At the time I was there, I don’t think Peggy was affected that much with [the solitude]. She was only three and four years old. I think as she got to be eight, nine, and ten, it affected her a lot. By that time, Jerry had also put that apartment over the garage, and that’s where he sat and wrote “Raise High the Roof Beam.” If he was in either of those places, the kids weren’t allowed to get near him. Neither was his wife. You kind of fantasize that if people have money, they have happiness. It’s not so.
Claire impressed me greatly for putting up with so destitute of a husband. He was just never there, and she’s just the kind of a lady you imagine with a long dress and a neat hairdo and a glass of wine in her hand, talking with lots of New York people. Well, that’s how she always appeared to me. Her role just didn’t seem right.
GERALDINE McGOWAN: Claire was very young, but Salinger always treated women like they were unbreakable. He has this idea that little girls especially can be leaned on by adult males. It’s a bizarre, bizarre thing to think. But he does, and in the fiction it’s almost like he’s writing an urban Heidi or an urban Pollyanna. These little girls, who come in and save the world, don’t need any help from anybody, no matter what they’ve suffered. It’s a fairy tale, of sorts. Women have a fairy-tale quality in his work.
Esmé has lost both her parents, but she helps Sergeant X. Zooey says some of the nastiest things in the world to his mother, Bessie; she never blinks, just worries about Franny. Women don’t break, in [Salinger’s] view; they’re always just there to support these very sensitive men. I don’t think he thought much about Claire. I think this image of women was so strong within him, he didn’t think there was any reason for him to worry about Claire, whereas, of course, any woman alone—with a baby at the age of twenty, no family, no friends—would need help. That did not seem to occur to him.
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BEN YAGODA: In that period, 1955, Salinger was clearly concentrating on this family he had invented, the Glass family. “Franny” was quickly followed by “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” a wonderful novella about members of that same family.
BRUCE MUELLER and WILL HOCHMAN: The importance of “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” within Salinger’s body of work cannot be overstated. This 1955 story assembles and introduces the Glass family in its entirety and may be considered a watershed event in Salinger’s publication history.
DAVID SHIELDS: It’s as if he is pulling an immense blanket over himself: from now on he will keep himself warm by the heat of this impossibly idealized, suicidal, genius, alternative family. This will become his mission: to disappear into the Glasses.
JAMES LUNDQUIST: [“Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters”] centers on sacrament and celebration, although ironically at first. It deals with Seymour’s wedding to Muriel, but Seymour does not appear, and Buddy, the only member of the Glass family who is able to be present for the ceremony, is forced into a car with four other wedding guests to be driven to the apartment of the bride’s parents for what has turned out to be a non-wedding reception. The situation Salinger utilizes to build his story around is a classic one in vaudeville and burlesque humor.
JOHN UPDIKE: [It is the] best of the Glass pieces: a magic and hilarious prose-poem with an enchanting end effect of mysterious clarity.
EBERHARD ALSEN: Seymour is presented as both highly educated and mentally unstable. The story is told by Seymour’s brother Buddy, and Seymour’s character emerges from Buddy’s conflict with the irate wedding guests and from his attempts to understand Seymour’s unstable behavior. These attempts include lengthy quotations from Seymour’s diary, which contains many references to Eastern religions, chiefly classical Taoism and Vedanta Hinduism.
J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Swami Adiswarananda, 1975:
I read a bit from the [Bhagavad] Gita every morning before I get out of bed.
LESLIE EPSTEIN: What a triumph “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” is. It’s a magnificent story and a perfect counterweight to “Bananafish.”
SHANE SALERNO: In “Franny” and “Raise High,” both published in 1955, Salinger still had the balance about right: 80 percent story and character, 20 percent religion and lecture.
J. D. SALINGER (“Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” The New Yorker, November 19, 1955):
“We were up at the Lake. Seymour had written to Charlotte, inviting her to come up and visit us, and her mother finally let her. What happened was, she sat down in the middle of our driveway one morning to pet Boo Boo’s cat, and Seymour threw a stone at her. He was twelve. That’s all there was to it. He threw it at her because she looked so beautiful sitting there in the middle of the driveway with Boo Boo’s cat. Everybody knew that, for God’s sake—me, Charlotte, Boo Boo, Waker, Walt, the whole family.” I stared at the pewter ashtray on the coffee table. “Charlotte never said a word to him about it. Not a word.” I looked up at my guest, rather expecting him to dispute me, to call me a liar. I am a liar, of course. Charlotte never did understand why Seymour threw that stone at her.
DAVID SHIELDS: In her book, Margaret Salinger says she doesn’t understand why Seymour throws the rock at Charlotte, but it’s clearly meant as a parable: the young, beautiful Charlotte was too beautiful to remain undamaged in this world. Margaret, having lived with Salinger, doesn’t believe in damage as revelation. This, though, is Salinger’s major chord. Seymour never appears in the story except when Buddy reads his diary or characters describe his actions, all of which occur off the page as ritualized funeral ablutions, washing the body in preparation for its spiritualized reincarnation in thousands of future dead GIs and Jews. Seymour writes that he told his fiancée, Muriel, that a Zen Buddhist master answered the question “What is the most valuable thing in the world?” with the answer “a dead cat was, because no one could put a price on it.” Seymour tells Muriel’s mother that the war seems likely to go on forever, but if he is ever released from the army he would like to return to civilian life as a dead cat.
IHAB HASSAN: In the story of his wedding and the record of his buried life Salinger has exercised his powers of spiritual severity and formal resourcefulness to their limit, and it is indicative of Salinger’s recent predicament that in the story the powers of spirit overreach the resources of form. He is seeking, beyond poetry, beyond all speech, the act which makes communion possible. As action may turn to silence, so may satire turn to praise.
SUBHASH CHANDRA: Salinger kills Seymour—his chief protagonist of several works—in one of the early stories [“A Perfect Day for Bananafish”]. In the later works, the novelist proceeds with dexterous artistry to re-create and rebuild all those circumstances and reasons responsible for his hero’s tragic end. This enables the novelist to construct a corpus of investigation on which he slowly but surely goes to delineate his concept of man. In doing so, a visibly perceptive change comes in the form and the structure of the later works when it becomes clear that the thematic interest triumphs over the fictional interest.
PHILIP ROTH: He has learned to live in this world—but how? By not living in it. By kissing the soles of little girls’ feet and throwing rocks at the head of his sweetheart. He is a saint, clearly. But since madness is undesirable and sainthood, for most of us, out of the question, the problem of how to live in this world is by no means answered; unless the answer is that one cannot.
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DAVID SHIELDS: There was the Salinger family and the Glass family, but there was also a third family: the New Yorker, with William Shawn as patriarch. In contemporary parlance, he was Salinger’s enabler: he encouraged Salinger’s best tendencies (his devotion to literary art) but also his worst tendencies (toward recusal, toward retreat, toward isolation, renunciation, purity, inscape, even silence). Salinger found an artistic, neurotic soul mate in Shawn; while he reaped the artistic benefits that resulted, Claire and their children were left to fend for themselves in the hermetic Cornish paradise Salinger had built for himself, not for others.
ROGER ANGE
LL: When he first came to the [New Yorker], Salinger worked with Gus Lobrano [and William Maxwell], but William Shawn took over [after Lobrano’s death]. . . .When I came to the fiction department, none of the editors in the department dealt with Salinger—only Shawn.
BEN YAGODA: What elevated Shawn professionally was World War II. Shawn used the war to transform the magazine from a sophisticated humor magazine into a magazine that published serious journalism, culminating in the publication of John Hershey’s “Hiroshima,” which occupied one entire issue. It was shepherded by Shawn. He was the one who germinated the idea with Hershey, argued it should take up the entire issue, edited it, and brought it into print. That elevated Shawn in the halls of the New Yorker and in the literary world.
William Shawn, editor of the New Yorker and Salinger’s editor, loyal defender, and close friend.
THOMAS KUNKEL: Shawn always wanted to be a writer, and because of that, he just understood the writer’s psyche in a way that few people ever have. He understood what they were trying to do and how hard it is, but also knew how it could be put into print.
A. SCOTT BERG: Shawn didn’t want to be seen or known about, wanted to print his authors rather selflessly, and knew that often the time that an author needs an editor most is not when the book is all done but while he’s actually writing it. Shawn was the presence on Salinger’s shoulder.
VED MEHTA: Shawn got involved in every little thing at the New Yorker. J. D. Salinger wrote about this family of geniuses. In a way, the atmosphere at the New Yorker was that of an extended Salinger family. Mr. Shawn really didn’t want to be a wise father; he was like a wise brother on the nineteenth floor. You consulted him on anything and everything. If you needed a psychoanalyst, you would ask Shawn.
Shawn never gossiped. If you said something to him, it was like shouting it in a tomb. There was never this worry, “Oh God, people will know that a third of my piece had to be cut because it was badly written.” It was all so secret. After all, he was the most private man I’ve known, except maybe for J. D. Salinger.
LAWRENCE WESCHLER: Imagine the most phobic man in the world. He lives in a city surrounded on all sides by water, and he is afraid of everything—bridges, tunnels, buses, limousines, helicopters, planes, ferries. He cannot bring himself to get off that island, but he is also the most curious man in the world. He wants to know about everything and everyone and every place. And now imagine that by some fluke this man has come into what amounts to limitless wealth: he can take people and train them as his surrogates and then send them forth. “Go,” he tells them. “Go—take however long you need, but then write me back what it is like there, what the people are saying and feeling, how they spend their lives, what they worry about—write me all that, make it complete, and make it vivid, as vivid as if I’d been able to go there myself.” And each week he puts together a folio of their letters, of their reports, and he produces a little private magazine, just for himself. And everybody else gets to read over his shoulder (he doesn’t mind, but he hardly notices). That’s what it’s like to work for William Shawn. He really is the New Yorker.
ROBERT BOYNTON: Beyond what he accomplished as an actual editor, Shawn was important because of the cult of personality that arose around him.
THOMAS KUNKEL: Shawn was a person of very set routines. He edited only with certain kinds of pencils. He did have a lot of idiosyncrasies, but that was part and parcel of the person, and I think one of the reasons that writers responded to him so well was that the insecurities and phobias actually humanized him a little bit.
PAUL ALEXANDER: Shawn would go to lunch every day at the Algonquin and order Corn Flakes.
BEN YAGODA: In the summer, Shawn wore wool suits and sweaters and overcoats. He left the state of New York only once in the last fifty years of his life, to visit his family in Chicago. He was introverted and never gave interviews. His whole life was wrapped up in the New Yorker and his writers until the end of his life. Two employees were outside his office to prevent people from walking in unexpectedly.
TOM WOLFE: Shawn went to work at the New Yorker building on Forty-third Street with an attaché case. As soon as he entered the building, an elevator operator would put a hand across the elevator entrance so nobody else could get in. They’d ride Shawn up to his office. Inside the attaché case was a hatchet. In case he got stuck between floors he would be able to chop his way out. Good way to get killed. That was Shawn’s personality.
THOMAS KUNKEL: It was very much the New Yorker’s editing style to be obsessive in a lot of different ways. The editors—Shawn principally among them—were equally passionate about where the commas should go and whether this warrants a dash or not. A writer would get to the point where he was answering countless questions; there were iterations and iterations and iterations of galleys.
A final proofreader found a spot that he felt needed a comma. He went to Maxwell, who looked at it and said, “Well, it looks like it needs a comma to me.” They couldn’t find Salinger, so they went ahead and put the comma in. When the story came out, Maxwell said Salinger was melancholy about that comma and never forgot it. Maxwell said, “I never again introduced another piece of punctuation into a Salinger story without talking to him.”
BEN YAGODA: It’s hard to know much about the precise nature of the collaboration between Salinger and Shawn because, let’s face it, we’re dealing with two of the most private men in the history of literature, if not the world. But we do know that when Salinger submitted “Zooey,” the sequel to “Franny,” to the New Yorker in 1957, the fiction editors unanimously agreed to reject the story.
When I interviewed William Maxwell, who was one of the editors, he said the reason was that the New Yorker didn’t publish sequels, but they had before. I think he was being tactful. I think they just didn’t like the story.
DAVID SHIELDS: The New Yorker was trying to tell Salinger not to throw over art for religion, but he didn’t listen. Why should he? The New Yorker had rejected Catcher. So, too, on November 18, ’57, Time said, “The one new American author who has something approaching universal appeal is J. D. Salinger.”
BEN YAGODA: Shawn intervened. He was the editor in chief, and he decreed that the magazine would publish the story; he edited the story and worked with Salinger on it.
In a 1959 letter, William Maxwell wrote to Katherine White [fiction editor], who had retired, alluding to the earlier Salinger incident. Maxwell wrote, “I do feel that Salinger has to be handled specially and fast, and think that the only practical way of doing this is as I supposed Shawn did do it: by himself. Given the length of the stories, I mean, and the Zen Buddhist nature of them, and what happened with ‘Zooey.’ ”
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DAVID SHIELDS: “Zooey,” a 50,000 word sequel to “Franny,” takes place two days after Franny has returned from her date with Lane. While she’s in the living room in the Glass family apartment in New York, having a breakdown, her brother Zooey is taking a long bath and reading a long letter from their brother Buddy; his mother, Bessie, barges in, wanting to talk with him about Franny. A large percentage of the story occurs in that bathroom while Zooey and Bessie talk and smoke.
JOHN WENKE: The action of “Zooey” picks up two days after Franny has fainted at Sickler’s restaurant. It is Monday morning at the Glass family’s Manhattan apartment. Franny’s breakdown continues, and Mrs. Glass does not know what to do. . . . Zooey seems, in Bessie’s view, to be the only one available who might be capable of helping Franny get beyond her exasperating and frightening behavior. . . . [The story] resembles a one-act play of three scenes in which the players transact their business almost solely through dialogue.
MAXWELL GEISMAR: “Zooey” is an interminable, appallingly bad story. Like the latter part of “Franny,” it lends itself so easily to burlesque that one wonders what the New Yorker wits were thinking of when they published it with such fanfare.
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT: I was looking at “Zooey,” and there we are in that bathroom, right? Fo
rty pages of someone in a bathroom being bothered by his mom. We want to get out of this bathroom. Why can’t we get out of this bathroom? Why won’t Salinger let us out? It’s so imprisoning, so claustrophobic. It’s not Kafka-claustrophobic or Beckett-claustrophobic. It’s boring-claustrophobic. Bathroom claustrophobic. I’m thinking, “Let’s get out, face the world, get to business.” I think that [claustrophobia] is the state a writer is in at his desk. He is asking you to experience being in that bathroom, unable to leave, the way a writer experiences being at the desk, unable to leave.
DAVID SHIELDS: “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” comes close to structural perfection, whereas the problem with “Zooey,” and why it took Salinger so long to write it, is that he is blatantly pontificating about religion, which he was criticized for having done in previous stories. Increasingly, he is determined to present his religious beliefs through his stories.
PHOEBE HOBAN: It’s interesting that Salinger uses letters so much in his books. One of the reasons he does that is that, for Salinger, writing is the most perfect form of communication; almost all of his stories have a pivotal letter in them. He begins “Zooey” with a four-year-old letter from Buddy that Zooey’s reading in the bathtub and gaining wisdom from so that he can then tell Franny how to get through her breakdown.
DONALD COSTELLO: “Franny” and “Zooey” speak to one another: they’re separate yet nicely joined. Franny’s sick of ego. “Ego, ego, ego!” she says. She finds a mystical connection with the Jesus Prayer. It’s also very Buddhist, of course, in its philosophy of withdrawal. Zooey, on the other hand, argues, as Mr. Antolini does, and as Holden allows Phoebe to do at the end [of Catcher in the Rye], for engagement.
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