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I just wanted to let you know how happy I am—for you and for the magazine—that you were able to bring it down to publishable length. Sorry it can’t be used at once … we simply have to wait for that special issue that can absorb a story of that length.20

Six weeks later she again wrote to Salinger but sounded far less certain about his progress than before. In a tone that must have made Salinger wary, the letter is reminiscent of Whit Burnett and his cajoling for The Catcher in the Rye:

I have been thinking about you a great deal, and sympathizing with you in your labors to cut the long section of the novel to feasible New Yorker length. I realize what an agonizing process it must be for you and I do very much hope that it is going alright and is not taking too much out of you or slowing up too much the process of the novel that we all wait for so eagerly.21

White had also addressed the eagerly awaited novel in her earlier letter. “I can’t help but hope that new and shorter stories from the novel will come along soon,” she wrote, “so that we can publish them right away.”22

There is another intriguing aspect to White’s letters apart from Salinger’s incomplete novel. The story that he and Shawn struggled to “compress” and that scholars assume to have been “Zooey” is in fact referred to by both White and The New Yorker only as “Ivanoff the Terrible.”* Academics have since ignored the “Ivanoff” title, confident that it refers to “Zooey,” but their reasoning may be more emotional than logical. The misfortune of having lost such a major work and a large section of an unpublished novel about the Glass family is simply inconceivable.

• • •

Home in Cornish, the singular devotion that Salinger paid to reworking “Zooey” forced his disappearance into his bunker for days on end. For Claire, the advent of her third winter in New Hampshire was further embittered by his absence. As she had during previous winters, she sank into hopelessness, becoming brooding and forlorn. Salinger barely noticed. But the consequences of his ambition to perfect “Zooey” would soon collect its debt in Claire’s deepening despondency.

During the third week of January 1957, Jamie Hamilton and his wife, Yvonne, visited New York from London. Seeing the perfect opportunity to introduce the baby (and to meet with Shawn over “Zooey”), Salinger and Claire happily bundled up Peggy and set out for the city.

With his mother and sister away on a Bermuda cruise, Salinger opted to take a Manhattan hotel room rather than stay on Park Avenue. Reintroduced to the once-familiar comforts of New York, Claire found the prospect of returning to another lonely Cornish winter unbearable. She waited for Salinger to leave the hotel, and when he did she fled with the baby. When Salinger returned, he found the hotel room empty.23 Whatever remorse gripped him as he returned to Cornish alone—and later events prove that his remorse was considerable—he bore in silence. None of his personal letters or professional correspondence ever addressed the issue of Claire’s absence or the loss of Peggy. Instead, he continued to labor on “Zooey.”

At the same time, the already humbled Salinger received word from his Hollywood agent, H. N. Swanson. The negotiations to sell the movie rights to “The Laughing Man” had collapsed. The story had last been in the hands of the producer Jerry Wald, who had envisioned creating a comedy from the tale. Wald, however, considered the story too short to be made into a film and complained of Salinger’s unwillingness to revise it.

I feel that the particular elements captured in the writing which give the story its special charm and pathos would be difficult to convey when blown up to screen-size reality.… Naturally, this would require a writer in perfect tune with the idea, and … Mr. Salinger will not consider working on it himself. My main complaint is that “The Laughing Man” gives me too little to work on.24

Wald’s decision to reject “The Laughing Man” ended Salinger