of the English language. Here is a typical example of a sentence, which is about a fellow camper: “He, young Griffith Hammersmith, is also seven;
however, I am his senior by a brisk and quite trivial matter of three weeks.” Then, well over into the story, Seymour spends paragraph after paragraph describing his reading list, which
includes the Brontë sisters, John Bunyan, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and so on. “In fact,” says Edward Kosner, who had followed Salinger’s career long after he had
published his article on him in the
New York Post,
“‘Hapworth 16, 1924’ was barely publishable. The material had gotten too precious, too inward. Salinger had become so
preoccupied with his own concerns that it didn’t translate into the outer world anymore.”

During 1964, Salinger attempted something he had not tried in his career: to write a piece of nonfiction unrelated to anything he had been working on. The piece came about
because Whit Burnett, relentless as always, had approached him about publishing a story in an anthology. This particular anthology was going to be called
Story Jubilee: 33 Years of Story,
and it would stand as a monument to the magazine’s prestigious history. Burnett wanted to include Salinger among all the other “name” authors he would have in the
anthology—all those writers who had made it after
Story
published them at the
beginning of their careers. Naturally, as he had in the past, Salinger refused
to allow Burnett to use a story. So the two decided Salinger would write an introduction to the anthology instead.

During the year, Salinger worked on the piece. When he gave Burnett the introduction, Burnett felt the essay was not about the anthology as much as it was about him, Burnett; or, more
specifically, Salinger’s recollections of Burnett from the days when Salinger was his student. Since the anthology was about
Story,
and not Burnett, Burnett decided he could not use
Salinger’s introduction. “The preface was embarrassing,” Burnett wrote to Salinger on April 17, 1965, “because it had more about me and our Columbia class than it had about
the fifty authors and I felt embarrassed to use it.”

If there was any hope of Salinger and Burnett repairing their relationship, which had been severely damaged by their run-ins over the years, all hope was destroyed when Burnett killed
Salinger’s introduction. It was bad enough that Salinger had wasted his time writing the piece; even worse, he must have been angry with himself for writing it for a man who, all those years
ago, had let a publisher reject a book that he had been committed to.