by JILL LEPORE
IMAGE/Wikipedia
J. D. Salinger’s eight-thousand-word story, “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor,” appeared in The New Yorker on April 8, 1950. It’s one of his best stories, and one of his shortest; at the last minute, he cut six pages. Not much happens in it except that a terribly lonely man writes a story for a terribly clever girl. Salinger is sometimes compared to Lewis Carroll; Esmé was his Alice. The New Yorker rejected a lot of his stories but loved “For Esmé,” and Salinger got more letters about it than he received for anything else he’d ever written. “The Esmé story was just the shot in the arm I needed,” he told his editor, the boost that made it possible for him to finish the book he was trying to write; “The Catcher in the Rye,” Salinger’s only novel, was published a year later. There was talk of a movie. Billy Wilder wanted to make it, but Salinger refused. He told Elia Kazan, “I fear Holden wouldn’t like it.” (“If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies,” Caulfield says on page 2.) Salinger didn’t hate the movies, but he regretted having sold an earlier story, “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” to Samuel Goldwyn, who padded it into a daffy romance called “My Foolish Heart.” “My contempt for Hollywood is immeasurable,” Salinger wrote. Also, he didn’t think “The Catcher in the Rye” would necessarily make a good movie. “There are readymade ‘scenes,’ ” he explained to one rights-inquirer, but “the weight of the book is in the narrator’s voice.” To another, he sent a testy telegram: “IM AFRAID THE ANSWER IS EMPHATICALLY NO REPEAT EMPHATICALLY.”
For a long time, Salinger had the same policy for “Esmé.” A month after the story appeared, “an English film maggot,” as Salinger called him, said he wanted to make a movie out of it; Salinger wasn’t interested. In 1953, “Esmé” was reprinted in Salinger’s “Nine Stories,” a collection whose U.K. edition was titled “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor: And Other Stories.” The following year, the BBC tried to acquire the rights to adapt “Esmé” for a radio drama series hosted by Laurence Olivier. Salinger said no. In 1958, Salinger’s U.K. publisher sold paperback rights to the story collection to a publishing house that issued a cheap pocketbook whose flashy cover pictured Esmé as a dishy blonde, with the tagline “Explosive and Absorbing—A Painful and Pitiable Gallery of Men, Women, Adolescents, and Children.” Salinger never spoke to the publisher again.
“Some of my best friends are children,” Salinger wrote in 1955. “In fact, all of my best friends are children.” There were two kinds in his work: earlier versions of himself, and girls. Some Salinger stories, Norman Mailer once said, “seem to have been written for high-school girls,” which was untrue but seems to have been the worst insult Mailer could think of. Salinger was among a crowd of postwar writers whom Leslie Fiedler called Teenage Impersonators, along with Mailer, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs. One reason that Salinger’s writing can seem juvenile is that it contains no adult sexuality, which is not the case with Mailer, Kerouac, and Burroughs. Sex would have ruined Salinger’s girls, narratively speaking, since their purpose is to serve as moral housekeepers, the cleaners of men’s souls. As Fiedler pointed out, “The series which begins with ‘Esmé’ goes on through ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish,’ where the girl-savior appears too late to save Seymour, oldest of the Glass family; and reaches an appropriate climax in ‘Catcher in the Rye,’ where the savior is the little sister.” When I was a little sister, girls who were readers had, as a rule, two choices: stories about boys or stories about unsullied girls. (So many little Nells, so few Elizabeth Bennetts.) Salinger knocked my kneesocks off, at least until “Lolita” ruined him for me, which wasn’t Salinger’s fault. But these things happen.
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