My Salinger Year

by Joanna Rakoff

  “And it’s a good thing, too. In typing up the story, I noticed that there are a few small typos.” He seemed a bit pleased by this, to have caught The New Yorker in error.

  “Really?” I asked, surprised. The New Yorker’s fact-checking and copyediting departments were legendary. Mistakes, I’d thought, simply didn’t slip through.

  “Oh yes,” Roger affirmed. “Small typos, but typos still. I went ahead and corrected them. Salinger is such a stickler for details, I’m assuming he’d want them corrected.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” I said, discreetly rolling a piece of letterhead into my typewriter, though I couldn’t type when on the phone—other than with Don, or my mother, or Jenny, or someone else who wouldn’t be offended—as the Selectric made too much noise. Actually, I wasn’t at all sure.

  “I also considerably widened the margins to give the book some length. If it’s too thin, I won’t be able to fit the title on the spine horizontally. Jerry wants a horizontal title. He hates vertical titles. So I’ve made some really wide margins. But Salinger prefers that. Not too much text on the page. He wants the story to breathe.”

  “Vertical titles?” I’d never heard this term before and wondered if Roger—or Salinger—had invented it. It sounded like a Joy Division album. Or a collection of abstract poetry.

  “Yes, yes!” In his overexcitement, Roger sometimes sounded like the White Rabbit. I pictured him as small and pudgy, his hair parted deeply on one side and combed over to the other. “Vertical titles. When the title is printed sideways along the spine of the book. So you have to turn your head sideways to read it. Most titles are printed that way, actually. Because you need a relatively thick spine to print a title horizontally. Look at Salinger’s books.” I glanced at the bookshelf in front of me. “All of them have horizontal titles.” Squinting, I saw he was right. They did indeed. Each word of each title printed across each book’s spine, the words stacked on top of one another.

  The following Wednesday Salinger drove down to D.C. and met Roger for lunch at the National Gallery, a busy, public place if there ever was one, but Salinger was not—as Roger half expected—mobbed by fans or converged on by photographers. The two men sat and looked over Roger’s designs, then parted ways at the little waterfall by the stairs leading up to the lobby.

  “He insisted on paying for lunch,” reported Roger, who seemed baffled by the fact that he, Roger Lathbury of Alexandria, Virginia—the kid who read Nine Stories in his suburban bedroom—had somehow ended up eating sandwiches with J. D. Salinger. He had, of course, called first thing Thursday morning to give me a postmortem. “The pub date will be January 1,” he told me. “Jerry’s birthday.”

  “January 1 of next year?” I asked. Producing and publishing a book usually took longer than six months. Could Roger really get this book in stores by the New Year?

  “Yes, yes, of course. No need to wait,” he confirmed. “There’s not that much to do. Jerry chose the design I thought he would. And we decided against running the title at the top of each page. Because it’s an epistolary story. You know. It’s a letter. So it takes you out of the moment to have the title running across the top of the page. Jerry agrees.”

  The two men agreed on everything, it seemed, except for one. Salinger did not want the typos corrected. In fact, he’d bristled at Roger’s correcting them without consulting him first.

  “I don’t understand it,” said Roger. “He actually seemed put out that I’d fixed them”—he paused, unsure if he should even speak of the potential catastrophe—“I thought for a moment he was going to say, ‘Let’s just forget this whole thing.’ Because I corrected some small mistakes. But okay. I’ll put the typos back in.”

  “Did he say why?” I asked. I’d had a feeling—based on nothing—that Salinger would respond in this way. My suspicion was that with Jerry it was all about control: Had Roger asked him about correcting the typos in advance, he might have said, “Sure, correct them.” But the fact that Roger had gone ahead and done so, without consulting him, just annoyed him.

  “Sort of.” Roger’s voice was fading, the adrenaline rush of the lunch dissolving as he recounted its downside. “Not really. He just said he wanted it printed exactly as it had originally run in The New Yorker. It was almost as if he were saying the typos were intentional. Though he didn’t exactly say that. But it made me realize …” He drifted off and I wondered, for a moment, if he’d hung up or the connection had been lost. Then he cleared his throat.

  “Are you okay?” I asked. I liked him. I did. I wanted him to be okay. I wanted him to not mess this up. To not correct any more typos.

  One night in early July, at a rooftop party, I spent hours talking to two young New Yorker editors. They were a few years my senior—and a few Don’s junior—and dressed like caricatures of prep school types, like characters from a Whit Stillman movie. They were, in other words, exactly as I’d pictured New Yorker editors, if I’d actually had the wherewithal to even imagine the people behind the magazine that had so profoundly shaped my life, which I did not, nor did I ever imagine that I might really and truly find myself in the same room with such people, much less at the center of their orbit, as I did that night. I’d read The New Yorker religiously growing up, emulating my father’s complicated, well-hewn reading system, which involved starting with the movie reviews, then turning to theater, then Talk of the Town, then features. But I’d not, somehow, understood the magazine’s larger cultural significance until college. I’d thought it was a magazine for people who lived in New York, or were from New York, like my father. New Yorkers. I thought, too, that the magazine was a secret, something consumed only by my father and me. No one else read it in our small, conservative town, just as no one else read the Times.

  The New Yorker editors knew the Agency, of course—the two entities having been founded around the same time, their histories intertwined—and so we talked about Fitzgerald and I answered the usual Salinger questions—no, I’d not met him; yes, reporters still called for him; no, I didn’t know if he was working on a new novel—and recounted some of the more arcane Agency procedures and policies—the cards! the typewriters! the tumblers of “water” on Carolyn’s desk—which made them laugh. Even The New Yorker, I learned—with its patina of old-timey fustiness—was fully computerized and Dictaphone-free. But they’d heard tales of the Agency’s weirdness—as had many in certain publishing circles—and were hungry for more. And so I told them about the Salinger letters, of course, about the girl from Japan with her Hello Kitty stationery and the endless veterans and the woman whose daughter had died. And I told them about the crazy people who sent letters on dirty scraps of paper written with what seemed to be stubs of pencil, the lead smudged and smeared across the page. I told them, too, about the kids who wrote in the voice of Holden. “Dear Jerry, you old bastard,” I cried, in imitation of these fans. “I’d sure get one helluva kick out of it if you’d find a goddam minute to write me back.”

  “No,” said one editor. “Really?”

  “Oh yes,” I said.

  “That’s amazing,” said the other, wiping a tear of laughter with one muscular thumb. “I didn’t realize Salinger was still so popular. But I guess every teenager goes through a Salinger phase, right?”

  “Definitely,” I found myself saying, “but, you know, those stories really hold up.” Where was this coming from? I’d not read Salinger as a teen, nor had I read him now. Stop, I told myself. “A lot of the letters we get are from Salinger’s peers, who read Catcher, or the stories, when they first came out and are rereading them now—and seeing things they never saw the first time around. Like the war. All the stories, ultimately, are about the war.”

  “I should reread them,” said one editor. “I loved Nine Stories in high school.”

  “Me too,” said the other. “I loved Catcher, too. Though, I guess, who didn’t?”

  Finally, as the air grew cool, and the crowd thinned, I asked the question I’d wanted—and been afr
aid—to ask. “What’s it like, working at The New Yorker?” My voice had fallen to almost a whisper and the wind picked up, whipping my hair and skirt around. I’d been to roof parties with Don, atop tenements in the East Village, five-story buildings from which one could catch a glimpse of our neighborhood across the river—the Domino sugar factory, the abandoned industrial buildings of the South Side—one’s shoes sticking to the tar paper, if ever so slightly. But this was a roof garden atop a tall new office building, with pretty patio chairs and sleek gray tiles embedded in the floor, willowy plants emerging from square planters bent in the wind. A waiter stopped by, offering us fresh sloshes of icy white wine. We sipped deeply, the young editors contemplating my question. One was short and dark, with shiny hair that flopped into his eyes and an impish smile. The other was tall, with auburn hair and freckles and an extraordinarily direct gaze. They were both, it suddenly occurred to me, handsome. As if on cue, they turned to me and shrugged, smiling. There was, I saw, no answer to my question.

  Don skittered at the edge of this scene. It was perhaps the first situation in which he’d struck me as ill at ease. Usually, at parties, he walked in and took stock of the room, then immediately engaged in his particular version of male territorial marking. We had been dating long enough that I could predict his behavior upon arrival at any gathering of more than, say, five people: First, he greeted every man he knew with half hugs and high fives and the intense and potent utilization of the sort of slang—“What’s up, bro?”—he generally scorned. Next, he obtained a drink involving some sort of brown alcohol, ideally in a short tumbler, with ice cubes that could be rattled during lulls in conversation. Drink in hand, he staked out a spot that allowed him to survey the room so that—I now knew—he might both monitor the arrival of attractive women and further assess the attractiveness of the women already in attendance.

  Regardless, tonight he’d been unaccountably subdued. Marc’s wedding was approaching and he was, increasingly, brooding about it, retreating into himself. Usually, he took pains with his ablutions before any and every party—shower, shave, insertion of contact lenses. But tonight his dark stubble was in evidence and he wore his glasses—round, wire-rimmed—which made him look younger, and his white shirt was less than pristine. Don included The New Yorker in his list of bourgeois frippery, though he read it, of course, sometimes poring over issues in a way I rarely did. “The nonfiction is amazing,” he said, when I’d mentioned this contradiction, some weeks back. “But the fiction is a joke. It’s just atrocious. And that whole twee Talk of the Town thing, the flaneur in the top hat with the monocle. Blech. Doesn’t it just make you want to throw up?” Cackling, he drew me to him in a hug, the way one might pull a child onto one’s lap as a response to her blinding cuteness. “Of course it doesn’t make you want to throw up. You love that shit. That”—here he adopted a high, warbling voice—“Oh, we’re all gathering for drinks at the Algonquin. I do wish you would join us bullshit.” I’d heard him air these opinions—and loudly—at all those parties on the roofs of East Village tenements and at the various dive bars he found “authentic” and romantic—the Holiday Cocktail Lounge and the International and Tile Bar and the Irish bar on Driggs—expounding on the corrupt, watered-down nature of contemporary fiction.

  But tonight he stayed, literally, in my shadow, standing a step or two back from me in the dark double that stemmed from my feet, sipping a drink, his eyes wide. That night, as we left the party—“Come by the office,” the taller editor said to me, pressing a card into my hand, “I’ll show you around”—and walked to Fifty-Third and Lex, to catch the 6 down to Union Square, the air cool on my bare arms, I recalled something one of Max’s clients had said to me, in passing, at a book party. “I judge a woman by her friends.” At the time, this had seemed strange and harsh to me. But now I understood what he meant: that a person is only as good as those with whom he surrounds himself. All of Don’s friends were, it was true, strange or damaged in some way or another: Allison and Marc and Leigh tragically hampered by their privileged upbringings, paralyzed by fear of failure. His friends in Hartford, stunted and angry.

  Why didn’t Don consort with writers? Successful writers, published writers, or even simply ambitious, interesting writers, published or no? Why hadn’t he argued and bantered with the New Yorker editors? Why hadn’t he made them his friends? Forged alliances? Told them about his novel? Why hadn’t he talked about Gramsci or Proust with them? The answer sent a shiver through me: Don didn’t want friends who worked at The New Yorker. He didn’t want friends who dressed in creamy Brooks Brothers oxfords and college ties, friends who had health insurance and degrees from Harvard, friends who’d just published their first Talk of the Town pieces. He surrounded himself with fools—the broken, the failed or failing, the sad and confused—so that he might be their king. Which, obviously, made him nothing but the king of fools.

  But what did that make me?

  The next morning, I turned to the letters straightaway. There were the usual proclamations of love for Holden, the usual war stories, the usual stories of despair and redemption, the many, many letters from Japan and Denmark and the Netherlands. The Japanese loved Holden. I tapped out a few form responses and modified form responses, filed away a few Tragic Letters for another day, then slit open an envelope addressed in bubbly, girlish script. The letter was almost a novella unto itself, this girl’s story unfolding over three pages of wrinkly, pencil-smudged notebook paper. She was a freshman in high school, she explained, and she hated school, particularly English class, which she was failing. Her English teacher was maybe an all right person, but she didn’t understand what it meant to be young, and she assigned the class these stupid books that had nothing to do with their lives. The only book the girl had liked, over the course of the year, was The Catcher in the Rye. As things stood, she was going to have to go to summer school or repeat freshman English, which would be so embarrassing she wasn’t sure if she could stand it, and her mother would kill her. The year was almost over, but she’d asked her teacher if she could do anything at all to bring her grade up, just enough so that she’d pass. “There is something you can do,” the teacher told her. “Write a letter to J. D. Salinger and make it good enough that he’ll write back. If he writes back, I’ll give you an A.”

  Hmm, I thought, putting the letter down and staring, for the millionth time, at the wall of Salinger books. It was lunch-time and I had a neat stack of letters ready to be mailed. I ran them through the postal meter, threw on my coat, and slipped the girl’s letter in my bag. On line to buy my salad, I read it again. Despite various misspellings and sloppy penmanship, this girl wasn’t a terrible writer. She conveyed her story vividly and honestly, with passion and detail. And then there was the pure audacity—the ballsiness, the brattiness—of writing to J. D. Salinger and saying, “Please respond so I can get a free A.” I kind of liked her. Salinger had been a terrible student himself. Perhaps he would like her, too. Perhaps he would—as the boy from Winston-Salem said—get a kick out of her letter. “I really need this A,” I read, holding my plastic container of watery lettuce. “It will bring my entire GPA up to passing. My mother is mad at me all the time now. I know you understand.”

  And yet there was something that rankled me. What would Salinger say to her? I pondered this as I walked back to the office, across Forty-Ninth Street and down Madison, the sun warming my bare arms. He had failed out of schools himself. I knew this from Hugh and Roger and also the letters, many of which referred to incidents in Salinger’s life. They could be informative, the letters. Holden, I knew, had also failed out of a few schools. Would either of them have attempted to maintain his place through this kind of trick? I hadn’t read Catcher, so I wasn’t sure about Holden, but I knew—I knew—that Salinger would not. He would have taken his failure as deserved.

  Back at my desk, I ate my olive, then turned toward the Selectric and banged out a response to the girl, suggesting that it was decidedly not in the spirit of H
olden—or Salinger—to be worrying about grades or her mother’s anger. If she wanted to be like Holden—or Salinger—she should accept her failing grade, a grade she, by her own admission, deserved. Trying to trick herself into a grade she hadn’t earned was a coward’s way out, a phony’s way out. “If you desire an A or at least a passing grade, there’s only one way to earn it: you must study and do the work assigned to you. This might mean making up papers or tests. This might mean begging your teacher to give you another chance. This might mean apologizing or otherwise humbling yourself. But it is the only way. An A earned by trickery means absolutely nothing.”

  As I signed the letter with my name, my heart raced happily. I had done the right thing. I was mastering the art of What Would Salinger Say? But I had also crossed a line. The barely visible seam between bemused interest or compassionate engagement or plain sympathy and utter over-involvement. Why could I not leave these letters alone? I asked myself as I walked over to the mail meter. Why could I not just send on form letters to every single fan? The answer was plain: I loved them. They were exciting. When I read them, sitting at my desk alone on, say, a Friday morning, I felt a strange charge, a mixture of anger and affection, disdain and empathy, admiration and disgust. These people were writing to me—or, well, no, to Salinger, care of me—about their marital frustrations, their dead children, their boredom and desperation; they wrote about their favorite songs and poems, about the trips they’d taken to the Grand Canyon and Hawaii, about their favorite dolls. They told me—Salinger—things I knew, for sure, they’d never told anyone else. Could I, over and over, respond to them in the most formal, impersonal manner possible? Could I just abandon them? Could I let them think that no one cared, no one was listening?