Re: new yorker

Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Tue, 24 Aug 1999 23:24:11 -0400 

At 8:49 PM -0400 on 8/24/99, D. wrote:

>    And don't even think of using it in a book, lest the Copyright
>Police nail yer hide to wall! <chuckle>

Mein Gott, I wouldn't even THINK about the contents once I left the
room!

>    Nine Stories was jointly dedicated to Lobrano and Olding....

I knew most of them but couldn't recall the Lobrano/Olding book.  I
love the CONTENT of the last two dedications -- [from memory] one, in
the spirit of young Matthew Salinger, urging a cool lima bean on a
lunch companion, and that other lovely Shawn dedication, which I've
heard criticized for calling attention to itself, when to me it is a
secular and non-sexual love letter.

>  Interesting sidelight fact to the dedication page to RHTRB&SAI: it
>was inadvertently
> left out of the first print run of the book in 1963!  (One imagines
>Old Jerry blowing a
> gasket over this....)  They had to stop the presses and fire it
>back up with the page
> properly inserted. The copies that hadn't been shipped yet had that
>page manually
> inserted (called tipping in) before hitting the shelves.

It's funny, but there are plenty of anecdotes about his reactions to
covers and title changes and editorial reaction to his work, but I've
never heard a thing officially or unofficially about what he did when
this happened.  I'd love to see the correspondence between him and
Little, Brown.  I'd love to see the expression of the publisher's rep
who had to explain the mistake!

> (Hearing shouts of "digression!" out there)

Naah.  This is meat and potatoes stuff, isn't it?

> I've always thought Salinger must have found some very sympathetic
>pals on the
> editorial staff at the New Yorker over the years.

That is how it appears, and Lillian Ross's memoir ("Here But Not
Here") certainly reinforces that impression.

> Just the sheer volume of work published there and the relationships
>he had with
> various editors seem to make that pretty obvious, no?

Yes, I'd say he had a guardian angel of some kind looking out for
him....  It sounds as if Shawn did this heavily, much as Max Perkins
did with Thomas Wolfe.

Which makes this speculator wonder how Perkins and Salinger might
have gotten on.  This is starting to turn into one of those "dream
baseball" games, where you make up teams of what you think are the
finest baseball players in history, and put them through simulated
games....  Now, THERE'S a board game nobody would buy.  Maybe me and
Paul and a couple of other subscribers....

--tim