My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff

“Why didn’t you tell me?”
    “I tried to. I called all day on Friday, but you weren’t home. I must have called ten times.”
    “She did,” said Hugh, and I looked to him gratefully.
    “He said not to, though,” I clarified. My boss glared at Hugh, opening her mouth to shout. “
Jerry
said not to. Jerry said not to call you at home. That it could wait until Monday.”
    “Well, it’s Monday now! Why haven’t you told me?”
    An hour later, the shouting began, and Hugh came out to watch my boss’s door with me. “She’s just going to yell for me the minute she gets off the phone,” he said. “I may as well wait out here.”
    “Are you sure, Jerry?” we heard her shout. “Well, of course, if that’s what you want. We’ll take care of it.”
    “So good to talk to you,” she shouted. “As always.”
    When the door opened, she emerged quietly, thoughtfully. “I need to talk to Carolyn …” Her voice trailed off. “Maybe I should talk to Max.” She drifted toward the front of the office, then thought better of it, turned on her heel, and trod back to us. “Salinger wants to publish a new book,” she said, in the same dreamy tone of voice. “Or an old book. An old story. ‘Hapworth.’ A publisher approached him about putting it out as a stand-alone volume. And he wants to do it.”
    “ ‘Hapworth’?” asked Hugh, his voice choked with surprise. “He wants to publish ‘
Hapworth
’ as a book?”
    “Well, it
is
very long,” said my boss. “It’s really a novella. It
could
be a book.”
    “I think a novella is ninety pages, minimum,” said Hugh stiffly, with a particularly sharp sigh. “ ‘Hapworth’ is maybesixty. With very wide margins, I
suppose
it could be a book.” He pursed his lips. “Just because it
can
be a book doesn’t mean it
should
be a book.”
    “Well,” said my boss, emitting her own sigh. “He seems pretty keen on doing this.”
    “Really?” asked Hugh. “Are you sure this isn’t some whim? He’s not going to change his mind tomorrow?”
    “Well, I’d say not,” my boss said, laughing. “He’s been thinking it over for eight years.”
    Hugh and I looked at each other. “Eight years?” he said.
    “Yesiree. The publisher first approached him eight years ago. In 1988.”
    “The publisher approached him directly?” Hugh shook his head in amazement.
    “Yup,” my boss said, swinging her arms back and forth. It was hard to tell if she was delighted or horrified by this turn of events. “They, or he—it seems like this press might be a one-man show—wrote him a letter.” She raised one finger in the air and smiled. “On a typewriter! Jerry was very impressed by that.”
    It had not, until that moment, occurred to me that the Agency’s typewriters-only policy had anything to do with Salinger. Was it possible that Salinger had somehow mandated our lack of modern office machinery? This seemed crazy, but possible. Or was it simply that the Agency—like an aging star of the high school football team—had simply stopped developing during its glory days? That instead of growing and changing and adapting, it had retreated into the business of
being
the Agency. Which meant following the same rituals and procedures it’d followed in 1942, when Dorothy Olding first signed Salinger.
    “How did the publisher get his address?” I asked. Hugh had told me that an assistant had been fired, a few years back, for giving out Salinger’s address to a reporter.
    “He just sent it to J. D. Salinger, Cornish, New Hampshire.” She made a clucking sound with her teeth. “And the mailman delivered it. Can you believe it?”
    “No,” I said. I was impressed.
    “Why has no one else thought of that?” asked Hugh.
    “I don’t know,” said my boss, pulling a pack of cigarettes out of her jacket pocket and peeling off the plastic wrapper. “I don’t know. Maybe someone has.”
    Hugh looked a bit as if he were going to throw up. “Which publisher is it? Why