Salinger Page 23

  Salinger worked hard on the book through the summer of 1950, and by autumn it was finished. One day Salinger drove from Westport to William Maxwell’s home on East 86th Street and read the manuscript to Maxwell in person. He read it in its entirety, finally getting to live out his ambition of performing Holden Caulfield.

  Maybe it would have helped if he’d read it aloud to the New Yorker. Dorothy Olding, Salinger’s literary agent, submitted Catcher to the magazine, which promptly rejected it. The editors didn’t believe in Holden as a character; they found him too articulate, even precious.

  The negative reaction to Catcher at the New Yorker grew out of the magazine’s unwavering bias against what it called “writer-consciousness.” This was considered “showy,” what the slicks let their writers do.

  In a letter dated January 25, 1951, Gus Lobrano wrote:

  Possibly by now you’ve heard from Miss Olding and know that the vote here went, sadly, against your story.

  At least two of us here have read your novel, and to us the notion that in one such family (the Caulfield family) there are four such extraordinary children . . . is not quite tenable.

  Another point: we can’t help feeling that this story is too ingenious and ingrown. . . . [There is a] prejudice here against what (as you know) we call writer-consciousness.

  Lobrano himself felt Salinger was not ready to write the novel; he thought the author seemed “imprisoned” by the novel’s mood and scenes. Not only did the New Yorker fiction editors reject it, not only did they say that it needed to be completely rewritten, but they said they didn’t believe it.

  They were telling him that it was phony.

  Next it was Harcourt, Brace’s turn to commit one of the worst mistakes in publishing history. A messenger came to Giroux’s office with a package from Olding. There on the top page was the title: The Catcher in the Rye.

  Giroux liked the novel and wanted to publish it. Then he gave it to his boss, the Harvard- and Oxford-educated Eugène Reynal, whom Giroux would later call “tactless” and a “terrible snob.” Reynal, a member of the New York Social Register, could hardly have represented more exactly everything that Salinger—and Holden—despised.

  When two weeks went by without a reply, Giroux went to see Reynal. “He didn’t like it,” Giroux recalled, “didn’t understand it. He asked me, ‘Is this kid in the book supposed to be crazy?’ ” Giroux acknowledged to Reynal that Holden was “disturbed,” but asserted that Catcher was a great book. “Gene,” Giroux said, “I’ve shaken hands with this author. We have a gentleman’s contract at this point. I agreed to publish this book.”

  “Yes,” Reynal answered, “but, Bob, you’ve got to remember, we have a textbook department.”

  “The textbook department?” Giroux asked.

  “Well, it’s about a kid in prep school, isn’t it? I’m waiting for their reply.” So Gene Reynal sent The Catcher in the Rye to the textbook people. Not surprisingly, they were unenthusiastic, although some people in the company fought for the book.

  Giroux, realizing that Harcourt was not going to publish The Catcher in the Rye in its current form, took Salinger to lunch to try to get him to consider rewriting the book. Salinger said nothing during the meal. There was absolutely no way he was going to rewrite Catcher.

  Back in his office, Giroux repeated to Salinger Reynal’s question about Holden: “Is he crazy, this kid?” Salinger didn’t answer, and then Giroux realized why—he was weeping. Salinger got up, left the office, went down to the ground floor, and phoned Olding. “Get me out of this publishing house,” he said. “They think Holden is crazy.” Giroux made up his mind that day to leave Harcourt. Or at least that’s the story Giroux told for decades; in actuality, he didn’t leave until 1955. The inconsistencies in Giroux’s story led me to want to hear directly from someone who knew all the principals involved. In July 2013, I spoke to Gerald Gross, now ninety-two, who worked for fourteen years with Eugène Reynal, first at Reynal & Hitchcock and then at Harcourt, Brace; Gross has never spoken publicly about this matter before. In his job at Harcourt, Brace, Gross handled the manuscript of The Catcher in the Rye; it’s quite possible he’s the last person alive who touched the original manuscript. Gross explained that when Reynal’s partner, Curtice Hitchcock, died, Reynal sold his company to Harcourt, Brace; the merger occurred in 1947. One year later, only three employees from Reynal & Hitchcock were still employed by Harcourt.

  According to Gross, Reynal, who was head of the trade division at Harcourt, “couldn’t understand” Catcher and said, “We should let people in the school division read this.” The Harcourt vice president in charge of the school division—the perfectly named Dudley Meek—told Reynal, “If we publish this as written, it will kill our school division business.” Gross said, “Back in those days, things were very conservative. The school division was the most lucrative division” at Harcourt, and “Meek was afraid of the language.” The official version of the story has a scapegoat (Reynal) and a martyr (Giroux), but it is not the full truth. A business decision was made that, rather than saving Harcourt embarrassment, cost the company tens of millions of dollars, and likely much more.

  Gross said, “Bob Giroux instructed me to get the manuscript back from the printer after Meek spoke to Reynal. The word was: we must make some changes.” It’s now easy to forget what a radical book Catcher was for America at that time—how revolutionary it was in everything from its use of “fuck” to its fuck-you attitude toward the status quo.

  According to Gross, at that point Salinger made the decision to pull the book and take it to Little, Brown. As Louis Menand pointed out more than fifty years later in, of all places, the New Yorker, the editor at Little, Brown, John Woodburn, “was evidently prudent enough not to ask such questions.” Little, Brown became the publisher of The Catcher in the Rye. (And in an eerie echo, Giroux soon after rejected On the Road, when Jack Kerouac refused to revise it. In a brief span, Harcourt passed on two of the most beloved American books of the twentieth century.)

  Giroux was furious at Harcourt about Catcher, but he didn’t quit in protest, as he has claimed and has often been written. That is the story he created years later.

  Actor Edward Norton says, “What I like about the story of Catcher’s rejections is that it makes you realize that the gatekeepers aren’t gatekeepers. They have the gate, but there’s no fence around the gate. You know what I mean? They’re standing at some door, but the best things just walk around the door.”

  —

  Under normal circumstances, a prepublication procedure occurs: the publisher packages the book, giving it a jacket design featuring a photograph and a short biography of the author on the back cover. At the same time, advance copies of the book are mailed out to magazines and newspapers for review, and journalists are approached to write about the book and its author.

  But this author was J. D. Salinger, and the circumstances weren’t going to be normal. First, he demanded that Little, Brown not send out any advance copies of the book, an unheard-of request for a fiction writer to make. Since the copies had already been shipped, Salinger ordered the publisher not to forward him any of the book’s reviews. In addition, Salinger decided he wouldn’t do any publicity. An author who wrote a book for the public refused to talk to the public except through his book.

  I can’t explain what I mean. And even if I could, I’m not sure I’d feel like it.

  The Book-of-the-Month Club chose The Catcher in the Rye as the main selection for its midsummer list, a rare coup for a first novel. The only interview Salinger gave concerning the publication of The Catcher in the Rye was to the BOMC News, which had commissioned Salinger’s editor and friend William Maxwell to write the piece. “It means a great deal to say that a novelist works like Flaubert (which Salinger does),” Maxwell wrote, “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. Such writers go straight to heaven when t
hey die, and their books are not forgotten.”

  Book-of-the-Month Club News, July 1951.

  “I think writing is a hard life,” Salinger says in the interview. “But it’s brought me enough happiness that I don’t think I’d ever deliberately dissuade anybody (if he had talent) from taking it up. The compensations are few, but when they come, if they come, they’re very beautiful.”

  On July 16, 1951, Little, Brown released the hardback edition of The Catcher in the Rye.

  Salinger with signature cigarette.

  Priced at three dollars, the book featured a dust jacket with flap copy that Salinger had written himself but that—nevertheless—seemed to be struggling to make sense of the book:

  Anyone who has read J. D. Salinger’s New Yorker stories—particularly “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” “The Laughing Man,” and “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor”—will not be surprised by the fact that his first novel is full of children. The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days.

  The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it.

  There are many voices in this novel: children’s voices, adult voices, underground voices—but Holden’s voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure. However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher order, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep.

  Salinger allowed a brief biography of himself to appear on the dust jacket, but it gave only a bare-bones outline of his life:

  J. D. Salinger was born in New York City in 1919 and attended Manhattan public schools, a military academy in Pennsylvania, and three colleges (no degrees). “A happy tourist’s year in Europe,” he writes, “when I was eighteen and nineteen. In the Army from ’42 to ’46, most of the time with the Fourth Division. I’ve been writing since I was 15 or so. My short stories have appeared in a number of magazines over the last ten years, mostly—and most happily—in The New Yorker. I worked on The Catcher in the Rye, on and off, for ten years.”

  “I seldom care to know a writer’s birthplace,” Salinger says elsewhere, “his children’s names, his working schedule, the date of his arrest for smuggling guns (the gallant rogue!) during the Irish Rebellion. The writer who tells you these things is also very likely to have his picture taken wearing an open-collared shirt—and he’s sure to be looking three-quarter-profile and tragic. He can also be counted on to refer to his wife as a swell gal or a grand person. I’ve written biographical notes for a few magazines, and I doubt if I ever said anything honest in them.”

  I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it’ll say “Holden Caulfield” on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it’ll say “Fuck you.”

  Salinger loved the design his Westport friend Michael Mitchell created for the cover of Catcher : a raging, red carousel horse. A haunting photograph of Salinger appeared on the jacket photograph of the first and second printings of The Catcher in the Rye. By the third printing, Salinger expressly requested that Little, Brown remove his picture from the book.

  The famous photo on the back of Catcher in the Rye that Salinger had removed.

  Salinger was starting to turn inward on himself, trying to shut out the world and separate himself from his book. It was a naïve wish. He’d started a revolution, and the world reacted. And yet the initial response, from reviewers, was mixed. In the Chicago Daily Tribune on July 15, 1951, Paul Engle wrote, “Here is a novel about a 16 year old boy which is emotional without being sentimental, dramatic without being melodramatic, and honest without being simply obscene.” Then he gave it the backhanded compliment, “It largely succeeds.”

  The Los Angeles Times critic Irene Elwood thought it was “so real it hurts, and all the muddled adults will read it avidly for their own enjoyment and hide it immediately from their children.”

  Renowned editor, critic, and radio personality Clifton Fadiman was the chief book critic for the New Yorker until 1943. Writing about Catcher for the Book-of-the-Month-Club News, he spoke of the pleasure of “sponsoring a brilliant, new, young American novelist.”

  The original hardcover of The Catcher in the Rye, published by Little, Brown; cover design by Salinger’s friend Michael Mitchell.

  The New York Times had an almost schizophrenic view of the novel, attacking the book one day in the Times Book Review, praising it the next in the daily edition. The Book Review’s James Stern complained on July 15 that Salinger was a “short story guy” and that Catcher was “too long. Gets kind of monotonous. And he should’ve cut out a lot about these jerks and all at that crumby school. They depress me. They really do.” Stern recovered sufficiently from his ennui to express astonishment that he liked the section about “Mr. Antolini, the only guy Holden ever thought he could trust, who ever took any interest in him, and who turned out queer—that’s terrific. I swear it is.” On July 16 the daily Times’s Nash K. Burger praised “the strange, wonderful language” in “an unusually brilliant first novel” and observed that he wouldn’t be surprised if the fictional character Holden “grew up to write a few books (he talks about books quite a lot), books like ‘Of Human Bondage,’ ‘Look Homeward, Angel,’ or ‘The Catcher in the Rye,’ ” a wry comment on the novel’s autobiographical origins.

  In a startling volte-face, the New Yorker, whose editors had called the book “writer-conscious” and its main character not believable, now called Catcher a “brilliant, funny, moving novel.”

  “Catcher in the Rye caught my attention when it first came out,” Gore Vidal recalls. “There was a certain knife’s, a razor’s edge to what we were writing during the war, since we knew that we might end very soon. Boys do think about dying. Previously, Salinger wasn’t getting beneath surfaces; he was just shining surfaces. So when he finally got a bright glitter of that boy’s voice, it shone.”

  No less a figure than William Faulkner, visiting Washington & Lee University in 1958, said, “I was impressed with [Catcher]. It seemed to me that it showed a—it’s not a fault, it’s an evil which the writer has got to—to arm himself against—which is the pressure of our culture to compel everyone to belong to something, to a group. It’s difficult to be an individual in our culture. I think that what I saw in that book was a tragedy which, in a way, represented Salinger’s own tragedy. There was a young man, intelligent, a little more sensitive than most, who simply wanted to love mankind, and when he tried to break into mankind, to love mankind, man wasn’t there. That, to me, was the tragedy of the book.” He also called The Catcher in the Rye the best novel by a writer of the next generation.

  And Samuel Beckett wrote to a friend, “Have you read The Catcher in the Rye? . . . I liked it very much indeed, more than anything for a long time.”

  What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.

  The business with the photograph was not the only odd behavior Salinger exhibited surrounding the publication of Catcher. Once the book came out, he cut off most of the people in his life and dropped a lot of his friends.

  People are always ruining things for you.

  In the fall of 1952 Salinger briefly dated a fellow writer named Leila Hadley. He
“talked about Holden as if he were a real live person,” she recalled. “I would ask him about what he was doing at some point in the past and he would say, ‘Well, that was when Holden was doing this or that.’ It was as if Holden really existed, which I couldn’t understand.”

  What was there not to understand? Holden did exist. He was J. D. Salinger.

  “I fought alongside him in the war,” said his comrade Werner Kleeman. “I knew right away it was his life story.”

  “So personal,” Tom Wolfe calls Catcher. “So revealing. It seemed like someone stripping the layers away from his soul.”

  “I felt he was talking to me,” Salinger scholar John Wenke says. “In fact, he was not only talking to me—in a very real sense he was writing me.”

  Edward Norton says, “Your first experience of The Catcher in the Rye is not that you think Holden would be your friend. It’s that you think Holden is you. Literally.” Hundreds of thousands of readers would have that experience: they would relate to Holden as an alter ego, a secret friend, a co-conspirator against the tyranny of an indifferent world. “I didn’t know that a writer could go as deeply into my own life and my consciousness as that book went,” Aram Saroyan said. “I stayed up all night reading it and I forgot I was reading. It went deeper than I could go.” Screenwriter Robert Towne summed it up when he said, “Like a whole generation, I thought he was writing about me.” Asked in December 1951 by the New York Times what books he would give as presents, Salinger said, “I may give [The Catcher in the Rye] away this Christmas, but not till I’m sure that boys really talk that way.”

  They do:

  Catcher became the literary anthem of a generation. Disaffected young people in the 1950s suddenly found a voice: Holden wasn’t interested in getting the good job, the house in the suburbs with the 2.5 kids, the perfect dry martini, the right clothes. He was a rebel for a generation desperately in need of one. This was the Eisenhower ’50s. A war-weary country was back at war—a cold war against the Soviets, a hot war in Korea—and what the country wanted was conformity. The House Un-American Activities Committee and Joe McCarthy had stifled dissent, and society suffocated individualism. And here came this novel about a boy who would not conform, by an author who refused to be the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit of the publishing world.