Salinger Page #8

---

He loved it.

He was impressed by it.

And he said that he'd be proud

to publish it.

But then Giroux showed it

to his boss.

Eugene Reynal,

who looked at the novel

and said, "This guy's crazy.

We need to have this rewritten."

Bob Giroux got Salinger

into his office,

spent a lot of time

looking out of his window

and down into Madison Avenue

and then turned to Salinger

and had said,

"But of course

Holden Caulfield is crazy."

And there was no response

from Salinger.

But then, on closer inspection,

Giroux saw

that Salinger was weeping.

He rose, went down

into the ground floor

of the office building

and called his agent and said,

"Get me out of

this publishing house!

"They think

my Holden Caulfield is crazy!"

Holden was, in fact,

Jerry Salinger.

So, to be told

that he was crazy...

...meant that he had to

take offence.

Salinger came

to William Maxwell

at the 'New Yorker' magazine

to read him the manuscript

in its entirety.

Salinger hoped to have

segments of the novel

published in the 'New Yorker'.

"Dear Jerry, The vote here

"went, sadly,

against your novel.

"To us, the notion that in one

family, the Caulfield family,

"there are four such

extraordinary children

"is not quite tenable.

"Another point - this story

is too ingenious and ingrown.

"Prejudice here against what

we call writer-consciousness."

If he thought

everything was phoney,

he thought the 'New Yorker'

was anything but phoney.

They had the greatest status.

If you're published there,

you are a real literary person.

So when that was rejected,

he wondered if he was

a middle-brow writer.

Salinger began to lose hope.

How could you pass up

on 'Catcher'?

Pages of

'The Catcher in the Rye'

stormed the beaches on D-day.

They witnessed the atrocities

of the concentration camps.

There was no way

that J.D. Salinger

was going to rewrite

'The Catcher in the Rye'.

A short time after that,

he placed the novel

with Little, Brown,

and I guess we might say

the rest is publishing history.

The publication of

'Catcher in the Rye' in 1951

was something of a revolution.

He really wanted to be up there,

beyond Hemingway.

A figure of such

brilliance and wisdom...

...that we can only

think of people

like Shakespeare and Beethoven,

and that novel was so popular,

it meant he was middle-brow.

Here he was

thinking he's saying

the most original things

that nobody's ever thought of,

and the entire world's like,

"Yes! That's exactly

what we feel."

How many people actually

read 'The Catcher in the Rye'

in this class?

That's pretty amazing.

There's only one person,

actually,

who hasn't read it out of 18.

When you're a kid and

you read 'Catcher in the Rye',

you're just like,

"Oh, my God, somebody gets it."

You suddenly realise that

you are part of a larger world

and that that larger world

is no longer reliable.

I remember that being

the first book

you take with you

when you walked around.

Just wanted

to have it with you.

I think we all thought,

"Ooh, here's this cool guy.

"He's such a badass.

He's such a rebel.

"I wanna date him."

I think 'Catcher in the Rye'

is one of the funniest novels

ever written.

I re-read it

and I started highlighting

lines that I thought were great,

and almost the entire book

was yellow.

It just crossed

all the lines, on every level,

between old and young,

rich and poor,

black and white,

male and female, everywhere.

Millions and millions

and millions of people.

'The Catcher in the Rye'.

The enormous impact

of 'Catcher in the Rye'

overnight transported him into

a major writer and personality.

I don't think

he was prepared for

the instant celebrity

of 'Catcher in the Rye'

when it became

a Book of the Month Club,

and there was a fantastic,

very soulful picture

on the back of it.

And he asked that that picture

be removed from the book.

It was unheard of

that an author

would not want his picture

on the back of the book

or on the back flap of the book

and as big and beautiful

as you could possibly get it.

As I walk

down the street...

I understand why anyone who was

becoming famous would stop it.

You're born with

the right of anonymity.

You're just anonymous.

You walk the streets,

you do whatever,

and you can actually

have private thoughts

while you're amongst

other people.

People who never had

that change in their life

don't think about it.

They don't even question it.

It just is.

He wouldn't

go on a book tour or sign books

or go on television shows.

He didn't ever want to be

interviewed.

He always, always, felt

that what people should know

about an author

was nothing personal.

They should know the author

through his work,

and that's all

that he was willing

to give people -

his work.

So I was rather surprised

to go to a cocktail party,

as we did in the time,

someplace on the East Side,

where... the prominent

young publishers were there,

some publicity people

and some editors.

I remember Joe Fox

of Random House was there.

He and his wife, Jill,

who were the ones that said,

"Salinger's here!"

And this was terribly exciting.

And I thought,

"Is it that guy over there?"

And then they said,

"He's coming to dinner."

And I remember

we went to this restaurant,

they'd shoved tables together,

and, sure enough, he was there.

And I remember

that he sat down at the table.

We were all excited

about being in his presence.

He was really there,

the real Salinger,

and presently he got up and

muttered something to someone

that he had to

make a phone call.

Disappeared and never came back.

When there was this

sudden onslaught,

he suddenly realised,

"I don't really need this,

and I don't want this."

And I think that's the moment

he just turned on his heels

and disappeared into

the mountains of New Hampshire.

When you read

'Catcher in the Rye',

you just know

some day, some way,

Salinger's gonna end up

in a spot

that he considers

his seclusion.

In letters, he said to me

that his friends thought

that he was like Holden

moving west

to run a gas station

and just bailing out

of the world.

It didn't mean that he was

a hermit, you know.

He just didn't want to be

with writers,

and he certainly didn't want

to be the toast of New York.

He was protecting himself.

His motives

were really very pure.

He wanted the peace and quiet

to do his work.

And Cornish

is where he found it.

I think the world was...

The world!

The buzz-status group.

...was waiting for a big novel.

And I'm not sure

that's the way Salinger

really ever wanted to write.

Everybody wanted him to

write a sequel to 'Catcher'.

He was the guy that

wrote 'The Catcher in the Rye',

and he was the only one that

really knew what that took,

how much that cost him,

personally, and its true value.

Never mind what the society

thought or the literary world.

To him, it was finished,

and he had to move on.

'Nine Stories' begins and ends

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes