Salinger (18 page)

“I think writing is a hard life,” Salinger was quoted by Maxwell as saying in the
Book-of-the-Month Club News.
He began to see the spoils of that hard life
on July 16, when Little, Brown released the hardback edition of
The Catcher in the Rye.
Priced at three dollars, the book featured a dust jacket with flap copy that seemed to be struggling
to make sense of the book—a sign that the work was unique. Salinger did allow a brief biography of himself to appear on the dust jacket, but it gave only a bare-bones outline of
Salinger’s life.

The critical reaction to
The Catcher in the Rye
began even before its official publication date of July 16. On the fifteenth, the
New York Times Book Review
ran a review by
James Stern called “Aw, the World’s a Crumby Place.” Written as if it were spoken by Holden himself, the
article was meant to be serious if ironic. Stern
wrote: “This Salinger, he’s a short-story guy. And he knows how to write about kids. This book though, it’s too long. Gets kind of monotonous. And he should’ve cut out a lot
about those jerks and all at that crumby school.” Hardly praise from the newspaper of record. Stern even seemed to be making fun of the novel’s distinctive voice. However, as if to make
up for the attack, the next day in its daily edition the paper ran a review by Nash K. Burger. Saying that “Holden’s story is told in Holden’s own strange, wonderful
language,” Burger deemed
Catcher
“an unusually brilliant first novel.” Burger particularly enjoyed Phoebe—“a wonderful creation”—and predicted
that Holden would grow up to write a novel like
The Catcher in the Rye.

On that same day,
Time
weighed in with an extremely positive review. “In his tough-tender first novel,
The Catcher in the Rye,
” the unnamed critic said,
“[Salinger] charts the miseries and ecstasies of an adolescent rebel, and deals out some of the most acidly humorous deadpan satire since the late great Ring Lardner. . . . For U.S. readers,
the prize catch in
The Catcher in the Rye
may well be Novelist Salinger himself. He can understand an adolescent mind without displaying one.”

Most of the reviews, however, were not as good as
Time
’s. Writing in the
New Republic,
Anne L. Goodman attacked the book even as she praised it. “
The Catcher in
the Rye
is a brilliant tour de force,” she wrote, “but in a writer of Salinger’s undeniable talent one expects something more.” This made her conclude
Catcher
was “disappointing.” Three days later, in the
Christian Science Monitor,
T. Morris Longstreth was
more direct in his criticism. Longstreth said that the
novel was “not fit for children to read” and that “one finds it hard to believe that a true lover of children could further this tale.” Next, in the
Atlantic
Monthly,
Harvey Breit called the novel a flawed but “brilliant tour de force,” and, in the
Nation,
Ernest Jones dismissed it as “predictable and boring.” On
August 11, in the longest review of the book published to date, the
New Yorker
finally offered some unrelentingly positive praise, in a piece by S. N. Behrman called “The Vision of
the Innocent.” Behrman thought that Phoebe was “one of the most exquisitely created and engaging children in any novel,” while Holden’s innocence “in the face of the
tremendously complicated and often depraved facts of life makes for the humor of this novel . . . one of the funniest, expeditious, surely, in the history of juvenilia.” “I loved this
novel,” Behrman said at the end of his review. “I mean it—I really did.” Perhaps the review was the
New Yorker
editors’ way of compensating for not running
excerpts from the novel.

Despite the book’s mixed critical reception, after being in print just two weeks,
The Catcher in the Rye
appeared on the
New York Times
best-seller list. It would remain
there for the next thirty weeks, rising as high as the number 4 position. Not surprisingly, Salinger began to receive an onslaught of fan mail. All of this—the reviews, the letters, the
unavoidable buzz publishing a best-seller creates—proved too much for Salinger, who felt uneasy about getting any attention in the first place. Without a doubt, this was one reason he told
his publisher he wanted his picture removed from the dust jacket on all future editions and reprints of the book; it was a demand Little, Brown
accommodated when the house
released
Catcher
’s third printing in hardback—without Salinger’s photograph. As for the acclaim
Catcher
received, Salinger would one day tell a friend he
“enjoyed a small part of it” but felt most of it was “hectic and progressively and personally demoralizing.” This would explain why, some weeks before the publication of
Catcher
in the United States, almost as if he were able to predict the public reaction to the novel and how he was going to feel about it, Salinger set sail for a vacation in England. As
it happened, it was a vacation that had him coming back to America right at the time the initial interest in
The Catcher in the Rye
hit its peak.

2

In late April, as he was getting ready for his trip, Salinger and Hamish Hamilton were trying to decide when to bring out
The Catcher in the
Rye
in England. At first, when the Book-of-the-Month Club chose the novel as a main selection, it looked as if Little, Brown might delay the American publication until the fall. Ultimately,
Little, Brown went ahead and released the book in July, which meant a British publication should have followed soon afterward. So, on April 17, Hamilton wrote to Salinger to tell him that, now that
it was clear the novel’s U.S. publication would not be delayed until the fall, Hamilton was putting pressure on the printers in England to get the book ready for a summer release. Ten days
later, Hamilton wrote to Salinger again, informing him that the book’s proofs had just been airmailed to him and that he needed Salinger to correct the proofs and return them to him by
airmail before he set out for England by sea. Salinger
followed Hamilton’s instructions, so the book’s publication could proceed on schedule.

In mid-May, Salinger had sailed to England. Meeting in London, Salinger and Hamilton discussed the pending publication of
The Catcher in the Rye.
On this trip Hamilton gave Salinger a
copy of Isak Dinesen’s
Out of Africa,
a book important to Holden Caulfield; then he took him to see Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in
Antony and Cleopatra
(the Oliviers,
“Larry and Vivien,” as Hamilton called them, were friends of his), after which they all went to dinner. On June 7, Salinger was on his way to Hull. On his trip so far, he had seen and
loved Scotland, especially the Ballachalish Ferry; the Lake Country, home to William Wordsworth; the Cotswolds; and Oxford, where he visited the university. Of all of the sights, the one Salinger
liked best was West Riding, mostly because of the moors. After visiting there, Salinger wrote to Roger Machell in Hamish Hamilton’s office to say he could almost see the three Brontë
sisters in their beautiful white flowing dresses running across the green rolling moors that are divided by a seemingly never ending crisscrossing of rock fences. Salinger did not feel the same
sort of connection with Shakespeare when he visited Stratford-on-Avon; in fact, he was so put off by the place he didn’t even go to the Globe Theatre, which seemed too much like a shrine.
Instead, he went to two of the colleges and then to Christ Church for Evensong.

By late July, Salinger had completed his European trip. Back in America, he did not return Westport, but, after looking around the city, decided to take a lease on an apartment at 300 East 57th
Street. There, he settled into his new life. He was just beginning to absorb
Catcher’
s American reviews, which he seems to have read even though he ordered
his publisher not to send them to him, when a second wave of reviews started to appear following Hamish Hamilton’s release of the novel in England in August. Overall, the British reviews were
more negative than the American ones. “[W]e are asked to believe,” R. D. Charques wrote in the
Spectator
on August 17, “that [Holden] discovers how mean the world is and
falls straight on the psychiatrist’s sofa. Intelligent, humorous, acute, and sympathetic in observation, the tale is rather too formless to do quite the sort of thing it was evidently
intended to do.”

On September 7, the
Times Literary Supplement
was no more positive. “Mr. Salinger . . . has not achieved sufficient variety in this book for a full-length novel,” the
unnamed reviewer wrote. “The boy is really very touching; but the endless stream of blasphemy and obscenity in which he thinks, credible as it is, palls after the first chapter. One would
like to hear more of what his parents and teachers have to say about him.”

On July 14, in the middle of the hoopla surrounding the release of
The Catcher in the Rye,
the
New Yorker
published Salinger’s short story, “Pretty Mouth and Green
My Eyes.” One of the few stories Salinger wrote that did not have as one of its characters a “very young” person, it centers around an adult love triangle: Arthur, Lee, and
Arthur’s wife, who is having an affair with Lee.

In the fall of 1951, as
The Catcher in the Rye
remained on the
New York Times
best-seller list, Salinger tried to get his life back to normal. In
his pleasant East Side apartment, he worked on another story, this one a long and unusual piece called “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period.” Understated and academic, it
was not like the other stories he had been writing.

When he was not working, Salinger kept up with the worsening health of Harold Ross. In early September, Salinger wrote to Ross, saying he hoped Ross would come back to work soon at the
New
Yorker;
by mid-September, after being away for five months, Ross did. His return was short-lived. As the weeks passed during the fall, Ross became worse. On October 6, Salinger wrote to Ross
to cancel plans for an upcoming weekend visit to Ross’s country home. In the letter Salinger mentioned his own illness, not Ross’s. At the time, Salinger was suffering from a horrendous
case of shingles, which made him nervous and jumpy. On October 23, Ross wrote back. “I’ll put you down for the spring,” he said optimistically.

In mid-November, before Salinger answered Ross, Lobrano wrote to Salinger with alarming news. The
New Yorker
editors were rejecting “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period,”
which Olding had recently submitted to them. Deciding not to buy the story had turned into a terrible ordeal for them, Lobrano said, but ultimately the editors did not feel the piece succeeded. The
notion behind the story was too complicated, Lobrano believed; its events were “too compressed.” Finally, the piece seemed almost willfully strange, which Lobrano knew wasn’t
true, but that was how it
seemed.
Salinger was affected by this rejection more than most, not only because he had worked so hard on the story, but because he had reached the point where
the
New Yorker
accepted almost any story he submitted to them. On November 15, Salinger wrote to Lobrano to tell him he was profoundly disheartened by the
rejection. It was a short letter.

The rejection was still on his mind a month later when Salinger wrote to Roger Machell in Hamish Hamilton’s office on the eleventh. He was deeply disappointed by the
New
Yorker
’s rejection, he said; even so, as a writer, he had the kind of drive that made him focus on the future, not the past. As proof of this, he had already started working on another
story.

Meanwhile, Harold Ross’s health continued to grow worse. Throughout October and on into November, as he tried to maintain his schedule at the magazine, Ross was sick. In early December, he
traveled to Boston and checked into New England Baptist Hospital to undergo exploratory surgery so that doctors could determine once and for all what was wrong with him. On December 6, doctors
performed the surgery. When they opened Ross up, they discovered a massive cancer on his right lung. In fact, the growth was so large Ross’s doctors were unsure about how they could treat it.
As Ross lay on the operating table, his system began to fail. Ross died having never regained consciousness.