J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [86]
*Until its closure in 2007 for indefinite structural repairs, Chumley’s remained largely unchanged from when Salinger was a regular customer. Proud of its popularity among famous authors over the decades, the bar’s owners festooned the walls with photographs of well-known literary patrons. Salinger’s photograph hung next to that of Ring Lardner, one of Salinger’s favorite authors.
*According to Time magazine, starting in late 1946, Salinger would distribute reading lists of Zen-related material to the women he was dating. This was apparently his way of gauging their spirituality.
*There is a temptation to compare Raymond Ford to Charles Hanson Towne, Salinger’s Columbia poetry professor, who, like Ford, authored a number of successful poetry collections. However, the character of Raymond Ford has little else in common with Towne.
†Salinger uses the occasion of this story to reject the pessimistic outlook of T. S. Eliot in his poem The Waste Land, as he did in “Last Day of the Last Furlough.” Existence is “Not a wasteland,” Ford declares, “but a great inverted forest. With all foliage underground.”
7. Recognition
When the German army surrendered on May 8, 1945, the world erupted in celebration, but, fearful of being engulfed by emotion, Salinger found himself unable to face the occasion. Instead, he spent the day alone, sitting on his bed, staring at a .45-caliber pistol clutched in his hands. What would it feel like, he wondered, were he to fire the gun through his left palm?1
The scene is a macabre one and speaks powerfully of Salinger’s feelings of estrangement and imbalance after the war. These sentiments continued to percolate within him at the close of 1946, drawing him closer to that “trembling melody” that he recognized must be written—a melody of words that would give voice to all those who cowered in introspection while the world around them rejoiced. A year later Salinger would release the first chords of that melody.
In November 1946, Salinger was informed that The New Yorker was finally going to publish “Slight Rebellion off Madison” in its December issue. The news had come to his agent, Dorothy Olding, through William Maxwell, the same editor who, in January 1944, had declared the boastful Salinger “just not right” for The New Yorker.
Salinger was ecstatic. The anxious and compliant persona of his youth once again rose to the fore, just as it had in 1941, when the magazine had first accepted the story. After a year of inactivity and five months of furious writing, he was desperate to reignite his career. The New Yorker had held “Slight Rebellion” for five long years, and he had abandoned hope of ever seeing the story in print. And although he had never stopped submitting works to the magazine, he had nearly given up on The New Yorker itself. Now, when the opportunity to see his byline in the magazine he most coveted finally arose, he was willing and happy to do anything. This time he uttered no complaint when Maxwell requested revisions to the story before release, as he had in 1943.2
The timing of the news about “Slight Rebellion” was not without a happy irony. Salinger had recently completed “A Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All,” which recalls the week most closely associated with “Slight Rebellion.” This caused Salinger to relive his own anticipation of “Slight Rebellion”’s publication in 1941 and relive the circumstances that had put a halt to the story’s release. It was as if he had put pen to paper and turned back time, resurrecting the very week that had determined the story’s fate in order to bring it to a happier conclusion.