LA Times on the article Tim found in Book Magazine

>
>
>By TIM RUTTEN, TIMES STAFF WRITER
>
>Every culture has its central rite of passage--a pilgrimage, a quest, a time
>of testing.
>
>For Americans and their cultural fellow travelers, the defining experience
>is adolescent alienation. What better preparation, after all, for life in a
>society where the worship of autonomy has turned individualism into
>isolation?
>
>Hence the enduring popularity of J.D. Salinger and his iconically alienated
>creations, Holden Caulfield and the family Glass.
>
>Earlier this year, for example, Web sites across the Internet fairly
>vibrated with excitement over reports that the reclusive author would soon
>be bringing out his long-anticipated, book-length version of "Hapworth 16,
>1924," which appeared as a novella in a 1965 issue of the New Yorker.
>Amazon.com even began booking advance orders. But although Salinger's agent
>and publisher confirmed that such a manuscript exists, both denied that
>publication was imminent.
>
>Salinger, in fact, has not published new work in almost 40 years, which is
>why the September/October issue of Book magazine promises to be something of
>an event. It contains an article by novelist Joanna Smith Rakoff--"My
>Salinger Year"--in which she recounts the months she spent working as a
>secretary at Harold Ober Associates, the Manhattan literary agency that
>represents the author of "The Catcher in the Rye."
>
>One of her duties at the agency was answering the author's fan mail, an
>assignment that was hers because Salinger refuses to read or even to take
>receipt of the letters that continue to pour in from around the world.
>
>How Rakoff changed the way the mail was handled--and how she, in turn, was
>changed by it--is the narrative spine of her extended reflection on
>Salinger's enduring popularity.
>
>Her story, which included a meeting with Salinger, is a source of
>satisfaction to Book's editor, Jerome V. Kramer. ["Salinger is the Holy
>Grail for people on the pop cultural side of the literary world," he said.
>"He is so successfully secretive that anything that provides this sort of
>neat insight into him is fascinating.
>
>"Salinger still captures our imagination because the wisdom and specificity
>of his characters have made him the philosopher of adolescence," Kramer
>said, "and I think this piece helps explain why new generations are still
>being drawn to him at a certain period in their lives. Part of his appeal is
>that nobody has ever come up with a better strategy for maintaining their
>integrity in this media-saturated culture than by bowing out of it. Just
>getting a glimpse of him, as you do in Joanna's piece, is a reaffirmation
>for many people."
>
>Committed Salingerites probably will delight in Rakoff's crisp description
>of their idol's current living arrangements:
>
>"Finally, you need to go to New Hampshire, where a tall, dark-eyed man
>meditates in the back room of his simple, wood-frame house. In his eighties
>now and mostly deaf, he thrives on routine: Each morning, he rises, eats
>breakfast, kisses his wife goodbye and heads to his study, where he
>meditates and, allegedly, writes. He is a Buddhist, a vegetarian, the son of
>a man who made his living processing meat. His wife, 30 years his junior, is
>a nurse at the local hospital. She enjoys weaving tapestries. He enjoys
>watching television. A satellite dish crowns the top of their farmhouse.
>
>"Every five years or so, he visits New York, the city in which he was born
>and raised, the city he made intimate--and eccentrically romantic--for
>several generations of readers. He hates the city now, but he needs to come,
>needs to meet with his agent [Phyllis Westberg], make sure she's handling
>the business of his books in exactly the way he likes. He visits her office
>and they head out to lunch. He says hello to the low-voiced girl who assists
>his agent, the girl who fields his questions about royalties and contracts,
>repeating her answers three and four times on the days when he doesn't feel
>like using his special amplified phone, bought for him by his wife."
>
>When she was first assigned to answer Salinger's mail, Rakoff recalls, she
>was handed "a few crumbling, yellowed carbon copies of sample responses,"
>composed in the 1960s. At first, she used them, but gradually her impression
>of Salinger's fans changed. They were, she writes "smart. They were misfits.
>And, for all their cynical posturing, what they loved about Holden was not
>just his smart-alecky whining or his refusal to conform to adult
>expectations, but his hopeless, dewy-eyed naivete, his utter idealism.
>
>"If Holden were to write a letter to Salinger, he too would hope to hell
>that somehow, some way, that irascible hermit would write a ... letter
>back."
>
>And since the hermit wouldn't, Rakoff did--individual, not form, replies.
>She was particularly taken with a remarkably eloquent and sincere
>16-year-old from North Carolina, who had read "The Catcher in the Rye" three
>times and hoped one day to write a novel like it of his own. Rakoff had the
>boy's letter in her desk drawer one day in 1996, when she met Salinger face
>to face.
>
>Two questions occur:
>
>"'You are probably wondering, right about now," she writes, "if I signed my
>own name to the letters I wrote to Salinger's fans--or if I actually
>pretended to be Salinger, signed a loopy 'J.D.' at the bottom of the page."
>
>And, finally, what did Rakoff do when she finally met the author?
>
>"When the actual J.D. Salinger--with his thin gray hair and saucer-sized
>ears and self-deprecating smile--visited our office," she writes, "I shook
>his hand (or, really, he shook mine), said, 'Nice to meet you,' smoothed my
>skirt and turned back to my typing. In my desk lay the letter from North
>Carolina, two neatly typed pages, unfurled from a laser printer, and ending:
>
>" 'I'll write you again soon. I can hardly wait. Anyway, my line of thought
>is this: If I was the guy who put myself onto paper and I came out in the
>form of "The Catcher in the Rye," I'd get a bang out of the [person] who had
>the nerve to write me a letter pretending (and wanting) to be able to do the
>same thing.'
>
>"As the door to my boss' smoke-clogged office closed, a thought slashed
>through my brain: What if I gave Salinger the letter?"
>
>So, did Rakoff sign her replies with Salinger's name? Did she violate his
>decades-long order and hand him the letter from the young man whose idealism
>and sincerity had touched her so deeply--made him, in her eyes, worthy of
>his idol's notice?
>
>The answers, along with other things worth knowing, can be found in the
>forthcoming issue of Book magazine.
>
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Received on Wed Aug 28 11:08:55 2002