Between 1940 and 1965, J.D. Salinger published a total of thirty (the right figure is thirty-five) stories and one novel. Of these, thirteen were collected into his three well known volumes: Nine Stories, Franny & Zooey, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction; the remaining twenty-two have long since remained buried, and largely unknown (except to the faithful few), in the magazines. These twenty-two stories constitute the material of these two volumes. Some immature, some excellent in themselves, together, they are perhaps the skelton (sic) key to Salinger’s continuously developing religious theme, tracable (sic) from the earliest social struggles of the suburban adolesents (sic), to the frustrations of the wartime intellectual, and to the literary-mystic figure of Seymour himself, the culmination of a tradition of deepening self-consciousness.
Incredible as it may seem, these few lines constitute the whole preface of a pirated edition of all the short stories Salinger had refused to collect in a book before becoming a recluse in the boondocks of New Hampshire and adopting a long lasting self-imposed authorial silence. When The Catcher in the Rye came out in 1951, Salinger had already published 27 stories in various magazines, such as Collier´s, The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Story, Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan and The New Yorker. Six of these were included in Nine Stories, published in 1953, but since then Salinger’s appearances became less and less frequent, either in person or in writing: Franny and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters were only published in 1955, Zooey in 1957, Seymour: an Introduction in 1959, and Hapworth 16, 1924 in the June 19, 1965, issue of The New Yorker, taking up almost the entire magazine. This was his last original work to see the light of day until he died 45 years later.
Meanwhile, the fame of the author increased by leaps and bounds since he had been made the object of a veritable cult, the guru of every adolescent who identified himself with Holden Caufield in rejecting the phoniness of adult life. When it became clear that the other stories would never be collected in a book, the magazines where they had first appeared started to be hunted all over the United States as Salinger’s young devotees used a safety razor as their weapon of choice: it is said that not a single of these magazines remains intact in university libraries.
In the second half of the 1970’s I learned that Salinger had filed a civil suit against a certain “John Greenberg” and several bookstores, alleging violation of the copyright laws because a bootleg edition of his 22 stories was being sold on the lam all over the country. This led Salinger to come out of isolation and, in an article that appeared in The New York Times, claim that “There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”
By then I had co-translated into the Portuguese spoken in Brazil both The Catcher in the Rye and Nine Stories, but, living in Brasília, had no chance of committing the pecadillo of buying the pirated edition and reading the self-banned stories.
But it so happens that years later I was roaming the streets of Paris late in the afternoon, after participating in a meeting on international trade, and looked at the window of a modest bookstore. My eyes were attracted to two small volumes with white covers and the elaborate image of a woman and a girl sitting on a bed with canopy and bulky pillows talking to a soldier who sits in an armchair in front of them. On top of the covers, in red letters over a rose-coloured background, J. D. Salinger written in the best Belle Époque style; a little below, March 1940 in both Vol.1 and Vol. 2 (the precise month and year when Salinger’s first story, The Young Folks, was published). At the bottom, the titles of the stories (17 in the first volume and 5 in the second), together with a rosy rectangle containing the words that astonished me: Featuring The Complete Uncollected Short Stories.
Now I know that this kind of event has a beautiful name, serendipity, but that day I simply ran into the store sure that somebody was already finalizing the purchase of that little treasure. Of course, there was no customer inside and the old lady who attended me had never heard of J. D. Salinger, did not know the origin of the books and was very glad when told that I would take not only the two copies in the window but two other pairs that were sleeping soundly in a badly lighted shelf (and which I gave to my co-translators).
At first I believed that these volumes were part of the operation begun in California years before, some of a small number of copies that had to find other markets due to the police repression in the United States. But now I think that there may have been two separate bootleg editions, the volumes I found in Paris apparently published in 1970 and the ones that first appeared in San Francisco in 1974. Besides the risks involved in importing pirated books in any European country, this impression is reinforced by the several mistakes that are found in the preface, suggesting that the final revision and typographical work were made by people who did not know English well.
Nowadays, this question may be easily settled by someone who owns both editions since they are offered in the web despite their rarity. For example, the pair I own can be bought for close to one thousand dollars – but mine, you can be sure, is not on sale! While the illegality of such publications needs to be condemned, the knowledge of Salinger’s early works has deepened my appreciation for his literary legacy while calling my attention to the complexities surrounding unpublished works and authorial control.
By Jorio Dauster