Joanna Rakoff - My Salinger Year

Equally harmless were editors of textbooks and anthologies, guilelessly hoping to include “Teddy” in their collection of stories on marriage and divorce or an excerpt from Catcher in the new edition of The Norton Anthology of American Literature. “We can grant permission for Catcher to appear in the Norton anthology, right?” I’d asked Hugh.

“No!” Hugh cried. “We can’t. You didn’t tell them yes, did you?” His face was turning red with panic.

“No, of course not,” I said. “But, we shouldn’t ask him if he wants to be included?” This was, after all, the Norton . The anthology used on every campus in America.

“No.” Hugh shook his head and sucked in his upper lip. “No anthologies. No excerpts. If you want to read Salinger, you have to buy his books.”

I thought of the last category simply as the Crazies. This was, if not the largest genre of caller in sheer volume, then certainly the most consuming, in terms of time. Occasionally said craziness was clear from the moment I picked up the phone, and I quickly extricated myself, replacing my receiver with a satisfying little thud. Other times, I’d pick up the phone and find myself talking, say, with a polite man—“Oh, yes, hello! Thank you so much for taking my call!”—who explained that he was the dean of a community college in southern New Jersey. “We would be very honored if J. D. Salinger would serve as our commencement speaker this year. The ceremony is on May 28 and we can, of course, offer a small honorarium, as well as accommodations at a very fine inn.” There was more—the history of the college, information about the current student body—but I interjected as soon as he took a breath.

“It’s so lovely of you to think of Mr. Salinger, but I’m afraid Mr. Salinger isn’t accepting speaking engagements at the moment.”

“Yes, I know .” The dean’s polite formality quickly devolved into testiness. “But I thought he might make an exception for our particular school because”—insert your reason here; in this case it was—“as I mentioned , our student body is largely comprised of veterans—from the Gulf War—and seeing as Mr. Salinger is a veteran himself and has written about the experiences of veterans adjusting to life in civilian society…” There was more. Already, I realized that there was always more.

“I completely understand. But Mr. Salinger isn’t accepting any speaking engagements at all.”

“Well, could you at least put me in touch with him so I could extend our invitation directly? I’m sure if he let me explain the situation, he’d be happy to come. We put all our speakers up at a lovely inn—”

“I’m afraid I can’t put you in touch with Mr. Salinger. He’s explicitly asked us not to give out his phone number or address.”

“Well, if I sent on a written invitation, could you forward it?”

I took a deep breath. It would be so much easier to lie. To say, “Sure! Of course!” And just toss the thing in the garbage, let them blame Salinger when they never got a reply. But I stuck to the script. There was a perverse pleasure in it. “I’m afraid that I can’t. Mr. Salinger has asked us not to forward any mail that arrives for him.”

“So if I sent on an invitation, what exactly would happen to it?” I could virtually hear the blood vessels bursting in this man’s face. This venture, I knew, was personal to him. It was not about bringing glory to his tiny college but about the relationship he’d forged with Salinger in his mind. “Would you just send it back to me? What would you do with it?”

Was I really supposed to tell him that his invite would be either returned to him or thrown in the round trash can below my boss’s desk (if I dared pass it on to her) or lost in Hugh’s pile of papers?

Yes, I was.

“But isn’t that illegal? Don’t you have an obligation to make sure Mr. Salinger receives all his mail? If it’s sent through the U.S. Postal Service?” This argument came up from time to time.

“Mr. Salinger has hired us as his agents. He has hired us to act on his behalf. Our job is to carry out his wishes.”

“But how do you know what his wishes are?” The dean was shouting by now, and I was sweating under the arms. “How do you know what he wants? Who are you anyway?”

“Mr. Salinger has detailed his wishes for us and we are simply carrying them out,” I said smoothly. He had a point, though. How did we—how did I —know the confines of Salinger’s wishes? What if he really did want to drive down to the Pine Barrens and stay at a very nice inn and talk to some veterans? Such a thing didn’t seem outside the realm of possibility. “I’m so sorry, Dean Something”—I’d also discovered that remembering and using the callers’ names helped defuse their anger—“but Mr. Salinger has explicitly instructed us to turn down all speaking engagements. It’s been a pleasure talking with you and I’m sure you’ll find a perfect speaker for your commencement.”

I hung up the phone. My sweater was soaked through under the arms, though my boss had decided to air out her office: an icy wind was now snaking through her windows, swirling around my desk. My body convulsed, briefly, as the chill air insinuated itself into my hot points. Confrontation made me very, very anxious. Then it hit me: I wasn’t anxious. I was ill. I had a fever. As a kid, sickness came upon me this way, out of nowhere: my head suddenly too heavy to keep up.

I stood up from my chair, my legs wobbling dangerously. Halfway across the office, I realized I was running , fueled by adrenaline. Slow down , I told myself, forcefully. Under the thin, anemic glare of the bathroom’s fluorescents, I splashed water on my face—noting my forehead’s coolness—then caught myself in the warped, peeling mirror: My cheeks were flushed pink, my eyes glistening brightly. This wasn’t illness. This wasn’t anxiety.

This was excitement.

Things were happening. I wasn’t becoming part of something. I was already part of something.

My best friend from high school, Jenny, worked a few blocks away, in the McGraw-Hill Building, editing social studies textbooks. Or text book , for she spent the entirety of her tenure working on one enormous project, a fifth-grade social studies primer that was being adapted for the public schools of the state of Texas. Apparently, Texas was so enormously powerful—so large, with so many schools and students, so much money—that it could demand a textbook tailored specifically to its needs, with a whole chapter on the Alamo, and another on the history of the state, and—most distressingly—the chapter on the civil rights movement omitted entirely. Jenny made light of all this, but she was genuinely troubled by it, and yet she also loved her job, the cleanness and rigor of it, the meetings at which her presence was required. She had drifted through college, transferring twice and picking up a variety of prescriptions along the way, but now she had a purpose, a structure to her life. Now she had Texas.

“It’s so nice just to be normal ,” she’d told me a few months earlier, when I returned from London. In high school, we’d not wanted to be normal. We’d made fun of the normal people. We’d hated them.

“I know,” I said reflexively, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to be normal. I wanted to be extraordinary. I wanted to write novels and make films and speak ten languages and travel around the world. I wanted everything. So, I’d thought, had Jenny.

Perhaps as much as normalcy, she loved having money, her own money. She had a fraught relationship with her parents—more so than any of our friends—and she’d rushed into the trappings of grown-up life earlier than the rest of us. Editing textbooks paid far more than the literary jobs available to those who had recently graduated from Swarthmore with a degree in poetry—as had Jenny—and, thus, she’d made a calculated decision to toil in the less glamorous realm of educational publishing. At the time, this was unfathomable to me. As was her equally calculated decision to move to a remote, cultureless, suburban section of Staten Island, in a newly built complex of identical fiberboard apartments. The commute to midtown took her a full hour and a half—each way—and meant that she couldn’t, for instance, meet after work to go to the Angelika for the new Hal Hartley movie, or for drinks at Von, or—certainly not—to see a band at Mercury Lounge. She had to join her fiancé, Brett, at the train and start the arduous journey home.