Joanna Rakoff - My Salinger Year

They had been sitting on my desk for months now, the pile growing larger and larger until my desk began to resemble Hugh’s. The previous week, I’d stuffed them into the large—and largely empty—filing cabinet at the lower right-hand corner of my desk. Every day more letters trickled in, and every week or two a large bundle arrived, courtesy of Salinger’s publisher, where someone very much like me presumably spent hours each week crossing out its address and writing in ours.

One day, as we waited to hear from Salinger, I pulled open the drawer to add a few more letters and found it filled to capacity. One at a time , I told myself. You don’t have to do it all today . Taking a deep breath, I grabbed a few letters off the top. Ah, there he was: the boy from Winston-Salem.

I think about Holden a lot. He just pops into my mind’s eye and I get to thinking about him dancing with old Phoebe or horsing around in front of the bathroom mirror at Pencey. When I first think about him I usually get a big stupid grin on my face. You know, thinking about what a funny guy he is and all. But then I usually get depressed as hell. I guess I get depressed because I only think about Holden when I’m feeling very emotional. I can get quiet emotional… Most people don’t give a flying hoot about what you think and feel most of the time, I guess. And if they see a weakness, why for God’s sake showing emotion is a weakness, boy, do they jump all over you!

Rolling a piece of paper into the typewriter, I began tapping out the form letter. “Thank you for your recent letter to J. D. Salinger. As you may know, Mr. Salinger does not wish to see his fan mail, so we cannot send your kind letter—” Kind letter? I stopped there, thinking. Could I at least bring the form letter into the modern era? Give this kid a bit of hope? “Quiet emotional?” With a rip, I pulled my letter out of the Selectric and tossed it in the trash can. Then I pushed the letter aside and grabbed another, which turned out to be a Tragic Letter, from a woman in Illinois whose daughter—an aspiring writer whose favorite author was Salinger—had died of leukemia at twenty-two. Now she wanted to start a literary magazine in memory of her daughter and name it Bananafish , after the daughter’s favorite story. Would Mr. Salinger grant her permission to do so?

This was not so simple either. Letter in hand, I ambled over to Hugh’s office and explained the situation. “Can we let her call the magazine Bananafish ?” I asked, “She doesn’t seem crazy.” I held up the letter: white paper, Times New Roman. “Is it possible that Salinger would approve of… this?”

“Who knows?” said Hugh with a sigh. “We can’t ask him about it, if that’s what you’re wondering.” I nodded, disappointed. “And we can’t give her permission to use the title.”

“So I should just send her the form letter?” My chest tightened at the thought of this.

“Yes,” said Hugh, nodding.

As I left, he called after me, “You know that titles can’t be copyrighted, right?”

I stopped. “What do you mean?”

“A title can’t be copyrighted,” he explained. “So if I want to write a book and call it The Great Gatsby , I can. As long as none of the actual text is lifted from The Great Gatsby .” I didn’t fully understand. “So she can call her magazine Bananafish . It’s perfectly legal. You can’t copyright a title. And you can’t copyright a word.”

“Oh!” I cried. “Thanks.”

“But you’ll send her the form letter, right?” Hugh asked, in overly loud tones, smiling impishly.

“Of course!” I was already halfway to my desk. As you may know , I typed, Mr. Salinger has asked us not to forward his mail, so I cannot send on your kind letter. With regard to your question about entitling your magazine Bananafish, we cannot grant you permission to do so, because Mr. Salinger holds no claim over the term. Titles cannot be copyrighted. Words cannot be copyrighted. You are free , I typed, to do as you wish .

That is where I should have stopped, but I went on. We are so very sorry to hear of your loss. We hope that your new venture provides some consolation. Surely, a literary magazine is a worthy vehicle for honoring your daughter’s memory. We wish you the best of luck with it .

Before I could back down, I signed it and sent it off. The original letter, I knew, was supposed to go in the bin, but I couldn’t bring myself to put it there. I thought of the boy from Winston-Salem: Most people don’t give a flying hoot about what you think and feel . I grabbed the Bananafish letter and stashed it in my file drawer in a manila folder that had previously been empty, purposeless.

Back in January, the Agency had held a large, formal retirement party for an agent named Claire Smith. By my first day, Claire had cleaned out her office, but she stopped in once or twice before the party, her bellowing laugh echoing through the hallways. She was tiny and energetic and not terribly old—perhaps in her early sixties—and I wondered why she was retiring. She didn’t at all seem the type to move to Florida and take up golf. Hugh, of course, supplied the answer: She had cancer. Lung cancer. Advanced. On her visits to the office, she’d worn a turban, but I’d thought it mere fashion. My boss’s mode of dress—enormous rings and necklaces, nebulous flowing garments—was one step away from turbans. “But, um,” I began, telling myself not to continue, “wasn’t she smoking? When she was here?”

“Yes,” sighed Hugh. “She was. She says there’s no point in giving it up now.”

Claire had been a true grande dame of publishing, in the bygone style of martini-soaked lunches. “She was an important agent,” James told me somberly. She was also, I saw, important to my boss: her confidante and adviser, her friend. My boss was a stoic person, a Teutonic midwesterner who didn’t believe in unseemly displays of emotion. Her favorite counsel was “Pull your socks up!” So it had taken this long to realize that I was working for a person in mourning. In mourning for the Agency as it had been before Claire’s departure and perhaps prematurely in mourning for Claire herself.

It didn’t occur to me, in January, to ask what happened to Claire’s clients after her retirement. But as the months wore on, I slowly began to understand: They were passed on to my boss. And they were leaving. In droves. Every few days, the phone rang in my boss’s office—Pam had put someone directly through to her, which meant the person was a major client or editor—and she greeted the caller with genuine cheer. “Stuart, it’s so great to hear from you! How’ve you been?” The door quickly closed. Ten minutes later—or sometimes much, much less—it swung abruptly open, and she emerged, yelling for Hugh. “Well, another one down,” she’d say when he popped out of his office.

My boss had few of her own clients: a health writer, who pitched her own stories to women’s magazines, then sent the contracts to us for a working over; an environmental writer of some repute, who did the same, but also had a few books under his belt; a writer of strange, hybrid speculative fiction, with an intense, rabid cult following; and the writer I thought of as my boss’s Other Client, for he was the only one in her ranks to possess even a fraction of Salinger’s fame. A well-known poet who taught at a prestigious MFA program, he had also published a few well-received literary novels—one, in the absurdist vein, was, here again, something of a cult favorite—and a series of high-toned, meditative mystery novels. “He can do anything,” my boss once said, with an awe I rarely heard in her voice.