Salinger (16 page)

In October, Salinger thanked Lobrano for including “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” in
55 Stories,
an anthology published by Simon and Schuster
composed of stories that had appeared originally in the
New Yorker.
Salinger was extremely happy over his appearance in this anthology, since it indicated that the
New Yorker
editors considered him important. He saw his stories published in three other anthologies as well: “The Long Debut of Lois Taggett” appeared in
Story: The Fiction of the
Forties;
“A Girl I Knew” in
Best American Short Stories of 1949;
and “Just Before the War with the Eskimos” in
Prize Stories of 1949.
Though Salinger
enjoyed having these stories reprinted, he wasn’t writing any new ones at the moment. Instead, he was working full-time on his novel.

At some point during 1949, Robert Giroux, an editor at Harcourt Brace, wrote to Salinger in care of the
New Yorker
to ask him if he would be interested in bringing out
a book of short stories. In a gesture that would indicate just how ambivalent Salinger was beginning to feel about editors and publishers, he did not write back for months. No doubt, in the wake of
the
Young Folks
mess, which he still blamed on Burnett, Salinger must have felt apprehensive about an editor contacting him with a proposition to publish a story collection.

So much time passed that Giroux assumed Salinger wasn’t interested. Then, one day as he worked at his desk in his office at Harcourt Brace, Giroux looked up to see Salinger suddenly appear
unannounced in his doorway. “A tall, sad-looking young man,” Giroux would write,
“with a long face and deep-set black eyes walked in, saying,
‘It’s not my stories that should be published first, but the novel I’m working on.’”

“Do you want to sit behind this desk?” Giroux said. “You sound just like a publisher.”

“No,” Salinger said, “you can do the stories later if you want, but I think my novel about this kid in New York during the Christmas holidays should come out first.”

Giroux said that—absolutely—he would be interested in publishing Salinger’s novel. The two men then sealed their informal deal with a handshake.

Salinger had not been in a creative-writing class since he had finished Burnett’s course at Columbia University, until one day in 1949 when, as a favor to a friend, he
found himself sitting in a classroom as a guest lecturer at Sarah Lawrence College, then an all-girls school located twenty minutes by train north of Manhattan in the wealthy “bedroom”
community of Bronxville, New York. Perhaps he had gone there because the Columbia experience had been so positive for him. Sitting in the classroom, he knew he had made a mistake.

He looked out at the faces of the girls, who were bright and energetic and full of questions.
He
was the one who felt uncomfortable about what he was having to say in his role as guest
lecturer. How different it was for Salinger to be the teacher instead of the student. The longer he sat there the more he decided that, in place of teaching, which required him to
“label” writers, what he should do was
simply stand up before the class and shout at the top of his lungs the names—and just the names—of the writers
he loved. For Salinger, that list would have included Kafka, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Proust, O’Casey, Rilke, Lorca, Keats, Rimbaud, Burns, Emily Brontë, Jane Austen,
Henry James, Blake, and Coleridge. And these were just the names of the dead writers he admired.

But he didn’t stand up and shout any names. He agonized through the class, then left. Needless to say, he never went back to Sarah Lawrence, or any other college or university, for that
matter. In fact, after this episode, Salinger refused ever to appear in a similar setting again. As a result, Salinger’s career as a guest lecturer, something most writers do either to make
money or build an audience or both, consisted of one appearance only.

In Westport, Salinger focused on writing his novel, which he had decided to call
The Catcher in the Rye.
He did leave his work long enough to make a few friends, who knew all about the
novel. “During Salinger’s brief stay in Westport, we became fast friends,” said Peter DeVries, a friend and
New Yorker
colleague of Salinger’s. “I knew at the
time that he was writing the book, and I was enormously interested in the idea, without ever dreaming that I was being made privy to the early workings-out of a classic. I remember saying that it
all sounded very wonderful, but couldn’t he think up a more catchy title?”

These days, however, Salinger had more on his mind than literature. Earlier in the year, not long after “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” appeared in the
New Yorker,
Samuel
Goldwyn bought the story’s film
rights—the first time a Hollywood producer had purchased the rights to one of Salinger’s stories. For much of 1949, Goldwyn
and his creative team in Hollywood had worked on the picture, which was scheduled to be released in early 1950.

1

On January 21, 1950, Samuel Goldwyn Studios released
My Foolish Heart,
the motion picture based on “Uncle Wiggily in
Connecticut.” To qualify it for Academy Award consideration, the picture had been shown on screens in New York and Los Angeles during late December 1949, and was being released
nationwide.

During the entire creative process that resulted in a finished picture, Salinger had no input whatsoever. Goldwyn’s creative team took his story and turned it into a picture that ended up
having almost nothing to do with the original short story on which it was based. That creative team was headed by Goldwyn himself, the legendary independent producer who went on to have his own
studio. Goldwyn had bought the rights to “Uncle Wiggily” at the suggestion of Julius and Philip Epstein, the team (they were twins) who had written the screenplays for, among other
pictures,
Mr. Skeffington
and
Casablanca.
Once the Epsteins had finished the script for
My Foolish Heart,
Goldwyn hired Edith Head to design the
picture’s wardrobe, and Mark Robson, then known for
Home of the Brave,
to direct a cast that would include Susan Hayward, whom Goldwyn got on loan from Universal, and Dana Andrews,
whom he had used in previous pictures. Finally, Goldwyn commissioned Victor Young to compose a theme song to be entitled, appropriately enough, “My Foolish Heart.” Lilting and lovely,
the song was a quintessential movie ballad and, after the picture’s release, would eventually become an American popular standard.

As soon as Salinger saw the finished picture, he hated it. In his short story, the action takes place mostly in the living room of a house in Connecticut with two old college
roommates—Eloise and Mary Jane—sitting around drinking highballs and smoking cigarettes. What action there is focuses on the comings and goings of Eloise’s young daughter, Ramona,
whose presence forces Eloise to realize she is in a loveless marriage to a man she doesn’t like. There is an air of quiet despair about the story as Salinger criticizes the very
lifestyle—that of the Eastern WASP—he, in some ways, had become a part of. However, motion pictures being what they are, even Goldwyn’s team, composed of some of the top talent in
Hollywood, could not have gotten much more than a short film out of Salinger’s story. What had to happen was the inevitable: characters, scenes, subplots, and dialogue had to be added. To
Salinger’s story Goldwyn’s team added flashbacks to, among other times, Eloise’s boarding-school years, the months Eloise dated her true love Walt,
and the
day Walt died in an airplane crash—the event that caused her to enter her unhappy marriage. Beyond this, Goldwyn’s team created new characters, most notably those of Eloise’s
mother and father, characters who are not even mentioned in Salinger’s story. But what was most egregious was this: Manipulating tone and emotional content, Goldwyn’s team somehow
turned Salinger’s bitter indictment of the Connecticut WASP into a picture that was so sentimental, so unabashedly maudlin, that one critic called it a “four handkerchief”
tearjerker.

In fact, most if not all of the critics attacked
My Foolish Heart.
“Every so often there comes a picture which is obviously designed to pull the plugs out of the tear glands and
cause the ducts to overflow,” Bosley Crowther wrote in an unfavorable review in the
New York Times.
“Such a picture is Samuel Goldwyn’s latest romance,
My Foolish
Heart.
” In the
New Yorker,
John McCarten was even more biting. McCarten contended that the picture was so “full of soap-opera clichés” it was “hard to
believe that it was wrung out of a short story . . . that appeared in this austere magazine a couple of years ago.” However, no one could have despised the picture as much as Salinger did,
which was ironic since, early on in his career, he had dreamed of selling his stories to Hollywood, even going so far as to write one, “The Varioni Brothers,” to attract the interest of
a particular star. But
My Foolish Heart
ended that. Salinger detested the picture so much he never had anything to do with Hollywood again. “In the future,” says A. Scott Berg,
the author of the definitive biography of Samuel Goldwyn, “people would try to get the film rights to
The Catcher in the Rye
for years, and the answer
from
Salinger was always the same. ‘No, no, no,’ he would say through his agent, ‘I had a bad experience in Hollywood once.’”

2

In the career of J. D. Salinger, 1950 would be a pivotal year. It was during this year that Salinger brought into its final stages his novel
about Holden Caulfield. He had been talking and thinking about the book for much of the decade of the 1940s; he had even written and published stories about Holden. In 1950, however, he finally
finished the book.

In February, while he was still reeling from what he considered to be the humiliation of
My Foolish Heart,
Salinger wrote to Lobrano to tell him he had cut six pages from a story on
which he was working for the
New Yorker.
“For Esmé—With Love and Squalor” was longish, passionate, unique, and it would become one of Salinger’s most
enduring stories. Indeed, some readers sensed its importance as soon as it appeared in the magazine on April 8, 1950. Sometimes, as was the case here, a writer produces a “signature”
story, one that crystallizes exactly what the writer is trying to say in his work even as it stands as a perfect blending of that author’s style and subject matter. For Salinger, “A
Perfect Day for Bananafish” had been such a story. In it, he invented a compelling and original character in Seymour Glass; he also created a young female character, Sybil, on whom the
story’s main character lavishes attention so intensely one comes to question the very nature of that affection. Through these characters, Salinger dealt with a topic that had singular meaning
to
him—the devastating emotional effect war can have on a person. This particular combination of ingredients for a story was obviously too appealing for Salinger not
to use again as he did in “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor.”

The story begins with suggestions that it may be autobiographical. The story’s narrator—a first-person narrator—thinks back to April 1944 when he was stationed in Devon,
England, as an intelligence officer in a regiment that was preparing to be a part of the Allied invasion of Europe. Then, one day, he happens into a church (Salinger often went to the Methodist
church in Tiverton) and watches the choir practice of a group of children, one of whom catches his eye. She is “about thirteen” with “straight ash-blonde hair of ear lobe
length,” “blasé eyes,” and a voice that is “distinctly separate from the other children’s voices.” Later, when the girl and her younger brother go across
the street to a tearoom where the narrator has gone as well, the girl, for no apparent reason, joins the narrator at his table. While they speak, the girl asks the narrator questions that are
unusual for a thirteen-year-old. “Are you married?” is one. “Are you deeply in love with your wife?” is another. When the narrator remains silent, the young girl speaks
instead. “I purely came over because I thought you looked extremely lonely,” she says. “You have an extremely sensitive face.” Then the young girl reveals her
name—Esmé. When the narrator tells her he is a writer, she asks him to write a story for her—a story about squalor. Finally, after Esmé leaves with her brother, the
narrator becomes inexplicably moved. “It was a strangely emotional moment for me,” he observes, without ever saying why.