The Long Debut of Lois Taggett

Plot

Biographer Kenneth Slawenski provides this sketch of the story:

Background

During 1941, Salinger wrote numerous works of short fiction, “each designed to find his own writing style and distinguish what was salable to various magazines.” Eager to be published in The New Yorker, he submitted at least eleven stories to the journal, all of these rejected, among them “The Long Debut of Lois Taggett.” The eventual publication of “Lois Taggett” is linked to Salinger’s 1941 “Slight Rebellion Off Madison.” The latter story was the first Salinger work accepted by The New Yorker, slated for publication in their December 1941 issue.

With the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, The New Yorker quickly pulled “Slight Rebellion” from the upcoming issue: as the United States prepared to enter World War II, the American public “was no longer anxious to read the frivolous whining of dissatisfied upper-crust youths.” “Slight Rebellion” would not appear in The New Yorker until after war in December 1946.

Salinger, disappointed by this setback, compensated by instructing his agent Dorothy Olding to submit “Lois Taggett” to Story magazine immediately. Slawenski notes that the story “was accepted for publication by Story, rescuing it from oblivion, and pleasing to Salinger.”

Theme

Salinger presents “a sympathetic life study” of socialite Lois Taggett, and satirizes the materialistic values of the privileged upper-middle-class world she inhabits. Salinger’s cynical voice is expressed in the following passage: “[Lois] didn’t do badly. She had a good figure, dressed expensively and in good taste, and was considered Intelligent. That was the first season when Intelligent was the thing to be.” Lois is the victim of “the inexplicably deranged” Bill Tedderson, a social-climber who marries her for her good looks, sophistication and family fortune. Bill inflicts gratuitous cruelties on Lois - burning her hand with a cigarette and smashing her foot with a golf club. His psychotic behavior is assumed to be an element of the social milieu of the rich.

As an exploration of the “incursions of psychosis,” Salinger fails to provide a motive for Ted’s “inexplicable violence” and, as such, “the tale suffers from serious structural problems” in its narrative.

Footnotes

Sources

• French, Warren. 1988. J. D. Salinger Revisited. Twayne Publishers, Boston. G. K. Hall & Co.
• Slawenski, Kenneth. 2010. J. D. Salinger: A Life. Random House, New York.
• Wenke, John. 1991. J. D. Salinger: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twaynes Studies in Short Fiction, Gordon Weaver, General Editor. Twayne Publishers, New York.

References

1. Wenke, 1991 p. 167: Selected Bibliography
2. Starosciak, Kenneth. (1971). "J. D. Salinger: A Thirty Year Bibliography, 1938-1968". Croixside Press.
3. Slawenski, 2010 p. 42
4. Slawenski, 2010 p. 42
5. Slawenski, 2010 p. 42-43: String of rejections, including works that were entirely lost. “Eleven” total is calculated from “seven Salinger stories” rejected by TNY (later published in other journals), as well as four other “lost” stories submitted to TNY.
6. Slawenski, 2010 p. 43
7. Slawenski, 2010 p. 47
8. Wenke, 1991 p. 24
9. Slawenski, 2010 p. 52
10. Wenke, 1991 p. 7-8: “a sympathetic life study of Lois Taggett as well as a satire of upper-middle-class materialism” and of “social manners.”
11. Wenke, 1991 p. 7-8: “The third-person narrator speaks in a sarcastic voice.” And: Wenke quotes this passage, capital “I” in “Intelligent” in the original.
12. Wenke, 1991 p. 65
13. Wenke, 1991 p. 8-9: “The narrator avoids any attempts to explain these acts [of violence].”
14. Wenke, 1991 p. 8
15. French, 1988 p. 20
16. Wenke, 1991 p. 8: See footnote 16: remark is from Warren French