He had often needed to stand still until a hand could reach down for him through the stepped-back apartment buildings, the patchwork brick alleyways, the asphalt circuits of New York City; a hand to prop him up, and keep him safe. He would be one moment on a wharf by Sutton Place, or a bar in Yorktown, or an automat in Times Square, then the next moment, he would be in bed, his wife’s white arms around his middle…

There was a charming piece in today’s Times (no, not more of Allesandra Stanley, waxing rhapsodic about the charm of Watergate): a little story about the Morgan Library’s purchase of some letters written by J.D. Salinger to a woman named Marjorie Sheard. They corresponded about their respective writing careers when they were young. Salinger went on to fame and fortune; Ms. Sheard folded away her manuscripts. But she kept those letters, all these years.

I never wrote to famous writers when I was young. I wish I had. But when I started my writing career, after law school, you could still send your manuscripts to actual editors, and a striking number of those people actually wrote back to me. Morgan Entrekin was friendly and encouraging. So were Ann Godoff and Nan Graham (whose telling me that I wrote with “grace and precision” probably made me write another two novels-- gracefully, and precisely). And more. A baker’s dozen were friendly in this fashion.

It’s amazing, really, because when I recall them, my first stories were pretty traditional affairs. The females were beautiful and broken; the males were sensitive and torn. Stoic suffering abounded. So did epiphanies. I can no longer write that way. I can only have sympathy.

So strong is that sympathy, however (“You understand, though. Don’t you, Henry. Every flower in every field. Every Maybelline eyelash, and every Revlon mouth. Every drop of Fanta Orange spit, in every kiss you ever stole. Tell me you understand, man. Please.”), that I find the Salinger-Sheard correspondence to be truly touching. Salinger is a guy I admire, and I miss him, and I’m glad he was nice to Marjorie Sheard.

And now that I think of it, the New York City of Henry Bell belongs to the forties even more than to the seventies. So maybe he overlaps with Holden Caulfield after all.