J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [107]
When Giroux received the manuscript, he “thought it a remarkable book and considered [himself] lucky to be its editor.” He was convinced that the novel would do well but later confessed that “the thought of a best-seller never crossed [his] mind.” Assured of the novel’s distinction and having already sealed a verbal contract with a handshake, Giroux sent The Catcher in the Rye to Harcourt, Brace vice president Eugene Reynal.
After Reynal reviewed the manuscript, it became clear to Giroux that the publishing house would not recognize the verbal contract. Worse still, it was apparent that Reynal did not understand the novel at all:
I didn’t realize what big trouble I was in until, after he’d [Reynal] read it. He said, “Is Holden Caulfield supposed to be crazy?” He also told me he’d given the typescript to one of our textbook editors to read. I said “Textbook, what has that to do with it?” “It’s about a preppie, isn’t it?” The textbook editor’s report was negative, and that settled that.9
Giroux broke the news to Salinger in the worst way possible: he took the author to lunch. Humiliated, he confessed that Harcourt, Brace wanted Salinger to rewrite the book. To Salinger, the scenario was doubtless a nightmarish replay of Whit Burnett and the Young Folks anthology. He did his best to restrain his fury throughout lunch (Giroux had brought along another Harcourt, Brace employee for support) but, immediately upon returning home, called Harcourt, Brace and demanded his book back. “Those bastards,” Salinger wailed.10
There was trouble too in London, where Jamie Hamilton was having his own reservations about publishing Catcher. Personally, Hamilton thought the manuscript brilliant, but he worried that it might be a professional risk. He himself was half American and more tolerant of the slang in which the novel was written, but he was doubtful that other Britons would accept Holden Caulfield’s language. Expressing his concerns to a colleague, Hamilton said:
I think that Salinger, whose first novel this is, has remarkable talent and that the book is extraordinarily funny, though whether the idiom of adolescent American will appeal to English readers I cannot say.11
Hamilton’s instincts prevailed, and he published The Catcher in the Rye in Britain. Back in America, Dorothy Olding had sent the retrieved Catcher manuscript to the fiction editor John Woodburn at Little, Brown and Company in Boston. Woodburn was enchanted, and Little, Brown snatched it up immediately.
After overcoming the apprehension of Hamish Hamilton and the shock of Harcourt, Brace’s abandonment, Salinger at last felt secure. But he would endure one final blow to the novel, and it would come from the institution closest to his own heart. At the end of 1950, Dorothy Olding delivered The Catcher in the Rye to the offices of The New Yorker, a gift from Salinger to the magazine that had stood by him for so long. He intended for The New Yorker to print excerpts from the book in proud affirmation of his talents and fully expected its reception to be warm and enthusiastic.
On January 25, 1951, Salinger received The New Yorker’s reaction from Gus Lobrano. According to Lobrano, the Catcher manuscript had been reviewed by himself and at least one other editor, possibly William Maxwell.* Neither of them liked it. Its characters were considered to be unbelievable and the Caulfield children, in particular, too precocious. In their opinion, “the notion that in one family (the Caulfield family) there are four such extraordinary children … is not