Free Salinger by Paul Alexander

emotional meltdown. Over drinks, he bares his soul to Sally in a long monologue during
which he confesses he hates“everything.” “I hate living in New York,” he says. “I hate the Fifth Avenue buses and Madison Avenue buses and
getting out at the center door.” That’s not all, either. He hates plays, movies, even fitting sessions at Brooks Brothers. So he tells Sally he wants the two of them to leave New York,
go to Vermont or “around there,” and live in a cabin near a brook until the money he has—one hundred and twelve dollars—runs out. Then he’ll get a job up there so they
can live in the country. Always the good WASP, Sally cannot begin to understand the motivation behind Holden’s “slight rebellion.” “You can’t just
do
something like that,” she tells him.
    The story ends with Holden making a drunken telephone call in the middle of the night to Sally to tell her that he will join her to trim her Christmas tree as planned. Even so, there is a
disturbed, and disturbing, quality to the conversation. Holden’s line “Trim the tree for ya,” which he repeats over and over like a mantra, has a pleading, desperate quality to
it, as if he is asking Sally to give him some sign she still wants him despite what he has told her before. She says what he hopes she will say—yes, she wants him to come trim her
tree—but still, that answer doesn’t seem to be enough.
    By inventing Holden Caulfield, Salinger had entered an arena where he would be able to produce significant fiction. Holden was that genuine article—the literary creation that speaks from
the soul of the author to the heart of the reader. Salinger had to realize Holden was special because he started another story about him right away. At this rate, perhaps he would end up with a
series of stories about Holden. There was one other fact Salinger knew, and it was important. AsSalinger would admit years later, Holden was an autobiographical character.
Holden’s drunken telephone call to Sally, for example, was based on an episode Salinger himself had lived. In the future Salinger would repeatedly contend that fictitious events had to sound
real to the reader. In Salinger’s case, he may have ensured that authenticity by basing his characters on real people, himself among them.
    Salinger wanted to do something with “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” right away. So, at his urging, Olding submitted the story to the
New Yorker,
and in November, much to
Salinger’s surprise, the editors accepted it, probably looking to run it right away since the story is set during the Christmas season. When he got word of the acceptance, Salinger was
overjoyed. He had been eager to break into the pages of the
New Yorker;
at the amazingly young age of twenty-two, he had been successful. Elated, Salinger wrote to William Maxwell, who
would be his editor for this story at the magazine. He had another story about Holden, but he was going to hold off on sending it to him, Salinger said. Instead, Salinger told Maxwell, he would try
a different story on him—another one about prep-school children, an obese boy and his two sisters.
    As the
New Yorker
prepared to publish “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and all the warnings Roosevelt had made through
the years about radical nationalism growing uncontrollably in parts of Europe and Asia seemed more than justified. Within hours, Roosevelt asked Congress, and Congress agreed, to declare war on
Japan. The start of war meant the editors of the
New Yorker
did not feel it was appropriateto publish—so soon after Pearl Harbor—a story about a
neurotic teenage boy whose “slight rebellion” is prompted by the fact that he has become disenchanted with the life he leads as the son in a wealthy family in New York. Holden’s
problems were trivial compared to world developments. So the magazine’s editors postponed the publication of Salinger’s