Salinger Page 18

  SHANE SALERNO: Gus Lobrano had no qualms about turning down Salinger’s stories. In fact he turned down many stories that eventually became part of The Catcher in the Rye.

  BEN YAGODA: In that long period, there was, I think, a mutual dance going back and forth, the New Yorker recognizing Salinger’s talents but trying to rein him in—“We think Mr. Salinger is a very talented young man and wish to God you could get him to write simply and naturally,” William Maxwell once wrote to Olding—and Salinger himself trying to stick to his guns, adapting a little bit but also trying to get the New Yorker to stretch and grow.

  PAUL ALEXANDER: In January 1947, not long after “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” appeared in print, Salinger decided to leave his parents’ apartment once and for all. He moved from Manhattan to Tarrytown, an upper-middle-class community in Westchester County, where he rented a small garage apartment. The living arrangements in Tarrytown were far different from his parents’ ritzy Park Avenue apartment, but at least he was on his own and not living under his father’s influence.

  BEN YAGODA: The very next story that he submitted to [the New Yorker] was called “The Bananafish.”

  WILLIAM MAXWELL, excerpt from January 22, 1947, letter to Salinger’s agent Harold Ober:

  We like parts of The Bananafish by J. D. Salinger very much, but it seems to us to lack any discernible story or point. If Mr. Salinger is around town, perhaps he’d like to come in and talk to us about New Yorker stories.

  BEN YAGODA: The version of this story he had sent to the New Yorker, and which later became perhaps his most celebrated story, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” included only the episode of Seymour at the beach—the somewhat mystifying episode of Seymour Glass on the beach, talking to a little girl—and then killing himself.

  What Maxwell was saying, which is understandable, is that there didn’t seem to be a reason why Seymour had taken this action. Salinger met with Maxwell, and the result was that another section of the story was added, the opening, in which Seymour’s wife is talking on the phone with her mother.

  J. D. SALINGER (“A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” The New Yorker, January 31, 1948):

  “Did he keep calling you that awful—”

  “No. He has something new now.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, what’s the difference, Mother?”

  “Muriel, I want to know. Your father—”

  “All right, all right. He calls me Miss Spiritual Tramp of 1948,” the girl said, and giggled.

  “It isn’t funny, Muriel. It isn’t funny at all. It’s horrible. It’s sad, actually. When I think how—”

  “Mother,” the girl interrupted, “listen to me. You remember that book he sent me from Germany? You know—those German poems. What’d I do with it? I’ve been racking my—”

  “You have it.”

  “Are you sure?” said the girl.

  DAVID HUDDLE: When “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” appeared in the New Yorker in 1948, everybody woke up.

  JOHN WENKE: “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is the first demarcation of a new body of material for Salinger.

  DAVID SHIELDS: “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is, quite simply, the announcement of a new sound in American literature.

  A. E. HOTCHNER: When Jerry published “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” it caused a great buzz. Everybody was talking about it: “Did you read that story? Isn’t it remarkable? That little girl!” He became a name to the intellectual set.

  LEILA HADLEY LUCE: We’d call each other on the telephone when the New Yorker came out: “Have you read this Salinger story? Have you seen this? And isn’t it wonderful?” Everyone was totally captivated by his writing.

  GAY TALESE: It really seemed to be the first legitimate young American voice on the printed page that had all the power and song of what would later be in the words of Bobby Dylan, or the Beatles, or the music of Motown. That was later stuff. This one character—that was Salinger. And the word of mouth: I’d be in the city room, and someone would tell me in the cafeteria—we had a coffee break—“Hey, I heard Salinger . . .”

  Before Tina Brown thought of buzz, there was this buzz. I’d never heard any word of mouth on an about-to-be-published short story in some magazine. I know the New Yorker wasn’t just “some magazine,” but I don’t care. It never happened with Roth or Updike or Don DeLillo or anybody. Half an evening’s meal was spent discussing [Salinger’s work]. This was very much what was going on. From Chumley’s down in the Village; maybe, if you had the money, even Toots Shor’s, the old sports bar—you heard about Salinger. He just was a new man on the planet. And he carried us away.

  MARC WEINGARTEN: A lot of Salinger’s contemporaries were blown away by the piece. Cheever thought it was an absolutely incredible piece of work.

  E. L. DOCTOROW: I remember hearing that there was a new Salinger story in the New Yorker being passed around school. My wife, who’s from North Carolina, remembers being fascinated by those stories because they were about people who lived in apartments and who were very verbal.

  TOM WOLFE: I must say, his style was infectious; as a matter of fact, you can see a little bit of it in the first magazine piece I ever wrote, which was “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.” One of the things that made his writing so personal was that he was constantly using expressions such as “If you really want to know the truth, it happened this way,” and all sorts of other little touches you use in conversation. Usually they’re edited out, but his weren’t.

  BEN YAGODA: “Bananafish” made a huge splash. He became a sensation in the literary world. Salinger still got rejections—almost nobody got every story accepted by the New Yorker—but his acceptance rate became well over 50 percent.

  —

  DAVID SHIELDS: The month before, in Cosmopolitan, Salinger had published “The Inverted Forest,” which explores themes that Salinger will pursue the rest of his life: the cost of art, the relation of art to spirituality, and the hunger for spirituality. The story’s protagonist, Raymond Ford, writes, “Not wasteland, but a great inverted forest / with all foliage underground”—a pointed rejoinder to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

  J. D. SALINGER (“The Inverted Forest,” Cosmopolitan, December 1947):

  “Listen,” Corinne said. “You’re implying that he’s some kind of psychotic. I won’t have it, Bobby. In the first place, it isn’t true. He’s—he’s serene. He’s kind, he’s gentle, he’s—”

  “Don’t be a fool, Corinne. He’s the most gigantic psychotic you’ll ever know. He has to be. Don’t be a fool. He’s standing up to his eyes in psychosis.” . . .

  As though it might be best to look immediately for shelter, Corinne had to put the book down. At any moment the apartment building seemed liable to lose its balance and topple across Fifth Avenue into Central Park.

  DAVID SHIELDS: In The Fiction of J. D. Salinger, the first comprehensive study of his work, Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner group “The Inverted Forest” with “The Varioni Brothers” as “Destroyed Artist Melodramas” that show “Salinger struggling with a theme he wants to be able to handle but which he really doesn’t seem to understand.” He does not understand it because he’s too close to it.

  FREDERICK L. GWYNN and JOSEPH L. BLOTNER: Half a dozen of [Salinger’s early stories] introduced sympathetic characters who—under the influence of the same World War II experiences that the writer underwent—develop attitudes and relationships and names that end in the Caulfield and Glass families with whom Salinger is later to feel so much at home.

  DAVID SHIELDS: Good Housekeeping published “A Girl I Knew” in February 1948. Salinger used his experiences in pre-Anschluss Vienna in 1937 for the story, which he’d originally titled “Wien, Wien.” John, the college dropout narrator and Salinger alter ego, says, “My father informed me quietly that my formal education was formally over.” His father sends John to Paris and Vienna to learn the family business and pick up “a couple of languages the firm could
use.” John spends five months in Vienna and falls in love with a young girl named Leah.

  EBERHARD ALSEN: Salinger’s early efforts to write stage plays are briefly mirrored in this story. A young American reads a play he has written to a Viennese girl, from whom he is taking German lessons.

  GLORIA MURRAY: He must have known the girl in the story, although he didn’t say if he did. He just said that it was a story he had written very quickly.

  DAVID SHIELDS: “A Girl I Knew” is shadowed by the Nazi takeover of Vienna’s Jewish quarter in 1938. Margaret Salinger believes that even though her father had left Austria a month before the Nazis annexed the country on March 12, he probably was aware, through the Viennese family he befriended, of the incipient German destruction of the Jewish neighborhood he’d lived in. Salinger was young and in love, and his being Jewish suddenly became a danger that could make the people he loved disappear.

  JOHN C. UNRUE: Good Housekeeping changed the title of “Wien, Wien” to “A Girl I Knew,” and Salinger reacted so strongly that the editor, Herbert Mayes, was puzzled by the extent of his anger.

  HERBERT MAYES: I don’t know what upset Salinger, but he protested vehemently and ordered his agent, Dorothy Olding, never again to show me any of his manuscripts.

  JOHN C. UNRUE: When Salinger was writing for the slicks, he was testing himself constantly. By the time he became what we might call a New Yorker author, he had polished his craft. He was able to avoid the formulaic process that he had to employ for the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and even Esquire, to some degree.

  DAVID SHIELDS: After a decade of innumerable rejections by the New Yorker, Salinger had three stories published there in a six-month period. Why? He was finally writing about something real.

  BEN YAGODA: Nineteen forty-eight was the turning point for Salinger regarding the New Yorker. He published “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” and “Just Before the War with the Eskimos.” It was really a breakthrough. They were much talked about, and from then on he was known and identified as a New Yorker writer.

  SHANE SALERNO: The enormous accomplishment and success of “Bananafish” led the New Yorker to give him a first-look contract: the magazine paid him an annual retainer in exchange for his giving the New Yorker the first chance at publishing his new stories. The magazine would also pay him a higher rate than it had been paying him for the stories it published. Over the years, only the New Yorker’s most esteemed writers had received first-look contracts: John O’Hara, Irwin Shaw, John Cheever, S. J. Perelman. Salinger was joining very select company.

  J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Paul Fitzgerald, April 29, 1948:

  As for me, I signed a year’s contract with the New Yorker. I like the magazine and I like writing for it. They let me write the kind of stuff I care about—and I don’t have to look at a dumb illustration. It’s all very straight and satisfactory.

  —

  BEN YAGODA: In the beginning, it was just the cognoscenti who had “discovered” this guy, the way people today might discover a singer or a rock band and share it among themselves. A New Yorker contributor named Arthur Kober, who was in Hollywood working as a screenwriter, wrote a letter to Harold Ross and said, “Everybody here talks about Salinger. My God, that guy is good! Evenings are spent—and this is on the level—discussing the guy and his work.”

  DAVID SHIELDS: “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” was Salinger’s second story about a member of the Glass family—the first being “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”—to be published in the New Yorker.

  J. D. SALINGER (“Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” The New Yorker, March 28, 1948):

  “Stop that,” Eloise said. “Mary Jane asked you if you have a beau.”

  “Yes,” said Ramona, busy with her nose.

  “Ramona,” Eloise said. “Cut that out. But immediately.”

  Ramona put her hand down.

  “Well, I think that’s just wonderful,” Mary Jane said. “What’s his name? Will you tell me his name, Ramona? Or is it a big secret?”

  “Jimmy,” Ramona said.

  “Jimmy? Oh, I love the name Jimmy! Jimmy what, Ramona?”

  “Jimmy Jimmereeno,” said Ramona.

  “Stand still,” said Eloise.

  “Well! That’s quite a name. Where is Jimmy? Will you tell me, Ramona?”

  “Here,” said Ramona.

  Mary Jane looked around, then looked back at Ramona, smiling as provocatively as possible. “Here where, honey?”

  “Here,” said Ramona. “I’m holding his hand.”

  “I don’t get it,” Mary Jane said to Eloise, who was finishing her drink.

  “Don’t look at me,” said Eloise.

  Mary Jane looked back at Ramona. “Oh, I see. Jimmy’s just a make-believe little boy. Marvellous.” Mary Jane leaned forward cordially. “How do you do, Jimmy?” she said.

  “He won’t talk to you,” said Eloise.

  J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Paul Fitzgerald, October 19, 1948:

  My work goes along pretty much the way I want it to, Paul, since you ask. I don’t make barrels of money, but I love what I’m doing. And every once in a while enough dough comes in to let me work on something that has no silver lining. One of my New Yorker stories, called UNCLE WIGGILY IN CONNECTICUT, sold to Sam Goldwyn and is going to be a picture with Dana Andrews and Teresa Wright. I didn’t make a fortune on the sale, but enough to let me go on with my own work for a while without major money worries.

  GUS LOBRANO, excerpt from letter to Salinger’s agent, Dorothy Olding, December 10, 1948:

  Dear Miss Olding,

  Here, alas, is Jerry Salinger’s latest story [“The Boy in the People Shooting Hat”]. I’m afraid I’m incapable of expressing adequately and convincingly our [the New Yorker’s] distress at having to send it back. It has passages that are brilliant and moving and effective, but we feel that on the whole it’s pretty shocking for a magazine like ours.

  It would be wonderfully comfortable to rest on the above paragraph, but because we have a real interest in Jerry I have to say further that we feel the story isn’t wholly successful. Possibly the development of the theme of this story requires more space. Actually, we feel that we don’t know the central character well enough. We can’t be quite sure whether his fight with Stradlater was caused by his feelings for June Gallagher or his own inadequacy about his age (which is brought into relief by Stradlater’s handsomeness and prowess), or suggestion of homosexuality in Bobby. And it’s perhaps our uncertainty about which of these elements is the real one, or the predominant one, that makes it difficult to feel any real compassion for the character, or to feel (except extraneously) that the author has real compassion for him. Our feeling is that, to be quite definite and so sympathetic, Bobby would have to be developed at considerably more length than he is here. . . . I’m convinced that it would have worked out for us if it had been developed as the less complicated theme which Jerry told me about shortly after it had occurred to him, but I imagine that that theme seemed too sparse to Jerry as the character grew in his mind. We are, of course, very grateful to have had the chance to consider the story.

  SHANE SALERNO: Not even Salinger was seeing every story accepted by the New Yorker, but Samuel Goldwyn bought the film rights for “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” assembled a creative team, and spent much of 1949 transforming the brief story into a movie, now called My Foolish Heart.

  THOMAS F. BRADY: Samuel Goldwyn has borrowed Susan Hayward from [producer] Walter Wanger to play opposite Dana Andrews in My Foolish Heart, which will be Goldwyn’s next film. . . . Miss Hayward will play the role originally scheduled for Teresa Wright, who parted company with the Goldwyn company after a dispute last December. Mark Robson will direct My Foolish Heart, which Julius and Philip Epstein have written from a magazine story “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” by J. D. Salinger.

  Samuel L. Goldwyn.

  A. SCOTT BERG: Samuel Goldwyn was one of the ori
ginal Hollywood moguls, one of that group of a half-dozen Jewish immigrants who realized early on that there was not only a lot of money to be made in the movie industry but there was a budding art form there, and a really interesting life could be had making movies. Because of his temper, Goldwyn got kicked out of Paramount Studios, which he helped form, and then he got kicked out of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which he helped form, and ultimately he got kicked out of United Artists, which he supplied most of the movies for. So he started his own company, Samuel Goldwyn Productions.

  The Epstein brothers came to Sam Goldwyn with an idea for a movie based on a story they had recently read in the New Yorker. The story was “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” and the author was a young J. D. Salinger, who was being talked about a great deal. This appealed to Goldwyn on several levels. First of all, the Epstein brothers had worked almost exclusively for Warner Bros. It was a great coup for Goldwyn to nab these great contract writers. Second, they had wonderful credits, so Goldwyn was eager to be working with them. Also, they came up with the idea to do a story that had been in the New Yorker, which by the ’40s had become one of the most important venues in which to publish serious fiction. That intrigued him a great deal. It’s an emblematic Salinger story, written in that spare style. In fact, if you parse it, there’s very little plot and very little character development per se.

  Frankly, I think that’s one of the things that intrigued the Epstein brothers, because they must have thought, “There’s so much opportunity for us to fill in what’s been left out,” and indeed the beauty of the story is how much Salinger left out, and the great delight for the Epsteins was how much they could put in. So when they spun the tale to Goldwyn of what the movie was going to be, it turned from a somewhat bitter, satiric look at a troubled, alcoholic marriage in the Connecticut suburbs into a rather sentimental, talky tearjerker. That’s the movie Goldwyn wanted to make and so that’s the movie he made. There was inevitably going to be considerable artistic disparity between the original source material and the final product.