J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [186]
Salinger did not have to wait for the passage of years for vindication. Nor did he need to depend upon friends such as William Maxwell for defense. Satisfaction for Salinger and the supreme answer to his critics came on Wednesday, September 14, 1961, the day Little, Brown and Company published Franny and Zooey. Lines of enthusiastic readers formed in front of bookstores, anxious to purchase Salinger’s new release. Within the first two weeks of publication, the book sold more than 125,000 copies and was catapulted to number one on the New York Times best-seller list, a position never attained by The Catcher in the Rye. The presses of Little, Brown could barely keep up with the demand. In its first year Franny and Zooey underwent no fewer than eleven hardcover printings and remained on the best-seller list for six months. Even after falling off the list, it stubbornly slipped back on, placing it among the best-selling novels of both 1961 and 1962.
Within the sober cover, the stories “Franny” and “Zooey” remained unaltered from their original appearances in The New Yorker. For new material, Salinger had chosen to write a short commentary that he added to the book’s jacket flap, detailing the position of both stories as sections of an ongoing saga about the Glass family. Aside from the Glass stories already published, Salinger promised his public that more sections of the series were awaiting release by The New Yorker. This, of course, was not true, but Salinger led readers to believe that Franny and Zooey was but the first of many such installments. “I have a great deal of thoroughly unscheduled material on paper, too,” he claimed, “but I expect to be fussing with it, to use a popular trade term, for some time to come.”24
There can be little doubt that Salinger fully expected to fulfill his promise to his readers when he released the jacket flap commentary, but less forgivable is the self-serving untruth with which he closed the segment. “My wife has asked me to add, however, in a single explosion of candor, that I live in Westport with my dog.” This unnecessary aside was, of course, false and the inclusion of the word “candor” especially unfortunate. It was common knowledge that Salinger lived in Cornish, and to claim otherwise not only showed his desperation for privacy but proved that he was out of touch with the extent of his own fame.
The reality of Salinger’s position became inescapable on September 15, the day after the release of Franny and Zooey. As lines once again formed in front of bookstores and newspapers continued to scream of Salinger’s unseemly love for his characters, Time, the most widely circulated and respected newsmagazine in the nation, hit the newsstands with Salinger on its cover. American culture held few greater acknowledgments of celebrity; to make the cover of Time was to be cherished and envied. But for Salinger, it was an assault. Reflecting on the experiences of previous attempts to uncover the details of Salinger’s life, Time determined to leave no stone unturned. It had sent reporters to Cornish, where they badgered his neighbors, his grocer, and even his mailman. The magazine’s investigators were dispatched to Valley Forge and Washington to track down old classmates and members of the 12th Regiment. Others were sent to stalk the offices of The New Yorker, to lurk about Park Avenue, and to ambush Salinger’s sister, Doris, at her job at Bloomingdale’s.
The resulting feature article, entitled “Sonny—an Introduction,” began in a way that must have made Salinger’s heart sink. It relayed the supposed findings of an unnamed group of Cornish locals who, driven to madness by curiosity, sneak over Salinger’s fence to spy on the goings-on of his compound. After lurking about apparently unseen, the prowlers describe what they have observed: Salinger’s daily routine, the articles