Subject: JDS and 'The New Yorker'
From: citycabn (citycabn@gateway.net)
Date: Thu Oct 05 2000 - 14:21:38 GMT
Finally, I have a copy of Ben Yagoda's 'About Town' under my roof (albeit a
library copy).
Since this list is called 'bananafish', and since I don't recall anyone
quoting in full what's available regarding APDFB in 'About Town', I'll turn
a blind eye to the fair use issue and
"But the time still wasn't right. All his [Salinger's] submissions were
rejected in 1944, 1945 (he had a group of fifteen poems rejected that year
as well), and 1946. The next year, however, saw a breakthrough. Maxwell to
Ober, January 22, 19*47* [emphasis added]: 'We liked parts of 'The
Bananafish' by J. D. Salinger very much but it seems to us to lack any
discoverable story or point. If Mr. Salinger is around town, perhaps he'd
like to come in and talk to me about 'New Yorker' stories.' The story, at
this stage, was about a young man named Seymour Glass who has a conversation
with a little girl on a beach in Florida, then goes back to his hotel room
and shoots himself in the head with a revolver. Salinger did come in to
talk to Maxwell, the result being that he added a new scene to open the
story: Seymour's shallow new wife sits in their hotel suite and talks with
her mother by long-distance telephone. The first rewrite was sent back, but
the second one--which Salinger now was calling 'A Fine Day for
Bananafish'--was accepted and printed in January 1948. Its title in the
magazine was 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish.' The week it came out, John
Cheever wrote to Gus Lobrano, 'I thought the Salinger piece was one hell of
a story.' "
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