J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [167]
*According to Peggy, her father insisted upon designing the nursery himself with disastrous results. Forgetting the consequences of nature, he instructed the builders to construct the nursery with a flat roof. Winter snows had to be shoveled from the roof, and rain collected on it, often seeping through into the nursery.
†In fact, there was room for little else in the mid-May issue of The New Yorker.
*Although Buddy largely blames himself and Seymour for much of Franny’s spiritual predicament, his narration also hints at Franny’s personal tendency toward elitism by revealing that she sees herself as being languid and sophisticated.
*In describing the Glass family apartment, Salinger inserted one of the tiny misleading details that he enjoyed injecting into his stories. The Glasses’ apartment is plainly based upon Salinger’s parents’ apartment on Park Avenue. However, Buddy Glass refers to the apartment’s southern exposure. Salinger’s Park Avenue apartment had no southern exposure, and his parents’ much-coveted corner apartment faced north and west, toward Central Park.
*Among Yogananda’s revelations was the disclosure that Christ had spent many years in India before beginning his ministry. Equally expedient was Yogananda’s use of Gnostic and apocryphal texts to shore up assertions not supported by the four Gospels proper.
*To carry out his ruse, Zooey calls Franny by the nickname “Flopsy” when pretending to be Buddy.
15. Seymour
“Zooey” proved popular among readers of The New Yorker. The novella’s acceptance silenced, or at least subdued, pundits who had convinced themselves that it would be Salinger’s public downfall. These critics (who included Katharine White’s cadre at the magazine itself) attributed the novella’s success to the sophistication of the average New Yorker reader, who had become accustomed to the unpredictability of Salinger’s style. Still, the story’s detractors continued to believe that if “Zooey” were presented to a general audience it would not survive. Few believed Salinger to be brazen enough to release it in book form. “Zooey” had been born within the pages of The New Yorker, and it was within those pages that it was expected to grow old and die.
The silence of critics did not completely save “Zooey” from degradation, at least in Salinger’s eyes. On May 21, 1957, a mere week after “Zooey”’s release, Signet Books took out an ad in The New York Times that compared the novella to its paperback editions of Nine Stories and The Catcher in the Rye* Salinger detested those presentations of his work and was infuriated with their being connected to his new effort. He naturally blamed Little, Brown and Company for the affront and impulsively dashed off a furious telegram to Boston, deploring the analogy and Signet’s tactics. Little, Brown’s apologies were immediate and profuse. It claimed to be unconnected to the ad and unaware of its appearance. Salinger collected himself and after a few days responded to Ned Bradford, editor in chief at Little, Brown, with a calmer but no less indignant approach. He reiterated his aversion to paperback releases in general and explained that Signet’s ad was so close to the debut of “Zooey” as to make it “unattractively timely.”1
The episode is seemingly minor, but it displays Salinger’s simmering contempt for publishers. The dispute with Signet and Little, Brown over the New York Times ad spotlights his opinion that he was embroiled in a constant struggle to protect his work from the very publishers that held charge over it. Striving as he was for perfection, the thought of allowing his work to be mangled by editors in the pursuit of profits incensed him. And money was very much the point. In Salinger’s view his publishers raked in far too much profit, and his letters brimmed with complaints of their greed.
The incident spoke directly to the dilemma that Salinger had presented in “Zooey,” the conflict between the production of art and the gleaning of profits.