• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1579 0

and influenzas, leading to a chest infection serious enough to lay him up and pause his writing. Meanwhile, The New Yorker was growing increasingly impatient to see his new story or at least obtain a firm date for its completion, charging that the delay was wreaking havoc at the magazine. Come October, after bolstering his health with an intensive regimen of vitamins, Salinger had convinced himself that he was well enough to resume work.6 But he had lost months and found it difficult to resume where he had left off. Early 1959 saw the novella still incomplete, and The New Yorker’s tone became increasingly exasperated.

When encountering spells of writer’s block, Salinger had often traveled, believing that changes of scenery awakened his creativity. The success of many of these excursions is debatable, but Salinger was desperate to finish “Seymour.” In March 1959, he left Cornish alone and took a room in an Atlantic City hotel. Claire’s reaction to Seymour Glass being granted a trip to the Jersey shore while her own vacation had been denied can only be imagined, but such a declaration of Salinger’s priorities almost certainly fed into her increasingly bitter resentment.

Salinger found himself no more capable of completing “Seymour” in Atlantic City than he had been in Cornish. Now frenzied, he again relocated, this time to New York City, and took a room a block away from the offices of The New Yorker. As he had in 1950 when completing The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger used an office at the magazine in an effort to work. This too failed. Within days of arriving in New York, Salinger again fell ill with influenza. Despairing, frustrated, and now infirm, he returned home to Cornish with the novella still in pieces.7

When Salinger finally finished “Seymour” in the spring of 1959, the manuscript went directly to William Shawn, who accepted it immediately and refused any input from the New Yorker fiction department. Katharine White was incensed by being shut out of the process yet again. It was up to William Maxwell, who understood Shawn’s motivation and was perhaps closest to White, to soothe her feelings. “I do feel that Salinger has to be handled specially and fast,” he told her, “and think that the only practical way of doing this is as I supposed Shawn did do it—by himself. Given the length of the stories, I mean, and the Zen Buddhist nature of them, and what happened with ‘Zooey.’ ”8

Aside from being a diplomatic consolation, Maxwell’s note to White helps to explain how “Seymour—an Introduction” avoided The New Yorker’s usual editorial gauntlet. While excusing Shawn by painting Salinger as being difficult to work with, Maxwell’s final reference to “Zooey” reveals his and White’s overriding reluctance to challenge Salinger’s new work and risk being embarrassed as they had been over “Zooey.”

• • •

Between the publication of “Zooey” in May 1957 and the appearance of “Seymour—an Introduction” on June 5, 1959, the most important occurrence in Salinger’s life was conducted on a stage far larger than the settings of Cornish, New Hampshire, or the office of The New Yorker. During this time, the public perception of J. D. Salinger suddenly lurched from that of short-story writer into the realm of legend. The myth of Salinger as an ascetic hermit reluctantly dispensing jewels of enlightenment became indelibly ingrained in the American consciousness. Just as Salinger had elevated the character of Seymour Glass to a position of sainthood, he himself found that he had been equally elevated by a segment of the population too large to ignore. His search for humility through privacy had endowed him with an aura of pious inapproachability that readers found alluring. It also added an ambiguity to his image that easily lent itself to a vast variety of interpretations. In a very real way, the author had become indistinguishable from his work. And just as the name of Holden Caulfield was invoked in the defense of a rising call to social dissatisfaction, the name of J. D. Salinger began to be called upon to defend myriad social issues.

The