Subject: Re: An About Town Republican
From: Tim O'Connor (oconnort@nyu.edu)
Date: Wed Mar 08 2000 - 12:12:41 EST
On Wed, Mar 08, 2000 at 08:14:57AM -0800, citycabn wrote:
> I vaguely recall when "Time" magazine (or was it "Life"), back in 1961, was
> hot on the heels of a reclusive, best-selling author, named J. D. Salinger,
> it reported that Mr. Salinger was a registered Republican.
Indeed, he is. (There was once a party list of registered voters posted
on the front door of the Cornish town hall, and there was one
high-profile Republican on the list.)
> Any news re our Republican's appearances in _About Town_?
I've been dreadfully remiss in summarizing what I've read.
It's astonishing, really, to read about JDS in "About Town." It's
overall quite a negative portrait. Much of it concerns the fiction
department's objection to JDS work, and then being overruled by William
Shawn; some of it shows reaction by other writers (as someone previously
quoted Cheever as saying to Gus Lobrano, "You may have invented Salinger
and Brodkey, but you didn't invent me."), but the most head-turning
assertion is by the Ben Yagoda himself, when he editorializes (on pages
287-288, "For all the acclaim his stories received, and for all the
undeniable virtues of most of them, Salinger was ultimately something of
a literary novelty act, spinning out a series of variably intoxicating
fantasies." I find that bizarre, because to me, that's just about the
hallmark of a good writer; what, should a creative writer spin out a
series of dull, uninteresting fantasies? But at the same time, that
summarizes things neatly, as this list proves, to some degree: we keep
returning to the same topics as if we were studying the Talmud,
splitting hairs, searching for nuances, rummaging around for patterns,
offering our own marginalia.
The more interesting part -- which I must work out myself when I can get
my run-down self to the NY Public Library -- is that the book bears out
what some of us have speculated in the past, that the editing process
molded JDS's work significantly, and that it's no surprise that he
seemed to magically change his style once he came within the orbit of
The New Yorker. I strongly suspect that without Gus Lobrano's help,
and, later, Shawn's, Salinger would have continued turning out stories
like "The Hang of It," or at least until the popular magazine market
turned sour for short-story writers.
I never believed that a writer could leap from the quality of work that
appears in the Saturday Evening Post to "A Perfect Day for Bananafish"
without having received some serious editing and guidance beyond what
Whit Burnett could offer.
One part that is definitely of interest to me is that while Katharine
White was fiction editor, then a consulting fiction editor, then (after
relocating to Maine) a part-time editor and in-house critic of how the
issues were put together [Mrs. White is a fascinating story unto
herself, and anyone interested in her should have a look at "Onward
and Upward : A Biography of Katharine s White," by Linda H. Davis],
she was never involved with editing Salinger; it fell to Lobrano and
then, near or after Lobrano's death, to Shawn. Mrs. White herself
attracted many, many great writers to the magazine, but Salinger was not
one of them. I have no recollection of a negative word she may have
said, but I get the impression that he wasn't her type of writer.
(I'm hoping against hope that the NY'er archives will have some
correspondence or other paperwork to shed more light on this subject.)
At any rate, my copy of "About Town" bristles with little "Post-It"
flags where JDS is mentioned, and perhaps half of the mentions contain
only his name in passing. Where there is a passage of substance, it
either shows that the fiction department didn't want to publish
certain stories, or it offers a summary of Salinger's career that is
definitely closed-out, as if he were dead and had no further work
extant.
I offer this proviso, of course: I haven't finished reading the whole
thing (it's quite long and I've been reading other books concurrently),
but that's the meaty part about Salinger. I'm already strategizing
about how in my hobbled state I can get to the NYPL and spend a whole
day examining the NY'er archives. I like my sources to be first-hand,
not filtered through the eyes of a writer/historian, no matter how good
that writer/historian may be.
--tim
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