Salinger (17 page)

Next, Salinger shifts forward in time to recount an episode involving a sergeant—the unnamed narrator called Sergeant X. It is strongly implied that the unnamed
narrator
is
Sergeant X, and, because there are so many details similar to Salinger’s life, the further implication is that Sergeant X is Salinger himself. We’re introduced to
Sergeant X in Bavaria only weeks after the war ended in Europe. Because Sergeant X is “a young man who had not come through the war with all his faculties intact,” he has been interned
in a hospital (as Salinger himself had been); now, released, he is staying in a room where he is visited by Corporal Z, his “jeep partner and constant companion from D-Day straight through
five campaigns in the war.” (Sergeant X’s tour of duty is distinctly similar to Salinger’s.) “Did you know the goddam side of your face is jumping all over the place?”
Z says to X. He goes on to mention a curious incident, a day in Valognes when X shot a cat. Furious, X insists that he killed the animal because “that cat was a spy.” The episode ends
with X sitting in the room alone looking at a letter Esmé sent him thirty-eight days after they met. Finally, as he peers at the letter, X suddenly feels sleepy. “You take a really
sleepy man, Esmé,” the episode (and story) concludes, “and he always stands a chance of again becoming a man with all his fac- with all his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s in tact.” Of
course, it is obvious that “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor” is the story the narrator wrote for Esmé.

As soon as the
New Yorker
published “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor,” Salinger began to hear from readers. On April 20, he wrote to Lobrano from Westport to
tell him he had already gotten
more letters about “For Esmé” than he had for any story he had published. The reason the story would be perceived as being
so successful, the reason it would soon be thought of as a minor masterpiece, had to do with how the story was told and what the story was about. Simply put, “For Esmé” is an
ideal fusion of innovative narrative technique and provocative subject matter. The reader is fascinated by what he is being told even as he is caught up in the way Salinger is telling it.

3

Salinger had spent much of the summer working on his novel in a variety of locations. In one scenario, he was locked away in the Westport house
grinding out chapter after chapter. In another scenario, offered years later by a friend, he was holed up in a Manhattan hotel room diligently rewriting sections of the book. On August 2, Salinger
did spend time in the office of Carol Montgomery Newman at the
New Yorker,
probably working on the novel, for on that day on Newman’s desk calendar Salinger wrote a note thanking
Newman for the use of his office. “One summer while I was on vacation,” Newman later recalled, “Salinger used my office.” More than likely, Salinger worked on the novel in
these and other places—wherever he could shut himself away to get the book done. For there is no doubt the book then weighed heavily on his mind. Now thirty-one years old, he had been either
contemplating or writing this novel for much of his adult life. It was time to finish it.

When “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor” appeared in
World Review
in London in August, Salinger continued to get a unique
response to the
story. One British publisher, Hamish Hamilton, the owner of a mid-sized firm that specialized in literary fiction, approached him after reading the story. On the eighteenth, Hamilton, whose firm
bore his name, sent Salinger a telegram which read, “
MOST ANXIOUS PUBLISH ANYTHING YOU HAVE AVAILABLE
.
WRITING
.” On the twenty-first,
writing on
New Yorker
stationery, Salinger responded to Hamilton’s telegram and follow-up letter by saying that he did not want to publish a collection of stories, as Hamilton had
suggested he should, but that he would forward Hamilton’s letter to his agent in case he changed his mind. Four days later, Hamilton responded, telling Salinger he would be willing to discuss
publishing his work whenever Salinger was ready to talk.

Salinger was not interested in discussing a story collection with Hamilton because, after working on it for much of 1950, he was almost finished with
The Catcher in the Rye.
By the
fall, the book was done. It was then that, following up on the meeting he had had with Robert Giroux at Harcourt Brace, Salinger submitted the book to Giroux. As soon as he read it, Giroux wanted
to publish it, and he and Salinger agreed informally that Harcourt Brace would acquire the book. However, when Giroux gave the novel to his superior, Eugene Reynal, problems arose. “Is Holden
Caulfield supposed to be crazy?” Reynal asked Giroux. It was a comment that, for all practical purposes, ended the possibility of Giroux entering into negotiations to buy the book. By
misreading the novel as he had, Reynal passed up the opportunity to buy a book that would go on to become one of the most successful ever published in America. When a book becomes phenomenally
successful, there is always a list of potential publishers who, for one reason or another, could have bought the rights but didn’t. In the case of
The Catcher in
the Rye,
that list would have only one name on it—Eugene Reynal’s. For as soon as Salinger’s agent submitted the novel to John Woodburn at Little, Brown, Woodburn snapped it
up. Not too long after that, Olding also sold the novel to Hamish Hamilton in England.

Toward the end of 1950, with two different publishers for the novel secured, Salinger instructed Olding to submit
The Catcher in the Rye
in manuscript form to the
New Yorker.
Obviously, Salinger hoped the magazine would publish excerpts of the novel, especially since “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” which had become the basis of one of the book’s
chapters, had appeared there five years ago. Astonishingly, the editors did not like the novel and refused to publish any excerpts. On January 25, 1951, Lobrano wrote to Salinger to smooth over
hurt feelings since Salinger was irate about the magazine’s decision. At least two editors had read the novel, Lobrano said, and their main problems with the book were simple. They did not
believe the Caulfield family could have four children who were so “extraordinary.” Nor did they believe the two sibling relationships (Phoebe-Holden and Allie-D. B.) were
“tenable”; those relationships were too similar. What’s more, Lobrano himself, or so he said, felt Salinger was not ready to write the novel; to him, Salinger seemed
“imprisoned” by the novel’s mood and scenes. Lobrano ended his letter by reiterating to Salinger what he had apparently told him on occasion in the past. The reaction to
Catcher
at the
New Yorker
—an unquestionably negative one—grew out
of the fact that the magazine’s editors had an unwavering bias against
what they called the “writer-consciousness.” This was considered “showy”—what the slicks let their writers do. (For almost all its history, for example, the
New
Yorker
was published without contributors’ notes.) If the
New Yorker
published a writer, he was known first and foremost as a “
New Yorker
writer,” always
keeping the attention focused on the magazine, where the editorship thought it belonged.

In the last part of 1950, as friends would later report, Salinger seems to have become more and more fascinated by alternative religions. Specifically, Salinger started to
study Advaita Vedanta, a type of Indian thought that promotes “nonduality.” To learn about this, he took lessons from Swami Nikhilananda at the Sumitra Paniter Ramakrishna Vinekananda
Center in New York City. This led Salinger into a more general study of Eastern religions, something he would pursue for the rest of his life. It was probably not coincidental that at the very time
he was becoming involved in a religion that opened up his consciousness as both a person and an artist, he finally completed the book he had been working on for a decade.

1

In March 1951, as Salinger was getting ready for the American release of
The Catcher in the Rye,
Hamish Hamilton came over from England
to New York to meet with American editors and some of his authors. One night, Salinger saw Hamilton and his wife Yvonne. In their first face-to-face meeting, Salinger and Hamilton seemed to have an
instant rapport. Salinger appeared to trust that Hamilton would publish his novel well in England—as much as he trusted any publisher.

The only publisher or editor Salinger trusted completely was Harold Ross, the
New Yorker
’s editor-in-chief. After he had founded the magazine in 1925, Ross made a reputation for
himself as being a stylish and tasteful man blessed with a profound editorial brilliance. Over the years, Ross took a personal interest in a few of his writers, and Salinger was one of them.
Similarly, Salinger not only admired the
New Yorker,
even though the editors did not accept every story Salinger submitted to them, but he also liked Ross as a
person. Consequently, like many of Ross’s friends, Salinger was deeply troubled in May and June of 1951 when Ross became ill. At first, doctors thought Ross was suffering from pleurisy. By
the end of June, he was diagnosed with something much more serious—cancer of the windpipe. On July 11, Ross had checked himself into a Boston hospital where over the next eight weeks he
underwent thirty-nine radiation treatments. During this time, Salinger kept track of Ross’s medical condition as best he could, but in July he had more than a few distractions. That was the
month
The Catcher in the Rye
was finally published.

Under normal conditions, when a book is about to come out, a standard prepublication procedure occurs. The publisher packages the book, which is given a jacket design featuring
a photograph and short biography of the author on the back cover. At the same time, galleys of the book are mailed out to magazines and newspapers for review, and journalists are approached to
write about the book and its author. In the case of
The Catcher in the Rye,
the prepublication process did not proceed as it does with most books. First, Salinger demanded that Little,
Brown not send out any advance galleys of the book, an unheard-of request for a fiction writer to make. Since the galleys had already been shipped, Salinger ordered the publisher not to forward him
any of the book’s reviews. In addition, Salinger decided he would not do any publicity. In fact, the only interview he gave concerning
the publication of
The
Catcher in the Rye
was to a small trade magazine called the
Book-of-the-Month Club News.

The Book-of-the-Month Club had chosen
The Catcher in the Rye
as the main selection for its midsummer list, which itself was a coup since first novels are rarely chosen to be main
selections. As a part of the arrangement between Little, Brown and the Book-of-the-Month Club, Salinger agreed to give an interview to the
BMOC News.
No doubt the reason Salinger consented
to do this was because the
BMOC News
had commissioned William Maxwell, the
New Yorker
editor and a friend of Salinger’s, to write the piece.

Maxwell’s profile appeared in the midsummer edition. Maxwell painted a vivid and lively picture of Salinger. He was not ashamed to compare him with very great novelists noting that it
would be too easy to say Salinger wrote like Flaubert, since “Flaubert invented the modern novel with
Madame Bovary.
” Maxwell believed Salinger
worked
like Flaubert
“with infinite labor, infinite patience, and infinite thought for the technical aspects of what he is writing, none of which must show in the final draft.” It was writers like Flaubert
and Salinger, Maxwell declared, who “go straight to heaven when they die, and their books are not forgotten.”

At the beginning of the book club’s newsletter, the editorial board summarized their opinion of the novel. “This book,” the board said, “will recall to many the comedies
and tragedies of Booth Tarkington’s
Seventeen,
but
The Catcher in the Rye
reaches far deeper into reality. To anyone who has ever brought up a son, every page of Mr.
Salinger’s novel will be a source of wonder and delight—and concern.”
However, the
Book-of-the-Month Club News
’s most impassioned praise
came from Clifton Fadiman who offered a somewhat longer statement on behalf of the Book-of-the-Month Club’s board. Praising Salinger as a skilled, thoughtful writer, Fadiman stated that
The Catcher in the Rye
“arouses our admiration—but, more to the point, it starts flowing in us the clear springs of pity, understanding, and affectionate laughter.”
Fadiman could hardly control his admiration. “Read five pages,” he ordered, and “you are inside Holden’s mind, almost as incapable of escaping from it as Holden is
himself.” Finally Fadiman gushed: “That rare miracle of fiction has again come to pass: a human being has been created out of ink, paper, and the imagination.”