There was another assistant at the Agency, Olivia, who was indeed overburdened with reading, and it was her complaints that I mimicked. A beauty in the Pre-Raphaelite vein—ethereally pale, ashy ringlets, tubercular figure—Olivia was a truly terrible assistant, forever losing contracts and packages, misfiling correspondence, and simply not answering her phone. She had a handsome Italian boyfriend with whom she fought constantly—it was not uncommon to walk by her desk as she screamed at him and slammed down the phone—and who sometimes arrived at the office to pick her up, embracing her in a mildly inappropriate way. Hugh couldn’t utter her name without rolling his eyes. I desperately wanted to know her, or at least wanted to absorb some modicum of her slender, languorous charms.
The following Monday, the burble of the coffeemaker informed me of her arrival. I had been saving a question for Hugh—regarding those complicated pink cards—and decided to use this as an excuse to say hello. “Oh, I always do that wrong,” she answered nonchalantly, cupping her mug of black coffee in two hands and seating herself on her desk, a gesture that shocked me, for I knew that my boss would be horrified by such overfamiliarity with the office furniture. Today, she had on a black chiffon blouse covered in large white dots and a slim-cut black skirt, which hung loosely on her narrow hips, bunching up above her knees when she sat; on her feet, red ballet slippers that barely rustled when she traipsed across the carpet. “Maybe you just shouldn’t bother. Will anyone know?” She yawned extravagantly. “Do you want coffee? I need more.” As I followed her to the coffeemaker, she explained that she was a painter, and—like me—she’d ended up at the Agency through happenstance. “Basically, I have no interest,” she said with a shrug. “I have to get out of here.”
“But the reading must be great?” I asked, trailing her back to her desk, which she again leaped atop. “Some of it? My boss doesn’t ask me to read anything.”
“Not really,” she said, rolling her large blue eyes. “Most of it’s terrible. You read a few pages, you can tell.”
Just then, as I’d feared, my boss came by, cigarette in hand. Every so often, she surprised me—surprised everyone—by coming in the back entrance, which led directly into our little suite. “Olivia, what on earth are you doing? Get down from there immediately.” She raised her eyebrows at me, as if to say, I told you not to fraternize with that good-for-nothing.
Olivia worked for two different agents, Max and Lucy, who were often referred to as a unified entity—“MaxandLucy”—for they were the closest of friends and spent their days racing in and out of each others’ offices, laughing throatily at each other’s jokes, and lighting each other’s cigarettes. Lucy oversaw film rights for all Agency clients and represented a host of children’s book authors, as well as a few well-reviewed novelists. She’d started her career at the Agency, as an assistant, and though she was perhaps forty, at most, she embodied the best of the Agency’s archaic charms: she smoked cigarettes through an ivory holder, her hand held dramatically in the air, dressed solely in elegantly draped black crepe shifts, and effortlessly emitted Parker-ish quips in her low Bacall-ish voice. Max had been brought in a few years earlier to—it was no secret—rejuvenate the Agency. He was a star, one of the best-known agents of the moment, and represented a host of writers I loved—Mary Gaitskill, Kelly Dwyer, Melanie Thernstrom—and just as many that I’d long wanted to read, like Jim Carroll and Richard Bausch. His writers published in magazines I read—Granta, Harper’s, The Atlantic—and seemed always to be reading at KGB or Limbo, and his life was an endless succession of book parties. Every week, his circulating folder arrived thick with deal memos, and when he came to our side of the office to talk to my boss, it was usually to get her take on an enviable problem: three different editors were fighting over the same book and the author was losing her mind trying to decide which house to choose.
They were impossibly glamorous, Max and Lucy, and I loved merely to be in their proximity, listening to them banter, cigarettes held aloft. Max was short, with a ring of curly hair surrounding a bald pate, and Lucy squat, her skin dulled by nicotine, but their intelligence and wit—and the passion with which they threw themselves into their work, their books, their authors—made them as attractive, as thrilling, as film stars. Also, they were kind: they treated both Olivia and me less like furniture than did the older agents—Lucy asking me about my dresses, Max about my books. And an idea struck me as I sat chatting with Olivia: I could read for them. My boss had no reading for me. They had an assistant with no interest in reading. I trotted directly to Hugh’s office. “That makes sense,” he said. “So long as it doesn’t interfere with your work for your boss.”
“It won’t,” I promised. “I’d do it at home. At night.”
“Okay,” he said. “Go talk to Max. I’m sure he’ll be thrilled. I’ll clear it with your boss.”
“Great!” I said. “Thank you. So much.”
Before I could walk over to Max’s office, my boss appeared in the doorway, glowering. “Did Jerry call on Friday?” I nodded. Hugh, too, looked frozen. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I tried to. I called all day on Friday, but you weren’t home. I must have called ten times.”
“She did,” said Hugh, and I looked to him gratefully.
“He said not to, though,” I clarified. My boss glared at Hugh, opening her mouth to shout. “Jerry said not to. Jerry said not to call you at home. That it could wait until Monday.”
“Well, it’s Monday now! Why haven’t you told me?”
An hour later, the shouting began, and Hugh came out to watch my boss’s door with me. “She’s just going to yell for me the minute she gets off the phone,” he said. “I may as well wait out here.”
“Are you sure, Jerry?” we heard her shout. “Well, of course, if that’s what you want. We’ll take care of it.”
“So good to talk to you,” she shouted. “As always.”
When the door opened, she emerged quietly, thoughtfully. “I need to talk to Carolyn …” Her voice trailed off. “Maybe I should talk to Max.” She drifted toward the front of the office, then thought better of it, turned on her heel, and trod back to us. “Salinger wants to publish a new book,” she said, in the same dreamy tone of voice. “Or an old book. An old story. ‘Hapworth.’ A publisher approached him about putting it out as a stand-alone volume. And he wants to do it.”
“ ‘Hapworth’?” asked Hugh, his voice choked with surprise. “He wants to publish ‘Hapworth’ as a book?”
“Well, it is very long,” said my boss. “It’s really a novella. It could be a book.”
“I think a novella is ninety pages, minimum,” said Hugh stiffly, with a particularly sharp sigh. “ ‘Hapworth’ is maybe sixty. With very wide margins, I suppose it could be a book.” He pursed his lips. “Just because it can be a book doesn’t mean it should be a book.”
“Well,” said my boss, emitting her own sigh. “He seems pretty keen on doing this.”
“Really?” asked Hugh. “Are you sure this isn’t some whim? He’s not going to change his mind tomorrow?”
“Well, I’d say not,” my boss said, laughing. “He’s been thinking it over for eight years.”
Hugh and I looked at each other. “Eight years?” he said.
“Yesiree. The publisher first approached him eight years ago. In 1988.”
“The publisher approached him directly?” Hugh shook his head in amazement.
“Yup,” my boss said, swinging her arms back and forth. It was hard to tell if she was delighted or horrified by this turn of events. “They, or he—it seems like this press might be a one-man show—wrote him a letter.” She raised one finger in the air and smiled. “On a typewriter! Jerry was very impressed by that.”
It had not, until that moment, occurred to me that the Agency’s typewriters-only policy had anything to do with Salinger. Was it possible that Salinger had somehow mandated our lack of modern office machinery? This seemed crazy, but possible. Or was it simply that the A
gency—like an aging star of the high school football team—had simply stopped developing during its glory days? That instead of growing and changing and adapting, it had retreated into the business of being the Agency. Which meant following the same rituals and procedures it’d followed in 1942, when Dorothy Olding first signed Salinger.
“How did the publisher get his address?” I asked. Hugh had told me that an assistant had been fired, a few years back, for giving out Salinger’s address to a reporter.
“He just sent it to J. D. Salinger, Cornish, New Hampshire.” She made a clucking sound with her teeth. “And the mailman delivered it. Can you believe it?”
“No,” I said. I was impressed.
“Why has no one else thought of that?” asked Hugh.
“I don’t know,” said my boss, pulling a pack of cigarettes out of her jacket pocket and peeling off the plastic wrapper. “I don’t know. Maybe someone has.”
Hugh looked a bit as if he were going to throw up. “Which publisher is it? Why didn’t they contact us?”
My boss began to laugh. “I don’t even know. Some small press in Virginia. Orchid Press? Something like that. Tiny. I mean, tiny. Like I said, it might just be one man, it seems like.”
“Orchises Press?” I asked hesitantly. Orchises published some poets I liked. But I knew nothing about it. I wasn’t even sure how to pronounce its name.
“That’s it!” my boss cried. She narrowed her brows in surprise. “You’ve actually heard of them?”
“They publish poetry,” I told her. “Contemporary poetry. I like a few of their poets.”
“A small press,” said Hugh, unbelieving. “A small press in Virginia. A one-man press? For J. D. Salinger? How could this guy even meet the demand? Does he know what he’s getting into? Salinger is pretty different from publishing poetry.”
“You can say that again,” said my boss, with a low chortle. Slowly, she pulled a cigarette out of the pack and lit it with the tiny lighter she always kept on her person, hidden in some pleat or fold. She took a long draw and smiled. She was enjoying this. “We have a lot to find out. For starters, whether this Orchises Press fellow”—she looked at a Post-it in her hand and read a name aloud—“Roger Lathbury. We need to find out whether this Roger Lathbury fellow still even wants to do this. It’s been eight years. He’s going to think I’m crazy when I call him.” Her face compressed in contemplation. “We need to go very slowly on this one. Very slowly and very carefully. I need to think for a minute.”
When she was safely ensconced in her office, murmuring into the phone, I asked Hugh, in a low voice, “What’s ‘Hapworth’?” It sounded mysterious. Like a secret agent’s code name.
“Salinger’s last published story,” Hugh told me, brushing imaginary flecks of dust off his sweater. “It ran in The New Yorker in 1965. It took up almost the whole magazine.”
“Really,” I said. “The whole magazine?” I could not imagine this.
“It wasn’t that strange then,” explained Hugh. “You know Esquire once serialized a whole Mailer novel?” I shook my head no, though I had actually known this. Don was a huge Mailer fan. “Every magazine ran stories. All the women’s magazines. Salinger published stories in all of them. Cosmo ran a novella of his. A real novella.”
“Cosmopolitan?” I asked, incredulous.
“I think Mademoiselle, too. And one other. Ladies’ Home Journal? Good Housekeeping? One of those …” His voice faded to nothing and his hand moved in a circle, seemingly of its own accord, signifying I knew not what.
I’d known, of course, that glossy magazines had once run stories, largely because I’d written my master’s thesis on Sylvia Plath, who had been obsessed with selling stories to what she called “the slicks.” But somehow the idea of J. D. Salinger letting Good Housekeeping run one of his stories—or Cosmo, with its advisories on multiple orgasms—was absurd to the point of hilarity.
“You know that’s what your boss did, right?” he asked, his voice suddenly growing sharper.
I shook my head in confusion.
“First serial.” He nodded, as if agreeing with himself. “She was hired as the first serial agent. To sell stories to magazines. So she sold stories for all the Agency’s clients. For years. She worked at a magazine before she came here, as the assistant to the fiction editor.”
“What magazine?” I asked.
Hugh raised his eyebrows and smiled. “Playboy.”
“Playboy?” I whispered. I was sure he was joking. My boss, in her turtlenecks and slacks, at a girlie magazine?
But he nodded solemnly. “They ran serious fiction. Still do.” He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “People always say ‘I read it for the articles,’ and you think it’s a joke. But they pay well, so they get good writers.”
“Did my boss sell ‘Hapworth’?” I asked. For some reason my heart raced a little at the thought of this. “To The New Yorker?”
Hugh shook his head. “No, that was before her time. Dorothy would have handled that. Though I think, by that point, Salinger just gave all his stories directly to The New Yorker.” He sighed and shook his head as if to clear it. “The story is a letter home from camp,” he explained, his voice strangled and strange. Angry, I realized, he’s angry. “Seymour Glass, at age seven, writing to his parents from camp. Sixty pages. A sixty-page letter home from camp.”
“That sounds kind of postmodern,” I said, smiling.
Hugh sighed and raised his eyebrows at me. “People consider this his worst story. I’m not sure why he’d want to publish it as a stand-alone.” Shaking his head, he gestured toward the wall of Salinger books. “He says he doesn’t want attention. This is going to get a lot of attention. I don’t understand.”
“Yes,” I said, nodding, but I thought maybe, just maybe, I understood. Maybe he’s dying, I thought. Maybe he’s lonely. Maybe he wants the attention now. Maybe he realized that what he thought he wanted wasn’t what he wanted at all.
The next morning, my boss stopped at my desk before heading into her office. “Call this Orchids Press and ask for a catalog and a sample of their books.”
I nodded, but she’d already glided off across the thick carpet. From my shelf, I pulled down the LMP—Literary Market Place, an enormous, dictionary-sized tome, which lists the name and address of every publisher in the country, along with its staff—and sure enough, there it was: Orchises Press, Alexandria, Virginia. Publisher: Roger Lathbury, the Man Who Conquered Salinger. No other staff was listed. I took a deep breath and dialed. “Hello,” a brisk voice chirped midway through the first ring. Was this the man himself, Roger Lathbury? Suddenly I felt silly, unsure of what to say. When I identified myself as an employee of the Agency, would he not immediately realize I was calling on behalf of Salinger? For once, I wished my boss had dictated a letter. “Yes, hello,” I said finally. “Is this Orchises Press?”
“It is,” said the voice.
“I’m calling from the Agency.” Simply uttering the Agency’s name allowed me to regain my composure. “We’re expanding our submission base, and we’d love to see your most recent catalog, as well as a sample of current books.”
“Well,” the man said, “it would be my pleasure to send those materials on to you!” If he recognized the name of the Agency, he gave no indication of it. Or maybe he simply didn’t know that the Agency represented Salinger? After all, he’d written directly to Jerry.
“You did it?” my boss called the minute I hung up. I hadn’t realized that she could hear my phone conversations from her office and flushed a little, thinking what else she might have overheard over the past few months.
“Done,” I called back. There was a rustling as she got up from her chair and walked over to my desk. And another as Hugh joined her.
“Let’s see who they are,” she said. “We need to see what kinds of books they do, what kind of company Jerry will be in. And what the books look like. You know that will matter a lot to Jerry.”
“Really?” I asked.
I’d assumed the homogeneous—and singular—style of his books had been purely Little, Brown’s choice. Publishers, I thought, took care of designing books. Writers wrote them.
“Oh boy!” cried my boss. Hugh actually laughed. “You didn’t know that? Jerry has very strong feelings about how a book should look. Not just the cover. The font. The paper. The margins. The binding. No illustrations on his covers. Just text. It’s all stipulated in his contracts.”
“No author photo,” added Hugh. “He almost sued his British publisher over the cover of Nine Stories.”
“That’s an exaggeration,” my boss cried. “He did not sue them. He just was unhappy about it.”
The original cover of The Catcher in the Rye bore an illustration, a strange and beautiful—lyrical, really—drawing of a rearing carousel horse. I could see it out of the corner of my eye while seated at my desk. But that was his first book, predating, I supposed, his ban on images, as well as the sort of fame that allows an author to dictate his covers. In truth, I understood his objection. He wanted his readers to come to his work utterly fresh, utterly free. This, too, was noble. Lovely. But it was also, I suddenly realized, impossible. For J. D. Salinger, that is. No one, no one could come to his books without preconceived notions about them. About him. Myself included.
In the weeks that followed, my lies became true: My shoulder quickly began to ache from toting manuscripts. In reading for Max and Lucy, the texture of my life changed, the fabric of my days growing more and more complex and thrilling. Many of the novels—for they were novels, all novels—that I brought home were indeed bad, as Olivia had promised, but many were good or almost good or at least evidenced a strong and strange voice, and even if I knew that Max or Lucy wasn’t going to take on the writer, there was a certain frisson to being part of the making of a book, however far down the line, of a career, a life. Each time Max or Lucy took on a book I’d recommended, I walked around stunned for days. Reading manuscripts was the exact opposite of reading for grad school: it was pure instinct, with some emotion and intelligence thrown in. Does this novel work? Or can it be made to work? Does it move me? Does it grip me?
My Salinger Year Page 8