Franny & Zooey & Me

I'm the kind of person who's slightly obsessive about my favorite artists. I scan newspapers, magazines and whatever else I can get my hands on for even the most esoteric scraps of information. Stanley Kubrick is tossing around the idea of moving back to the United States? Eddie Vedder got a new cat? Even though I keep my ear to the ground, I have the peculiar habit of going into bookstore and record stores for the sole purpose of scanning the titles of my favorite artists and authors. Even when I know damn well that a new work isn't coming out for months. Even when I have no reason to believe that anything new is coming out at all. And it doesn't really matter if they're dead--as sick as it is, I never leave a bookstore without checking to see if there's any new Kafka available.

While surfing the World Wide Web last week, I happened to land on the site for Amazon.com (www.amazon.com), a cyberspace bookstore that purports to be the world's largest. I did my perfunctory search for works of J.D. Salinger, scanning the titles for something new. This, despite knowing full well I've read nearly everything he's ever published and several things he hasn't. But the impossible happens. Amazon.com lists "Hapworth 16, 1924" as a book to be released in January of 1997 by Orchises Press, and even though I've read the story (it was originally published in The New Yorker in June of 1965), it's certainly not without significance. Salinger is among the most reclusive men in the universe. For a living writer whose works are admired by so many and who is often called one of the most important literary figures of the century, he only has four books to his name, and none in nearly 35 years.

Being a Salinger fanatic myself, I realize that this new book is most likely another in a long line of pirated Salinger editions; more than a dozen of his stories have only been published in magazines, and people are always trying to make illegal copies of them. In the early 1970s a two-volume edition of all these stories was pirated in California, much to Salinger's consternation. (Houghton Library has one of the existing copies.)

Being the diligent reporter that I am, I call his agent, ready with a list of questions: Did Mr. Salinger authorize the publication of a new book? Do you uncover illegal editions frequently? Does Mr. Salinger want you to prosecute those who pirate his works? Does the public perhaps have a right to read previously-published stories?

When a young women answers the phone I am suddenly and unexpectedly nervous. I ask to speak to Mr. Salinger's agent and the words sound ridiculous coming out of my mouth. Who the hell am I to speak to such people? After the young woman grills me very aggressively as to why I'm calling, she makes the remarkable decision to hand me over to Phyllis Westberg, J.D. Salinger's agent (J.D. Salinger's agent!), and now I'm mumbling and stuttering as if I were talking to the man himself.

Right away, she gives me the only answer I'm not prepared for: "There is a possibility" that a new book will be coming out in the near future, she tells me. I'm floored. It seems that Salinger, a man who is rumored to be so reclusive that he doesn't even have a telephone, has decided to fuel the curiosity of crazy folks like me by publishing his first book in decades. She won't tell me why Salinger has decided to publish it, why the publisher chosen was Orchises Press, or even if Salinger is still writing. And she stresses the fact that the book isn't a sure thing. The deal "hasn't been penned yet." Still, she tells me that she is in frequent contact with him and that "he is well."

I want to ask her to send my regards to him, to tell her that she is privileged to have a personal relationship with one of the world's literary giants, to ask her if maybe the three of us can get together some time for lunch. Instead I thank her and hang up.

Dan S. Aibel's column appears on alternate Wednesdays.