J. D. Salinger dies at 91

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Re: J. D. Salinger dies at 91

Postby beeline » Fri Feb 12, 2010 5:53 pm

He's been driving erratically, or at least he's been distracted by trees, for some reason.


That was another, previous suicide attempt.

In short, it's not in dispute that the guy is undergoing some kind of mental or emotional crisis.


Yes. He is much like the main character in For Esme With Love and Squalor, except without the Esme. In fact, Seymour's little girl is the opposite of the innocence found in Esme, which in my estimation, is why he kills himself.

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.


Yes, and Seymour DESPISES her for her vanity. Notice that before he kills himself, Seymour aims the gun. Now, this is literary conjecture, but to me, you can't really 'aim' a gun at yourself. You can point a gun at yourself, but the act of aiming implies that you are looking down the barrel and between the sights. So, it is my belief that Salinger wanted Seymour to contemplate killing his wife, but a moment later kills only himself.
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Re: J. D. Salinger dies at 91

Postby Alaya » Sat Feb 13, 2010 3:00 am

HamdenRice wrote: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.



First of all I think "Esme' is about Buddy not Seymor.
Buddy is the narrator of Salinger's Glass family.

I believe the "Nine Stories" are narrated by Buddy.

Also, i don't think Seymor is a pedophile. If he's thinking about bananafish, it's probably because he's impotent with Muriel. I don't think he despises anyone. It's not like him to despise.
If he prefers spending time with that wretched little Sybil, it's because he's avoiding Muriel and he's lonely. Him killing himself has nothing to do with Sybil. It's because he loves Muriel so much and knows he can't make her happy and therefore will never be happy himself.
He screwed up from the war and he feels it's hopeless. In his mind it's the kindest thing he can do all around. Muriel will get over him and eventually have a life.

I mean it IS possible for a man and a child to be together without those overtones.
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Re: J. D. Salinger dies at 91

Postby MacCruiskeen » Sat Feb 13, 2010 8:46 pm

Hamden, the first thing I'd say about Seymour's interaction with Sybil is that there's nothing overtly sexual about it at all. She approaches him - whom she already knows - while he's dozing on the beach, he chats with her in a friendly and whimsical way (while making a little moral point about why it's not right to mistreat helpless little animals, as she had done), they walk down to the sea together hand-in-hand, and he pushes her around in the water for a while on the float. Then he says it's time to go back, and the child runs off happily as soon as they're back on the sand. That's it.

Yes, Seymour holds the child's ankles briefly while she's standing there chatting to him. And yes, he kisses her foot after she says she's seen a bananafish in the water. But again: that's it. No more and no less. There is not the slightest indication of lust, or of torment, or of anything like that.

I think it's important to remember that Salinger wrote that story more than 60 years ago, when adults were a lot less worried about interacting with children than they are today. And also to read the other stories (e.g. "For Esmé" and especially "Down at the Dinghy" - a wonderful thing), in which Salinger shows an amazing sensitivity towards children, including a deep awareness of their own sensitivity to hurts and to slights. This is all the more remarkable when you consider that he was a very recent veteran of the worst of WWII, and when you remember standard American and European attitudes towards children in the 40s and 50s.

Rather than being a closet paedophile, Seymour strikes me as being a remarkably feminine man. (I don't mean he's gay.) I mean he interacts with the child in the way a kindly woman might, i.e., with empathy and with unabashed physicality. But not lustfully. And the "bananafish" tale he tells the child is designed neither to manipulate her nor to patronise here nor to disturb her. If it has other connotations for him, for Salinger or for the reader, those connotations are neither unambiguous in meaning nor threatening to the child.

No doubt there's tons more to be said about this story, and about Salinger's attitude to children and adolescents in general, but I guess that's enough for one post on a message board.

On Edit: As Alaya says, Seymour is "screwed up from the war", as was Salinger for quite some time. The experience of atrocity is crucial. It's very common for war veterans (Wilfred Owen comes to mind) to report a feeling of unreality when they return to civilian life; to complain that people simply have no idea. The Army is also an environment of non-stop bullshit and disinformation, a place where language and people get mangled; and Seymour has returned to a world in which adults just collect consumer stuff (the expensive suitcases, the nail varnish, the magazines) and chat trivially all day. So that's why he's attracted (but not sexually) to children: because they tell it like it is, without bullshit, without embellishment, without irony and without guile: "This is a yellow. This is a yellow."
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"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

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Re: J. D. Salinger dies at 91

Postby Alaya » Sun Feb 14, 2010 1:52 am

I have to admit that I was already in bed and trying to sleep last night when I had to grab the computer in the dark knowing that i would never get to sleep all on account of the hideous accusation against Seymor. :)
Thanks Mac for splaining. If you read Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters and Seymor, An Introduction, you get a more complete picture of Seymor.
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Re: J. D. Salinger dies at 91

Postby brekin » Sun Feb 21, 2010 2:08 pm

Interesting non-MK-ULTRA critique of Catcher in the Rye in regards Mark David Chapman, Hinkley, etc in the film Six Degrees of Separation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7t9St3pT ... re=related

http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scri ... cript.html
Then we asked him
what his thesis was on.
- The one that was stolen.
- Well...

A teacher out on Long lsland was dropped
from his job for fighting with a student.
Weeks later, he returned to the classroom,
shot the student - unsuccessfully,
held the class hostage,
and then shot himself - successfully.

This fact caught my eye.
Last sentence, Times -
"A neighbour described
the teacher as a nice boy,
always reading Catcher in the Rye. "
This nitwit Chapman,
who shot John Lennon,
said he did it to draw the attention
of the world to Catcher in the Rye,
and the reading of this book
would be his defense.
Young Hinckley, the whiz kid who shot
Reagan and his press secretary, said:

"If you want my defense, all you
have to do is read... Catcher in the Rye. "

- I haven't read it in years.
- Shh.
I borrowed a copy from a young friend.
I wanted to see what she had underlined.
And I read this book to find out why
this touching, beautiful, sensitive story, published in July
had turned into this manifesto of hate.

I started reading. It's exactly as I had
remembered. Everybody's a phoney.

Page two - "My brother's
in Hollywood being a prostitute."
Page three -
"What a phoney slob his father was."
Page nine -
"People never notice anything."

Then, on page my hair stood up.
Well...

Remember Holden Caulfield, the definitive
sensitive youth wearing his hunter's cap?

A deer hunter's cap.

"Like hell it is. I sort of closed one eye
like I was taking aim at it."
"This is a people shooting hat."
"I shoot people in this hat."
This book is preparing people for bigger
moments than I had ever dreamed of.

Then, on page
"I'd rather push a guy out the window
or chop his head off with an axe
than sock him in the jaw."
"I hate fistfights. What scares
me most is the other guy's face."

I finished the book.
It's touching and comic.
The boy wants to do so much
and can't do anything.
Hates all phoniness
and only lies to others.
Wants everyone to like him but is only
hateful and is completely self involved.
In other words, a pretty accurate
picture of a male adolescent.
What alarms me about the book - not the
book so much as the aura about it - is this.

The book is primarily about paralysis.
The boy can't function.
At the end, before he can run away and
start a new life, it starts to rain. He folds.
There's nothing wrong in writing about
emotional and intellectual paralysis.
It may, thanks to Chekhov and Samuel
Beckett, be the great modern theme.
The extraordinary last lines
of Waiting for Godot.;

"Let's go."
"Yes."
"Let's go."

Stage directions:
"They do not move."
The aura around Salinger's book -
which, perhaps, should be
read by everyone but young men - is this.

It mirrors like a fun-house mirror,
and amplifies like a distorted speaker
one of the great tragedies of our times -
the death of the imagination.
Because what else is paralysis?

The imagination has been
so debased that imagination...
being imaginative, rather than
being the linchpin of our existence,
now stands as a synonym for
something outside ourselves,
Like science fiction.

Or some new use for tangerine slices
on raw pork chops -
"What an imaginative summer recipe."
And Star Wars - "so imaginative".
And Star Trek - "so imaginative".
And Lord of the Rings,
all those dwarves - "so imaginative".

The imagination has moved out
of the realm of being our link,
our most personal link, with our inner
lives and the world outside that world,
this world we share.
What is schizophrenia
but a horrifying state
where what's in here
doesn't match what's out there?

Why has imagination
become a synonym for style?
I believe the imagination
is the passport that we create
to help take us into the real world.

I believe the imagination is merely another
phrase for what is most uniquely us.

Jung says "The greatest sin
is to be unconscious."
Our boy Holden says "What scares me
most is the other guy's face."
"It wouldn't be so bad
if you could both be blindfolded."

Most of the time, the faces that we face
are not the other guys', but our own faces.

And it is the worst kind of yellowness
to be so scared of yourself

that you put blindfolds on
rather than deal with yourself,

To face ourselves - that's the hard thing.

The imagination...
that's God's gift to make
the act of self-examination bearable.
If I knew all mysteries and all knowledge, and have not charity, I am nothing. St. Paul
I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind. Eric Hoffer
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Re: J. D. Salinger dies at 91

Postby MacCruiskeen » Wed Feb 24, 2010 10:52 am

Salinger
Michael Greenberg

http://blogs.nybooks.com/post/385853779/salinger

J.D. Salinger; drawing by David Levine

Rereading J.D. Salinger after his death on January 27, I am struck by an improbable connection between his work and that of Jack Kerouac. Both were writing in the late Forties and Fifties, from opposite ends of the social spectrum, but with a relentless ethos of non-conformism at the center of their fiction. Salinger, however, has none of Kerouac’s easy American Romanticism, much less his patriotic celebration of the open road. Salinger’s world is one of constricted New York spaces: bathrooms, restaurants, hotel rooms, buses, a tiny obstructed table in a piano bar where one barely has room enough to sit down. The high cost of not conforming is far more palpable in Salinger than in Kerouac. For Salinger’s characters, to be different isn’t a choice but a kind of incurable affliction, a source of existential crisis rather than social liberation.

There’s no alternative “lifestyle” for Holden Caulfield or the members of the Glass family to retreat to, as there is for the Beats, no group of like-minded adventurers. Salinger’s characters aren’t after thrills. Their quest is for an impossible purity that drives them away from the workaday world, toward a dangerous, self-burying seclusion. “We’re…freaks with freakish standards,” says Zooey Glass to his sister Franny. “We’re the Tattooed Lady, and we’re never going to have a minute’s peace, the rest of our lives, till everybody else is tattooed too.”

Salinger’s subject is the burden of having these freakish standards, of being what Tolstoy called “an aristocrat of the spirit.” His freaks are the sort most people would envy—good-looking, witty, talented, well off. But they are paralyzed by their uncompromising sensibility. Franny, a gifted actress, abruptly quits the stage to seek the attainment of satori through repetitive, entrancing prayer. Acting embarrasses her. “I feel like such a nasty little egomaniac,” she tells her boyfriend. The boyfriend accuses her of behaving as if “you’re the only person in the world that’s got any godamn sense.” He wonders if maybe she’s afraid to compete. “It’s just the opposite,” says Franny.

Don’t you see that? I’m afraid I will compete—that’s what scares me. Just because I’m so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else’s values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn’t make it right. I’m ashamed of it. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.


Effortlessly distinguished, Franny seems the furthest you can be from a nobody; in Salinger’s world this becomes the logical reason for wanting to be one.

Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye is beset by a similar crisis of authenticity. It isn’t merely that most people are “phony”; the deeper problem is that sincerity itself is suspect. Like the members of the Glass family, Holden lives in a hell of second-guessing, in which every motive—even those behind seemingly altruistic acts—is potentially corrupt. He demands a purity that is impossible because it opposes the basic machinery of human nature. Thus, to be a high-minded lawyer, for instance, who goes about “saving innocent people’s lives,” would be tainted by the fact that you wouldn’t know

if you did it because you really wanted to save guys’ lives, or if you did it because what you really wanted to do was be a terrific lawyer, with everybody slapping you on the back and congratulating you in court when the godamn trial was over…. How would you know you weren’t being a phony? The trouble is you wouldn’t.


J.D. Salinger, New York, November 20, 1952 (San Diego Historical Society/Getty Images)

Intent is given equal moral weight to action, even when intent can’t be definitively known! Under the circumstances, the only solution is the renunciation of ambition itself. Salinger’s characters are like aspiring monks with no religion.

Throughout Salinger’s fiction is a highly defined, consistent aesthetic, so exacting that it negates creative action itself. In The Catcher in the Rye, a virtuosic jazz pianist has stooped to “dumb show-offy ripples in the high notes, and a lot of other very tricky stuff that gives me a pain in the ass.” The people in the club listening to the pianist roar their approval, “the same morons that laugh like hyenas in the movies at stuff that isn’t funny.” Attending a Broadway play starring the universally worshiped actors Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Holden remarks “…they were good, but they were too good.” The delivery of their lines was

supposed to be like people really talking and interrupting each other and all. The trouble was, it was too much like people talking and interrupting each other. If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don’t watch it, you start showing off. And then you’re not as good anymore.


Holden is instinctively postmodern, too knowing to suspend disbelief, and hyper-aware of the motif or trope that is behind every formal performance. At Radio City Music Hall “a guy came out in a tuxedo and roller skates on, and started skating under a bunch of little tables, and telling jokes while he did it. He was a very good skater and all, but I couldn’t enjoy it much because I kept picturing him practicing to be a guy that roller-skates on the stage.” To be a true artist, the performer must give up being on stage.

Near the end of the novel Holden has an elaborate fantasy of living in seclusion in a cabin in the country. “I’d have this rule that nobody could do anything phony when they visited me. If anybody tried to do anything phony, they couldn’t stay.” Holden doesn’t make good on the fantasy, but his creator did, living reclusively in Cornish, New Hampshire, for more than fifty years, in what appears to have been a state of relative contentment. According to Salinger he continued to write about the Glass family during those years. He declined to publish these books, if that’s what they are, while he was alive, disgusted perhaps with the vagaries of “ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s,” as Franny put it. He seemed to regard his literary success as a moral stain. It would be hard to think of a contemporary American writer whose personal life was more true to the ethos of his fiction.

February 12, 2010, 2:04 pm | 7 comments

http://blogs.nybooks.com/post/385853779/salinger
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

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Re: J. D. Salinger dies at 91

Postby Alaya » Wed Feb 24, 2010 3:47 pm

I for one always wanted to read Seymor's haiku and other poems but how could S. possibly rise to write them after the buildup he gives them in "An Introduction"?
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Re: J. D. Salinger dies at 91

Postby MacCruiskeen » Fri Sep 06, 2013 9:32 pm

From Adam Gopnik's recent (Sept. 5) New Yorker review of the imminent and much-hyped film and book biographies:

... Salinger as writer, or craftsman, or just listener—with a perfect ear for the sound of American mid-century speech—is invisible throughout. The subject of the book and documentary is not Salinger the writer but Salinger the star: exactly the identity he spent the last fifty years of his life trying to shed. Cast entirely in terms of celebrity culture and its discontents, every act of Salinger’s is weighed as though its primary purpose was to push or somehow extend his “reputation”—careerism is simply assumed as the only motive a writer might have. If he withdraws from the world, well, what could be more of a come on? If it turns out that he hasn’t entirely withdrawn from the world but has actually participated in it happily enough on his own terms: well, didn’t we tell you the whole recluse thing was an act? This kind of scrutiny might possibly say something about a writer like Mailer, whose loudest energies (if not his best ones) were spent playing in the public square, not to mention Macy’s windows. But it couldn’t be worse suited to a writer like Salinger, the spell of whose work is cast, after all, entirely by the micro-structure of each sentence—on choosing to italicize this word, rather than that; on describing a widower’s left rather than right hand; on the ear for dialogue and the feeling for detail; above all, on the jokes. (Salinger, as Wilfrid Sheed long ago pointed out in the best thing ever written about his style, was first of all a humorist, trained on other humorists. [...]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/b ... inger.html
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Re: J. D. Salinger dies at 91

Postby Joao » Fri Sep 06, 2013 9:58 pm

MacCruiskeen » Fri Sep 06, 2013 6:32 pm wrote:From Adam Gopnik's recent (Sept. 5) New Yorker review of the imminent and much-hyped film and book biographies:

Hardly a surprise that a Salinger bio-doc and its bookification are misguided and full of shit...

The Punishment for Being Publicity-Shy
‘Salinger,’ a Documentary by Shane Salerno
By A. O. SCOTT, New York Times, September 5, 2013

“Salinger,” the doorstop-thick new biography by David Shields and Shane Salerno, announces itself on the dust jacket as “the official book of the acclaimed documentary film” of the same title. (The film itself credits Paul Alexander’s biography of Salinger as its source.) “Acclaimed” is perhaps wishful thinking, but the most dubious words in that puffy phrase are “documentary film.” There are plenty of archival images and talking-head interviews, but “Salinger,” directed by Mr. Salerno, is less a work of cinema than the byproduct of its own publicity campaign. It does not so much explore the life and times of J. D. Salinger as run his memory and legacy through a spin cycle of hype. Salinger moved to the woods of New Hampshire partly to escape the intrusions and indignities of American celebrity culture. “Salinger” is that culture’s revenge.

Mr. Salerno, a dogged researcher and tireless interviewer, assembles his documentary material (supplemented by re-enactments and propelled by a throbbing, action-movie score) into a breathless story full of hyperbole and speculation. The resulting blend of reverence and character assassination is an almost perfect distillation of the modern pathology of fame. Salinger, a talented, hard-working and very popular writer, who died in 2010, is built up into a world-historical literary genius. Though a few negative reviews are mentioned — by Mary McCarthy and John Updike, most notably — they are drowned out by a chorus of extravagant praise. High school students and movie stars testify that “The Catcher in the Rye” changed their lives and changed the world.

But Salinger’s work is built up in this way so that his life can be torn open, and the fortress of privacy he erected around it torn down. A run-of-the-mill eccentric author of short stories might be left alone in the hills above the Connecticut River, but a genius of this caliber, whose books have been declared the common property of all humanity, is clearly asking to be exposed. And several of his stalkers — journalists and fans who staked out Salinger’s local post office or roosted at the bottom of his driveway — choose to interpret his supposed reclusiveness as a covert demand for attention.

This is an interesting and not altogether implausible idea, one of many that flicker into view during “Salinger,” only to be dissolved in the acid of sensationalism. Some of the film’s most intriguing information has to do with Salinger’s experiences in World War II, where he endured almost 300 days in combat and took part in the liberation of Dachau. He stayed in Europe after V-E Day to work with the Army Counterintelligence Corps and was briefly married to a German woman who may have been a Nazi. All the while, he was writing chapters of “The Catcher in the Rye.”

Mr. Salerno overplays his hand by making the war the key to nearly everything about Salinger, the primal wound that festers beneath the surface of his stories about young, rich, disaffected Americans. The idea that “Catcher” is a closet combat novel is provocative and not necessarily dismissible, but it needs to be argued with a sense of literary nuance, a sense of literature as something other than a message-delivery system, that is utterly missing here. Juxtaposing cover art from an early paperback edition of “Catcher” with photographs of death camp corpses does not do the trick.

The other main theme of “Salinger” is his personal life, in particular the relationships he had, platonic and not, with younger women and teenage girls. Interviews with two of them — Jean Miller, who met Salinger in the late 1940s in Florida and who is thought to have inspired his story “For Esmé — With Love and Squalor,” and Joyce Maynard, who lived with Salinger in the early ’70s and later wrote a book about the experience — are genuinely illuminating and disturbing. His behavior with them sheds a queasy light on his fiction, which often dwells on the precocity and half-innocence of characters perched on the brink of ruinous disillusionment.

“Salinger” offers up the bombshell revelation — anonymously sourced and blasted onto the screen with the kind of music that usually accompanies the destruction of a planet — that more novels are in store. Those will be acclaimed (or not) in due course, but in the meantime, Salinger fans will have to contend with this garish and confusing portrait. There are insights that can be plucked from it, but to do so requires strenuous resistance to the spirit of the project (both book and film), which is not just leering and gossipy, but aggressively anti-literary.

It is not entirely Mr. Salerno’s fault that he barely quotes any of Salinger’s words, apart from a few snippets of letters in the possession of their recipients. The film is dealing with an author notoriously protective of his copyright. (One of the few times he initiated contact with a journalist was to expose, and try to suppress, the circulation of pirated editions of early stories). But it is curious that a movie about such a notorious perfectionist should be so sloppy in matters of judgment and craft. The re-enactments — in which a dark-haired figure in a suit paces a darkened stage and pounds away at a typewriter, or else (dressed in a blue jumpsuit) lumbers through the forest with an ax — are embarrassingly literal. And the conversation about the place of “The Catcher in the Rye” in the imaginations of a few notorious killers would be a parody of hyperventilating tabloidism if it were not so obviously the real thing.

One of the experts dragged into that discussion notes that the word “phony” appears in “Catcher” more than 30 times. The last time I read the book, I thought Holden Caulfield overused that word, but, in this case, it is surely le mot juste.
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Re: J. D. Salinger dies at 91

Postby MacCruiskeen » Sun Feb 17, 2019 4:56 pm

Great news:

JD Salinger's unseen writings to be published, family confirms

Exclusive: The Catcher in the Rye author’s son tells the Guardian estate will publish almost ‘all of what he wrote’ over next decade

Alison Flood

Fri 1 Feb 2019 20.00 GMT Last modified on Mon 4 Feb 2019 10.21 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/ ... y-confirms


- and a great interview:

Matt Salinger: ‘My father was writing for 50 years without publishing. That’s a lot of material’

Lidija Haas

Fri 1 Feb 2019 20.00 GMT Last modified on Tue 5 Feb 2019 15.08 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/ ... in-the-rye

Matt Salinger has put aside his work as an actor and producer to work on his father’s literary estate.

Among all the dispute and conjecture that has surrounded the life of JD Salinger, one mystery remains especially puzzling. What did he produce after ceasing to publish his writing in 1965, and will it ever be read? It seemed possible that more work would come to light after Salinger’s death in 2010. In 2013 a documentary and accompanying book claimed, among other things, to describe the contents of five new Salinger books that would be forthcoming by 2020 at the latest, yet here we are at his centenary and there has been no sign.

I ask Salinger’s son Matt about the rumours of new material when we meet for breakfast near his home in Connecticut, and he doesn’t mince words. “They’re total trash,” he says. “The specific bullet-point dramatic quote-unquote reveals that have been made are utter bullshit. They have little to no bearing on reality.” He has been reluctant, until now, to talk about his father at all. “I’ve gotten away with not having this kind of conversation for 58 years,” he says. Still, he is ready, now, to confirm that other writing does exist. His father “teemed with ideas and thoughts, and he’d be driving the car and he’d pull over to write something and laugh to himself – sometimes he’d read it to me, sometimes he wouldn’t – and next to every chair he had a notebook.” He assures me that “most all of what he wrote will at some point be shared with the people that love reading his stuff”. When I ask why that moment hasn’t yet arrived, he is disarmingly direct. “It’s not ready. He wanted me to pull it together, and because of the scope of the job, he knew it would take a long time. This was somebody who was writing for 50 years without publishing, so that’s a lot of material. So there’s not a reluctance or a protectiveness: when it’s ready, we’re going to share it.”

Image
‘Funny as hell’ … JD Salinger in 1950.
Photograph: Gado Images/Alamy Stock Photo

Tall and striking, with an air of warmth and amusement that belies his evident doubts about talking to me at all, Matt Salinger is an actor – probably best known for playing Captain America in the 1990 film – and a producer of movies and theatre, most notably Pamela Gien’s The Syringa Tree, which he “put my whole self into for a decade”, producing an international hit. What becomes clear is that he has been immersed in his father’s material for years – pages typed on Underwood and Royal typewriters, as well as what Salinger called “his squibs, or his fragments” on ordinary paper cut into eighths: “a lot of handwritten, very small notes”. When he began work in 2011, Matt never expected it would take eight years. He feels “fortunate”, he says. “Reading this stuff for the first time” has been “an emotional thing”, like having an ongoing dialogue with his father. “A lot of my friends at this age, their parents are dying or have died and they’re just gone, you know. And my father’s not gone. He hasn’t died for me.” Often he will “just have to stop what I am doing”, struck by something “that I recognise that for the right reader, whether it’s millions or hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands or three or one, it could just be the one right reader that needs to read that. I feel the pressure to get this done, more than he did.”

When I ask how much longer it will take, Matt replies: “We’re definitely talking years,” though, he hopes, fewer than 10. “When his widow and I were first gauging what needed to be done after he died, I knew that I wouldn’t be producing any films or theatre for a while and I knew that I would only be doing enough acting to keep my family’s health insurance.” Often people will approach Matt in public, at a ski resort or bike repair shop – “it’s always my credit card that does me in!” – with “a cri de coeur”, pleading to know if or when more work will appear. One older woman said she didn’t want to die without having read what more there is. “If that’s not pressure …” he says. “I don’t take any of this lightly.” He adds, “I don’t owe an apology, I don’t think, but your readers should know that we’re going as fast as we freaking can.”

We’re never going to be merchandising anything. There’s never going to be a Salinger vodka


Of the rumours that have spread, Matt laughs that “anyone that understood my father at all would find the idea hysterically funny that he would write a book about his first brief marriage. It’s so far beyond the realm of plausibility.” He’s unwilling, at this point, to reveal anything specific, though it’s clear that there will be more about the Glass family, who inhabit many of his best published stories. He says there’s “no linear evolution” in the later work: “It becomes clear that he was after different game.” Matt believes the new work “will definitely disappoint people that he wouldn’t care about, but for real readers … I think it will be tremendously well received by those people and they will be affected in the way every reader hopes to be affected when they open a book. Not changed, necessarily, but something rubs off that can lead to change.”

Matt was born in 1960 and immortalised a year later in the dedication to Franny and Zooey (Salinger writes that he offered the book up to the New Yorker’s editor, William Shawn, “as nearly as possible in the spirit of Matthew Salinger, age one, urging a luncheon companion to accept a cool lima bean”). By the time Matt came along, the second child of his father’s second marriage, in 1955, to Claire Douglas, Salinger had already published most of the work on which his monumental reputation rests. After the perennial bestseller The Catcher in the Rye (1951) came For Esmé – with Love and Squalor, Franny and Zooey, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (the last three mostly consist of stories that appeared in the New Yorker from the late 1940s to 1950s), and then that final New Yorker story, “Hapworth 16, 1924,” in June 1965.

As a child, Matt didn’t hear much about his father’s work. “We were more likely to talk about the Dartmouth football team, or what are we going to do when I pick you up on Wednesday.” He speaks of the respect his father had for children: “He did see the world as something that will just work on fucking you up, if allowed to. He had a real belief and even reverence for the innate intelligence and beauty of kids before they’re homogenised.” Matt’s sister, Margaret, who is four years older than him, offered in her 2000 memoir Dream Catcher a much darker portrait of their parents and childhood, which Matt refuted in print as “gothic tales”. (These days he keeps her informed about plans for the centenary and says: “I only wish her happiness.”) JD Salinger’s first marriage, to a German woman just after the second world war, lasted less than a year. After his divorce from Matt and Margaret’s mother in the 1960s, he eventually married Colleen O’Neill, who now has joint charge of his literary trust with Matt.

That means being on the first line of defence, “fighting lawsuits and tilting at windmills”, fending off what Salinger called “wanters” (I can’t quite tell if the “relentless” Harvey Weinstein, who was “after me forever” to get a film of Catcher off the ground, counts as one of these), and hindering, for instance, the republication of several early stories that Salinger did not want collected. (His father’s feeling about those stories, which were “youthful exercises, part of his process, his development as an artist,” seemed to Matt to be akin to “when you’re having a bad night and you’re trying to go to sleep and you think of things and you just have that wince, ‘Did I really say that?’ or ‘Did I really do that?’ …. There was also more ego in those, he called himself a showoff when he was young.”) Matt has been “keeping up that vigilance. And it’s not a sporting exercise, I don’t do it lightly, it’s no fun. I do it because my father would have done it and out of love for him, and out of love and protectiveness for his work and his books.” He has made himself an expert in international copyright law, and speaks with energy about “European countries where their law came more from Hegel than from Locke.” In the cottage industry of Salinger quasi-biography, he identifies a “weird sort of inverse relationship,” in which “the better somebody knew my father, the less likely they were going to be to talk to anybody. And there was really no middle ground, you either knew him really well and intimately or you just knew him completely casually.” He himself is painstakingly precise in what he says about his father or the work, often second-guessing a word or phrase, reiterating that his father would probably hate what he’s saying and how he’s saying it, or deciding, mid-way through a seemingly harmless sentence, not to finish it. All Salinger’s files, which in his lifetime were kept in a pair of safes in his house – “and thank God they were”, Matt remembers, because otherwise everything would have been lost when Salinger’s house burned down during the 1990s – are now in a high-security storage facility.

His work was everything to him ... the rest is just noise and mythologising and pathologising


Salinger’s desire for privacy, of course, only increased the feverish interest of the press, and his son kept track of the shift in words habitually used to describe him as the decades passed, “seeing when the word recluse started being used. And then that morphed in the common vernacular among journalists to ‘famous recluse’, and then it became ‘infamous recluse’. In the last 10 years, it became ‘notorious recluse’, and if you really think about that word, it’s damning, it has all kinds of psychological overtones, and it’s dishonest, and like so much that’s written, it says more about the person who’s writing it than it does about the subject.” There was nothing sinister or mysterious, Matt insists, in his father’s wish to live and write in private. “He just decided that the best thing for his writing was not to have a lot of interactions with people, literary types in particular. He didn’t want to be playing in those poker games, he wanted to, as he would encourage every would-be writer to do, you know, stew in your own juices.” Salinger gives a vivid, impromptu impression of his father, on the phone, clearing his throat: “Sorry Matt, God, I haven’t used my voice in three days.” Time alone was simply “what he needed for his work, and his work was everything to him”. The rest, Matt says, “is just noise and mythologising and pathologising and people’s own neurosis”.

At one point he shows me a copy of one of the small, handwritten notes that he came across recently, as “an offering or a gesture” to Salinger’s readers. “Anyone that loved his writing and thinks they cared for him in a certain way might have been alarmed or concerned at so much of what’s been written,” he thinks, and he wants them to get “a glimpse” at how Salinger was feeling late in life. The piece, “like a haiku in a way”, describes a moment of unexpected and “still, not disquieting” happiness while resting, having been up working at the typewriter since six that morning: “and, through the window by the bed he saw that snow was falling without rush but copiously into the grayness, the December unsunniness of the late afternoon, and it was suddenly, bliss, sheer bliss, to be alive and watching and about to fall asleep, nearing sleep. Bliss. Thank you, God!”

He is currently deciding what should be included in an exhibition at the New York Public Library in October – “talk about things that go against my nature!” – that will have some manuscripts, photographs, objects, letters. But, he promises: “We’re never going to be merchandising anything. There’s never going to be a Salinger vodka.” Going through some of the hundred or so letters his father wrote him, “often funny as hell”, dating from the early 1970s to 2009, he offers to read some to me. A letter from 1976 links an interpretation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar with the TV journalist Dan Rather’s soppy coverage of Nixon’s resignation and with a tennis match between Chris Evert and Evonne Goolagong, whom he sees as “like some Star Trek girl from outer space ... Too peace-loving, too placid to be effective against any of the hustlers from Earth.” He writes:

“There’s probably no limit to the extremes of infantile and Zoo-like behavior adults will take to, or revert to, if they’re in a group (which means any number of people in excess of two – and on some occasions two’s a mob, especially if there’s booze around), and if the organised shit-throwing is given the permissive, O.K. general heading of Fun & Games, or if it’s vaguely categorized as Letting Off a Little Steam Once in a While Never Hurt Anybody, Mac. Oh, groups at large give me the willies, Da. Group enthusiasm, of any kind, either for cheering or lynching, makes me very uneasy …”


Elsewhere he expresses delight in catching one of Matt’s appearances on TV (he praised his honesty and brilliance, “right in the middle of all that SHIT!!”). Other letters are very emotionally direct. Going through “all those old papers and letters yesterday made me all the more aware how happy and relieved I am to be living in the present, not the past. I can’t say I cared much for the War or military school or my childhood. These Cornish years with you and Peggy and this house and you and the fields and my notebooks and work and you and Lili and Schotland and Nice Doggie and Rosie and you and Sri. R. and the Nuremberg Egg and our trips to London and Lake Placid and Dublin and Montreal and Andover – these years have been what I would call my real life.”

The preparation of his father’s writing is, Matt feels, the most meaningful work he could be doing. “You’re only given one life. Most of the movies that I produced were crap.” He also assures readers that “when my father said that everything he has to say is in his fiction, believe it – it’s there. I think when more of his writing is made accessible, he covers everything that the discerning reader would care about. My job is to help that happen as soon as it can, and stay out of the way.” He adds: “Whatever I have to offer up on his behalf, I’ll certainly do with more belief and faith and love than I offered that lima bean to whoever it was. And hope.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/ ... in-the-rye
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

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