My Salinger Year

by Joanna Rakoff

  I nodded. “You want me to read this?” I asked. “Now?”

  He nodded. “You can take your coat off.”

  The story was very short, just a few pages, and written in such dense prose that the events were not altogether clear. But the narrative appeared to concern a short, dark-haired working-class young American man involved with a tall, gorgeous Swedish woman whose pale blond hair and “perfect ass” and odd passivity drive him into a sexual rage. Panties are ripped. Otherwise, not much else happens. The story seemed to me less an actual story—with a narrative arc, and a beginning, middle, and end—than a sketch or an exercise, an exploration of this character’s mixed feelings of desire and disgust, of unworthiness and superiority. There was something about it that made me uncomfortable and it wasn’t just the sex. There seemed, within the story, an unconscious desire to punish this perfect blonde. It was a mean story.

  I wasn’t sure what I’d expected from Don—Don who quoted Hegel and Kant, who loved Proust—but it certainly wasn’t this.

  “Okay,” I told him warily, when I finished, and handed the thin sheaf back to him. He’d had to force himself not to stand over me as I read.

  “That’s it?” he said. “Okay.” He let out a strange cackle. “Did you like it?”

  I shrugged. “I guess, well, this character seems kind of like a male fantasy. The blonde with the perfect body who says, ‘Do anything you want to me.’ ”

  “It’s funny you say that,” said Don, his face darkening, nostrils flaring. “It’s really funny. Because this story is completely taken from my life. That character is based on one of my girlfriends in San Francisco. Grete.”

  “Greet?” I asked. This seemed a strange name, even for a Swedish girl. “Her name is Greet?”

  “Grete,” he said. “It’s a softer e sound. From the back of the throat. It’s hard to pronounce if you don’t speak Swedish.”

  Don did not, to my knowledge, speak Swedish.

  “He showed me a story last week,” I told Jenny. “But it was something old and not really relevant to the novel. I think his style has changed a lot since then.” For a moment, I considered my sandwich, which was chilled from the refrigerator, the bread tough and hard. “Do you show Brett your poetry?”

  She started, then gave me a cold look. “No,” she said. “I don’t.” Some small—infinitely small—victory was mine, but I wished it were otherwise. “But,” she said, swallowing a bit of crust, “I’m not really writing poetry anymore.”

  I nodded. I suppose I had already known.

  When I returned to my desk, overpriced and unremarkable cup of coffee in hand, Hugh came by and dropped a bundle of letters in front of me. I looked at him questioningly. I was getting used to the long silences of the office.

  “These are the Salinger letters,” he said.

  “Oh?” I asked.

  “Fan letters. To Salinger.” He sighed and shifted the bundles in his arms. “We need to answer them.”

  “Okay.” I took a sip of coffee. “Does it matter what I say?”

  Tersely, Hugh nodded. “There’s a form letter. Somewhere. I’ll find it.”

  Hugh could, to my continual amazement, pull anything one needed from the mountain of paper on his desk. A few minutes later, he returned bearing a disintegrating sheet of the yellow paper used for carbon copies, its edges faded and frayed and soft with handling.

  Dear Miss So-and-So:

  Many thanks for your recent letter to J. D. Salinger. As you may know, Mr. Salinger does not wish to receive mail from his readers. Thus, we cannot pass your kind note on to him. We thank you for your interest in Mr. Salinger’s books.

  Best,

  The Agency

  The date at the top of the carbon: March 3, 1963.

  “So I just send this, verbatim? I just retype it?”

  Hugh nodded. “Yep. You don’t need to keep a carbon”—the Xerox machine was still new enough that many Agency employees still referred to copies as “carbons”; I loved this—“and you can toss the letters, too.”

  “Really?” I asked, surprised. Nothing was tossed at the Agency. Every bit of correspondence was meticulously copied and filed. I couldn’t believe they’d throw out anything to do with Salinger, in particular. “Just put them in the garbage?”

  “Yeah, we can’t keep them.” Hugh smiled a little. “They’d take up the entire office. Or, we’d need a separate archive.”

  I nodded. “It’s a lot,” I admitted, gesturing toward the bundle, which still sat where Hugh had left it on the corner of my desk.

  “And that’s just what came in today,” said Hugh.

  I laughed. “Of course,” I said.

  “No,” said Hugh. “That’s really just what came in today.”

  “You’re kidding. Where’s the rest?”

  Hugh resumed his habitual sigh. “In my office. Somewhere. I tried to respond to some of it back in December.”

  “Does this much come in every day?” If so, I would henceforth spend my entire day, every day, retyping the letter in my hand.

  “No. It ebbs and flows. We always get a lot right after the New Year.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll start on this right now.” I pulled the bundle toward me and began unwinding the rubber band.

  “There’s no rush.” Hugh shrugged. “Just when you get to it. Maybe on Fridays, when your boss isn’t here. If you have nothing to do.” Sighing, he bent his neck awkwardly, trying to crack it. This was either a new nervous habit or one I’d not noticed before. “They’re just fans. It’s sort of the least important thing.”

  “Okay,” I said again, but as soon as he returned to his office, I took the rubber band off one packet and sifted through the letters, which bore postmarks from all over the world: Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Japan, any number of Scandinavian countries, Germany, France, the Netherlands, everywhere. Quietly, I began slitting open the envelopes with my thumb, unfolding the letters inside. They were long, these letters, far longer than I expected, though what had I expected? I’d never written such a thing myself. What did I know? Some were typed on typewriters, in the style of the Agency. Some were modern missives, unfurled from laser printers on plain white paper. Many were written on stationery—pink, blue, fragile airmail, creamy white from Smythson, Hello Kitty, Snoopy, rainbows and clouds—the small, thick pages covered densely with words. One contained a friendship bracelet, woven of embroidery thread; another a photo of a small white dog. And yet another, inexplicably, some coins, taped to a sheet of ripped, dirty paper.

  Over the next hour, I read and read and read, ignoring my typing and filing, impatient with the ringing phone. Many of the letters came from veterans—mostly but not entirely American—confiding in Salinger about their experiences during the war. Now, like Salinger, they were in their seventies and eighties, and they found themselves—they explained—thinking more and more about the friends who’d died in their arms, the cadaverous bodies at the death camps they’d liberated, the despair they’d felt when they returned home, the sense that no one understood what they’d undergone, no one except Salinger. Some, many, were turning to his stories again, they said, and finding that they loved them even more. They wanted Salinger to know, to understand, all this, they explained, with an urgency that made me slightly uncomfortable.

  What else? Who else? There were what I came to think of as the Tragic Letters: missives from people whose loved ones had found solace in Salinger during their years-long struggles with cancer, who’d read Franny and Zooey to their dying grandfathers, who’d obsessively memorized Nine Stories in the year after losing their children or spouses or siblings. And there were the Crazies, of course, ranting about Holden Caulfield in smudged pencil, a dirty lock of hair falling out of the creased paper and onto my dark desk.

  But probably the largest group of fans were teenagers, teenagers expressing a sentiment that could be summed up as “Holden Caulfield is the only character in literature who is truly like me. And you, Mr. Salinger, are surely th
e same person as Holden Caulfield. Thus, you and I should be friends.” Schoolgirls professed their love for Holden. They understood Holden, they explained, and they wished they could find a boy like him, someone who understood the hypocrisies of the world, someone who understood that people have emotions, but all of the guys they knew were morons like Stradlater. “My mother says you won’t write back,” wrote a Canadian high school girl, “but I told her you would. I know you will, because you understand what it’s like to be surrounded by phonies.”

  These young people deployed language that I knew derived from The Catcher in the Rye. The repeated use of “goddam” and “crumby” and “as hell” and, of course, “phony.” The boys, I suppose, inclined more toward such imitation than the girls, for the boys wanted to be Holden, while the girls wanted to be with Holden.

  One letter caught my eye:

  I’ve read your book The Catcher in the Rye three times now. It’s a masterpiece, and I hope that you’re proud of it. You certainly should be. Most of the crap that is written today is so uncompelling it makes me sick. Not too many people have anything to write that even approaches sincerity.

  The flat-out nerve of this particular kid—who was, I checked, from Winston-Salem, North Carolina—impressed me. Who writes to possibly the most famous living American writer to inform him that his beloved, best-selling book is a masterpiece and he should be proud? Amazing. But the boy’s brio came straight from Holden. He was hoping to impress Salinger with his likeness to Salinger’s hero.

  I was finishing this letter—eventually, he gets around to seeking romantic advice from Salinger (“I used to get nervous as hell around girls”)—when Hugh returned, materializing at my desk so silently that I started, as if he were a ghost. “I just realized,” he began. “You should actually read them.”

  “The letters?” I asked, gesturing to my desk, which was covered with stationery.

  “Yeah. Just in case.” For a moment he stood up perfectly straight, as if he might balance a book on his head, then his normal slouch returned. “They’re mostly harmless, but occasionally we’ll get a death threat. Back in the ’60s, Salinger got some pretty scary letters. Threatening him. And his kids.” He grimaced.

  “What should I do,” I asked, “if I find something scary?”

  He considered. “You can bring them to me. I’ll decide if it’s worth bothering your boss. We’ve been pretty careful since the Mark David Chapman thing.” I nodded, knowingly, though it was only later that the significance of this name would come to me, with a shudder: Mark David Chapman, the man who’d shot John Lennon, then sat down on the steps of the Dakota and read The Catcher in the Rye. When the police confiscated the book, they found he’d scrawled “This is my statement” on the title page. Holden Caulfield, he said, had made him do it.

  I gestured to my desk, the letters piled on it, robbed of their envolopes. “I’ve been reading them,” I said. “I was curious.”

  “Great,” said Hugh, but he didn’t leave. Did my face, my tone, betray something? Some sentiment of which I wasn’t even aware? “Don’t get too caught up in them.”

  When I got home that night, the apartment was empty. Don was likely at the gym. He had a big match in a couple of weeks and had started running miles each day to get his weight down, training every night. I put on water for pasta and grabbed a book off his desk—Martin Amis’s London Fields, which I’d taken out of the library the previous week, only to have Don claim it. Underneath I found a letter, in Don’s cramped penmanship. For a brief moment, a flicker of a moment, I thought this letter was meant for me, that Don had left it under my book as a romantic gesture. “My dearest, mi amor,” I read. Oh God, I thought, dropping it on the desk as if it were aflame. Those four words were enough. I knew, with utter certainty, that it was not at all meant for me. “Oh my God,” I said aloud. A sick sensation, like vertigo or seasickness, began to overtake me. Slowly, I walked across the apartment and turned off the pot of water. Then I picked up the letter and read on. Whoever “mi amor” was, well, he missed her, he couldn’t believe it had been two months since their days at the beach, he couldn’t stop thinking about her beautiful brown shoulders—I stopped, for I was certain now that I was going to be sick. My skin, as Don often mentioned, was unusually pale. And we had never been to the beach together. Though we had been to his parents’ house for Christmas, where I’d been awkwardly introduced to his extended family—awkwardly, since I barely knew him, was unsure of how or why I’d ended up there—and his oldest friends, a tight-knit group of guys who had mostly stayed in Hartford, doing pickup construction jobs or tending bar or living with their parents, still, at thirty. Only Don and Marc had left.

  I checked the date on the letter. March 16, 1996. This was not a missive from Don’s deepest past. This was a letter written five days ago. Three months ago, he’d been calling me every day, saying things like, “Let’s just run away and get married.” Then I realized: Los Angeles. In December, he’d gone to Los Angeles for a week, to do some final research for his novel. Had he met this person—her name, I discovered, from reading on, was Maria or Mariana—on the trip? Was she someone he’d interviewed? Or—this seemed somehow worse—had he flown out to see her and spun the trip as research for my benefit?

  I fell asleep before Don got home that night, but the next morning the letter was still there, partially obscured by the large black journal in which he recorded his thoughts and observations.

  As the train raced me up to midtown to the Agency, I suddenly thought of Mark David Chapman. Had he written a fan letter—fan letters?—to Salinger? Had the 1980 or 1979 version of me methodically opened a plain white envelope and found a crazed rant? A plan for murder? A tirade against John Lennon? And sent back a crisp, formal dismissal in reply?

  When I got to the office, I asked Hugh. He sighed, as usual. “Maybe,” he said. “Probably. I don’t know.” He sighed again. “I guess that’s why we usually keep all correspondence. It would be interesting to know, wouldn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  “But I guess that’s life, right?” he said. I nodded again, unsure of what I was agreeing with. “There’s just a lot that we’ll never, ever know.”

  1

  The Cover, the Font, the Binding

  How many times had I been told that Salinger would not call, would never call, that I would have no contact with him? More than I could count.

  And yet one morning, a Friday, at the beginning of April, I picked up the phone and heard someone shouting at me. “HELLO? HELLO?” Then something incomprehensible. “HELLO? HELLO?” More gibberish. Slowly, as in a dream, the gibberish resolved into language. “It’s Jerry,” the caller was shouting. Oh my God, I thought. It’s him. I began, slightly, to quiver with fear, not because I was talking to—or being shouted at by—the actual J. D. Salinger, but because I so feared doing something wrong and incurring my boss’s wrath. My mind began to sift through all the Salinger-related instructions that had been imparted to me, but they had more to do with keeping others away from him, less to do with the man himself. There was no risk of my asking him to read my stories or gushing about The Catcher in the Rye. I still hadn’t read it. “WHO IS THIS?” he asked, though it took me a few tries to understand. “It’s Joanna,” I told him, nine or ten times, yelling at the top of my lungs by the final three. “I’m the new assistant.”

  “Well, nice to meet you, Suzanne,” he said, finally, in something akin to a normal voice. “I’m calling to speak to your boss.” I had assumed as much. Why had Pam put him through to me, rather than taking a message? My boss was out for the day, it being Friday, her reading day.

  I conveyed this to him, or hoped that I did. “I can call her at home and have her call you back today. Or she can give you a call when she gets in on Monday.”

  “Monday is fine,” he said, his voice ratcheted down another notch. “Well, very nice to meet you, Suzanne. I hope we meet in person someday.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “Have a grea
t day.” This was not a phrase I ever used. Where had it come from?

  “YOU, TOO!” Ah, the shouting.

  I put the phone down and took a deep breath, as I’d learned to do in ballet. My entire body, I realized, was shaking. I stood up and stretched.

  “Jerry?” asked Hugh, stepping out of his office with a mug of coffee.

  “Yes!” I said. “Wow.”

  “He’s deaf. His wife set up this special phone for him, with an amplified receiver, but he refuses to use it.” He sighed his trademark sigh. To be Hugh was to be let down by the world. “What did he want?”

  “Just to talk to my boss.” I shrugged. “I offered to call her at home and have her call him back, but he said Monday was fine.”

  Hugh wrinkled his face in thought. “Hmm, why don’t you call her anyway. I think she’d want to know.”

  “Okay,” I said, thumbing through my Rolodex.

  She wasn’t home and had no answering machine. She didn’t believe in them. Just as she didn’t believe in computers or voice mail, another newfangled invention not employed by the Agency. If you called during business hours, you reached Pam, the receptionist. If you called outside business hours, the phone just rang and rang, as it did at my boss’s apartment, twenty blocks north of the office. I tried again, every hour or so, until the end of the day, to no avail. It would have to be Monday.

  I’d been at the Agency for a few months now, and my boss had not yet asked me to read anything. Minus this task, my job did indeed seem to resemble that of a secretary, as my father had said, mildly bolstered by the proximity to great works of literature. Without really intending to, I found myself lying when questioned about my responsibilities. “So much reading,” I would say at parties. “I’m always carrying a manuscript around with me. I can’t keep up.”