J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [178]
Privately, Salinger derided politics of all stripes. His letters to Learned Hand reveal that he believed strongly in the ideals upon which American society had been founded and had faith that the shortcomings of government, politics, and culture were worth overcoming in defense of those ideals.1 He also had close relationships that gave him unique insights into current events and the principles that bound society together. In addition to Hand, who remained deeply engaged in current events, Salinger kept in close touch with John Keenan, his counterintelligence partner throughout the war, who had reacted to his experiences by joining the New York Police Department, where he was now a chief.* With the insights of such knowledgeable friends at hand, Salinger made his first and only foray into the arena of public social comment.
In the autumn of 1959, the New York Post ran an article by Peter J. McElroy entitled “Who Speaks for the Damned?” The editorial drew attention to the finality of a New York State law that denied the possibility of parole to prisoners given life sentences. For Salinger, who was most likely familiar with the law through his friendships with Hand and Keenan, the article’s title was a challenge. On December 9, the Post printed his response on page 49 of the newspaper. “Justice,” Salinger wrote, “is at best one of those words that make us look away or turn up our coat collars, and justice-without-mercy must easily be the bleakest, coldest combinations of words in the language.”2 Salinger’s position was clear and his letter to the editor was scathing. What flawed the New York State law prohibiting parole was not only its lack of “mercy” but also its denial of the existence of redemption. Even if a prisoner experienced a complete change of character, the law was so ironclad that it removed any reconsideration of the sentence. Rather than allow for the possibility of penitence, the state insisted upon incarcerating these convicts for the rest of their lives without recourse, “to rust to death,” as Salinger noted with derision, “in a sanitary, airy cell superior in every way to anything offered in the 16th century.” For Salinger, to whom salvation was the goal of life, its denial by the state of New York was sacrilege. And the victims of that sacrilege, those imprisoned without hope of change, seemed to him to be “the most crossed-off, man-forsaken men on earth.”
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An uncomfortable episode began on November 7, 1959, when Salinger received a letter from his former editor and mentor Whit Burnett. A decade before, Story magazine had fallen upon hard times, a situation that Burnett blamed on an unscrupulous business manager. As a result, the magazine had been forced to suspend regular publication and existed only through sporadic hardcover collections of former contributions. In 1949, Salinger had permitted the rerelease of “The Long Debut of Lois Taggett” for one of those editions. Burnett now planned to resurrect the magazine and wrote to Salinger asking for a similar donation. Not only was the request ill timed, but it also had a tone that bordered on reproach. “This will probably come as a surprise—to hear a voice from the past,” Burnett began, “but not a past as long as the Columbia days when you sat looking out the window.”3 Burnett went on to ask for permission to publish two Salinger stories still in his possession that had never been released.* Both had been rejected by him years before. Now, in light of Salinger’s success and fame, they had taken on a new appeal. “One is a wartime story and might seem dated,” Burnett reasoned. “It is ‘A Young Man in a Stuffed Shirt’ and it is, I think, one of the best of its kind we have read. The other, more like ‘Elaine