This Sunday’s New York Times printed a section from Al Silverman’s book The Time of Their Lives: The Golden Age of Great American Publishers that recounted the story of recently deceased Robert Giroux (see Dan Torday’s blog entry) having to back out of a handshake agreement to publish J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. The head of Harcourt, where Giroux was working at the time, sent it to the textbook department for a second opinion because it dealt with a prep school student. They said, in Mr. Giroux’s words, “It’s not for us.”
The Friday before this I was mining the archives at the Harry Ransom Center here in Texas, leafing through the two boxes of Salinger material they’ve managed to obtain. Of note was a collection of fragments from an unpublished story that Salinger told his friend Elizabeth Murray was “a horror story (my first and last) called Mrs. Hincher.” (It was also known as “Paula” depending on the draft.)
The story, though incomplete in the Ransom archive, gives some clue to Salinger’s process (he later completed the story for Stag Magazine but it was never published). Pages are sometimes labeled alphabetically (A, B, C) and sometimes by number (1, 2, 3), making it clear that he worked in multiple drafts, and later compiled the final story from these various versions. Paragraphs are rewritten and reworked multiple times on the same page, a process of addition, subtraction, and repetition that reveals Salinger to be an instantaneous editor and not a banger who went over his work later with a heavy red pen. Because of the fragmented nature of the Ransom Center’s collection, the story is in no particular order and large sections are missing. It makes the process of reading it wonderfully vertiginous.
The story concerns the Hinchers. Mrs. Hincher spends 23 hours of the day locked in a room, only coming out when no one else is around. Mr. Hincher lies to his coworkers about Mrs. Hincher’s whereabouts. An earlier section shows the Hinchers before this odd behavior, playing casino and reading to one another. Then the POV shifts to a dinner party where a Mr. Perkins tells the story of Mr. Hincher confessing to him about his wife’s “antics.” She claims to have given birth but won’t let Mr. Hincher see the child. This goes on for months and no doctor is called and Hincher keeps his distance (they’d earlier been told by a doctor they couldn’t have children). After arranging a “playdate” with a relative but still not seeing his child, Mr. Hincher breaks down the door and finds his wife naked in a crib. She then calls him the “meanest” man she’s ever known. In a handwritten section that ends the archive’s fragments, Salinger has Perkins tell of the Hinchers subsequent vacation to Florida where Mr. Hincher accosts a hotel employee and is put in a state hospital. Mrs. Hincher returns home and resumes her job as a librarian, where she is “doing a brilliant job of it.”
In the “Mrs. Hincher/Paula” story, there are undertones of other Salinger stories–the framing device of ”The Laughing Man,” the psychological themes of “Teddy.” Still, the fragmented text gives few clues as to how Salinger intended the story’s information to be revealed and his writing process makes it almost impossible to put the pages in an exact order.
In terms of the rest of the archive, Salinger’s letters are largely from a period before or during the writing of Catcher in the Rye. He consistently talks about how his writing is going, shows both ego and humility depending on the day, and makes note of where he’s been published recently. In the letters, writing forms the core of his life; his correspondence is almost exclusively related to how his work is going. It is refreshing to meet the Salinger of these letters, not yet a recluse, just a struggling author. There are hints of his future disappearance–a reticence to talk to Oona O’Neill Chaplin’s biographer, a tendency to send letters from “characters” rather than himself (e.g. one letter comes from “Cortez” who explains “our ???z’ is pronounced like your ???th’”).
Given the scarcity of Salinger materials available to the public, it may be too easy to make sweeping generalizations from the Ransom Center’s small archive, though it was Giroux who said the young writer named Jerome with the “horsey” face reminded him, more than anything, of Hamlet (and that proved to be quite spot-on).