J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [82]
Angry with Burnett and bitter over the way he had been treated, Salinger committed another in a series of irrational acts. He took what he had completed of the Holden Caulfield novel and submitted it for publication as a ninety-page novella. Information on this is scant, and we know of it only through William Maxwell, who heard the account from Salinger in 1951. Maxwell indicated only that the manuscript had not been presented to The New Yorker.15 Yet it is reasonable to assume that this original form of The Catcher in the Rye was submitted to Simon and Schuster. At the time of his fallout with Burnett, Salinger had grown close to Don Congdon. If he wanted to submit the abbreviated version of Catcher for publication—with The New Yorker and Story Press out of the equation—Congdon, and Simon and Schuster, would have been the logical choice.
Spite was not the sole reason for offering the ninety-page Catcher. After working on the novel for six years, he was becoming exasperated with it. Experiencing difficulty writing even the shortest of stories after the war, the prospect of producing a novel now seemed slight. In his interview with Esquire the previous October, Salinger had admitted doubts that he was capable of completing the novel. He confessed himself to be a short-story writer rather than a novelist; or, as he had put it, “a dash man and not a miler.”16
Salinger’s judgment soon returned, and he realized how impulsive he had been to send off Catcher incomplete. He quickly retracted the manuscript and recommitted himself, at least emotionally, to its completion. But it had been a close call. He also turned once more to short-story writing and in the closing months of 1946 began to resemble the dedicated author he had been before 1945. The outbreak of impulsiveness that had begun with the end of the war and his marriage to Sylvia had come to an end.
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By November 1946, Salinger had finished his first substantial story since writing “The Stranger” a year and a half before. Through it, he sought to turn back the clock to before the war and its disoriented aftermath. “A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All” returns Salinger to the decks of the SS Kungsholm, where he had served on the ship’s entertainment staff, back in the final carefree moments prior to the Second World War. While Salinger might have used the characters’ transition into adulthood as a metaphor for society’s own loss of innocence at the onset of war, he preferred to exploit the narrative to correct personal mistakes and romanticize the lost past. He avoided attempting anything original in this story and revised an old plotline, rewriting “The Children’s Echelon” with a reverse ending.
Although Salinger strove to write during the day, his nights were spent in Greenwich Village, where he socialized with a group of trendy artist types and joined a small group of poker players, which met each Thursday night at Don Congdon’s apartment in lower Manhattan. Salinger recalled the poker group and this period of his life in “Seymour—an Introduction,” when Buddy Glass mentions that he “went through a short period … when I played a semi-private, strenuous, losing game of turning into a good mixer, a regular guy, and I had people in frequently to play poker.”17
Besides playing poker and striving to be a “good mixer,” Salinger spent considerable time in Greenwich Village’s cafés and nightclubs, frequenting bohemian spots such as the Blue Angel and Reuben Bleu, where an assortment of in-vogue intellectuals regularly met to discuss the arts and peruse upcoming talents. A typical night on the town for Salinger began at Renato’s Restaurant in the Village for dinner and proceeded a few blocks up to the discreet bar Chumley’s. There he and his companions would