Re: An About Town Republican


Subject: Re: An About Town Republican
From: citycabn (citycabn@gateway.net)
Date: Wed Mar 08 2000 - 15:15:00 EST


>
>> Any news re our Republican's appearances in _About Town_?
>
>I've been dreadfully remiss in summarizing what I've read.

You haven't been 'dreadfully remiss'; remember you have had the Archives,
your real life, and your leg problems!

>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;

Yes, this I find incredible. That after APDFB, JDS met with many
rejections. A bunch in '48, '49 & maybe '50? Standing in the aisle of the
huge bookstore near my home, I gasped at all of them. And of course the
Glass story rejections were still to come! (If not for Shawn, I shudder to
think...)

>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."),

That 'someone' was me, and STILL the word "invented" leaves me woozy. I am
assuming there is a bit of professional envy/jealousy in there? In mean,
INVENTED Salinger?!?

 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?

Yes, I agree. Yagoda does shoot himself in the foot here.

  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.

Yea, we're a broken record, but it sure beats drinking & watching the tube.

>
>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.
>

Goodness, I really wonder about this. Once JDS had been set on the right
path (the first several New Yorker stories), I would have _thought_ he was
home free. And the thought that Shawn really aggressively edited the Glass
Stories boggles my mind, but well I guess it is true (given the dedication
of _F&Z_). But I can't imagine a writer such as Joyce or Beckett accepting
any editing of their later work. I guess what I'm stumbling around with is
the difficulty of accepting JDS being edited to any significant manner after
say 1950. (Since _The Catcher_ was NOT a New Yorker story, I wonder about
the editing at Little, Brown for that.)

>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.
>

I wholly agree with this. It's just how much editing did go on after say
'50?

>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.)
>

I agree and I think that Maxwell letter to K. White that Yagoda quotes
supports this.

>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.

God, the end of your sentence, beginning with 'Salinger's career', reads
eerily at this moment.

>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.

Good points in this last sentence. I need to move 3,000 miles due east.
MANY THANKS, Tim, for all of this post, especially given your physical
condition. I hope you are mending, and mending much faster than a
Salingerian soon or Soon (you know, on the flap copy of _F&Z_).

--Bruce

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