Salinger: The Heart of a Broken Story 1 comments

By Joel Hartse

On October 10, 1986, J.D. Salinger travelled to New York City to meet with a lawyer. It had been just over twenty years since he had published anything and he was not about to see any more of it published—even brief excerpts of letters he'd written to friends and editors years ago, which were to be included in an unauthorized biography by Ian Hamilton.

Salinger wanted to stop Hamilton from quoting from any of his letters at all. His lawyer, Robert Callagy, wanted to know why Salinger was so protective of his writing. We know about this exchange from the somewhat expurgated version of Hamilton's book which was eventually published.

"Could you described for me what works of fiction you have written which have not been published?" Callagy asked, seemingly on behalf of anyone who has ever read Catcher in the Rye.

"It would be very difficult to do," Salinger replied. And if the twenty—and perhaps now, forty—years' worth of manuscripts the author is rumored to have been stockpiling are anything like his final published "short story" (this is one case where scare quotes seem more a necessity than a distraction), "Hapworth 16, 1924"—a sprawling, sentimental, slangy, spiritual mess of allusions, ideas, character sketches, and devotions—his response is an honest one.

"It's very difficult to answer," Salinger responded when Callagy pressed him to reveal whether he had written any other novels. "I don't write that way. I just start writing fiction and see what happens to it."

Another honest answer. Even as Salinger's craft, in the twenty-five short years he was publishing, evolved from the "rattling good story" to the empathetic kunstlerroman to the near-formless syncretistic sermon, there is always in his stories a great freedom and freshness. It's both a humanistic and religious impulse—and perhaps a uniquely American one—that imbues Salinger's fiction with a sense that anything, in fact, might happen. Holden Caulfield might call up Jane Gallagher, although he never does. Seymour Glass might go swimming with a little girl or he might shoot himself. Franny Glass might drop out of college and become a nun, but she might finish her theater degree and become a great actress.

From the tight prose and dialogue of "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" to the claustrophobic character sketch of "Seymour: An Introduction," the question of what happens in Salinger is rarely settled, and often surprising. Ihab Hasan, one of few literary critics who has given the author's work the attention it deserves and that its author never wanted, refers a"rare quixotic gesture" made by Salinger's characters, a sudden action, seemingly unnecesary but almost sacramental in the way it brings hidden truths to life.

One of Salinger's earlier short stories, one which blends the slick New York romantic streak of his younger life with the contemplative pseudo-metafiction of his work in the 1960, has recently been republished online by Esquire, where it first appeared in 1941. "The Heart of a Broken Story" is a deconstruction of the boy-meets-girl romance, in which, Salinger writes, "the writer must go about the business of having the boy meet the girl." But, he continues, "I couldn't do it with this one. Not and have it make sense."

For all his recalcitrance and sentimentality, I really get the impression that Salinger was almost always being honest, writing from someplace real, alive, solid. By all accounts, he was intensely religious, and I think he knew that the Word became flesh, and that anybody who clickety-clacks on a typewriter in 1941 laptop in 2010 is trying to make that same miracle occur again.

It is impossible. It may never happen again. Yet we persist in writing, rewriting, digging deep, honestly toiling to scrape away the dirt and expose the Heart of a Broken Story.