Salinger (30 page)

Response to “For Rupert—With No Regrets” was overwhelming and unexpected. “There was an enormous amount of press coverage,” says Lish. “The speculation was
that either Updike or Cheever had written the story although many readers believed it
might
have been Salinger who wrote it. There was colossal interest from TV and radio.
Esquire
sold the magazine out. Two or three months later, I finally told an agent I wrote it because she made me believe I owed her. Within days, she was at a cocktail party telling people I had written
the story. So I came into a great deal of criticism. The story of who the author really was broke on the front page of the
Wall Street Journal.
I heard from Salinger through that agent
that what I had done was absurd and despicable. That needled me because I didn’t think it was either. My feeling was that if Salinger was not going to write stories, someone had to write them
for him.”

2

It was a cold and rainy fall evening in Cornish some months later when Salinger picked up his telephone and called Lacey
Fosburgh, a San Francisco–based correspondent for the
New York Times.
Along with the occasions in 1951 when he talked to William Maxwell for the
Book-of-the-Month
Club News
and the lunch with Shirlie Blaney in 1953 that led to the article in the
Claremont Daily Eagle,
this was only the third time in his life Salinger had knowingly agreed to be
interviewed by a reporter. On that night, as she answered her telephone, Fosburgh could not believe what good luck had brought her—the first interview Salinger had given in two decades.

“Some stories, my property, have been stolen,” Salinger said to Fosburgh after warning her that he would speak “only for a minute.” “Someone’s appropriated
[the stories]. It’s an illicit act. It’s unfair. Suppose you had a coat you liked and somebody went into your closet and stole it. That’s how I feel.”

What Salinger was referring to was
The Complete Uncollected Short Stories of J. D. Salinger,
a volume that had been published two months earlier without his permission. First in San
Francisco and then in New York, Chicago, and other big cities, wholesale booksellers, all identifying themselves as “John Greenberg from Berkeley, California,” had been going into
bookstores and selling a volume made up of stories Salinger had published in magazines and journals between 1940 and 1948, but which had not been included in
Nine Stories.
The retailers,
who paid $1.50 a book, sold the volume for between $3 and $5. In September and October 1974, retailers sold over 25,000 copies of Salinger’s
Complete Uncollected.
There was, of
course, one problem: Salinger hadn’t wanted the book published.

“It’s irritating. It’s really very irritating. I’m very upset about it,” said Salinger, who had been tipped off about the scheme by Andreas
Brown, the owner of the Gotham Book Mart. Salinger was so angered by Brown’s news that he filed a civil law suit in Federal District Court in San Francisco against “John
Greenberg” and seventeen bookstores across the country. In the suit Salinger asked for $250,000 in punitive damages and an immediate injunction against the book.

“I wrote [the stories] a long time ago,” Salinger told Fosburgh, “and I never had any intention of publishing them. I wanted them to die a perfectly natural death. I’m
not trying to hide the gaucheries of my youth. I just don’t think they’re worthy of publishing.”

For her part, Fosburgh made the best of the situation and got Salinger to answer as many questions as possible. Naturally she asked him about his refusal to publish.
“There is a marvelous peace in not publishing,” Salinger said. “It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But
I write just for myself and my own pleasure.” Then Salinger talked about how much he was writing. “I don’t necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for
myself,” he said. “I pay for this kind of attitude. I’m known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I’m doing is trying to protect myself and my work.”

The main issue on Salinger’s mind as he spoke to Fosburgh was the pirated edition of his stories. “It’s amazing some sort of law-and-order agency can’t do something about
this,” he went on. “Why, if a dirty old mattress is stolen from your attic, they’ll find it. But they’re not even looking for their man”—the mysterious
publisher. “I just want all this to stop,” Salinger said as a way of wrapping up a telephone call that had gone on for almost half an hour. “It’s intrusive.
I’ve survived a lot of things, and I’ll probably survive this.” It was then that Salinger ended the conversation, hanging up the telephone.

On November 3, 1974, the editors at the
New York Times
decided Fosburgh’s article about Salinger’s call was so newsworthy they ran it on the front page. The
Times
article spurred intense media interest in Salinger, the pirated edition of his stories, and the lawsuit. “Through the years,”
Newsweek
stated in a story the magazine
ran as a follow-up to the
Times
piece, “Salinger has made news only with the rare publication of his works and with such scattered items as his wife’s divorce from him in 1967,
his rumored liaison with nineteen-year-old writer Joyce Maynard in 1973, and a suit his lawyers filed recently over an unauthorized volume of early Salinger stories. It was the latter event that
prompted him to talk to
Times
reporter Lacey Fosburgh.”

Because of this, the magazine had sent Bill Roeder to Cornish to try to get an interview with Salinger. It was the same approach many other reporters and fans had begun to take.

“His house is a brown, modern-looking hilltop chalet with a sun deck facing across the Connecticut River into the mountains of Vermont,” Roeder wrote in his article, which appeared
in
Newsweek
on November 18. “The view is breathtaking.” However, even that spectacular view paled after Roeder walked up to the house, knocked on the front door, and came
face-to-face with Salinger, who answered his own door. “Salinger, tall, gaunt, and grey-haired at fifty-five, was dressed in a blue jump suit,” Roeder reported. After he introduced
himself to Salinger, the two men engaged in a brief chat. “His part of [the] conversation was reluctant—his hand never left the doorknob—but
civil.”

Was he still writing? Roeder asked.

“Of course I’m writing,” Salinger said.

What kind of life did he live?

“I like to hang on to my privacy—my undocumented privacy,” Salinger said before he added, “Is there anything more boring than a talking writer?”

After ten minutes, Roeder ended the strained, awkward exchange by thanking him for his time and extending his hand to shake Salinger’s. Salinger reluctantly obliged, extending his own
hand.

“This is not a friendly gesture,” Salinger said. “I really don’t appreciate your coming here.”

3

In 1975, Harper and Row published a book called
A Fiction Writer’s Handbook,
edited by Whit Burnett and his wife Hallie. At the end
of the book, the publisher included a piece called “Epilogue: A Salute to Whit Burnett, 1899–1972.” The piece was the introduction Salinger wrote for
Story Jubilee
that
Burnett had refused to run. Since the publication of that anthology, Burnett had died; it seemed appropriate to print a memoir written by Salinger, who had become one of Burnett’s most famous
pupils. It’s ironic that Salinger’s beautiful and moving memoir of Burnett would appear in the rather mundane setting of a fiction writers’ handbook, but there it was.

This, of course, was the first piece of writing by Salinger to appear in print since “Hapworth 16, 1924” had been published in the
New Yorker
on June
19, 1965—a fact further underscoring the irony of Salinger’s memoir being printed in a fiction writers’ handbook. A decade had passed and Salinger had not published any of those
new Glass stories he had promised in the editorial note to
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
—except for “Hapworth 16, 1924.” Most of
Salinger’s critics and many of his fans had come to believe that, no matter what he said or implied, Salinger had stopped writing. His brief memoir about Burnett gave some minor indication
that he had not.

Then, in that same year, 1975, Brendan Gill, who had written for the
New Yorker
for years, offered what he considered to be proof that Salinger
was
writing—an informal
testimonial from William Shawn. “I had feared that the author’s prolonged and obsessive scrutiny of the Glass psyches had led him to still his hand,” Gill wrote in a book of his
called
Here at the New Yorker,
“but Shawn has said that it is not so. Though Salinger’s absence from the pages of the magazine is from week to week and from year to year an
obscurely felt deprivation, the fact is that he goes on writing, and surely someday he will be willing to let us observe the consequences.”

More innuendo, more rumor, but this was nothing compared to a theory about to be published that would make the rounds among the fans and admirers of Salinger—the most outrageous piece of
gossip yet.

On April 22, 1976, the
Soho Weekly News
published an article by John Calvin Batchelor called “Thomas Pynchon Is Not Thomas Pynchon, or,
This Is the End of the Plot Which Has No Name.” In his article Batchelor argued that Thomas Pynchon was not born on May 8, 1937 in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York; did not matriculate at
Cornell University; did not go into the Navy for two years; did not work for a time as an editorial writer for Boeing Aircraft Corporation; and did not write such works of fiction as
“Entropy,” “Low-Lands” and
V.
Instead, according to Batchelor, Pynchon was born on January 1, 1919 in New York City, matriculated at Ursinus College, joined the Army,
met Ernest Hemingway during the war, and wrote
The Catcher in the Rye
and
Franny and Zooey.
“Yes,” Batchelor wrote, Thomas Pynchon “is Jerome David Salinger.”

“What I am arguing,” Batchelor continued, “is that J. D. Salinger, famous though he was, simply could not go on with either the Glass family, which had by 1959 become his
weight to bear, or with his own nationally renowned reputation, which had become by 1959 chained to both Holden Caulfield’s adolescence and Seymour Glass’s art of penance. So then, out
of paranoia or out of pique, J. D. Salinger dropped ‘by J. D. Salinger’ and picked up ‘by Thomas Pynchon.’ A
nom de plume
afforded Salinger the anonymity he had
sought but failed to find as Caulfield’s creator. It was the perfect cover.”

The response to Batchelor’s article was immediate. As one might expect, Batchelor received a number of letters, many of them unfriendly. As one might
not
have expected, Batchelor
also received a letter from Thomas Pynchon. Written on MGM stationery and mailed from Pluma Road, Malibu, California, the letter said that he,
Pynchon, had read the article,
that some of it was true and some of it was not (none of the interesting parts was true, he said), and that Batchelor should “keep trying.” That letter and additional factors—he
began to meet people who actually knew Pynchon—forced Batchelor to reassess his theory that Thomas Pynchon was J. D. Salinger, or rather, that J. D. Salinger was Thomas Pynchon. “I am
telling you right now,” Batchelor wrote a year later on April 28, 1977, in the
Soho Weekly News,
“that some if not most of those manuscripts”—
V., The Crying
of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow
—“have come from J. D. Salinger. I am telling you right now that some of those manuscripts might have come from Thomas Pynchon. I am telling
you right now that parts of those manuscripts might have come from Donald Barthelme” (a
New Yorker
writer known for his postmodern short stories). “I’d like to think
Salinger wrote almost everything. It’s the romantic in me.”

In the future, while he would never grant an interview of any kind (rumor has it that he once jumped out the window of a house and ran away because he heard Norman Mailer was on his way there to
talk to him), and while he would never allow himself to be photographed in any way (he does not have a driver’s license, it’s said, because he refuses to have his photograph taken),
Thomas Pynchon did finally surface enough so that people, even John Calvin Batchelor, had to admit that he did exist and that he had written all of the books credited to him. Pynchon would marry
Melanie Jackson, the New York literary agent, with whom he would have a son. That son, as luck would have it, would even end up attending the same Manhattan prep school as Batchelor’s
son.