J. D. Salinger dies at 91

[MacCruiskeen]

Er, bump. But not for no reason. I just re-read Franny and Zooey (thinking, yet again, what an amazing thing it is) and then remembered Janet Malcolm's really great essay about it from June 2001, "Justice for J. D. Salinger".

The last paragraph of that long close study is a kind of coda or footnote about the man himself:

[...]

Although Salinger stopped publishing after the appearance of "Hapworth," he evidently has never stopped writing, and someday there may be dozens, maybe hundreds, more Glass stories to read and reread. On the dust jacket of the 1961 Little, Brown edition of Franny and Zooey Salinger wrote an author's note about his enterprise:

Both stories are early, critical entries in a narrative series I'm doing about a family of settlers in twentieth-century New York, the Glasses. It is a long-term project, patently an ambitious one, and there is a real-enough danger, I suppose, that sooner or later I'll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and mannerisms. On the whole, though, I'm very hopeful. I love working on these Glass stories, I've been waiting for them most of my life, and I think I have fairly decent, monomaniacal plans to finish them with due care and all-available skill.

The image of the patiently and confidently "waiting" writer is arresting, as is the term "settlers," with its connotations of uncharted territory and danger and hardship.

Salinger's own perilous journey away from the world has brought many misfortunes down on his head. His modest wish for privacy was perceived as a provocation, and met with hostility much like the hostility toward the Glasses. Eventually it offered an irresistible opportunity for commercial exploitation. The pain caused Salinger by the crass, vengeful memoirs of, respectively, his former girlfriend, Joyce Maynard,[9] and his daughter, Margaret,[10] may be imagined. A redeeming moment occurred a few weeks after the publication of the latter book, when a letter by, of all people, Margaret's younger brother, Matt, an actor who lives in New York, appeared in The New York Observer. He was writing to object to his sister's book. "I would hate to think I were responsible for her book selling one single extra copy, but I am also unable not to plant a small flag of protest over what she has done, and much of what she has to say." Matt went on to write of his sister's "troubled mind" and of the "gothic tales of our supposed childhood" she had liked to tell and that he had not challenged because he thought they had therapeutic value for her. He continued:

Of course, I can't say with any authority that she is consciously making anything up. I just know that I grew up in a very different house, with two very different parents from those my sister describes. I do not remember even one instance of my mother hitting either my sister or me. Not one. Nor do I remember any instance of my father "abusing" my mother in any way whatsoever. The only sometimes frightening presence I remember in the house, in fact, was my sister (the same person who in her book self-servingly casts herself as my benign protector)! She remembers a father who couldn't "tie his own shoe-laces" and I remember a man who helped me learn how to tie mine, and even—specifically—how to close off the end of a lace again once the plastic had worn away.

What is astonishing, almost eerie about the letter, is the sound that comes out of it—the singular and instantly recognizable sound of Salinger, which we haven't heard for nearly forty years (and to which the daughter's heavy drone could not be more unrelated). Whether Salinger is the rat his girlfriend and daughter say he is will endlessly occupy his well-paid biographers, and cannot change anything in his art. The breaking of ranks in Salinger's actual family only underscores the unbreakable solidarity of his imaginary one. "At least you know there won't be any goddam ulterior motives in this madhouse," Zooey tells Franny. "Whatever we are, we're not fishy, buddy." "Close on the heels of kindness, originality is one of the most thrilling things in the world, also the most rare!" Seymour writes in "Hapworth." What is thrilling about that sentence is, of course, the order in which kindness and originality are put. And what makes reading Salinger such a consistently bracing experience is our sense of always being in the presence of something that—whatever it is—isn't fishy.

Whole essay here:

Justice to J.D. Salinger

(Her summary of early-60s journalists' responses to his work after Catcher is enough to make it easily understandable that he sickened of publishing while still in his mid-forties.)

[MacCruiskeen]

From someone named "riese" at a blog called Autostraddle. (Various embedded links at the link):

___________________________________

J.D. Salinger, 91, Dies: All Eyes On the Literary Recluse Who Despised Our Eyes

J.D. Salinger, author of “Catcher in the Rye” and legendary recluse, dies of natural causes at the age of 91. Will death kill his well-cultivated privacy? How do we honor our literary idols using the same media machine employed to vaporize/idolize our dead celebrities & rock stars? Will we get to read all his unpublished books now? Why do some people feel entitled to that, or anything, from anyone who has passed away, ever?

“My belief is that ‘recluse’ is a code word generated by journalists … meaning, ‘doesn’t like to talk to reporters.’”

- Thomas Pynchon to CNN, 1997

“I hope to hell that when I do die somebody has the sense to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetary. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.”

- Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye


The string of recent “celebrity” deaths isn’t, as twitter would suggest, the Grim Reaper’s unexpected comeback. The numbers don’t reflect, really, an unprecedented wave of viral rapid-fire high-profile deaths. It’s just that technology (and twitter specifically) disseminates information about these deaths so quickly, and so monolithically, that it just feels like a lot of people are dying. A lot of people have always died. Also — we just know (and know of) more people now. Without the internet, no-one outside of New York City heiress society or the Vanity Fair subscriber base would’ve likely recognized Casey Johnson’s name. On that same note, without the technological advances that enabled the round-the-clock monitoring of “famous” persons, many aspects of Casey’s life may’ve been different including, of course, her death.

The celebrity death machine’s media frenzy, and the specifically public/private life issues surrounding the deaths of some recent high profile passings, is quite meta. We The Media are invited to discuss the toxicity of fame while simultaneously contributing to the very “problem” we describe.

2009 mourned the earned superstar, the musical genius, killed by fame: Michael Jackson, the world’s most famous man and fame’s most violent victim, who died impossibly thin and over-medicated in his newly downsized residence only hours after gamely performing at a rehearsal for the reunion tour he hoped would revitalize his career. Death began dissecting much of the mystery that surrounded him — and oh there was plenty of mystery! – child molestation charges, the strange TV interviews, the drug addiction, the difficult relationship with his family.

We opened 2010 with the heiress born into fame, but wanting more, and wanting it differently, and killed by her tenacious access to only the most destructive aspects of her power: Casey Johnson; who died regretful that she’d turned down that part on The Simple Life with Paris Hilton.

In late 2008 we had the artist, plagued, as many artists are from the get-go, by manic depression and the caustic vulnerability engendered in those who are too smart to ignore the paradoxically nefarious/ambrosial nature of the world: David Foster Wallace, one of the 20th century’s greatest writers & keenest cultural critics (with a finger firmly on the pulse of the intersections of fame, pop culture, art, Serious Literature, human (dis)connection and technology), hanged himself in a dark room at the age of 46.

These untimely deaths prompted questions about how a person’s relationship to the public and reaction to existence itself — from the great thinkers to the tabloid stars — preempted their unnaturally early passing.

And now we have J.D Salinger. Nothing untimely about it. He was 91, he died of natural causes, and he had not published anything since 1965. He gave his last interview in 1980. His only recent murmurings were reactions to shit other people said and published about him, and legal actions to suppress his imitators and biographers. This retreat from public life was intentional. He did not want us to see him alive, and now we’re asked to gather up our truest hearts to decide how to see him in death; now that it’s possible, once and for all, that his hidden work might once again meet our unsuitable eyes.

“What I was really hanging around for, I was trying to feel some kind of a good-by. I mean I’ve left schools and places I didn’t even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don’t care if it’s a sad good-by, or a bad good-by, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it. If you don’t, you feel even worse.”
- The Catcher in the Rye

J.D. Salinger wrote the only book anyone enjoyed reading in 9th grade English — and although the school system’s ability to destroy literature by teaching it like math has a lot to do with Catcher in the Rye’s singular appreciation, it’s also really f*cking good book with endless unique staying power. Not for nothing; Salinger contributed to the novel’s imperishability by preserving it — turning down movie rights, only briefly publishing aftewards — Catcher in the Rye would never become fat Elvis.

The novel’s plot details seventeen-year-old Holden Caulfield’s experiences in New York City following his expulsion, and departure, from an elite prep school. The disillusioned teenage protagonist is arguably more famous than his creator. It’s an almost certain descriptor for coming-of age novel blurbs — “Holden Caulfield meets Harry Potter,” “a female Holden Caulfield,” “Holden Caulfield for the postmodern era,” “Holden Caulfield at Princeton,” and so on. The outsider protagonist is easily identifiable to queers like us and other misfits; rendered numb by life’s hypocrisies, feeling outside of everything, unable to reckon the slings & arrows of ordinary life and suffering, as Caulfield seems to have, from some humming strands of clinical depression.

Selling over 65 million copies, once upon a time “Catcher Cults” were formed around the book that would put Twilight conventions to intellectual shame. In 1979 one book-length study of censorship noted that The Catcher in the Rye “had the dubious distinction of being at once the most frequently censored book across the nation and the second-most frequently taught novel in public high schools (after John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men). [check out: walking holden's footsteps in new york]

In the early 1940s Salinger, seeking financial security, sold film rights to his short story Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut. The film version was terrible and departed dramatically from Salinger’s work. Henceforth he refused to sell film rights to any of his books; eventually turning down Billy Wilder, Samuel Goldwyn, Harvey Weinstein, Jerry Lewis and Steven Spielberg’s interest in securing the rights to Catcher in the Rye.

It was Catcher’s success and the subsequent scrutiny of Salinger, who was born in 1919 and grew up in Manhattan, New York, that led to his escape into permanent hermitage in Cornish, New Hampshire.

More dedicated Salinger fans will know his more narrowly appreciated works: Nine Stories (1953), a collection of a novella and a short story, Franny and Zooey (1961), and a collection of two novellas, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963).

They’re extraordinary, though no one thought so at the time:

When “Franny” and “Zooey” appeared in book form in 1961, a flood of pent-up resentment was released. The critical reception—by, among others, Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Joan Didion, and John Updike—was more like a public birching than an ordinary occasion of failure to please.

His last published work, a novella entitled “Hapworth 16, 1924,” appeared in The New Yorker on June 19, 1965.

From his last recorded interview:

There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. … It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure. … I don’t necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself. … I pay for this kind of attitude. I’m known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I’m doing is trying to protect myself and my work.

- J.D. Salinger, 1980

From the obituary of J.D Salinger. :

In their statement, Mr. Salinger’s representatives said that “in keeping with his lifelong, uncompromising desire to protect and defend his privacy, there will be no service, and the family asks that people’s respect for him, his work and his privacy be extended to them, individually and collectively, during this time.”

The statement added: “Salinger had remarked that he was in this world but not of it. His body is gone but the family hopes that he is still with those he loves, whether they are religious or historical figures, personal friends or fictional characters.”

In 1999, his ex Joyce Maynard published At Home in the World: A Memoir, which detailed her life and her brief relationship with Salinger, which included a claim that Maynard’s mother had told her to appeal to Salinger by dressing like a child. Maynard also auctioned off a bunch of love letters he’d written to her, which were purchased by a fan who didn’t want them to see the public eye.

In 1999, London’s Sunday Times reported that Salinger “has written at least 15 books since his last work was published more than 30 years ago, according to friends. He is keeping them in a huge vault at his home.” Furthermore:

To those who have seen him, Salinger comes across as a person who has for most of his adult life been emotionally stuck in his late teens. Nearly all his published writings are about young people.

In 2001, his daughter Margaret published Dream Catcher: A Memoir, which described the harrowing control he had over her mother and made allegations denied by her brother, who recalled none of the same experiences.


From Anneli Rufus’s study of hermitage and loner behavior, Party of One: A Loner’s Manifesto:

It perplexed Salinger, as it perplexed similarly lionized Jack Kerouac, why fans felt they had the right to want more of a writer. He stopped publishing new works in 1965.

In his New Hampshire home, Salinger practiced yoga and Zen meditation, solitary pursuits that primed him for the days he spent in a cement-block bunker on the property, writing. His wife and children were forbidden to interrupt him… a neighbor who came around canvsasing for a charity later recalled how the author “met us at the driveway with a gun in his hands saying, Just go away.’”

Some doubted Salinger’s intentions, accusing him of not being an actual recluse. In a 1999 article for Slate.com, writer Alex Beam quipped, “If Salinger really wants to be left alone, he is going about it in a very strange way. He doesn’t live in a gated community. He summons perfect strangers into his hideaway. He sues people, and then phones the media to spread the story.”

Ultimately Salinger succeeded, with only a few hiccups, in keeping himself away from public scrutiny and out of public life. Will his death prompt detective work, lawsuits, sentimental nostalgia, scramblings to republish his last works?

Writers, ultimately, are not rock stars or actors. They do not necessarily desire to be seen or even spoken to. One of the most difficult aspects for many writers today is dealing with the expectation that novelists will also function as personal publicists. Many writers don’t want to be around any other people at all.

In The Endangered Literary Recluse, Brian Joseph Davis wrote:

Young authors these days can’t afford to miss a single damn phone call, much less a camera crew. With the idea of the media wanting to profile literary writers becoming itself an anachronism, will we ever again have authors whose stature – and contracts – allow for decades long hiatus? Since one can now lose a good portion of Facebook friends by just taking a week off from oversharing, probably not … It was nice not knowing you, literary recluses.

Is it our right to know? Did Salinger’s privacy allow him to die with dignity, as he has done, and unlike other recent deaths?

Is he the last of a waning generation of artists who refuse to be seen? Will there ever be another who can write so well, and then stop publishing altogether without being tracked down and revealed? Haruki Murakami, the bestselling and critically acclaimed Japanese novelist, is one of the only contemporary literary “recluses,” though he has since emerged from several years of self-imposed exile in Europe and America. Thomas Pynchon is, of course, a legendary recluse, but he has been so for several decades now.

Some are very eager to tear into what Salinger left behind. From The Houston Chronicle, “What’s in J.D. Salinger’s Safe?”:

And if there are publishable works, will the author’s estate release them?
The Salinger camp isn’t talking.
No comment, says his literary representative, Phyllis Westberg, of Harold Ober Associates Inc.
No plans for any new Salinger books, reports his publisher, Little, Brown & Co.
Marcia B. Paul, an attorney for Salinger when the author sued last year to stop publication of a “Catcher” sequel, would not get on the phone Thursday.
His son, Matt Salinger, referred questions about the safe to Westberg.

As technology continues to evolve and media pervades, every human being, both in life and death, is increasingly defined not only by their actual personalities but also by their specific relationship to and feelings about the public, as well as how they choose to present themselves to us all. From kids with Myspace profiles to Michael Fucking Jackson to J.D. Salinger — and for those who refuse to present, “recluse” becomes such a defining feature, such a frustrating situation for fans demanding new levels of access. “The silence of a writer is not quite the same as the silence of God,” wrote Ron Rosenbaum in 1997, “but there’s something analoguous: an awe-inspiring creator, someone who we believe has some answers of some kind, refusing to respond to us, hiding his face, withholding his creation.”

With autopsies, eulogies, posthumous publications, bizarrely revelatory tweeters and articles like this one, it may turn out that flowers on the grave are really the least of any legend’s concern.

But unlike David Foster Wallace who was still teaching upstate as well as publishing stories, essays, and books at the time of his suicide, or Michael Jackson who was preparing for a tour, we’re not about to get cut off from more of our master’s masterworks. We were cut off in 1965 by Salinger himself. So if more of Salinger’s work emerges now that he’s safe from our eyes, that might not be such a bad thing. He had something to say after all, and took the time to write it down.

“Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behaviour. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them—if you want to. Just as some day, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.”

-J.D. Salinger

http://www.autostraddle.com/j-d-salinge ... ore-30587/

[MacCruiskeen]

http://web.archive.org/web/200804100317 ... /salinger/

The link goes to Salinger's complete works on the web - including his early magazine stories, which were never anthologized. I'm halfway through the first one I opened, a long short story from 1947 called "The Inverted Forest". It's brilliant.

[...]

Inside the restaurant Corinne selected a boothed-in table opposite the door. She sat down aware that she was probably the only person in the place who hadn’t either a textbook or a notebook within reach. She felt conspicuous, mink-coatish. Her face ached from the raw January weather. Her table, just vacated by a couple of beefy students, was wet with spilled tea.

Although she was ten minutes early she began at once to watch the door. She and Ford had not described themselves over the telephone, and all she had to go on was Robert Waner’s melba-toast remark about poets almost never looking like poets because they would be infringing on the rights of all the chiropodists who are dead ringers for Byron—this and a badly-lighted image in her mind of a small-featured, light-haired little boy. She nervously began unsnapping and snapping the silver catch on her wrist-watch band. Finally she broke the thing. While she was trying to fix it, a man’s voice spoke over her head. “Corinne?”

“Yes.”

She pushed her disabled wrist watch into her handbag and quickly extended her hand to a man in a gray overcoat.

Ford was suddenly seated and smiling directly at her. She had to look at him squarely now. There wasn’t even a glass for her to reach for.

Even if Ford had been a cyclops, Corinne probably would have flinched a kind of happy, integrating flinch. Actually, the other extremity was the case. Ford was a man. Only the glasses he wore saved him from gorgeousness. I won’t attempt to estimate the head-on effect of his looks on Corinne’s unused secret equipment. She was badly rattled, certainly, and immediately had to use her social wits. “I almost thought I’d better wear my middie blouse,” she said.

Ford started to make some comment, but he didn’t get a chance. The Chinese waiter, clinging to some greasy mimeographed menus, was suddenly hanging over him. The waiter knew Ford and immediately made some report to him about a book that had been left at a table the day before. Ford spoke to the waiter at some length, explaining that the book was not his, that it belonged to the other man and that the other man would be in later. Before the waiter could pass this bit of information along to the boss, Ford ordered lunch for Corinne and himself. Then Ford turned to Corinne, smiling kindly and with real warmth. “That certainly was quite a night,” he said to Corinne—as though resuming an interrupted discussion of last Saturday night at the Smiths’. “What ever happened to that man? Your father’s secretary. Or whatever he was.”

“Mr. Miller? He stole a lot of money from Father and went to Mexico. I guess his case is outlawed by now.”

Ford nodded. “And your dog?” he asked.

“He died when I was in college.”

“He was a nice dog. Are you doing anything now, Corinne? Some kind of work, I mean? You were a very rich little girl, weren’t you?”

They began to talk—that is, Corinne began to talk. She told Ford about her job; about Europe; about college; about her father. She suddenly told him all she knew about her lovely, wild mother, who had, in 1912, in full evening dress, climbed over the promenade deck railing of the S.S. Majestic. She told him about the Detroit boy who had fallen off the running board of her car in Cannes. She told him about her sinus operation. She told him—just about everything. Ordinarily Corinne was not a talker but nothing could have stopped her that afternoon. She had whole years and even days full of information which suddenly seemed transferable. Apropos, Ford happened to have a high talent for listening.

“You’re not eating,” Corinne observed suddenly. “You haven’t touched your food at all!”

“Yes, I have. I’m listening to you.”

Corinne’s mind jumped happily to something else.

“A friend of mine, Bobby Waner—he’s my boss at the magazine—told me something yesterday. He said there are two lines in American poetry which regularly blow off the top of his head. That’s the way Bobby talks.”

“What are the lines?”

“Uh—Whitman’s ‘I am the man, I suffered, I was there,’ and one of yours, but I won’t say it in front of—I don’t know—the chow mein and stuff. But the one about the man on the island inside the other island.”

Ford nodded. He was quite a nodder as a matter of fact. It was a defense mechanism, surely, but a nice one.

“How—how did you become a poet?” Corinne asked—and stopped to qualify her excited question. “I don’t mean that. How did you get an education? You were—you weren’t exactly on the right track when I last saw you.”

Ford removed his glasses, and, squinting, cleaned them with his pocket handkerchief. “No, I wasn’t,” he agreed.

“You went to college. What did you do, work your way through?” Corinne pressed innocently.

“No, no. I’d already made enough money to go, before that. When I was in high school, in Florida, I worked for a bookmaker.”

“A bookie? Really? Horse races and all?”

“Dog races. They were at night, and I could go to school during the day.”

“But isn’t there a law preventing minors from working for bookies?”

Ford smiled. “I wasn’t a minor, Corinne. I didn’t go to high school until I was nineteen. I’m thirty now and I’m only out of college three years.”

“Do you like teaching?”

He took his time answering.

“I can’t write poetry all day long. When I’m not writing it, I suppose I like to talk about it.”

“Don’t you have any other interests? I mean—don’t you have any other interests?”

This time he took even more time answering.

“I don’t think so,” he said carefully. “I used to. But I’ve lost them. Or used them up. Or just got rid of them. I don’t know any more. Not exactly, anyway.”

Corinne thought she understood and nodded appreciatively, but her mind was still clicking like a lover’s. Her next question was entirely uncharacteristic of her—but, then, it was that kind of afternoon.

“Have you ever been in love or anything?” she asked him, suddenly wanting to know about the women he had known, how many and what kinds.

One can guess, however, that she put this question to Ford less inexcusably than it records. Some of her lovely, lopsided charm must have come through with it, because Ford responded to the question with a real laugh.

He shifted a little in his seat—the booth was both narrow and hard—and replied, “No, I’ve never been in love.” But he frowned over his own statement, as though his craftsman’s mind suspected itself of oversimplifying—or of having bad material to work with. He looked up at Corinne, as though he hoped she was already losing interest in her question. She wasn’t. His handsome face frowned again. Then he undoubtedly took a guess at what Corinne really wanted to know—or what she ought to have wanted to know. At any rate, his mind began to select and juxtapose its own facts. At last, perhaps solely for Corinne’s benefit, he began to talk.

[...]

http://web.archive.org/web/200805050553 ... orest.html

PS I have mixed feeling about linking to that website, because Salinger was so protective of his own work. But the stories were out there already, just not collected in book form.

[MacCruiskeen]

January 29, 2010

From the Archives

Salinger & His Critics
Autopsy of a Faded Romance

Donald P. Costello

This essay appeared in the October 25, 1963, issue of Commonweal.

http://commonwealmagazine.org/salinger-and-his-critics

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour—An Introduction slips off the best-seller lists, the critics continue to snap at the heels of J. D. Salinger. The great disenchantment has set in among those whom Buddy Glass, the “alter-ego and collaborator” of J. D. Salinger, has called “camp followers of the arts.” It is, I suppose, natural that the long-standing (since 1951) great love affair among Salinger, the public, and the critics could not continue at the same fever pitch of passion. The statistics of the love affair are phenomenal. Some two million copies of The Catcher in the Rye have been sold in the United States alone; at last count the novel was required reading at 275 American colleges, enshrined not only in Bennett Cerf’s Modern Library, but also in paperback editions by Signet and soon by Bantam. Recently a travelling critic has discovered that the book is a great commercial and critical success in Finland, Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Israel, Great Britain, Czechoslovakia, with many more translations now coming out. (How would “…all that David Copperfield kind of crap” sound in Czech?) Much more room is occupied on my bookshelf by collections of criticism of J. D. Salinger than by his collected works. Every time a Salinger story is published in The New Yorker, that issue of the magazine sells out in one day; and after the stories are clapped together into hard covers they have stayed on the best-seller lists for months upon months. Salinger himself has been canonized by a Time cover story, and by a Life feature, the whole point of which was that Mr. Luce’s reporter couldn’t get an interview.

But one look at the reviews of the latest of the Salinger hard-cover collections will show that the critics are beginning to jilt J. D. Salinger, no matter how faithful the public remains. I’m certainly not sure of all the reasons for the disenchantment of the last year or so. Perhaps it is partly because a critic finds it as much fun to destroy a reputation as to mold one. Perhaps it is also because such popularity as Salinger has enjoyed is taken as a sure sign of selling out. But I’m quite sure that the major reason is a misunderstanding of Salinger’s attempt: he is simply not trying to be Ernest Hemingway. At any rate, for the past year, the cooling-off has been glacial.

Most critics are polite in their new disdain, some are sad, or merely tired. And then there is Mary McCarthy, thumbing her nose in a kind of bitchy pique. (She has seen to it that, lord knows, no reader would want to call her up.) In last year’s Harper’s article about Salinger’s “closed circuit,” Mary McCarthy asked, almost incidentally, “Who is to inherit the mantle of Papa Hemingway?” And with scorn she replied, “Who if not J. D. Salinger.” She is, of course, right in spite of herself. Some years ago now Granville Hicks pointed out that for college generations of the fifties and the sixties, Salinger has had precisely the kind of importance that Hemingway had for the young people of the twenties. But it is, I think, precisely the difference between what Hemingway created in fiction and what Salinger is in the process of creating which is the key to the current critical assault on Salinger. To Miss McCarthy’s Hemingway-fed generation, Salinger is a bad writer because he is the opposite of Hemingway.

Hemingway was the author of exile, the spokesman for a generation of expatriates. Withdrawal into self—to eat, to drink, to sleep with Catherine—was the answer for an age which saw man as so many ants on a log waiting to be roasted or steamed to death. In a world of Nada, a world which “kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially,” a man could only—sad as it might be—face death bravely. So Hemingway invented a new manner—a style which for forty years has been the most influential style in literature. The Hemingway style, of course, mirrored the theme: withdrawn, cold, matter-of-fact, brisk, the person of the author totally uninvolved, dealing with surfaces and the senses: “In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.… After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.” Hemingway carried through the Joycean attempt (after Henry James and Joseph Conrad) to refine the story-teller “out of existence.” This Hemingway detachment was of course a pose, for no great author can be detached. Mary McCarthy is probably right in contending that “in Hemingway’s work there was never anybody but Hemingway in a series of disguises.” J. D. Salinger’s purpose is exactly to drop the disguise, to bring the author, frankly and obtrusively and lovingly, back into the fiction. For J. D. Salinger is the opposite of Hemingway both in theme and in manner.

Hemingway’s solution was Holden’s disease—and Franny’s, and probably Seymour’s. Holden could not face a world of age, death, sickness, ugliness, sex and perversion, poverty, custom, and cant. He found phonies because that is all he looked for. And so he ran away, he withdrew. Franny, too, was “sick of pedants and conceited little tearer-downers,” sick of “ego, ego, ego.” Because she couldn’t meet anybody she could respect, because “everything everybody does is so—I don’t know—not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and—sad-making,” she, too, withdrew—into a false use of the mysticism of the Jesus Prayer. But Zooey, like Mr. Antolini, preaches a cure to this disease, a solution to the old problem of existence in an ugly world, a solution which is the opposite of withdrawal. The solution is not withdrawal or exile, but encounter. Mr. Antolini’s message to Holden is to accept the world, to “live.” Zooey’s solution, in the “love story, pure and complicated” called “Zooey” (the solution which Franny discovers contains “all of what little or much wisdom there is in the world”), is also to live, not for self, but for others, out of love—even to eat Bessie’s consecrated chicken soup. The Salinger solution is to live out of love for everyone, for “there isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady.” There isn’t anyone who isn’t, that is, “Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.” Buddy Glass gives us the same solution as Zooey, at the end of “Seymour—An Introduction.” He tells us that “there is no single thing I do that is more important than going into that awful Room 307,” because “all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next.”

It is, of course, dangerous to give answers in modern fiction. After the questionings of The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger has given some answers; and that doesn’t set well with The Group, or with the Partisan Review–Harper’s crowd. It is particularly dangerous if the answers, as Buddy Glass puts it, make any professional use of the word “God,” except as a familiar, healthy American expletive. Salinger uses not only “God” but the love that dwells there. That’s the trouble with the Glasses, says Mary McCarthy: “They are all good guys: they love each other and their parents and their cat and their gold-fish.” John Updike complains that “Salinger seems to love his characters more than God loves them.” And, indeed, at the beginning of “Seymour—An Introduction,” the narrator admits—along with Kafka—that he writes of his characters “with steadfast love.” I don’t know how Updike knows how much God loves the Glasses; but he clearly doesn’t like Salinger’s loving them. Updike is certainly right: Salinger does love the Glasses, and asks us to love them. It is an accurate description, but a very bad complaint.

To preach his doctrine of loving encounter, of acceptance of the world as Holy Ground, rather than of withdrawal from Nada, Salinger has progressively developed a manner which does it, a manner which fits, and is therefore artistic, no matter how different it may be from Hemingway’s artistic manner. To express an opposite theme, Salinger invents and develops an opposite style: personal, intimate, the narrator completely present, always in the mind of the reader in the person of the clever, self-conscious, idiosyncratic, even cute, Buddy Glass.

The germ of the purposeful, effective, developing Salinger style, which reaches its idiosyncratic peak in “Seymour—An Introduction,” was noticeable even at the beginning, in The Catcher in the Rye, In 1953, a critic in The Hudson Review remarked: “Salinger has a quick ear and a fine talent…, but to a certain extent he lacks detachment and disinterestedness. One has sometimes an oppressive and uncomfortable awareness of the author’s nervous involvement in the hurt of his sensitive, witty, suicidal heroes.” (Again, an accurate description, but a bad complaint.) And this new attached and interested style is, it seems, fast becoming as influential on the new generation as Hemingway’s was on the old. Prophetically, The Commonweal’s review of The Catcher in the Rye remarked that Salinger’s idiom and style were a “tour de force the American fiction writer will probably find himself increasingly doomed to attempt.” Read any undergraduate short story these days and decide whether that was right.

Of all people aware of this new Salinger style, conscious of its difference from the detached Hemingway ideal of the past, none is more aware than Salinger himself. He admits everything that the critics could complain about in his style. In his dedication to Franny and Zooey, Salinger calls himself “hopelessly flamboyant,” and in his introduction to “Zooey,” Buddy Glass calls his style “excruciatingly personal.” In “Seymour—An Introduction” Buddy tells us that he is “an ecstatically happy prose writer” who, therefore, “can’t be moderate or temperate or brief.” He tells us, indeed, that he “can’t be detached.” Buddy’s very existence—as a brother to the family at hand—allows Salinger to increase his “nervous involvement.” More and more Salinger has identified Buddy Glass with himself: on the dust jacket to Franny and Zooey, Salinger first calls Buddy Glass his “alter-ego and collaborator.” In “Seymour—An Introduction” we learn that Buddy was born in 1919, the same year as J. D. Salinger; and Buddy describes his past books, which are clearly J. D. Salinger’s past books; and even mentions the rumor that he spends “six months of the year in a Buddhist monastery and the other six in a mental institution.” By the time of this most recent Salinger story, so successful has the informality and the Salinger-Buddy personal involvement become that Buddy writes, “It seems to me that this composition has never been in more danger than right now of taking on precisely the informality of underwear.”

So personal a style will of course have “flaws” if one is expecting an opposite style. If the style is to communicate the love of a totally involved human being, it will not be neat or tidy or economical or cold or crisp: the letter in “Zooey,” Buddy admits, was “virtually endless in length, over-written, teaching, repetitious, opinionated, remonstrative, condescending, embarrassing and filled, to a surfeit, with affection.” If the person writing is to be himself always present, is to be communicated as clever and self-conscious, the style will be rather obtrusively clever: “Cleverness,” Seymour complains of Buddy’s style, is his “permanent affliction,” his “‘wooden leg.” That is the cleverness we see throughout the later Salinger: obtrusive, certainly, but that’s the point:

“If, with the right kind of luck, it comes off, it should be comparable in effect to a compulsory guided tour through the engine room, with myself, as guide, leading the way in an old one-piece Jantzen bathing suit…. She was wearing her usual at-home vesture—what her son Buddy (who was a writer, and consequently, as Kafka, no less, has told us, not a nice man) called her prenotification-of-death uniform…. Please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: ( ( ( ( ) ) ) ).”

Along with the self-conscious and involved style, what happens to the structure under this Salinger intent? It becomes not the conventional form of a short story, where we are aware that, chronologically, a story is being unfolded; nor is it a carefully constructed symbolic pattern. The form becomes instead personal, uneconomical, loose, spontaneous (and surprisingly delightful). “What I’m about to offer,” Buddy tells us in “Zooey,” “isn’t really a short story at all but a sort of prose home movie.” And in “Seymour—An Introduction” Buddy admits that he is “a narrator with extremely pressing personal needs.” And that therefore: “I want to introduce, I want to describe, I want to distribute mementos, amulets, I want to break out my wallet and pass around snapshots, I want to follow my nose. In this mood, I don’t dare go anywhere near the short-story form. It eats up fat little undetached writers like me whole.”

The characters are affected, too, by the Salinger intent. Of the people in “Zooey,” Buddy says, “Not one of the three, I might well add, showed any noticeably soaring talent for brevity of detail or compression of incident. A short-coming, I’m afraid, that will be carried over to this, the final, or shooting, version.” We like the casually-revealed Salinger people for themselves, and—when we recognize in astonishing flashes thoughts we thought were our own—we like them for ourselves which we see in them. It’s marvelously pleasant to like Salinger characters—the simply pleasant is rare in modern fiction, perhaps rare enough to account for a good deal of Salinger’s popularity. It’s pleasant to like Salinger characters even when we are embarrassed by them, when, that is, we see that the joke is on us, as, for example, when Lane, in an affected blasé attitude, goes to meet Franny’s train looking like “he has at least three lighted cigarettes in each hand.” Everyone will have his own embarrassing moment of recognition in Salinger. Salinger’s characters come alive astonishingly, “with a stunning and detailed air of presence,” as Henry Anatole Grunwald has put it. And as we savor the people, we savor the present conversational moment which they are engaged in. We savor, in Salinger, what Seymour called “the main current of poetry that flows through things, all things,” that which Salinger reveals to us through his style and structure and character. The result of the whole Salinger manner is a sense of leisure, delight in the moment, in the personality being revealed, in delightful witty people, delight in spontaneity, the delight we feel in even the long list of contents of the Glasses’ bathroom medicine cabinet.

“Salinger is a poet,” Arthur Mizener has pointed out, “in the only sense that he himself would probably take seriously: he’s a man with his own special insight into the meaning of experience.” If Salinger’s critics are abandoning him because it is becoming increasingly clear that he is not Ernest Hemingway, Salinger doesn’t seem to mind. Buddy Glass does seem to know what he is doing, and where he is going. All the personal idiosyncracies of the Salinger manner are there because Salinger has chosen a personal, positive way to say a personal, positive thing, to express his own special insight into the meaning of experience. He knows he is moving along. “I think it’s high time,” Buddy tells us, “that all the elderly boy writers were asked to move along from the ballparks and the bull rings.”

http://commonwealmagazine.org/salinger-and-his-critics

[justdrew]

Just want to say... I've a copy of 22 Stories, published by unknown in a plain unmarked blue cover, with a slip over white paper band with the title and some info. underground publishing. Back then Periodicals Paradise was still in existence, so it probably wouldn't have been too impossible to track down the original magazines.

[IanEye]

Here you go Mac: J.D. Salinger Hated Chris Hitchens (Allegedly)

[MacCruiskeen]

Thanks, Ian, but I'm sorry to have to say that "Taki" is full of shit. I mean, for god's sake, Salinger was a writer, a really exceptional writer - and that alleged "letter" from him is such an obvious, clumsy and grotesque forgery that it could have been written by George W. Bush himself.

I have no idea whether JDS ever did correspond with this creep "Taki" or ever did express any opinion about Christopher Hitchens. But that "letter" is a tacky and incompetent fake, and the whole article is a really shabby piece of work, crass, dishonest and illiterate. It's a scam. Shame on him for inflicting it on us only days after Salinger's death.

[norton ash]

Yep, very long odds that the ancient JD would be corresponding with a Eurotrash NYC gossip columnist. Pretty tacky, Taki.

[IanEye]

yeah, I just thought it was funny based on various threads on here lately.
It was like the 'take two thread headlines and smash them together' fun & games over in the Lounge....

[MacCruiskeen]

The Pre-Postmodernist
By DAVID LODGE

Published: January 29, 2010
Birmingham, England

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/30/opini ... ef=opinion

THE life of J. D. Salinger, which has just ended, is one of the strangest and saddest stories in recent literary history. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to let the disappointment of the second half of Mr. Salinger’s career — consisting of a long short story called “Hapworth 16, 1924” that reads as though he allowed the pain of hostile criticism to blunt the edge of self-criticism that every good writer must possess, followed by 45 years of living like a hermit in the New Hampshire woods — to overshadow the achievements of the first half.

The corpus of his good work is very small, but it is classic. His was arguably the first truly original voice in American prose fiction after the generation of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner. Of course nothing is absolutely original in literature, and Mr. Salinger had his precursors, of whom Hemingway was one, and Mark Twain — from whose Huck Finn Hemingway said that all modern American literature came — another. From them he learned what you could do with simple, colloquial language and a naïve youthful narrator. But in “The Catcher in the Rye” Mr. Salinger applied their lessons in a new way to create a new kind of hero, Holden Caulfield, whose narrative voice struck a chord with millions of readers.

The narrative is in a style the Russians call skaz, a nice word with echoes of jazz and scat in it, which uses the repetitions and redundancies of ordinary speech to produce an effect of sincerity and authenticity — and humor: “The thing is, most of the time when you’re coming pretty close to doing it with a girl ... she keeps telling you to stop. The trouble with me is, I stop. Most guys don’t. I can’t help it. You never know whether they really want you to stop, or whether they’re just scared as hell, or whether they’re just telling you to stop so that if you do go through with it, the blame’ll be on you, not them. Anyway, I keep stopping. The trouble is, I get to feeling sorry for them. I mean most girls are so dumb and all. After you neck them for a while you can really watch them losing their brains. You take a girl when she really gets passionate, she just hasn’t any brains. I don’t know. They tell me to stop, so I stop.”

It looks easy, but it isn’t.

Nearly everybody loves “The Catcher in the Rye,” and most readers enjoy Mr. Salinger’s first collection of short stories, “Nine Stories.” But the work that followed, the four long short stories paired together in two successive books as “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction,” were less reader-friendly and provoked more critical comment, leading eventually to the retreat of the wounded author into solitude.

This was as much the consequence of critical failure as of authorial arrogance. These books challenged conventional notions of fiction and conventional ways of reading as radically as the kind of novels that would later be called post-modernist, and a lot of critics didn’t “get it.” The saga of the Glass family is stylistically the antithesis of “Catcher” — highly literary, full of rhetorical tropes, narrative devices and asides to the reader — but there is also continuity between them. The literariness of the Glass stories is always domesticated by a colloquial informality. Most are narrated by Buddy, the writer in the family, who says at the outset of “Zooey” that “what I’m about to offer isn’t really a short story at all but a sort of prose home movie.”

The nearest equivalent to this saga in earlier literature is perhaps the 18th-century antinovel “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman,” by Laurence Sterne. There is the same minutely close observation of the social dynamics of family life, the same apparent disregard for conventional narrative structure, the same teasing hints that the fictional narrator is a persona for the real author, the same delicate balance of sentiment and irony, and the same humorous running commentary on the activities of writing and reading.

How Shandean, for instance, is Buddy’s presentation to the reader in “Seymour” of “this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: (((( )))). I suppose, most unflorally, I truly mean them to be taken, first off, as bow-legged — buckle-legged — omens of my state of mind and body at this writing.”

Seymour Glass first appeared in one of the “Nine Stories,” “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” as a disturbed veteran of World War II (as Mr. Salinger himself was), who on vacation with his rather shallow wife, after a charmingly droll conversation with a little girl on the beach, shockingly shoots himself in the last paragraph. The late stories are all in some way about the attempts of Seymour’s surviving siblings to come to terms with this action. This often takes a religious direction, and presents the Glass family as a kind of spiritual elite, struggling against a tide of materialism and philistinism with the aid of Christian existentialism, Eastern mysticism and a select pantheon of great writers.

This cultural and spiritual elitism got up the noses of many critics, but I think they overlooked the fact that Mr. Salinger was playing a kind of Shandean game with his readers. The more truth-telling and pseudo-historical the stories became in form (tending toward an apparently random, anecdotal structure, making elaborate play with letters and other documents as “evidence”), the less credible became the content (miraculous feats of learning, stigmata, prophetic glimpses, memories of previous incarnations, and so forth). But what were we asked to believe in: the reality of these things, or the possibility of them? Since it is fiction, surely the latter; to suppose it is the former is to lose half the pleasure of reading the books.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/30/opini ... ef=opinion

David Lodge is the author, most recently, of the novel “Deaf Sentence.”

[MacCruiskeen]

Mods, Jeff, would it be possible to shift this thread to the Data Dump? Because it's turning into a data dump. Thanks.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Unsealed Letters Offer Glimpse of Salinger

By ALISON LEIGH COWAN
NYT Published: February 11, 2010

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/books/12salinger.html

The letters, a total of 11, were written between 1951 and 1993, from one buddy, or “Buddyroo,” to another. In sharp and familiar prose, laced with humor and biting wit, the writer gives an intimate peek into his life and thoughts at precise moments in time. Read so many years later, they are filled with surprises.

The recipient of the letters was E. Michael Mitchell, a Westport, Conn., commercial artist who had designed the book jacket for a best-selling novel.

The author of the letters — and that novel — was J. D. Salinger.

Now, two weeks after Mr. Salinger’s death at age 91, the letters are being made public. They are likely to be among the first batch of many such correspondences, given Mr. Salinger’s history of letter-writing, that will surface and deepen — or perhaps even alter — the public’s understanding of one of the 20th-century’s most puzzling, and puzzled about, literary lights.

The letters furnish what may be the most specific description yet of Mr. Salinger’s writing habits in the years after 1965, when he stopped publishing. Even in the 1980s, he describes a highly disciplined writing regimen, starting each morning at 6, never later than 7, and not brooking interruption, “unless absolutely necessary or convenient.” This in-his-own-words account may bolster the conviction and hope of some that he left additional works behind.

The letters to Mr. Mitchell also capture, like Polaroid snapshots, how Mr. Salinger initially embraced the high life he tasted as an up-and-coming author — supping with Laurence Olivier and Vivian Leigh in the couple’s London home, for instance — before souring on the social scene and parts of New York that helped shape his fiction.

Trips to New York to meet friends, wolf down Chinese food, browse bookstores or take in shows, became rarer over the years, according to the letters, though Mr. Salinger acknowledged still getting a kick out of the subway into his ’60s.

The correspondence reveals an enduring fascination with pop culture and politics that is at odds with the popular mythology of the past half-century of Mr. Salinger as an odd recluse. His letters are peppered with sharp references — sometimes a bit too sharp — to household names like John Wayne, Nancy Reagan and even Eddie Murphy.

Now cloistered at the Morgan Library and Museum in Midtown Manhattan, the letters had reached the museum by way of gift, a single clamshell box of papers in a much larger collection of 20th-century American literature assembled by Carter Burden and donated to the museum in 1998, two years after Mr. Burden’s death.

Museum officials agreed to keep the letters’ contents under wraps, even from their own staff, so long as Mr. Salinger was alive, out of a voluntary abundance of caution. But the self-imposed seal was lifted last week, and the letters are being prepared for exhibition.

The literary world has been bracing for just such a moment. Despite his move to New Hampshire in 1953, his aversion to publicity and his withdrawal from the New York scene, Mr. Salinger, by his own admission, could not always resist the impulse to fire off cranky letters to people who criticized his behavior, polite letters to schoolchildren who popped questions and flowery letters to women who caught his eye. He had gone to great lengths to keep such unpublished musings private, successfully fighting one biographer all the way to the United States Supreme Court to assert control over their content.

The Morgan’s letters are particularly tasty. Mr. Mitchell, a onetime neighbor of Mr. Salinger’s in Westport, Conn., had designed a dreamlike image of a red carousel horse for the cover of Mr. Salinger’s first novel, “Catcher in the Rye,” in 1951. More than once in his letters, Mr. Salinger informs Mr. Mitchell, who died last year, that he has “never had two dearer friends” than Mr. Mitchell and his ex-wife Bet, a “tri-cornered” friendship.

The references to Mr. Salinger’s writings are tantalizingly specific. One 1966 letter refers to an accumulation of “ten, twelve years’ work” that includes “two particular scripts — books really — that I’ve been hoarding at and picking at for years.”

The first letter in the batch is dated May 22, 1951, weeks before “Catcher in the Rye” was published. The letter opens “Dear Buddyroos” — a moniker that the book’s hero, Holden Caulfield, tosses around, too. It provides an account of Mr. Salinger’s trip that month to London, where he was the toast of the town, basking in the perks that come with being an up-and-coming writer.

He shares his amusement at the very British offer of tea he received during intermission at “Swan Lake.” He tells of going on a couple of dates with a model for Vogue whom he met on the voyage. “No real fun, though,” he reports. A night at the theater ended with his being invited to sup at the elegant Chelsea home of the couple who starred in the show: Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh.

“Naturally,” Mr. Salinger recounts with some chagrin, over cocktails “some gin went up my nose. I damn near left by the window.”

Fast-forward 15 years to the next letter, which appears to have been sent in October 1966. In that time span, much had changed. Mr. Salinger had become one of the most sought-after writers in America. He had settled in New Hampshire to escape the spotlight and gradually lost interest in having his works published. He had gotten married and become a father. And in September of that year, his wife, Claire, filed for divorce, claiming in court papers that continuation of the marriage would “seriously injure her health and endanger her reason.”

In that second letter, Mr. Salinger shares the delight he felt in taking his two young children to Manhattan, mostly to visit the dentist. His 12-year-old daughter got a kick out of knowing that their suite at the Sherry-Netherland had once been used by the Beatles. The threesome dined out and enjoyed a stroll on Fifth Avenue after dark.

Mr. Salinger tells his friend that he loves watching his children sleep — another trait he shares with Holden — and has used those hours to write well into the night.

Two months later, Mr. Salinger is back at the typewriter thanking his friend for an update he devoured “greedily.” This time, though, he reports that he has become less enamored with New York’s charms. “Meaning,” he writes, “that there aren’t any places I like or love there any more. With the exception of the Museum of Natural History.”

While that was also a spot that Holden found comforting, Mr. Salinger also fantasizes about visiting Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in “the faint hope that some kindly old Hasid from the eighteenth century” would invite him home for matzoh ball soup or a cup of tea.

By August 1979, his interest in the city has further waned. He discusses how much he enjoys the 30 hours he spends each August mowing his fields atop “the big dopey tractor” and writes that he was in New York for the first time in months and hated it. He and a companion attended a performance of “Ain’t Misbehavin'.” The best part, he reports, was the subway ride.

The correspondence picks up on Dec. 30, 1983, when he bluntly warns his friend that Random House had hired a British author to do a biography of him. “I’ll weep if they bother you and Bet,” he writes, describing feelings akin to murder.

Two years later, he is apologizing to “dear old Mike” for his shortcomings as a friend and for solitary ways that are so ingrained, he can’t recall ever answering the telephone “without unconsciously gritting my teeth.”

It is not clear why Mr. Mitchell, given his obvious bond with Mr. Salinger, might have parted with the letters, resulting in their eventual sale to Mr. Burden. The last one, postmarked in January 1993, suggests that the decision may have sprung from Mr. Salinger’s refusal to send his friend an autographed copy of “Catcher.” “Most stuff that is genuine is better left unsaid,” the author wrote back, in a note that is crisper than the others.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/books/12salinger.html

[MacCruiskeen]

“Does anyone actually need,” Salinger told Maynard when she was doing precisely the sort of writing Dowd does, “one more hysterically amusing little assassination by typewriter? Sooner or later you may need to soberly consider whether what you write is serving any purpose but to serve your own ego.”

http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/02/11/i-do ... -betrayal/

[Alaya]

Whoever it was that said that Holden found phonies because he was looking for phonies is no doubt a king phony of the first order. Holden found phonies because for the most part that's all there is
out there. And unless there is some universal divine strike of force, it will never change.

Maureen Dowdy can piss up a rope.

Thank you man for sharing this great stuff. He's gone and it's all ours.

[HamdenRice]

I realize this isn't a popular opinion, but since this is a topic raised on this forum more than on most, I'll say it: I think one of Salinger's greatest stories, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," is about pedophilia. In fact, I've never been able to read it without thinking it's obviously about the suicide of a tormented pedophile.

I mean, everything about it screams that this is what it's about. There's the blatant sexual symbolism of the bananafish (banana=penis, fish=vagina in slang), which Symour tells Sybil. The bananafish swims into a whole, engorges itself and dies.

Symour touches the little girl in ways that today would get him arrested.

His wife is depicted as highly sexualized and he commits suicide on his honeymoon, so obviously, he was not normal sexually.

Salinger himself had a lifelong history of being attracted to much, much younger girls.

That doesn't mean it's a bad story. But I'm amazed at how the literary establishment and society in general could not bring itself to contemplate what Salinger was obviously trying to say.

[MacCruiskeen]

I realize this isn't a popular opinion, but since this is a topic raised on this forum more than on most, I'll say it: I think one of Salinger's greatest stories, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," is about pedophilia. In fact, I've never been able to read it without thinking it's obviously about the suicide of a tormented pedophile.

I mean, everything about it screams that this is what it's about. There's the blatant sexual symbolism of the bananafish (banana=penis, fish=vagina in slang), which Symour tells Sybil. The bananafish swims into a whole, engorges itself and dies.

Symour touches the little girl in ways that today would get him arrested.

His wife is depicted as highly sexualized and he commits suicide on his honeymoon, so obviously, he was not normal sexually.

Salinger himself had a lifelong history of being attracted to much, much younger girls.

That doesn't mean it's a bad story. But I'm amazed at how the literary establishment and society in general could not bring itself to contemplate what Salinger was obviously trying to say.

Emphases added.

Hamden, I re-read the story just a few days ago, and I too was disturbed by it. But. I don't think "the message" is anywhere near as unambiguous and obvious as you say it is. And I have to correct you on a couple of points upfront:

His wife is depicted as highly sexualized

No. She's depicted as being maybe a bit vain and maybe a bit shallow, but not necessarily any more than averagely so. She passes the time varnishing her nails, shifting a button on her dress, leafing through a magazine article entitled "Sex Is Fun - Or Hell", and enduring a long worried phone call from her mother, whom she constantly reassures. This doesn't exactly make her Mae West or Madonna or Mata Hari. She's just a fairly ordinary bored young woman in a hotel room.

and he commits suicide on his honeymoon, so obviously, he was not normal sexually.

No. The story takes place in 1948, by which time he's already been married to Muriel for six years. (See "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters": the wedding took place in 1942, while he was in the Army.) They're on holiday, on a kind of second honeymoon. No conclusions can be drawn about his or his wife's sexuality, "normal" or otherwise, but they have been together for six years and are still at least close enough to take a vacation trip together.

So. What the story does make clear is that Seymour's behaviour has been "inappropriate" for at least some time now - but not (or not just) his behaviour with children. He's been driving erratically, or at least he's been distracted by trees, for some reason. He gives his wife nicknames that make her giggle, but which shock her mother. He said something "inappropriate" to his wife's grandmother about her funeral arrangements. He says something "inappropriate" to the woman in the elevator ("Stop staring at my feet."), upon which she asks the elevator-boy to let her out a floor early. In short, it's not in dispute that the guy is undergoing some kind of mental or emotional crisis. He's obviously not in good shape at all. Salinger takes pains to make that clear to us, long before he shows us Seymour's encounter with the child Sybil on the beach. The story's a carefully-crafted psychogram of a fictional character, and certainly not obviously a coded confession on the part of the author. Whatever Seymour is, he is not identical with Salinger.

- Dammit, Hamden, I'm going to have to cut this short because I'm going out now. It's really hard to discuss Salinger with any brevity! But your post does demand a reply, and the section with Sybil is obviously the most relevant here. I'll get back to you later, probably tomorrow. Just briefly for now: I don't think the story means what you say it means, certainly not obviously.

PS For anyone following this, there's a link to the story (to all the stories) a little further up this thread.

On Edit: corrected my formatting error in the quoted post.