They talked a little bit more and then Salinger said, “I’ll let you do this under one condition: that I cast the role of Esmé.” When you say that to a director, that’s a hard one, especially because Peter had a wonderful way of drawing out young performers. I was watching his face and I thought, “Oh boy,” but he said, “All right, I’ll agree to that.” We said goodbye and went back to our farm in Vermont.
Peter started working on the script. The first thing he did was outline it according to the sequence of the scenes, not changing a lot. He made a few little changes and sent it off to Salinger. And it came back, very quickly—about three days later. Every single change that Peter had suggested had been put back into the exact same order it was written in the book. Peter said, “All right, let’s see what happens with the scenes when we are dealing with dialogue.” He began to break down the scenes—a couple of the early scenes with Esmé and her brother. He changed a sentence or two, moved around the order slightly here and there. He sent the first two scenes off to Salinger; we waited, and this time it was maybe a week and a half before they came back. Once again, almost every single change Peter had made had been carefully returned to the original order that you find in the story. This went on, oh, maybe three months—back and forth: corrections and changes that were then changed back. Finally, at one point, I remember Peter sitting at his desk and saying, “Okay, we will just film this exactly as he wrote it, because if we don’t, we won’t be doing this.”
Now it was time to meet the young woman that Salinger wished to cast in the role of Esmé. The young woman was the daughter of Salinger’s good friend Peter De Vries, and her name was Jan, an aspiring young actress, probably around twelve, thirteen maybe. We went to meet her. Salinger was not there. It was just De Vries and his daughter. In about half an hour, Peter came back and I knew that it hadn’t gone well. He sat down and said, “She’s too old. She is past that delicate moment that makes the miracle of Esmé. And if I cast this young woman in the role, I would be destroying the beauty of Salinger’s work, and I won’t do that.” He called Salinger and said, “I really wish that I didn’t have to say this, but I do: she is too old. So there will be no film.”
I have often thought it would have been a very beautiful film, because the parallels between Salinger and Peter were quite unbelievable. Their experiences in the Second World War were almost parallel. Peter was in the army with a group that had to go onto the islands of Japan and ferret out the remaining Japanese forces hiding in caves. He went in with thirty-five men; he came out with four. All our married life, I could never walk up behind him and surprise him. There were deep scars for all of them. It was all held within. Both of my children said, “You never want to make him angry.” You see that in “Esmé.” It is right there in the story of the sergeant. That is the other part that Peter really understood: he knew what that was. And he knew he could film it well. The reclusiveness, the experiences in the war, and the infinite understanding of young people were the three things that they really walked the same path on.
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BEN YAGODA: In the early ’60s in New York, strange and new things were happening in writing. The New Yorker had been on the top of the heap for many years in fiction, journalism, and as a magazine of New York. But there was a whole other group of people who later became known as the New Journalists who were stirring up a lot of trouble writing for the Herald Tribune, New York magazine, and Esquire. They—especially Tom Wolfe, but also writers like Norman Mailer and Gay Talese—represented everything the New Yorker didn’t. The New Yorker was quiet and subdued. The New Journalists were loud. The New Yorker was respectful. The New Journalists were loud.
MARC WEINGARTEN: In 1965 Tom Wolfe was thirty-four, a general assignment reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, a struggling newspaper. He was a writer desperately in need of making a name for himself. If you were a no-longer-quite-so-young writer trying to make a name for yourself in New York, it was not necessarily a great career move to attack the New Yorker. It was counterintuitive on Wolfe’s part, but he was canny enough to realize, “Look at my work. I use six exclamation points in a row. I use semicolons with impunity. I’m never going to get published in the New Yorker, anyway. William Shawn would never give me the time of day.”
TOM WOLFE: Shawn, it’s my contention—and I got into a lot of trouble over this—was, in effect, an embalmer. He was going to keep the New Yorker exactly the way it was under [founding editor Harold] Ross, but he didn’t have Ross’s temperament. Ross was starstruck with New York; that awe and vitality showed through. And he never would publish something called a “short story.” They were all called “casuals.” The idea was, “We’re not going to strain your brain with these short stories—this is not English Literature; this is the New Yorker. We’re sophisticated and we don’t get carried away.”
The New Yorker by the mid-’60s was this revered corpse. They had a snoozy nepotism. It’s amazing the things they would print if you were kin to somebody already in the magazine. John Updike’s mother worked and wrote under another name there. I can’t remember what her pen name was. That’s how Updike came into the picture. It had gotten pretty dreary.
Tom Wolfe.
MARC WEINGARTEN: The New Yorker writers all shared a certain sense of propriety. They didn’t like to get themselves mired in the muck of this strange new youth culture that they probably felt was metastasizing out of control—certainly out of their control. They approached it from a certain discreet remove. There were exceptions to this rule in the magazine’s history, like John Hershey’s “Hiroshima” and Lillian Ross’s pieces, but there was a general sense of, “We’re not equipped to really get our hands dirty in this new insurgent thing that’s happening in the country.”
BEN YAGODA: As Wolfe later recounted, the piece originated one day when he and Clay Felker, the editor of the Herald Tribune Sunday magazine section, New York, were sitting around and remarking that all the tributes to the New Yorker that were marking the magazine’s fortieth anniversary neglected to mention one thing: the New Yorker had for some years been, as he called it, unbearably dull. Wolfe decided he would try “having a little fun with the magazine,” in the style of Wolcott Gibbs’s celebrated 1936 New Yorker takedown of Henry Luce: write a profile of Shawn in a style that mocked the New Yorker’s own.
Shawn informed Wolfe that he would not grant an interview or answer questions in writing, nor verify facts presented to him before publication, all of which made the prospect of doing a profile rather daunting. Wolfe decided he would write what he called an antiparody.
MARC WEINGARTEN: The first part, which appeared on April 11, 1965, was called “Tiny Mummies,” and its subhead was “The True Story of the Ruler of Forty-third Street’s Land of the Walking Dead.” The piece gunned down the establishment of the New Yorker and everything it stood for. It portrayed Shawn as a passive-aggressive enabler of soporific culture who put out the magazine with his horsehair-stuffing shabby gentility. It showed him as a dunderhead who shuffled around the office in his slippers and used Coke bottles for ashtrays. He was undynamic and the magazine relied on old-time lifers who were there forever, producing sludgy, gray prose. Wolfe’s was a frontal attack on an almost untouchable cultural institution. No one else had dared.
TOM WOLFE (“Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead,” New York magazine, April 11, 1965):
They have boys over there on the nineteenth and twentieth floors, the editorial offices, practically caroming off each other—bonk old bison heads!—at the blind turns in the hallways because of the fantastic traffic in memos. They just call them boys. “Boy, will you take this, please . . .” Actually, a lot of them are old men with starched white collars with the points curling up a little, “big lunch” ties, button-up sweaters, and black basket-weave sack socks, and they are all over the place transporting these thousands of messages with their kindly old elder bison shuffles.
BEN YAGODA: Shawn made
probably one of the dumbest moves of his career, which was to try to use his influence with the publisher of the Herald Tribune to prevent the second half of the article from being published.
WILLIAM SHAWN:
To be technical for a moment, I think that Tom Wolfe’s article on the New Yorker is false and libelous. But I’d rather not be technical. . . .
I cannot believe that, as a man of known integrity and responsibility, you will allow it to reach your readers. . . . The question is whether you will stop the distribution of that issue of New York. I urge you to do so, for the sake of the New Yorker and for the sake of the Herald Tribune. In fact, I am convinced that the publication of that article will hurt you more than it will hurt me.
JIM BELLOWS: I sent over Shawn’s letter [to Time and Newsweek]. I let them know that the New Yorker’s lawyers were seeking an order of prior restraint to keep us from publishing [the second part of] Tom’s article. If that wasn’t a story, I didn’t know what was. . . .When Jimmy Breslin learned that Shawn was desperately trying to keep the Tribune from publishing Tom’s series, he called Shawn on the telephone and said he had a method by which this could be accomplished if Shawn would meet him at Toots Shor’s bar. He never dreamed that Shawn would show up. Jimmy was at the bar, talking to friends, when he noticed a little man crawling up behind him. Jimmy took him over in the corner and said: “I can stop the publication. It’s very simple—we just blow up the building!” Shawn left in a hurry.
TOM WOLFE: We began to hear from people like E. B. White. Joseph Alsop, who wrote for my own newspaper, protested. Walter Lippmann, the dean of all the national and international political pundits, wrote a letter in the Village Voice saying this man, Wolfe, is an ass. It doesn’t get much better than that, really.
Lyndon Johnson’s number one speechwriter, Richard Goodwin, called up Clay Felker. I happened to be in the office at the time. With the receiver at Clay’s ear, you could practically hear [Goodwin]. He said, “This is Richard Goodwin. I’m calling from the White House.” He used this phrase “I’m calling from the White House” about ten times. “I just want you to know we have never seen anything more despicable than this piece by Tom Wolfe. We’re convinced it cannot continue; that’s our feeling here at the White House.” My God, by this time, we didn’t know what they would do to us. There was the little gunboat incident in a creek off of Vietnam. They sent 500,000 soldiers over there. What were we? Clay was great. He said, “Well, Mr. Goodwin, if you will put what you just said in written form, I assure you, it will get very prominent play in the Herald Tribune.” Of course, that was the end of that.
The pièce de résistance, however, was that for the first time in I don’t know how many years, the world heard from J. D. Salinger, and people couldn’t believe it. He sent a letter to Whitney. It was the most lucid and comprehensible thing he had written in a decade. It was a telegram, so he didn’t want to get too wordy. It was very clear what he wrote, assuring Whitney he was gonna go to hell and there was gonna be fire down there.
J. D. SALINGER, telegram to the Herald Tribune, spring 1965:
With the printing of that inaccurate and sub-collegiate and gleeful and unrelievedly poisonous article on William Shawn, the name of the Herald Tribune, and certainly your own will very likely never again stand for anything either respect-worthy or honorable.
GORE VIDAL: What do you make of someone like Salinger, who comes to the defense of the editor of the New Yorker, as though he were an important figure? The editor of the New Yorker is of no importance in the scheme of things, except to a writer who writes for the New Yorker. He makes Shawn into a master of American literature; he was just another editor.
TOM WOLFE: At first, when we heard from these people, and also from the occasional big-time outsiders like Walter Lippmann, Clay Felker and I thought the sky was falling. I figured, well, I’m through in this town. The only thing that happened was that about ten days later Clay and I began to get invitations to parties from people we’d never met in our lives. Because in New York, a party is not a thing you invite friends to; you invite people that you think you should know. Pretty soon it was obvious that Clay and I had become, in the perversity of New York society, hot stuff.
MARC WEINGARTEN: At the New Yorker, the Wolfe attack really stung. If the New Yorker writers hadn’t felt personally offended and hadn’t felt there was some truth to what Wolfe was saying, they wouldn’t have risen up the way they did in defense of the magazine. They felt, deep in their bones, that their time was up, that they were perhaps becoming obsolete, writing for an older audience. There was an elegiac sense of one era passing and another one beginning.
TOM WOLFE (“Lost in the Whichy Thickets,” New York magazine, April 18, 1965):
The New Yorker comes out once a week, it has overwhelming cultural prestige, it pays top prices to writers—and for forty years it has maintained a strikingly low level of literary achievement. Esquire comes out only once a month, yet it has completely outclassed The New Yorker in literary contribution even during its cheesecake days.
LAWRENCE GROBEL: Salinger got angry, a little humiliated: “Why the hell are all these people attacking me and my magazine? I’m giving and they’re not taking.” He receded and then, two months after “Lost in the Witchy Thickets” [the second part of Wolfe’s attack on the New Yorker] was published, “Hapworth” appeared.
—
JANET MALCOLM: When J. D. Salinger’s “Hapworth 16, 1924”—a very long and very strange story in the form of a letter from camp written by Seymour Glass when he was seven—appeared in the New Yorker in June 1965, it was greeted with unhappy, even embarrassed silence. It seemed to confirm the growing critical consensus that Salinger was going to hell in a handbasket.
JOHN WENKE: That issue of the New Yorker [June 19, 1965] was mainly “Hapworth” and advertising; everything else was stripped out. “Hapworth” is a completely unreadable work in which an unbelievably precocious seven-year-old child offers a thirty-thousand-word reading list.
J. D. SALINGER (“Hapworth 16, 1924,” The New Yorker, June 19, 1965):
It was suddenly borne in upon me, utterly beyond dispute, that I love Sir Arthur Conan Doyle but do not love the great Goethe! As I darted idly through the water, it became crystal clear that it is far from an established fact that I am even demonstrably fond of the great Goethe, in my heart, while my love for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, via his contributions, is an absolute certainty! I have rarely ever had a more revealing incident in any body of water. I daresay I shall never get any closer to drowning in sheer gratitude for a passing portion of truth. Think for a stunning moment what this means! It means that every man, woman, and child over the age, let us say, of twenty-one or thirty, at the very outside, should never do anything extremely important or crucial in their life without first consulting a list of persons in the world, living or dead, whom he loves.
JONATHAN SCHWARTZ: A seven-year-old boy at summer camp writing in an adult voice, asking for the most abstruse books to be sent to him from his parents—once you do that, you can’t go back to the conventions of realistic fiction again. You’ve crossed a line. It’s simply out of the question. In my opinion, if he’s written anything since, he’s moved “Hapworth” forward. To me, that’s thrilling. We’ve had our Franny and Zooey and we’ve had our other stories, but after “Hapworth,” how are you going to go back again?
BEN YAGODA: “Hapworth,” published in the New Yorker only because of William Shawn’s position and regard for Salinger, was Seymour writing from camp, and it was just too much: impossible to believe and created to be unpalatable to the public and critics.
DAVID SHIELDS: In a June 26, 1965, letter, New Yorker poetry editor Louise Bogan wrote, “The Salinger is a disaster. Maxwell came to call, and rather deplored its total cessation of talent.”
MARC WEINGARTEN: “Hapworth” was the final manifestation of Salinger’s hermetic worldview. He had retreated so far into the bunker of his mind that he was writing for an audience
of one.
PAUL ALEXANDER: “Hapworth” is an indication that maybe Salinger had finally lost it.
SHANE SALERNO: The isolation of that bunker and his complete immersion in Vedanta destroyed his art. He lost the ability to create characters who are believable and not mouthpieces.
DAVID SHIELDS: Art is either quick or it’s dead. Most of Salinger is quick, but “Hapworth” just seemed dead on arrival—deliberately, angrily, fascinatingly so. It’s the barely sublimated anger that interests me most. After the cascade of criticism of his own work, the attack on the New Yorker, the relentless parade of seekers and reporters to his door, he has had enough. He finally fires back, phrasing fury as blithe indifference. He wants to maim or kill all his critics, but to admit he reads his press clippings would be anathema to the persona of spiritual seeker he has created in his fiction. “Hapworth” careens wildly between murderous rage and a desire for peace. Telling critics they can’t hurt him, he’s claiming to be disassociated from pain. This psychic pressure is itself a flashback to war.
CHRIS KUBICA: “Hapworth 16, 1924” wasn’t received well by anybody. The questions were not literary but personal: What’s happened to Salinger? Is he a crackpot?
TIME: After six years of painful, reclusive silence, Author J. D. Salinger, 46, has produced another story. It’s no Catcher in the Rye or Franny and Zooey—just one more refraction through his magic Glasses in the form of a fictional family’s letter that Seymour Glass, the presiding guru and ghost, wrote home from Camp Hapworth, Maine, at the tender age of seven. Published in The New Yorker, the note is introduced briefly by Family Historian Buddy Glass, who for years has been garrulously obsessed by the memory of his suicide brother. By the letter, Childe Seymour seems to have been, practically from birth, a perfervid scholar, linguist, spiritual genius and altogether verbose little man who finds everything in life “heartrending,” or “damnable.” “My emotions are too damnably raw today, I fear,” he starts, and in 28,000 words plunges forth to speculate on God, reincarnation, Proust, Balzac, baseball and the charms of the camp director’s wife (“quite perfect legs, ankles, saucy bosoms, very fresh, cute hind quarters”), while insistently querying his parents about “what imaginary-sensual acts gave lively, unmentionable entertainment to your minds.”
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