Re: new yorker

Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Tue, 24 Aug 1999 14:58:07 -0400

At 9:25 AM -0400 on 8/24/99, Will wrote:

> Tim, there's a treasure of Salinger insight in New Yorker files...I
>would
> love to know, for example, how much actual editing was done on his
>new
> yorker stories, what William Shawn actually did to earn Salinger's
>regard,
> and perhaps I'm most curious to know what new yorker editors said
>about
> Salinger's later, longer new yorker stories...I suppose a savvy
>scholar
> with the right connections may one day answer these q's...will

Yes; I've been SALIVATING at the prospect of being able to have a
genuinely scholarly/writerly look at such pages, where I could do a
line-by-line reading of manuscript and published story.  One set of
JDS paperwork (though I don't think MSS.) has recently become
available at the NY Public Library, in the Rare Books collection, at
42nd St.  The last time I checked, you needed what one Zachary Glass
might call "God's own list of accreditation and permission" to use
the materials, but they are allegedly very good on correspondence.

My own theory is that while hearsay has it that Salinger worked
exclusively with William Shawn -- at least in later years -- he had
quite a strong writer/editor relationship with Gus Lobrano, who was
the fiction editor who could have handled the early work, such as
"Bananafish."  Again, it would be fascinating to see the edits.  (And
recall that one book's dedication was either purely to Gus Lobrano or
jointly to Gus and Dorothy Olding -- I sure wish I had my set of
books with me!)

It's also a source of fascination that during his entire tenure at
the NY'er (to my knowledge), Salinger was never paired with Katharine
(Angell) White, who had been the magazine's Fiction Editor and then,
after she and E.B. White moved to Maine, was a long-distance fiction
editor for years.  I think she and JDS would have had very different
notions of what makes a short story click, and it would be
fascinating to see what kind of paper trail that would leave.

(She was distinctly more old-school than Lobrano and later NY'er
fiction editors, including her son, Roger Angell, and I could see her
having a lot of conflicts with Salinger's oblique style.  And she had
an iron will.  Of course, at the same time, there are some who
believe that the oblique style was the result of the NY'er's editing
technique.)

Go figure.

But it's endlessly fascinating to see what path a writer takes in
evolution (e.g., Raymond Carver going from "Will You Please Be Quiet,
Please?" to some of his last, lean fiction like "When It's Human
Instead of Animal" [title from memory; please don't pummel me if I
mangled it a bit).

In that case, the editor Gordon Lish has claimed a significant role
in causing the shift, and the extant paper trail largely bears out
his assertions; he did the same work with Amy Hempel, whose stories
seemed to become shorter with each new collection when he was her
editor at Knopf.  (He is no longer an editor at Knopf, being the
unfortunate victim of a clash of personality that was the house's and
the publishing world's loss, given his tireless championship and
encouragement of emerging writers.)

OBSalinger: I guess this strayed from the topic of tangible Salinger
papers in files to editorial technique, but I think it's more or less
pertinent, given JDS's unyielding position about his own work and
editorial changes to it.

What about (the collective) you: Are those of you who write tolerant
of editorial changes or suggestions or reactions?  Do you have an
open mind about why editors or readers react the way they do when
they read your work?  Do you think, with Salinger, that there is a
correlation between rigidity about editing and the relative looseness
of, say, "Hapworth" and then the authorial silence that followed?

I personally cannot imagine unleashing that story on the world,
getting a magazine to present it in the form in which it appeared,
and then ever having a chance to publish again in any magazine.  It
must surely have earned the author (if he didn't have one already) a
reputation as "difficult."

But, as with nearly everything since 1965, that's mere speculation,
and I don't know any more than the next fellow on the crosstown bus.

--tim o'connor