Salinger
Page 17
Besides correcting the galleys for the book, Salinger actually had very little to do to prepare for the book’s publication. This was true because of certain ground rules he had handed down to the publisher. There would be no advance publicity for the book. There would be a simple and understated art design for the book, although Salinger would provide a brief statement about the text; this decision itself was a compromise since Salinger had originally said he would write a 1,000-word introduction to the book but then changed his mind. There would be no advance sale of the book to clubs or any similar outlet. In other words Franny and Zooey would be issued with as little fanfare as possible. The publisher would merely ship the book to stores, and those readers who wanted to would buy it.
The publication date for Franny and Zooey was set for September 14. When readers did buy the book—125,000 copies were sold in its first two weeks of release alone—they discovered, besides “Franny” and “Zooey,” two new pieces of writing by Salinger. One was the book’s dedication, with a reference to his year-old son and a testimonial to his New Yorker editor, William Shawn. “As nearly as possible,” it read, “in the spirit of Matthew Salinger, age one, urging a luncheon companion to accept a cool lima bean, I urge my editor, mentor and (heaven help him) closest friend, William Shawn, genius domus of the New Yorker, lover of the long shot, protector of the unprolific, defender of the hopelessly flamboyant, most unreasonably modest of born great artist-editors, to accept this pretty skimpy-looking book.”
Naturally, the dedication was provocative, since it gave glimpses into Salinger’s private life—glimpses that a recluse who truly wanted to be a recluse never would have given. There was the quick image of his one-year-old son having lunch with someone—was it Salinger? There was the revelation that his best friend was William Shawn, who was also his editor at the New Yorker, and the added admission that Shawn was his best friend because Shawn loved long shots, protected unprolific writers, and defended flamboyant people. All of these, of course, were references to the way Salinger must have viewed himself. The “heaven help him” comment was even Salinger’s own clue to let his readers know he understood that by naming Shawn as his best friend he was unleashing a stream of ardent fans onto Shawn who would harass him in hopes of finding out more about Salinger—a fate Shawn could not have cherished.
The dedication was peculiarly revealing for someone who seemed to want to hide himself from the public. It appeared to be a tease, carefully crafted by Salinger himself. If Salinger had wanted to dedicate his book to Shawn but still intended to protect his privacy, all he had to do was run the dedication as most dedications of this sort are run. “To William Shawn,” it should have read. Only someone playing hide-and-seek with his audience would offer these “catch me if you can” tidbits that made his fans want to know more, not less, about him.
Besides the dedication, Salinger provided the dust-jacket copy, although it was nowhere near the 1,000 words he had promised for an introduction. It, too, was strangely autobiographical, full of coded and uncoded references to his life and work.
Most significantly, the jacket copy referred to a number of other stories in the works. While it was true two other Salinger pieces had appeared (“Seymour” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters”), what the public could not have known in 1961—what would not become obvious for years to come—was that there were no unpublished Salinger manuscripts being held by the New Yorker. According to all existing records, there were, in 1961, no new Salinger stories or novellas awaiting publication. But that was certainly not the impression Salinger created, implying that there was plenty of material in the pipeline waiting to be published. Salinger closed the dust-jacket copy with a piece of disinformation, misreporting the town in which he had taken up residence. His wife wanted him to say, Salinger wrote, that he lived in Westport, Connecticut, with his dog.
Franny and Zooey stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for six months, going so far as to reach the number one spot. It did not achieve this kind of popular success because of its critical reception, however. Compared to the reviews of The Catcher in the Rye and Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey’s reviews were much more harsh and mean-spirited. One after another, reviewers bemoaned the fact that, with all of his talent and originality, Salinger had been writing about the same subjects in the same way for ten years. It looked as if Salinger was going to be guilty of the flaw reviewers criticized Fitzgerald for. Because he had not developed beyond the level of accomplishment he had achieved at the beginning of his career, Fitzgerald was attacked for not living up to his potential as an artist. What was not said was this: From the start, he was writing at a level few writers ever reach, much less surpass.
Often with veiled references to Fitzgerald, reviewers criticized Salinger, some more than others. “[Salinger’s] fiction, in its rather grim bravado, its humor, its morbidity, its wry but persistent hopefulness, matches the shape and tint of present American life,” John Updike wrote in “Anxious Days for the Glass Family,” which ran on the front page of the New York Times Book Review on September 17, 1961. “It pays the price, however, of becoming dangerously convoluted and static.” On November 18, Joan Didion was even less kind in the National Review. Dismissing Salinger’s fiction as “spurious,” she focused on the Salinger cult. “I rather imagine that Salinger readers wish secretly that they could write letters to Franny and Zooey and their brother Buddy . . . much as people of less invincible urbanity write letters to the characters in As the World Turns and The Brighter Day.” In the December 1961 Yale Review, J. N. Hartt reviewed the book, again negatively. “It is rather more apparent,” Hartt wrote about Salinger and his characters, “that he loves them than that they are lovable. The rest of us have access to them only in their talk. The talk is often hilarious, deeply tender, and charming. But they cannot construct a world out of it; and so Salinger has not constructed a world out of them.”
Since the reviews were not selling the book, what was selling it was simple—an intense curiosity on the public’s part to see what Salinger had decided to publish. This curiosity was fueled early on when Time magazine ran a cover story about Salinger on September 15. Of course, Salinger had known about the story for a while, since the magazine had been approaching his friends and family members for interviews. Needless to say, he was disturbed that the magazine was doing the piece at all.
The magazine’s cover featured a freehand drawing of Salinger from the chest up. On his face he holds a demure expression. Behind him there is a field of rye with a boy rising up at the back of the field. It was the kind of drawing Salinger would have hated. Literal and devoid of irony, it took itself and its subject more seriously than the subject took himself. Inside the issue the Time editors ran four freehand drawings by Russell Hoban. There was an angular rendering of Holden Caulfield, who gave the appearance of being a young Hamlet contemplating his fate. “Salinger’s Holden Caulfield,” the drawing’s caption read. “Among the young, the mad, the saintly.” There was Franny lying on a sofa under an elaborate blanket. “Franny,” the caption read. “In flight from dancing egos.” Next, Zooey, with a squarish face that made him look “[l]ike a Jewish-Irish Mohican.” Finally, there was Bessie, wearing her lounging outfit, smoking a cigarette, and affecting the look of an over-the-hill theatrical agent. “Bessie,” her caption read. “With cups of consecrated chicken soup.”
In the “Letter from the Publisher,” Hoban warned readers that by doing these drawings he was violating Salinger’s characters’ “private rights to exist in the reader’s mind.” But he did the drawings, he said, because of his love of the writer, an admiration that so defined his life he had named his first two daughters Phoebe and Esmé. “Salinger, I think,” Hoban said, “is a man without eyelids. All of his material comes to him so painfully; it costs so much to write, more than anyone else who comes to mind.” That pain, one could argue, is what Hoban captures in his dark, unusual drawings.
“I had already done two or three Time co
vers,” says Hoban, “so my editor gave me the Salinger story to do. I had probably told him that two of my children had been named after Salinger characters. Phoebe and Esmé were such beguiling characters I thought they were good names for my first two daughters. I did the paintings entirely from imagination with no models. These were my own readings of his stories.”
If he disapproved of the illustrations, Salinger surely detested the piece. Over the years, he would be extremely vocal to friends about his contempt for the Time cover story, which the magazine’s editors had entitled “Sonny: An Introduction.” Primarily Salinger hated the piece because it invaded his privacy. “What they saw behind a cluster of birches,” the magazine reported, referring to the reporters who sneaked onto his property to get a look at where he lived, “was a simple, one-story New England house painted barn-red. A modest vegetable garden, some yards and across a stream from the house—a little concrete cell with a skylight. The cell contains a fireplace, a long table with a typewriter, books, and a filing cabinet.” After this, the magazine then called into question Salinger’s willingness to tell the truth, which must have also infuriated Salinger, When the article mentioned the dust-jacket reference to his living in Westport with his dog, it did so this way: “One source of bogus information is the author himself; in the jacket blurb for Franny and Zooey, which he wrote himself, he says with coy fraudulence that ‘I live in Westport with my dog.’ The dark facts are that he has not lived in Westport or had a dog for years.”
Salinger was also lucky. One aspect of Salinger’s life Time reporters had been examining but did not write about was his preoccupation with young girls. There had been one rumor circulating that Sylvia—the young doctor he had met in Europe after the war—was not his wife, but a girl he had fallen in love with in Daytona Beach, Florida; she, too, had been enthralled with him until her parents put an end to the friendship. On the issue of his fondness for young girls, Time had found someone who might help unravel Salinger’s potentially scandalous attractions. When one reporter discovered this source, he sent the magazine the following telegram: “WE HAVE FOUND A LEAD THAT MAY FINALLY OPEN MR. SALINGER’S CLOSET OF LITTLE GIRLS.” However, that lead did not produce convincing-enough proof for his information to be used in Time’s cover story which was not an exposé at all but an appreciation. “Salinger,” Time concluded, “is clearly an original.”
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The assault on Salinger’s privacy wasn’t over. On November 3, Ernest Havemann published “The Search for the Mysterious J. D. Salinger” in Life. Accompanied by a haunting black-and-white photograph of Salinger walking on his property, the article, long and often compelling, featured a description of Claire, whom Havemann had seen when he happened upon the Salinger house unannounced. “On the other side a baby began to cry,” Havemann wrote about what he had heard as he approached the fence surrounding the house. “A screen door quickly slammed. A woman’s voice quietly comforted the child. And then the gate opened.” This was what Havemann saw: “A young woman with blondish hair, barefoot and without make-up, stood there, holding her startled baby in her arms. Behind her was a little girl who had a friendly and expectant look as if she hoped I had brought her a playmate.” Then Havemann told Claire he was a journalist. “Mrs. Salinger’s eyes said unmistakably, ‘Oh, Lord, not another one.’ She sighed and said she had a set piece for visitors who want to meet her husband, the gist of it being absolutely no.” After that, Havemann said good-bye to Claire, “who was looking more distressed by the moment.” Finally, the gate closed, and she was gone.
After the ordeal over the Ace Book’s reprint of For Esmé—With Love and Squalor, Salinger refused to allow Hamish Hamilton to publish Franny and Zooey. It would be hard to calculate the future profits Hamilton had blown by losing Salinger, but their business arrangement ended for good when Salinger turned down Hamilton’s advance of ten thousand British pounds and accepted one from William Heinemann for four thousand pounds. The money, of course, meant nothing to Salinger, who, over the last ten years, had become nothing short of obsessive about controlling the design of his books.
When Franny and Zooey was published in England in June 1962, the reviews were bad there, too. On June 8, Frank Kermode wrote in the New Statesman that Salinger “very carefully writes for an audience he deplores, an audience that disposes of a certain amount of smart cultural information and reacts correctly to fairly complex literary stimuli: an audience . . . who have turned in pretty good papers on Flaubert or Faulkner. Or Salinger.” That same day, the Times Literary Supplement ran a mixed review. The critic praised “Franny” but felt “Zooey” suffered from the “occasional intrusion of the author . . . that alters [the story’s] flavour—and not for the better.”
These reviews were nothing compared to the one Mary McCarthy published on June 3 in the Observer Weekend Review. McCarthy had made a name for herself by attacking other contemporary writers, among them Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Lillian Hellman, and Gore Vidal. No doubt she intended to attract the same type of attention when she wrote “Closed Circuit,” her review of Salinger, which was so vicious it bordered on a personal attack.
She called The Catcher in the Rye “false and sentimental.” She believed the bathroom-stall scene in “Franny” was intentionally misleading. “[I]ts strange suggestiveness misled many New Yorker readers into thinking that Franny was pregnant—that was why, they presumed, such significance was attached to her shutting herself up in a toilet in the ladies’ room, hanging her head and feeling sick. . . . These readers were not ‘in’ on the fact that Franny was having a mystical experience.” Then McCarthy focused on what she saw as the problem with Franny and Zooey—and maybe even the rest of Salinger’s fiction. “In Hemingway’s work, there was hardly anybody but Hemingway in a series of disguises, but at least there was only one Papa per book. To be confronted with the seven faces of Salinger, all wise and loveable and simple, is to gaze into a terrifying narcissus pool. Salinger’s world contains nothing but Salinger, his teachers, and his tolerantly cherished audience—humanity. Outside are the phonies vainly signaling to be let in.”
McCarthy had finally spoken the unspeakable. What if Salinger had invented all of the drama in his life simply to create a source of ceaseless attention for himself? What if Salinger was the ultimate narcissist? After all, when one becomes an internationally famous author the public is dying to know more about, what better way to ensure the continuation of that attention than to run from it? The actions of a narcissist can be perverse, but the goal of each action is the same: to get the audience to look, to look some more.
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In the fall of 1961, Gordon Lish, then the director of linguistic studies at the Behavioral Research Laboratory in Palo Alto, California, wired Salinger, as he had several other writers, to ask him if he would participate in a program sponsored by the Office of Economic Opportunity’s Job Corps. Specifically, Lish wanted Salinger to write an essay about why he loved his work. The Job Corps’ program, entitled Why Work, was going to be targeted toward urban youth who were becoming unemployed in alarmingly large numbers.
“In February 1962 the telephone operator at the Behavioral Research Lab said she had a Mr. Salinger on the phone for me,” Lish recalls, “and because of the nature of the laboratory I thought that she was talking about Pierre Salinger, the press secretary to President Kennedy. So I was surprised to discover that it was J. D. Salinger. He started by saying, ‘You know who I am and you know I don’t reply to telephone calls and mail and I’m only doing this because you seem to be hysterical or in some sort of difficulty.’ That struck me as amazing since the telegram had gone out in the fall sometime and here it was winter. But that was the pretext of his phone call—he said I was in some kind of problem. Then he said, ‘You only want me to participate in this because I’m famous.’ And I said, ‘No, no, no, it’s because you know how to speak to children.’ Then he said, ‘No, I can’t. I can’t even speak to my own children.’”
Following t
his comment, Lish gave Salinger a brief lecture on how he—Lish—had succeeded in talking to children. “I said it was easy to speak to children if you open up your heart to them. After this, we talked for about twenty minutes, chiefly about children. His voice was very deep. Haggard-sounding, weary-sounding. He didn’t sound at all like I expected Salinger to sound. He didn’t sound verbal. He possessed none of the adroitness I would have anticipated. Anyway, he did tell me he never wrote anything if it was not about the Glasses and the Caulfields, adding that he had shelves and shelves filled with the stuff. So I said, ‘Well, gee, that will be fine. Just give me some of that.’ Soon the phone call ended and, of course, he didn’t agree to provide me with a piece on why he loved his work.”
That fall, Whit Burnett tried to get his own piece of writing out of Salinger when he asked if he could reprint a story in a Story magazine anthology. One would have thought that considering their history with each other Burnett would have given up on trying to repair his friendship with Salinger—or at least given up on trying to get a story out of him. But Burnett had accomplished what he had done in his career by being tenacious, and he certainly didn’t back away from confrontation with Salinger. What he learned was that Salinger could be equally tenacious, especially when it came to the publication of his work. Again, Salinger said no.
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.