J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [17]
Salinger could at least assuage his doubts with the knowledge that Scott Fitzgerald had suffered a similar period of rejection. In fact, Salinger would have needed only to walk a block in order to gaze up at the apartment where Fitzgerald had sat brooding over his own inability to sell his work. For when Fitzgerald had first moved to Manhattan, just six weeks after Salinger’s birth, he had settled at 1395 Lexington Avenue at 92nd Street, around the corner from where Salinger now lived on Park Avenue.
With Ober seemingly unable to promote his stories, Salinger grew anxious and spoke again of becoming a playwright. He talked about rewriting “The Young Folks” for the theater and taking the lead role himself. For a while, he tried his hand at writing radio scripts and briefly collaborated on a radio program being produced by Story Press.13 By and large, he had little success at scriptwriting and seriously considered giving up writing altogether.14 “I wondered if I was a has-been at twenty-one,” he grieved.
In the late summer of 1940, Salinger embarked on a monthlong trip to New England and Canada, where he contemplated the direction of his life. The solitude and surroundings seem to have had a restorative effect, and he began writing a long story about people sitting in the lobby of a hotel. Writing to Burnett from Quebec, he reported happily that “This place is full of stories.” As his enthusiasm gained force, Salinger began to realize that he was destined to be a short-story writer first and foremost, and for the rest of his life, whenever his creativity fell barren, he sought to re-create the effects of his stay in Canada.
When Salinger returned, his optimism was stronger than ever, but events dented his confidence. On September 4, Story rejected another submission. On the same day, Salinger completed the hotel piece that he had begun in Canada and sent it to Jacques Chambrun, an obscure agent whom Burnett had introduced to him the previous March.15 According to Salinger, he instructed Chambrun to submit the attempt to The Saturday Evening Post.16 No further mention was made of this story (or of Chambrun, for that matter), and it was certainly rejected in turn. Undaunted, Salinger retrieved his old story “The Survivors” from what he described as his “bottom draw” and rewrote it. He sent it again to Story along with a sheepish note apologizing for its lack of quality. As he had suspected, Burnett turned the piece down yet again, and this story too has disappeared.
Despite these setbacks, Jerry retained his poise. Far from being discouraged, in September he announced to Whit Burnett and Elizabeth Murray his plans to write an autobiographical novel, “something new,” he promised.17 Exactly what was so compelling about his life that people would pay to read about it was unclear, but Burnett was enthusiastic about the notion. After his rather tepid reaction to Jerry’s recent works, the magnitude of his interest should have been puzzling, but Salinger was young and naive, even though he might have thought otherwise. If he thought, however, that the lure of a novel would make his other stories more attractive to the editor, he was mistaken. Burnett’s interest quickly turned into insistence, and though the rejections from Story continued undiminished, they were now accompanied by demands for a novel.
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Jerry Salinger, while having a strong sense of destiny, had periods of deep doubt, evident in