September 11, 1981

Publishing: Visit With J. D. Salinger

By EDWIN McDOWELL

ast summer several newspapers recounted how Betty Eppes, a reporter for The Baton Rouge Advocate, managed a brief interview with J. D. Salinger by writing him a letter and asking a clerk at the post office in Windsor, Vt., to give it to the reclusive writer when he crossed the Connecticut River from his home in Cornish, N.H., to pick up his mail. In that interview, Mr. Salinger, who has not had anything published since 1965, said he still had no plans to have anything published, but that he continued to write regularly for his own pleasure.

The interview left many questions unanswered, at least in the mind of George A. Plimpton, the author and editor of The Paris Review. Why, for example, did a Louisiana reporter go to all that effort, and presumably expense, to try to interview Mr. Salinger? How did she induce him to talk with her? What else did he say?

"I called up The Baton Rouge Advocate and onto the phone came this storyteller in the classic Southern tradition," Mr. Plimpton said of Miss Eppes. "She has a storyteller's imagination and eye, she was a nonstop talker with wonderful little asides and some of that charming Southern paprika that such talkers drop into their conversation. She proceeded to tell me this incredible story of her odyssey and how she had secretly taped her conversation with Salinger, so when I asked if I could tape my conversation with her, she agreed."

The result of that conversation, which Mr. Plimpton later edited, is the article "What I Did Last Summer" by Miss Eppes in the current issue--summer 1981--of The Paris Review. Two photographs by Miss Eppes accompanying the article show a white-haired Mr. Salinger in sunglasses.

Miss Eppes is described in the Paris Review as "a rural Mississippian, a high-school dropout, mother of three, divorced, a tennis player and columnist ('Writing is a compulsion and tennis is my vehicle'), an ex-insurance agent, a former Playboy Bunny and a collector of stuffed animals."

In her letter to Mr. Salinger, Miss Eppes, who arranged her vacation so that she could search for him, said she was a woman who supported herself as a writer, but she did not say she was a reporter. She explained that since she was staying at a motel with no telephones in the rooms, she would wait for him at a designated location in Windsor for 30-minutes beginning at 9:30 the next morning, and that if he did not show up she would wait there again the following morning before returning to Baton Rouge.

The interview, conducted alongside Miss Eppes's sky-blue Pinto in Windsor, is unlikely to provide more than a footnote for Salinger biographers. In reply to every question about Holden Caufield, the author's irrepressible adolescent character, Mr. Salinger said that the answer was in his novel "The Catcher in the Rye." Talking about authors, he reportedly said that it was "cheap" to give autographs and that no self-respecting writer should do so. On another subject, he said: "I don't care about politicians. I don't have anything in common with them. They try to limit our horizons; I try to expand our horizons."

After Mr. Salinger returned from picking up his mail, according to Miss Eppes, he berated her because a Windsor shop owner had put his hand on the author's arm, apparently in an effort to shake hands. "Because of you, this man I don't know, have never even met, has spoken to me," Mr. Salinger reportedly said. "Just walked up to me on the street over there and spoke to me. Just like that. Walked up and put his hand on my arm and spoke to me. I don't like that." He then turned and walked across the covered bridge back home to New Hampshire.

"The whole thing almost sounds like a Salinger story," said Mr. Plimpton, who still hasn't met Miss Eppes. But judging from her account of the talk with the reclusive author, he said, "I think I'd rather spend half an hour with Betty Eppes than with J. D. Salinger."

Alex Haley, the author, received a letter recently from Coast Guard headquarters in Washington, and after reading it, he fell to reminiscing about his roots in the Coast Guard.

"After I'd enlisted as a messboy, my next few years were spent attending to the sundry comforts of officers of various ranks," he said. "But such a crevasse existed between messboys and admirals that I only rarely even saw one of them."

Meanwhile, he kept busy during off-duty hours trying to write. "After about 10 years, in 1950, one day I brought coffee to Rear Adm. Edward H. (Iceberg) Smith and nearly reeled with shock upon seeing him reading an article of mine in the Atlantic Monthly," Mr. Haley recalled. "He said, affably, 'Haley, I was just reading an interesting article by a colored writer.' I gulped out: 'Yes sir, I see, sir. I mean it's me, sir.' I'll never forget that admiral's look at me. And it was at that year's Washington meeting of all the United States Coast Guard admirals that he proposed a new enlisted rating--of journalist--and it was thus that I became the first one."

Oh, about that recent letter that Mr. Haley received from the Coast Guard brass: It was an invitation from Rear Adm. H. W. Parker inviting him to be the guest of honor at a luncheon for all the Coast Guard admirals at the Fort Myer Officers Club in Arlington, Va., on Oct. 8, saying they would be honored if he would be the guest speaker for the award to be made annually to the top Coast Guard journalist. That award, incidentally, is to be known as the Alex Palmer Haley Award.

To coincide with celebrations of the 250th anniversary of Joseph Haydn's birth in Austria, next month Rizzoli International Publication will publish "Haydn: A Documentary Study" by H. C. Robbins Landon, an authority on the composer. The 224- page book will contain 220 illustrations and sell for $37.50. In November, Rizzoli plans to publish "Picasso: The Early Years" by Josep Palau i Fabre. It will have 1,587 illustrations and sell for $160.

Rizzoli, a subsidiary of Rizzoli Editore of Milan, Italy, is best known to New Yorkers for its attractive Fifth Avenue bookstore. There are also Rizzoli bookstores in Atlanta, Chicago and the Georgetown section of Washington, with one scheduled to open next month in Costa Mesa, Calif. The company publishes 75 to 80 books a year, most of them on art and architecture.

The Picasso book will be published jointly by the American subsidiary and the Italian parent. "But except for that, we're editorially independent of our parent company," said Sherrie Murphy, the company's advertising and publicity director. "They own us, but we don't publish anything in this country that they publish in Italy or vice versa." A key difference between the operations is that the American company does heavily illustrated books while the Italian one concentrates on fiction.

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