SHANE SALERNO: In 1976 Gordon Lish, the fiction editor of Esquire, was told by his boss, “We need to publish something that’s going to generate a lot of buzz.” That night Lish got drunk, typed out a story, and called it “For Rupert—with No Promises.” It appeared in the magazine sans byline.
MYLES WEBER: “For Rupert—with No Promises” obviously echoes “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor.” Many people thought it might be a new Salinger story. In fact it was a rather brief exercise in mimicking Salinger’s style.
PAUL ALEXANDER: The prose style was intended to feel like Salinger might have written it, had it been his first published story in a dozen years.
There was a burst of interest; copies flew off the stands. The magazine literally sold out.
MYLES WEBER: It’s astonishing that anyone took it to be a Salinger story because it has none of Salinger’s wit and it’s not very carefully written.
ANONYMOUS, “For Rupert—with No Promises” (Esquire, February 1977):
If I say more about Rupert in regard of his unearthliness I will not be for long free from confusion. I will—what I want to tell you will—fall victim to the disorder of passion, and I have promised you clarity. I have also promised someone squalor. I now intend, in all scruple and with haste, with reverence and haste, to keep both promises—and to save my brother, and everyone else, in the bargain.
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT: It didn’t sound like Salinger, but I figured someone who’d been withholding his fiction for such a long time was not going to sound the same. His sensibility had had a chance to refurbish during this silence. It wasn’t going to sound like anything any of us would have expected. I was fooled for a few days, but after a few phone calls it became clear that Gordon Lish, the infamous editor, was behind it. He’s interested in literature as infection. He’s a Captain Hook type. He likes the down and dirty. He’s a profoundly provocative guy.
GORDON LISH: There was an enormous amount of press coverage. The speculation was that either Updike or Cheever had written the story, although many readers believed it may have been Salinger who wrote it. There was colossal interest from TV and radio. Esquire sold the magazine out. Two or three months later, I finally told an agent I wrote it because she made me believe I owed her. Within days she was telling people at a cocktail party that I’d written the story. So I came into a great deal of criticism. The story of who the author really was broke on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. I heard from Salinger, through that agent, that he thought what I had done was absurd and despicable. That needled me because I didn’t think it was either. My feeling was that if Salinger was not going to write stories, someone had to write them for him.
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT: It could only have been done by a scoundrel, and Gordon Lish likes being a scoundrel. Even in the classroom, he tells his students, “You’re at the edge of a cliff, and you’re going to jump off. Why should anyone be paying attention to you? What can you do with your very first sentence that’s going to galvanize attention?” Suggesting the story was by J. D. Salinger was obviously an effective attention-getting device. At the time it came out, it wasn’t exactly common knowledge that Salinger was still an object of such adoration that a story purported to be by him would sell out on newsstands across America.
GORDON LISH: I did not see that fiction as a hoax so much as an attractive plausibility.
MARC WEINGARTEN: I believe it remains one of the single best-selling issues of Esquire in the magazine’s history, but you would have to check that.