Smith Rakoff - My Salinger Year

ALSO BY JOANNA RAKOFF

A Fortunate Age

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2014 by Joanna Rakoff

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rakoff, Joanna, 1972
My Salinger year / by Joanna Rakoff.First edition.
pages cm
This is a Borzoi bookT.p. verso.
ISBN 978-0-307-95800-6 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-307-95801-3 (eBook)1. Rakoff, Joanna, 19722. Authors, American21st centuryBiography. 3. Literature publishingUnited StatesHistory21st century. I. Title.
PS 3618 .A 437 Z 46 2014
818.603dc23
[B]
2013026931

Front-of-jacket photograph by Gail Albert Halaban
Jacket design by Peter Mendelsund and Oliver Munday

v3.1

For Keeril,

with whom this story begins and ends

It was a day, God knows, not only of rampant signs and symbols but of wildly extensive communication via the written word.

J. D. SALINGER , Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters

Abigail Thomas describes memoir as the truth as best she can tell it, and this book is, indeed, the truth, told as best I could. In writing it, I interviewed people I knew during the period chronicled and consulted my own writings from the time and the years shortly thereafter.

To maintain narrative flow, Ive fiddled with the chronology of a few events, and Ive changed the namesand identifying traitsof most, though not all, of the people.

Those minor adjustments aside, this is the actual story of my Salinger year.

There were hundreds of us, thousands of us, carefully dressing in the gray morning light of Brooklyn, Queens, the Lower East Side, leaving our apartments weighed down by tote bags heavy with manuscripts, which we read as we stood in line at the Polish bakery, the Greek deli, the corner diner, waiting to order our coffee, light and sweet, and our Danish, to take on the train, where we would hope for a seat so that we might read more before we arrived at our offices in midtown, Soho, Union Square. We were girls, of course, all of us girls, emerging from the 6 train at Fifty-First Street and walking past the Waldorf-Astoria, the Seagram Building on Park, all of us clad in variations on a themethe neat skirt and sweater, redolent of Sylvia Plath at Smitheach element purchased by parents in some comfortable suburb, for our salaries were so low we could barely afford our rent, much less lunch in the vicinities of our offices or dinners out, even in the cheap neighborhoods wed populated, sharing floor-throughs with other girls like us, assistants at other agencies or houses or the occasional literary nonprofit. All day we sat, our legs crossed at the knee, on our swivel chairs, answering the call of our bosses, ushering in writers with the correct mixture of enthusiasm and remove, never belying the fact that we got into this business not because we wanted to fetch glasses of water for visiting writers but because we wanted to be writers ourselves, and this seemed the most socially acceptable way to go about doing so, though it was already becoming clear that this was not at all the way to go about doing so. Years ago, as some of our parents pointed outas my own parents endlessly pointed outwe would have been called secretaries. And as with the girls in the secretarial pool, back in our parents day, very few of us would be promoted, very few of us would, as they say, make it. We whispered about the lucky ones, the ones with bosses who allowed them to take on books or clients, who mentored them, or the ones who showed massive, rule-breaking initiative, wondering if, somehow, that would be us, if we wanted it badly enough to wait out the years of low pay, the years of answering a bosss beck and call, or if what we wanted, still, was to be on the other side of it all, to be the writer knocking confidently on our bosss door.

We all have to start somewhere. For me, that somewhere was a dark room, lined from floor to ceiling with books, rows and rows of books sorted by author, books from every conceivable era of the twentieth century, their covers bearing the design hallmarks of the moments in which theyd been released into the worldthe whimsical line drawings of the 1920s, the dour mustards and maroons of the late 1950s, the gauzy watercolor portraits of the 1970sbooks that defined my days and the days of the others who worked within this dark warren of offices. When my colleagues uttered the names on the spines of those books, their voices turned husky and reverential, for these were names of godlike status to the literarily inclined. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dylan Thomas, William Faulkner. But this was, and is, a literary agency, which means those names on the spines represented something else, something else that leads people to speak in hushed voices, something that Id previously thought had absolutely nothing to do with books and literature: money.

Three Days of Snow

On my first day at the Agency, I dressed carefully in clothing that struck me as suitable for work in an office: a short wool skirt, in Black Watch plaid, and a dark green turtleneck sweater with a zipper up the back, from the 1960s, purchased in a London thrift shop. On my legs, thick black tights. On my feet, black suede loafers of Italian provenance, purchased for me by my mother, who believed good shoes a necessity, not a luxury. I had never worked in an office before, but I had actedas a child, in college, afterand I regarded this outfit as a costume. My role being the Bright Young Assistant. The Girl Friday.

I paid, perhaps, too much attention to my dress, because I knew almost nothing about the job that awaited me or the firm that had hired me. In fact, I still couldnt quite believe that I had indeed been hired, it happened so quickly. Three months earlier, I had dropped out of graduate schoolor finished my masters, depending on how you looked at itand flown home from London, arriving at my parents house in the suburbs with little more than an enormous box of books. I want to write my own poetry, I told my college boyfriend, from the ancient pay phone in the hallway of my Hampstead dorm, not analyze other peoples poetry. I did not tell my parents this. I did not tell them anything other than that I felt lonely in London. And they, in keeping with our familys code of silence, asked me nothing about my plans. Instead, my mother took me shopping: at Lord & Taylor, she selected a suit, wool gabardine trimmed in velvet, with a pencil skirt and a fitted vest, like something Katharine Hepburn wore in