Joanna Rakoff - My Salinger Year

“I tried to. I called all day on Friday, but you weren’t home. I must have called ten times.”

“She did,” said Hugh, and I looked to him gratefully.

“He said not to, though,” I clarified. My boss glared at Hugh, opening her mouth to shout. “ Jerry said not to. Jerry said not to call you at home. That it could wait until Monday.”

“Well, it’s Monday now! Why haven’t you told me?”

An hour later, the shouting began, and Hugh came out to watch my boss’s door with me. “She’s just going to yell for me the minute she gets off the phone,” he said. “I may as well wait out here.”

“Are you sure, Jerry?” we heard her shout. “Well, of course, if that’s what you want. We’ll take care of it.”

“So good to talk to you,” she shouted. “As always.”

When the door opened, she emerged quietly, thoughtfully. “I need to talk to Carolyn…” Her voice trailed off. “Maybe I should talk to Max.” She drifted toward the front of the office, then thought better of it, turned on her heel, and trod back to us. “Salinger wants to publish a new book,” she said, in the same dreamy tone of voice. “Or an old book. An old story. ‘Hapworth.’ A publisher approached him about putting it out as a stand-alone volume. And he wants to do it.”

“ ‘Hapworth’?” asked Hugh, his voice choked with surprise. “He wants to publish ‘ Hapworth ’ as a book?”

“Well, it is very long,” said my boss. “It’s really a novella. It could be a book.”

“I think a novella is ninety pages, minimum,” said Hugh stiffly, with a particularly sharp sigh. “ ‘Hapworth’ is maybe sixty. With very wide margins, I suppose it could be a book.” He pursed his lips. “Just because it can be a book doesn’t mean it should be a book.”

“Well,” said my boss, emitting her own sigh. “He seems pretty keen on doing this.”

“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?