J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [219]
This is Orchises Press. There has been a delay in the publication of “Hapworth 16, 1924.” Definite publication information is not available at this time. We apologize for the indefiniteness and the confusion.22
The episode scorched Salinger fans, a sensation exacerbated twelve years later when Internet booksellers replayed the feint only to deliver disappointment once again. Roger Lathbury, owner of Orchises Press, blamed himself for the failed outcome. After making extensive arrangements with Salinger to repackage “Hapworth” and actually meeting with the author in the very public restaurant of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., Lathbury carelessly let word of the project slip to the press. Salinger’s reaction was predictable. He recoiled and the book deal collapsed. However, the extent of Lathbury’s resulting self-recrimination may have been undeserved. It is possible that Salinger’s interest in releasing “Hapworth” was rooted in a desire for control rather than a concern for literature. In 1997, Salinger legally owned complete rights to every story and book he had ever published, with the notable exception of “Hapworth 16, 1924,” the rights to which he continued to share with The New Yorker. Had he published “Hapworth” in book form as intended, the work would have been considered new and benefited from stricter copyright laws than it did as a 1965 story.
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By the late 1990s, Salinger was nearing eighty but remained healthy, if increasingly deaf and slightly stooped with age. His hair had gone from jet black to snow white years before, but his eyes retained the same dark intensity that had mesmerized the young women of Ursinus College during his youth. The children had long grown and embarked on their own careers. In 1979, after selling the cottage and returning much of the original 90 acres to her former husband, Claire had moved from Cornish to the West Coast, where she constructed a new life.* While Salinger could look back on an impressive array of women who had been drawn to him throughout his life, he had seldom chosen wisely. Oona O’Neill had embodied everything in a woman he both despised and craved. His marriage to Sylvia Welter had been impetuous. And in Claire Douglas, Salinger had managed to find the one person whose black moods could rival his own. Salinger dated a number of women after his divorce from Claire, and he continued to make poor decisions. In 1998, one of those choices would rise to haunt him in a very public way.
In April 1972, Salinger read an essay in The New York Times Magazine entitled “An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life” by a college student, Joyce Maynard. The article intrigued Salinger, as did the demure young writer herself, whose photograph was featured on the magazine’s cover. He wrote to Maynard conveying his admiration. After an exchange of letters, Maynard found herself living with Salinger in Cornish, romantically involved with a man thirty-five years her senior and light-years beyond her in experience. Salinger was certainly attracted to Maynard, but he proceeded cautiously. Within a year, their bond had disintegrated and Maynard was back at home with her parents, cast away, she decided, by a man who had used her callously.
In 1998, Maynard published her memoir, At Home in the World, recounting her relationship with Salinger twenty-six years before. Her account was damning. It depicted Salinger as being cold and manipulative, of taking advantage of an innocent girl at an age when she was most impressionable. The book received mixed reviews and its motivation was immediately called into question, but readers pored over the text in rapt