The brothers are hugely successful in their songwriting endeavors, but Joe is shot dead in error at one of their celebrated parties by the hired gunman of a mobster (the intended target being Sonny, who has welched on a gambling debt).
Years later, prematurely aged and deeply remorseful, Sonny, suffering from a guilty conscience, attempts to reconstruct his late brother's novel-in-progress from its numerous fragments.
The story is a “tale-within-a tale-within-a-tale” initiated by an entertainment columnist, Vincent Westmorland who, for nostalgic reasons, wishes to know what had become of composer and Jazz Age impresario Sonny Varioni.
Whole sentences and even paragraphs were marked out and rewritten on the backs of envelopes, on the unused sides of college exam papers, on the margins of railroad timetables.
[5] Before The Saturday Evening Post acquired the story, Salinger made an effort to interest Hollywood through the auspices of literary agent Max Wilkison.
[6] Kenneth Slawenski reports that Salinger repeatedly disparaged his “The Varioni Brothers” as literature, but notes that the story —a tale that explores “the power of success to destroy true inspiration”—presented a parable that film studio executives could never have grasped.
[7] While staff sergeant Salinger served at Patterson Field, Ohio overseeing a “ditch-digging operation” in July 1943, his superiors were alerted to his publication of “The Varioni Brothers” in The Saturday Evening Post.