A Perfect Day for Jerome David Salinger--an imagined rant by J.D. Salinger lamenting sequels that could have been
Written by Steven Jon Kaplan, January 18, 2021

I have to stop looking back, in anger or otherwise. I was so proud when I finished my very first major published story which I had originally called "Today is a Good Day for Bananafish." Imagine all those arrogant twats from my high school reading 28-year-old me in The New Yorker! Ha ha, Irving Goldstein--that shows what you knew when you made fun of my bird poem in ninth grade. I wasn't self-confident enough back then to leave well enough alone, so I tinkered with the title and practically everything else about Bananafish, egged on by editor William Maxwell, before I finished the story. What a schmuck I was in those days, needing the best of everything, so I retitled it "A Perfect Day for Bananafish." Perfect my ass. Then I redid the ending since Maxwell insisted it didn't seem dramatic enough. Why did I ever listen to that goy, the scourge of my existence? Because he was older and I probably wouldn't have gotten published there otherwise, and I hoped my cooperation would lead to future success at that magazine. It's so obvious now that this was one of the biggest mistakes of my life. Seymour Glass, the young protagonist, kills himself at the end. Such a brilliant Maxwell concept, right? So what does that mean for me? No sequel, just when they were paying those huge royalties and residuals for that kind of thing. I even thought of bringing Seymour back to life somehow--hey, if Arthur Conan Doyle could do that with Sherlock Holmes then why not me with Seymour? After all, Seymour was young and he had his whole life to look forward to. Why not have an accident that looked like death, but he was maybe just a little injured and shaken up and was fully recovered to his usual self after a week in the hospital? Hey, we're talking maybe a quarter million per sequel and when I wrote Bananafish I had two or three ideas in mind for Seymour's future. Nowadays I could have had a whole chapter about him in a nursing home getting Covid--that might have made the 2020 Hallmark Movie of the Year. All because of Maxwell. Yeah, that's me, blaming others for my problems, but still. I have something valid to kvetch about, don't I?

Okay, so what do we have? Here I am in my little house in New Hampshire. Not bad, but I could have done a lot better. I still have to schlep my own groceries, for Pete's sake. After "Catcher in the Rye" I was all set for "Catcher in the Wheat", "Catcher in the Corn", and maybe a song-book combo deal produced at Disney World with my buddy Sting called "Catcher in the Barley" to pair with his "Fields of Barley" number. I can see the video right now, zooming in on the barley in a field in North Dakota or wherever they grow it, swaying gently from side to side as the setting sun shines its rays. So beautiful and so many U.S. dollar bills following afterward. But, no, old Maxwell wanted it to be a unique piece, no follow-up, no nothing. We need that for the high-school and college crowd, he tells me. They get too many of those trilogies and pentalogies and icosahologies and what all, he says, and we don't want to copy "Lord of the Rings." Oh, really? Who's raking it in now, the interminable ring cycle with all those movies and collectible dolls which will probably feed fan fiction for another millennium, or little me with my one--count them, one--book about Holden Caulfield? My grandfather was right after all: why should I have a goy running the business side?

Meanwhile, should I be thinking about my love life? Maxwell had one thing right: those young women really had an obsession about my stories. Is it my fault that so many female teenagers kept stopping by my house? I still don't know how they got my address--probably Maxwell got a kick out of illegally telling them, that sneaky clown. What was I supposed to do with these young ladies--tell them to take the next bus back to wherever they came from? Okay, maybe I should have treated them a little better, but they tended to be quite literate and I needed someone to do all my publicity and food shopping and all that stuff, so why not have a healthy nineteen-year-old do that instead of old me? We won't even get into you-know-what as these ladies seem to have covered that already in their own autobiographies. In their hearts they know they'd be totally obscure without me.

Finally we have to mention Esme. You know, "For Esme--With Love and Squalor." Even I admit that this is my lasting masterpiece. More clever than "Catcher", much more concise--and here's the best part, so much more my own. That Maxwell cretin only made one minor change which was to take out the entire wedding scene and have Sergeant X not go to Esme's wedding after all. Didn't he ever hear the writer's dictum "just say yes"? No! Another bumbling fellow who keeps interfering with my copyrights, who goes by the name of Joe Fassler--yes, a fellow member of the tribe, unfortunately--said this about Esme: "It's somewhat Buddhist, too, the way that these characters have only the most transient of encounters, one that nonetheless manages to have long-lasting implications." Buddhist my butt! Since when did Fassler or Maxwell or any of those other bums actually spend time in a Buddhist monastery the way I did? They wouldn't know a Buddhist if they tripped over one wearing the whole orange outfit. More to the point, by taking away that wedding scene, I had to surrender a signed contract for "Esme's Squalid Wedding" and "At Home With Love Sans Squalor: Esme and Her Extended Family" and who knows what else might have followed. How many times was I fated to accept their screams of having to preserve their alleged uniqueness? Fassler had the balls to insist "X doesn't need to go to Esme's wedding. They don't need to be friends, or take up any kind of daily place in one another's lives. Their single, short interaction--we learn, later, that it only lasted half an hour--somehow contains enough connection for a lifetime." According to Joe, that is. Why should Esme and Sergeant X limit their meeting to a half hour in a dingy Devon cafe? Why not have them glamorously sweeping through the decades at the Plaza Hotel, somewhere in Paris in the next episode, maybe Tokyo for a little exotic tryst and whatever else looks fabulous on screen? They could become passionate lovers, then tragically break up, and maybe even find some kind of inner peace if it has to be so Buddhist. These editors and critics aren't getting the royalties--I am. Esme could have used a boatload of other connections, if you ask me. Okay, I'm starting to lose my cool, but just put yourself in my place for one day. Esme was my masterpiece! Even in my little New Hampshire town I should be proudly but discreetly glancing at an advertisement on the side of the passing bus for the next Esme streaming sequel and a bright promo on the front window of my local diner touting a popular brand of Esme coffee. These parasites have neither the balls nor the brains to go that far. Oh, well. As devout Buddhists they're going to get it in the end when they're reincarnated as cockroaches--and goishe ones who don't keep kosher.