ALSO BY JOANNA RAKOFF
A Fortunate Age
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2014 by Joanna Rakoff
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rakoff, Joanna, 1972–
My Salinger year / by Joanna Rakoff.—First edition.
pages cm
“This is a Borzoi book”—T.p. verso.
ISBN 978-0-307-95800-6 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-0-307-95801-3 (eBook)—1. Rakoff, Joanna, 1972–2. Authors, American—21st century—Biography. 3. Literature publishing—United States—History—21st century. I. Title.
PS3618.A437Z46 2014
818′.603—dc23
[B]
2013026931
Front-of-jacket photograph by Gail Albert Halaban
Jacket design by Peter Mendelsund and Oliver Munday
v3.1
For Keeril,
with whom this story begins and ends
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Note
All of Us Girls
Winter
1: Three Days of Snow
2: Office Equipment
Spring 1: The Cover, the Font, the Binding
2: The Obscure Bookcase
3: The World Wide Web
Summer 1: The Pitch
2: Sentimental Education
3: Three Days of Rain
Fall
Winter, Again
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
“It was a day, God knows, not only of rampant signs and symbols but of wildly extensive communication via the written word.”
—J. D. SALINGER, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters
Author’s Note
Abigail Thomas describes memoir as “the truth as best she can tell it,” and this book is, indeed, the truth, told as best I could. In writing it, I interviewed people I knew during the period chronicled and consulted my own writings from the time and the years shortly thereafter.
To maintain narrative flow, I’ve fiddled with the chronology of a few events, and I’ve changed the names—and identifying traits—of most, though not all, of the people.
Those minor adjustments aside, this is the actual story of my Salinger year.
There were hundreds of us, thousands of us, carefully dressing in the gray morning light of Brooklyn, Queens, the Lower East Side, leaving our apartments weighed down by tote bags heavy with manuscripts, which we read as we stood in line at the Polish bakery, the Greek deli, the corner diner, waiting to order our coffee, light and sweet, and our Danish, to take on the train, where we would hope for a seat so that we might read more before we arrived at our offices in midtown, Soho, Union Square. We were girls, of course, all of us girls, emerging from the 6 train at Fifty-First Street and walking past the Waldorf-Astoria, the Seagram Building on Park, all of us clad in variations on a theme—the neat skirt and sweater, redolent of Sylvia Plath at Smith—each element purchased by parents in some comfortable suburb, for our salaries were so low we could barely afford our rent, much less lunch in the vicinities of our offices or dinners out, even in the cheap neighborhoods we’d populated, sharing floor-throughs with other girls like us, assistants at other agencies or houses or the occasional literary nonprofit. All day we sat, our legs crossed at the knee, on our swivel chairs, answering the call of our bosses, ushering in writers with the correct mixture of enthusiasm and remove, never belying the fact that we got into this business not because we wanted to fetch glasses of water for visiting writers but because we wanted to be writers ourselves, and this seemed the most socially acceptable way to go about doing so, though it was already becoming clear that this was not at all the way to go about doing so. Years ago, as some of our parents pointed out—as my own parents endlessly pointed out—we would have been called secretaries. And as with the girls in the secretarial pool, back in our parents’ day, very few of us would be promoted, very few of us would, as they say, make it. We whispered about the lucky ones, the ones with bosses who allowed them to take on books or clients, who mentored them, or the ones who showed massive, rule-breaking initiative, wondering if, somehow, that would be us, if we wanted it badly enough to wait out the years of low pay, the years of answering a boss’s beck and call, or if what we wanted, still, was to be on the other side of it all, to be the writer knocking confidently on our boss’s door.
We all have to start somewhere. For me, that somewhere was a dark room, lined from floor to ceiling with books, rows and rows of books sorted by author, books from every conceivable era of the twentieth century, their covers bearing the design hallmarks of the moments in which they’d been released into the world—the whimsical line drawings of the 1920s, the dour mustards and maroons of the late 1950s, the gauzy watercolor portraits of the 1970s—books that defined my days and the days of the others who worked within this dark warren of offices. When my colleagues uttered the names on the spines of those books, their voices turned husky and reverential, for these were names of godlike status to the literarily inclined. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dylan Thomas, William Faulkner. But this was, and is, a literary agency, which means those names on the spines represented something else, something else that leads people to speak in hushed voices, something that I’d previously thought had absolutely nothing to do with books and literature: money.
1
Three Days of Snow
On my first day at the Agency, I dressed carefully in clothing that struck me as suitable for work in an office: a short wool skirt, in Black Watch plaid, and a dark green turtleneck sweater with a zipper up the back, from the 1960s, purchased in a London thrift shop. On my legs, thick black tights. On my feet, black suede loafers of Italian provenance, purchased for me by my mother, who believed “good shoes” a necessity, not a luxury. I had never worked in an office before, but I had acted—as a child, in college, after—and I regarded this outfit as a costume. My role being the Bright Young Assistant. The Girl Friday.
I paid, perhaps, too much attention to my dress, because I knew almost nothing about the job that awaited me or the firm that had hired me. In fact, I still couldn’t quite believe that I had indeed been hired, it happened so quickly. Three months earlier, I had dropped out of graduate school—or finished my master’s, depending on how you looked at it—and flown home from London, arriving at my parents’ house in the suburbs with little more than an enormous box of books. “I want to write my own poetry,” I told my college boyfriend, from the ancient pay phone in the hallway of my Hampstead dorm, “not analyze other people’s poetry.” I did not tell my parents this. I did not tell them anything other than that I felt lonely in London. And they, in keeping with our family’s code of silence, asked me nothing about my plans. Instead, my mother took me shopping: at Lord & Taylor, she selected a suit, wool gabardine trimmed in velvet, with a pencil skirt and a fitted vest, like something Katharine Hepburn wore in Adam’s Rib, and a pair of suede court shoes. The hope, I realized—as the in-house tailor pinned up my sleeves—was that the suit would be a conduit to some sort of acceptable employment.
A week before Christmas, my friend Celeste brought me along to a party, where an old friend of hers spoke laconically of her job at the science-fictio
n imprint of a large trade publisher. “How did you end up there?” I asked, less because I wanted the mechanicals of the hiring process and more because it struck me as strange that an English major, with an interest in serious fiction, would have taken such a job. By way of an answer, Celeste’s friend pressed a business card in my hand. “This is a placement agency,” she told me. “All the editors use them to find assistants. Give them a call.” The next morning, I hesitantly dialed the number. Publishing had not been part of my plan—though, of course, I didn’t have a plan—but the concept of fate appealed to me, a predilection that would get me into trouble soon enough, that it would take me years to shake, and I took it as a sign that I’d happened to get stuck in a corner with Celeste’s friend, the two of us quiet and ill at ease within the raucous party. “Can you come in this afternoon?” I was asked by the woman who answered the phone, her accent not exactly English but containing notes of competent Englishness.
And so I found myself, clad in my suit, handing over a hastily composed résumé to an elegant lady in a skirt and jacket rather similar to my own. “You just finished a master’s in English?” she asked, with a frown, her dark hair sliding into her face.
“Yes.”
“Well,” she said, sighing and putting my résumé down. “That will make you more appealing to some editors, less appealing to others. We’ll find you something, though.” She sat back in her chair. “I’ll give you a call in the New Year. No one’s hiring this close to Christmas.”
I’d barely made it home from her office when the phone rang. “I have something for you,” she said breathlessly. “How would you feel about working at a literary agency rather than a publisher?”
“Great,” I said. I had no idea what a literary agency was.
“Fantastic,” she said. “This is a wonderful agency. An old, venerable agency. I think it’s actually the oldest agency in New York. The job is with an agent who’s been in the business a long, long time.” She paused. “Some assistants have found her a bit difficult to work for, but others love her. I think you’d be a good match. And she’s looking to hire someone right away. She wants to make a decision before Christmas.” Later, I would discover that the agent in question had been interviewing potential assistants for months. But for now, on this cold day in December, I tucked the phone into my neck and hung my suit up in the shower to steam out the wrinkles.
The next day, zipped and buttoned back into my suit, I took the train down to Fifty-First and Lex, then walked across Park and over to Madison, to meet with the agent in question.
“So,” she said, lighting a long brown cigarette, a gesture that somehow reminded me simultaneously of Don Corleone and Lauren Bacall. Her fingers were long, slender, white, with nonexistent knuckles and perfectly shaped ovoid nails. “You can type?”
“I can,” I affirmed, shaking my head stiffly. I had been expecting more difficult questions, abstract inquiries into my work ethic or habits, challenges to the central tenets of my master’s thesis.
“On a typewriter?” she asked, pursing her lips and letting out frills of delicate white smoke. Ever so slightly, she smiled. “It’s very different from using a”—her face went slack in disgust—“a computer.”
I nodded nervously. “It is,” I agreed.
An hour later, as the sky darkened and the city emptied for the holiday, I lay on the couch rereading Persuasion, hoping I’d never have to put that suit back on again, much less the stockings that went with it.
The phone rang once more. I had a job.
And so, on the first Monday after the New Year, I woke at seven, quietly showered, and made my way down the building’s crumbling stairs, only to find the world stopped: the street was covered in snow. I’d known, of course, that a blizzard was coming, or I suppose I’d known, for I didn’t own a television or a radio, and I didn’t traffic in circles where people talked excessively about the weather—we had larger, more important things to discuss; weather was something over which our grandmothers, our dull neighbors in the suburbs, obsessed. If I’d owned a radio, I would have known that the entire city was shut down, that the Department of Education had declared a snow day for the first time in almost twenty years, that up and down the coast people were dying or had died, trapped in cars, unheated houses, skidding on unplowed streets. The Agency utilized a phone tree system for emergency closures, wherein the president of the company—my boss, though I didn’t realize that this was her position until a few weeks into the job, for at the Agency all knowledge was assumed rather than imparted—would call the next in command, going down the Agency’s hierarchy, until the receptionist, Pam, and the various agents’ assistants, and the strange, sad messenger, Izzy, all knew not to come into work. Because it was my first day, I didn’t yet figure onto the grid of numbers.
Though the city was indeed in an actual state of emergency, my trains came quickly—the L from Lorimer Street, the 5 express from Union Square—and at 8:30 I found myself in Grand Central, where the various purveyors of coffee and pastries and newspapers were eerily shuttered. Walking north, I arrived in the Great Hall, with its graceful canopy of stars, my heels echoing on the marble floor. I’d made it halfway across the chamber—to the central information booth, where in high school I’d often met friends—before I realized why my shoes were making such a racket: I was alone, or nearly so, in a space always filled with the sound of hundreds, thousands of feet racing across the marble. Now, as I stood stock-still in the middle of it, the hall was silent. I had been the only entity generating noise.
At the station’s west side, I pushed open the heavy glass doors and stepped out into the freezing wind. Slowly, I made my way west through the deep snow on Forty-Third Street, until I encountered something even stranger than a silent, unpopulated Grand Central Station: a silent, unpopulated Madison Avenue. The streets had not yet been plowed. The only sound was the wind. An untouched mantle of snow stretched evenly from the shops on its east side to those on its west, marred by not a footprint, a candy wrapper, not even a leaf.
Trudging my way north, I found a trio of bankers running—or trying to run—through the heavy snow and shrieking with delight, their trench coats trailing behind them like capes. “Hey,” they called to me. “We’re having a snowball fight! Come on!”
“I have to go to work,” I told them. It’s my first day, I almost told them, then stopped myself. Better to pass as experienced, seasoned. I was one of them now.
“Everything’s closed,” they called. “Play in the snow!”
“Have a good day,” I called back and slowly made my way toward Forty-Ninth Street, where I located the narrow, unremarkable building that housed the Agency. The lobby consisted of a narrow hallway leading to a pair of creaky elevators. This was a building of insurance salesmen and importers of African carvings, of aging family doctors in solo practice and Gestalt therapists. And the Agency, which occupied the whole of a mid-level floor. Stepping off the elevator, I tried the door and found it locked. But it was only 8:45 and the office, I knew, didn’t open until 9:00. The Friday before Christmas, I’d been asked to stop by to sign some paperwork and pick up a few things, including a key to the front door. It seemed odd to me that they’d give a key to a complete stranger, but I’d dutifully put it on my key chain, right there in the creaky elevator, and now I pulled it out and let myself into the dark, silent office. I longed to inspect the books that lined the foyer but feared someone might arrive and find me engaged in behavior that would betray me as the grad student I so recently was. Instead I forced myself to walk past the receptionist’s desk, down the front hallway, with its rows of Ross Macdonald paperbacks, to turn right at the little kitchen area and walk through the linoleum-floored finance department, arriving at the east wing of the office, which held my new boss’s sanctum and the large antechamber where I would sit.
And there I sat, spine erect, feet freezing in my soaked shoes, inspecting the contents of my new drawers—paper clips, stapler, large pink index cards im
printed with mysterious codes and grids—afraid to pull out my book, lest my new boss happen upon me. I was reading Jean Rhys and fancied myself akin to her impoverished heroines, living for weeks on nothing but the morning croissant and café crème provided by their residence hotels, the rents on which were, in turn, provided by their married ex-lovers, as compensation for ending their affairs. I suspected my boss would not approve of Jean Rhys. During our interview, she’d asked me what I was reading, what I preferred to read. “Everything,” I told her. “I love Flaubert. I just finished Sentimental Education and I was amazed by how contemporary it seemed. But I also love writers like Alison Lurie and Mary Gaitskill. And I grew up reading mysteries. I love Donald Westlake and Dashiell Hammett.”
“Well, Flaubert is all well and good, but to work in publishing, you need to be reading writers who are alive.” She paused and I suspected that my answer had been wrong. As always, I should have prepared myself more properly. I knew nothing about publishing, nothing about literary agencies, nothing about this specific literary agency.
“I love Donald Westlake, too,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “He’s so funny.” Then, for the first time since I’d stepped into her office, she smiled.
I was tentatively inspecting the books on the shelf above my head—some Agatha Christie paperbacks and what appeared to be a series of romance novels—when the heavy black phone on my desk rang. I picked it up, before realizing that I wasn’t sure of the proper greeting. “Hello?” I said tentatively.
“Oh no,” a voice shouted at me. “Are you there? I knew you were there. Go home.” It was my boss. “The office is closed. We’ll see you tomorrow.” There was a silence, in which I struggled to figure out what to say. “I’m so sorry you came all the way downtown. Go home and get warm.” And then she was gone.
My Salinger Year Page 1