J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [157]
On February 8, 1956, Salinger received his yearly (first-rejection contract) salary from The New Yorker. The check was delivered to Salinger’s agent along with a note from William Maxwell that expressed the magazine’s desire to publish Salinger’s next work. “It would give this magazine delight to get its editorial hands on a new story by him,” Maxwell stated.14
Within his bunker, Salinger was indeed working on his next project that February. But it was not intended to be a short story. He had actually begun to write a novel about the Glass family. It had been his intention to write a second novel as soon as he had completed The Catcher in the Rye, but that had never come to pass. Now, after creating an atmosphere of privacy in which to work and having envisioned a cast of characters who infatuated him, he felt the time was finally right. His correspondence during 1956 and 1957 was strewn with excited references to his new book. They also make it plain that the novella that we now know as “Zooey” was originally a large portion of that intended novel.
In attempting such an ambitious work, Salinger tried to employ the same method that had worked for him so well when he had penned The Catcher in the Rye: he sought to construct the new book by sewing together pieces that could also stand on their own as self-contained stories. “Zooey” is a prime example of this method. While his letters leave no doubt that “Zooey” was intended to rest within the new novel upon the book’s completion, the story’s most immediate purpose was to stand alone as a sequel to the story “Franny.”15
Salinger had nearly completed “Zooey” by mid-April 1956.16 He was, however, unsure of it at the time and, considering the chaos at the offices of The New Yorker, was fearful that it would be rejected by the magazine. He had good reason to be apprehensive: reaction to “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” had been muted.
“Carpenters” came close to structural perfection—a fact that had saved it from critics anxious to attack its religious content. As the New Yorker editor Ben Yagoda observed years later, the saving grace of “Carpenters” was that Salinger’s “obsession with the holy Seymour and the rest of the Glasses is restrained by an allegiance to literary and narrative values.”17 According to Salinger, “Zooey” held no such religious moderation, and unless he could duplicate the precision he had achieved with “Carpenters,” critics and editors would surely dismiss it.
Salinger tried his best to subdue the religious content of “Zooey,” but he found it impossible. Had he sat at his typewriter determined to write “a love story about a stolen pair of sneakers,” he said, the result would still be a religious sermon. It was something that he claimed to have no control over, and he seems to have given up trying. “The choice of material has never seemed to be really mine,” he said resignedly.18 Clearly, Salinger’s faith had become so intertwined with his work that they were now indistinguishable. The question that presented itself was how the public would receive such a union of prayer and authorship.
When Salinger submitted “Zooey” to “the editorial hands” of The New Yorker, it was scrutinized with vigor. The submission presented the new editors an opportunity to assert themselves by bringing the magazine’s most prestigious contributor into line. They deemed the story too long and meandering. Its characters were seen as too precious, presented by an author overly enamored of them. But most damning of all, they charged that the story was saturated with religion. “Zooey” was not only rejected by The New Yorker editorial staff—it was rejected unanimously.
With Gus Lobrano gone, the task of informing Salinger fell to William Maxwell, who sought to spare Salinger’s feelings by citing a New Yorker policy against publishing sequels as the reason for “Zooey”’s rejection.* But the truth was plain, and Salinger was distraught over the snub. He had worked long and hard on “Zooey,” and by 1956 there