My Salinger Year (11 page)

“Really?” asked Hugh. “Are you sure this isn’t some whim? He’s not going to change his mind tomorrow?”

“Well, I’d say not,” my boss said, laughing. “He’s been thinking it over for eight years.”

Hugh and I looked at each other. “Eight years?” he said.

“Yesiree. The publisher first approached him eight years ago. In 1988.”

“The publisher approached him directly?” Hugh shook his head in amazement.

“Yup,” my boss said, swinging her arms back and forth. It was hard to tell if she was delighted or horrified by this turn of events. “They, or he—it seems like this press might be a one-man show—wrote him a letter.” She raised one finger in the air and smiled. “On a typewriter! Jerry was very impressed by that.”

It had not, until that moment, occurred to me that the Agency’s typewriters-only policy had anything to do with Salinger. Was it possible that Salinger had somehow mandated our lack of modern office machinery? This seemed crazy, but possible. Or was it simply that the Agency—like an aging star of the high school football team—had simply stopped developing during its glory days? That instead of growing and changing and adapting, it had retreated into the business of
being
the Agency. Which meant following the same rituals and procedures it’d followed in 1942, when Dorothy Olding first signed Salinger.

“How did the publisher get his address?” I asked. Hugh had told me that an assistant had been fired, a few years back, for giving out Salinger’s address to a reporter.

“He just sent it to J. D. Salinger, Cornish, New Hampshire.” She made a clucking sound with her teeth. “And the mailman delivered it. Can you believe it?”

“No,” I said. I was impressed.

“Why has no one else thought of that?” asked Hugh.

“I don’t know,” said my boss, pulling a pack of cigarettes out of her jacket pocket and peeling off the plastic wrapper. “I don’t know. Maybe someone has.”

Hugh looked a bit as if he were going to throw up. “Which publisher is it? Why didn’t they contact us?”

My boss began to laugh. “I don’t even know. Some small press in Virginia. Orchid Press? Something like that. Tiny. I mean, tiny. Like I said, it might just be one man, it seems like.”

“Orchises Press?” I asked hesitantly. Orchises published some poets I liked. But I knew nothing about it. I wasn’t even sure how to pronounce its name.

“That’s it!” my boss cried. She narrowed her brows in surprise. “You’ve actually heard of them?”

“They publish poetry,” I told her. “Contemporary poetry. I like a few of their poets.”

“A small press,” said Hugh, unbelieving. “A small press in
Virginia
. A one-man press? For J. D. Salinger? How could this guy even meet the demand? Does he know what he’s getting into? Salinger is pretty different from publishing poetry.”

“You can say that again,” said my boss, with a low chortle. Slowly, she pulled a cigarette out of the pack and lit it with the tiny lighter she always kept on her person, hidden in some pleat or fold. She took a long draw and smiled. She was enjoying this. “We have a lot to find out. For starters, whether this Orchises Press fellow”—she looked at a Post-it in her hand and read a name aloud—“Roger Lathbury. We need to find out whether this Roger Lathbury fellow still even wants to do this. It’s been eight years. He’s going to think I’m crazy when
I call him.” Her face compressed in contemplation. “We need to go very slowly on this one. Very slowly and very carefully. I need to think for a minute.”

When she was safely ensconced in her office, murmuring into the phone, I asked Hugh, in a low voice, “What’s ‘Hapworth’?” It sounded mysterious. Like a secret agent’s code name.

“Salinger’s last published story,” Hugh told me, brushing imaginary flecks of dust off his sweater. “It ran in
The New Yorker
in 1965. It took up almost the whole magazine.”

“Really,” I said. “The
whole
magazine?” I could not imagine this.

“It wasn’t that strange then,” explained Hugh. “You know
Esquire
once serialized a whole Mailer novel?” I shook my head no, though I had actually known this. Don was a huge Mailer fan. “Every magazine ran stories. All the women’s magazines. Salinger published stories in all of them.
Cosmo
ran a novella of his. A real novella.”

“
Cosmopolitan
?” I asked, incredulous.

“I think
Mademoiselle
, too. And one other.
Ladies’ Home Journal
?
Good Housekeeping
? One of those …” His voice faded to nothing and his hand moved in a circle, seemingly of its own accord, signifying I knew not what.

I’d known, of course, that glossy magazines had once run stories, largely because I’d written my master’s thesis on Sylvia Plath, who had been obsessed with selling stories to what she called “the slicks.” But somehow the idea of J. D. Salinger letting
Good Housekeeping
run one of his stories—or
Cosmo
, with its advisories on multiple orgasms—was absurd to the point of hilarity.

“You know that’s what your boss did, right?” he asked, his voice suddenly growing sharper.

I shook my head in confusion.

“First serial.” He nodded, as if agreeing with himself.
“She was hired as the first serial agent. To sell stories to magazines. So she sold stories for all the Agency’s clients. For years. She worked at a magazine before she came here, as the assistant to the fiction editor.”

“What magazine?” I asked.

Hugh raised his eyebrows and smiled. “
Playboy.”

“
Playboy
?” I whispered. I was sure he was joking. My boss, in her turtlenecks and slacks, at a girlie magazine?

But he nodded solemnly. “They ran serious fiction. Still do.” He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “People always say ‘I read it for the articles,’ and you think it’s a joke. But they pay well, so they get good writers.”

“Did my boss sell ‘Hapworth’?” I asked. For some reason my heart raced a little at the thought of this. “To
The New Yorker
?”

Hugh shook his head. “No, that was before her time. Dorothy would have handled that. Though I think, by that point, Salinger just gave all his stories directly to
The New Yorker
.” He sighed and shook his head as if to clear it. “The story is a letter home from camp,” he explained, his voice strangled and strange. Angry, I realized, he’s angry. “Seymour Glass, at age seven, writing to his parents from camp. Sixty pages. A
sixty-page letter home from camp
.”

“That sounds kind of postmodern,” I said, smiling.

Hugh sighed and raised his eyebrows at me. “People consider this his
worst
story. I’m not sure why he’d want to publish it as a stand-alone.” Shaking his head, he gestured toward the wall of Salinger books. “He says he doesn’t want attention. This is going to get a
lot
of attention. I don’t understand.”

“Yes,” I said, nodding, but I thought maybe, just maybe, I understood.
Maybe he’s dying
, I thought.
Maybe he’s lonely. Maybe he wants the attention now. Maybe he realized that what he thought he wanted wasn’t what he wanted at all
.

The next morning, my boss stopped at my desk before heading into her office. “Call this Orchids Press and ask for a catalog and a sample of their books.”

I nodded, but she’d already glided off across the thick carpet. From my shelf, I pulled down the
LMP—Literary Market Place
, an enormous, dictionary-sized tome, which lists the name and address of every publisher in the country, along with its staff—and sure enough, there it was: Orchises Press, Alexandria, Virginia. Publisher: Roger Lathbury, the Man Who Conquered Salinger. No other staff was listed. I took a deep breath and dialed. “Hello,” a brisk voice chirped midway through the first ring. Was this the man himself, Roger Lathbury? Suddenly I felt silly, unsure of what to say. When I identified myself as an employee of the Agency, would he not immediately realize I was calling on behalf of Salinger? For once, I wished my boss had dictated a letter. “Yes, hello,” I said finally. “Is this Orchises Press?”

“It is,” said the voice.

“I’m calling from the Agency.” Simply uttering the Agency’s name allowed me to regain my composure. “We’re expanding our submission base, and we’d love to see your most recent catalog, as well as a sample of current books.”

“Well,” the man said, “it would be my pleasure to send those materials on to you!” If he recognized the name of the Agency, he gave no indication of it. Or maybe he simply didn’t know that the Agency represented Salinger? After all, he’d written directly to Jerry.

“You did it?” my boss called the minute I hung up. I hadn’t realized that she could hear my phone conversations from her office and flushed a little, thinking what else she might have overheard over the past few months.

“Done,” I called back. There was a rustling as she got up
from her chair and walked over to my desk. And another as Hugh joined her.

“Let’s see who they are,” she said. “We need to see what kinds of books they do, what kind of company Jerry will be in. And what the books look like. You know that will matter a lot to Jerry.”

“Really?” I asked. I’d assumed the homogeneous—and singular—style of his books had been purely Little, Brown’s choice. Publishers, I thought, took care of designing books. Writers wrote them.

“Oh boy!” cried my boss. Hugh actually laughed. “You didn’t know that? Jerry has very strong feelings about how a book should look. Not just the cover. The font. The paper. The margins. The
binding
. No illustrations on his covers. Just text. It’s all stipulated in his contracts.”

“No author photo,” added Hugh. “He almost sued his British publisher over the cover of
Nine Stories
.”

“That’s an exaggeration,” my boss cried. “He did
not
sue them. He just was unhappy about it.”

The original cover of
The Catcher in the Rye
bore an illustration, a strange and beautiful—lyrical, really—drawing of a rearing carousel horse. I could see it out of the corner of my eye while seated at my desk. But that was his first book, predating, I supposed, his ban on images, as well as the sort of fame that allows an author to dictate his covers. In truth, I understood his objection. He wanted his readers to come to his work utterly fresh, utterly free. This, too, was noble. Lovely. But it was also, I suddenly realized, impossible. For J. D. Salinger, that is. No one,
no one
could come to his books without preconceived notions about them. About
him
. Myself included.

In the weeks that followed, my lies became true: My shoulder quickly began to ache from toting manuscripts. In reading
for Max and Lucy, the texture of my life changed, the fabric of my days growing more and more complex and thrilling. Many of the novels—for they were novels, all novels—that I brought home were indeed bad, as Olivia had promised, but many were good or almost good or at least evidenced a strong and strange voice, and even if I knew that Max or Lucy wasn’t going to take on the writer, there was a certain frisson to being part of the making of a book, however far down the line, of a career, a life. Each time Max or Lucy took on a book I’d recommended, I walked around stunned for days. Reading manuscripts was the exact opposite of reading for grad school: it was pure instinct, with some emotion and intelligence thrown in. Does this novel work? Or can it be made to work? Does it move me? Does it grip me?

At night, I read, happy to have a break from the endless rounds of drinks and parties, a reason to get off the phone with my mother, an excuse to ignore my own imperfect poems—and stories, for I was, ironically, now working on some. I didn’t mention these ventures to anyone, least of all Don.

One afternoon in April, Max came over to my desk, a rarity. He was too busy to come to our wing of the office unless he had pressing business for my boss. Sometimes he asked her advice on contracts, and now, it seemed, he—and Lucy, too—were being made partners, so there were all sorts of complicated legal and financial things to work out. “Hey,” he said, “what are you doing tonight? One of my clients is reading at KGB. I think you might really like his novel. It’s this fantastic coming-of-age story set in New Jersey. And New York, in the ’80s. I really think you might like it. I just have a feeling. Come along. We’ll all have dinner afterward.”

My boss cleared her throat noisily—we were, somehow, disturbing her—and closed her door.

But another, with my name on it, had swung open.