J. D. Salinger dies at 91

[barracuda]

Considering his stated reasons for not publishing further works during his lifetime (he didn't want people to bother him?), you'd think any obstacles to releasing any existing material must have been surmounted by the fact of his death. I mean, I assume nobody's bothering him anymore.

[JackRiddler]

Remember the one about the enlightened child on a ship who knew all time was already written, and calmly received his own death foreseen? JDS may have had afterlife ideas.

(Maybe he woke up back at good old lousy Pencey? Or as a goddam Hollywood hack? The movies, they kill me.)

[barracuda]

Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City and Story of My Life, gives EW his take on the author’s legacy:


“When I heard about Salinger’s death yesterday I realized I hadn’t thought about him in quite a while. He left the stage a long time ago and his influence is so pervasive that it’s easy to forget how different the cultural landscape would probably be if he’d never come along. Like Mark Twain, whom he mimicked in the opening line of Catcher in the Rye, he injected a new slangy colloquial tone into our literature. It’s impossible to imagine the work of Philip Roth or John Updike without his influence. Several generations later, writers like David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers still seemed to be channeling Holden.

“Twenty-six years ago, when I published my first novel, more than a few reviewers remarked on my indebtedness to Salinger. Some commentators went so far as to suggest that my publisher had deliberately mimicked the cover art of the paperback edition of Catcher. I wasn’t necessarily displeased but I was baffled; back in 1984, it had been years since I’d read Salinger or really thought about him. In graduate school, we weren’t reading or discussing Franny and Zooey and I wasn’t remotely conscious of any influence when I was writing Bright Lights, Big City. I’d read Salinger in high school. I said as much in interviews. I’d point to what I thought of as more obvious influences like Hunter S. Thompson and Raymond Carver without stopping to consider the extent to which they were influenced by Salinger. I guess I was writing under the influence of Salinger, whether or not I was conscious of it. He’s the most influential American writer since Hemingway.

“As for the purported trove of fiction, I’m skeptical. Not of its existence, but of its quality. Anyone who’s read “Seymour: An Introduction” or most especially his last published work, “Hapworth 16, 1924” will wonder just how readable his later fiction is. “Hapworth” is a rambling, self referential, improbable letter home written by an alleged seven year old at camp. By the time he wrote it, Salinger seems to have decided to dispense with most of the niceties of storytelling, and to be talking to himself more rather than to the readers of Catcher in the Rye. I suspect we are going to be disappointed, but I would love to be proven wrong.”

[MacCruiskeen]

January 29, 2010
Remembering Salinger: A. M. Homes

Posted by A. M. Homes


I feel as though my father has died.

There are biological parents and adoptive parents, and then there are appropriated parents— artistic or intellectual parents—as instrumental in your development as any other parent or more so because they are selected by you. It is in that vein that I tell you: J. D. Salinger was my father—apologies to his biological offspring and my own multiple parents.

Like any parental relationship, one can’t exactly remember becoming aware of the parent as a someone other than a parent—i.e. the notion of Salinger as not just my father, but a writer, not just a writer but a hero, not just a hero but an icon, not just an icon but a complicated case—talk about the anxiety of influence, this is literally about how one writer makes another.

And like any coming to consciousness, it happened in bits and pieces, fragments. I don’t know when I first read “A Perfect Day For Banana Fish,” but I remember when it started to make sense. It began in the nineteen-seventies, with a conflation of Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin in “The Graduate” and Seymour Glass—two lost young men, poolside. Added to the mix is Hoffman again as Carl Bernstein in “All the Presidents Men”—the real-world events of my hometown, Washington, D.C., Vietnam, and Watergate were the backdrop to my emerging consciousness—scenes from the movie were filmed near my junior high school, and I played hooky to stand around and snap Polariods of the actors, like a wannabe Warhol. The process of transforming fact into fiction, reporters into movie stars, is part of the warp that became my experience.


It’s the nineteen-seventies, I’m sweating, in some polyester shirt with a wide collar and my elephant-leg bell-bottoms—so cool. I know beaches and hotels from family vacations spent at the Delaware shore riding the waves on a rubber raft and getting so sunburned I have to stay in bed for days, covered in salve. Here I think of Salinger’s sunburned Muriel finally able to get a call through to her mother who has been worried sick, and repeatedly asks, “Are you all right, Muriel? Tell me the truth.” The conversation between Muriel and her mother reminds me of the phrasing, the intonation of the Jewish Mother’s accent on “The Call From Long Island,” a comedy routine performed by Arlene Golonka and Betty Walker on my favorite childhood record, “You Don’t Have To Be Jewish.”

I am being imprinted, one of those boardwalk heat transfers hot-pressed onto a sweat shirt, “Love Means Never Having To Say You’re Sorry,” the tag line from Erich Segal’s 1970 film “Love Story.” (Oddly enough, Segal died in London just a few days ago.) This was a time of I’m O.K-You’re O.K., when we all still felt O.K. having clothing that spoke not just to us but for us.

In this swirl, this elixir of peace marches on Washington, of Nixon and Kissinger, and the first war broadcast in living color on television, there is Seymour Glass as the wounded hero from the Second World War—think P.T.S.D. and it begins to click. I am a pre-teen, native Washingtonian carrying my own odd and extreme alienation, the unrelenting sensation of being an outsider due to the fact that I was given up at birth and am not a biological relative to my family, but am now bearing witness to my adopted brother two years ahead of me, in the throes of adolescence and fully miserable. We are in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, parents, brother, and I sharing one hotel room, everything infused with misery and a damp smell and salty flavor.

In life as in Salinger, there is grief, a disconnect, a romantic wishing that somewhere out there, there is something else, something more, something other, and then grief comes round again; it is pointless to be so optimistic, knowing that this is it, this is what there is.

I am on the beach. It is bleached a blinding-hot white in the full sun, I am sticky with salt, Coppertone lotion, forever trapped with my family literally and figuratively.

I am between things neither Sybil Carpenter nor Seymour Glass, neither child nor adult, I have powers of seeing and knowing, but no ability to take action. I am a distant observer. I go for a walk, for a brief moment liberated, independent, inexplicably allowed to stroll freely down the beach, which I do, like a prisoner on parole, the distance I go ever-stretching, until an invisible bungee cord of anxiety snaps me back. I usually get to the point where our family’s umbrella is no longer visible, and panic.

As I am walking, a crowd is gathering just ahead, a three-quarter circle of people form around something at the water’s edge. I hurry. A small shark has washed up, alive, staring at the group of people—its shiny deep-black eye imploring them to do something.

“It’s a sand shark,” someone says. They may as well have said “Bananafish” (this is still a time of innocence; the film “Jaws” is a couple of years away.)

“Do they bite?” someone else asks.

The shark lies still, looking at us helplessly. The adults stare, the children poking their toes toward it as if trying to tempt the shark into action. Someone calls out, “Get a shovel,” and I remember not being clear about whether they wanted to use the shovel to club the shark to death or use it to save the shark by pushing it back into the water. Several people break away from the circle and hurry off in search of shovels. A small boy of about five pushes through the crowd coming into the center of the circle. He looks down at the shark and quickly, definitively, picks the shark up by the tail and hurls it back into the water—done. To me it seemed Salingeresque.

I think of “Bananafish,” of the story’s very different end. Seymour Glass, sitting on one twin bed while his wife Muriel sleeps on the other. Seymour Glass firing a single shot into his brain, as terrifying now as it was in 1948, and honestly it makes perfect sense.

For me, this is the beginning, and then there is a middle, where I have by now read all of Salinger and have developed a habit of writing letters to strangers—here think about Holden Caulfield’s comment about reading a book and wishing “the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”

My parents would drop me at the local public library—the one that had phone books for every city in America, and I would look up names, names of people whose work interested me. I was too shy even to think of calling and too skittish to write to random strangers—they could be “weirdos,” but famous strangers seemed to a degree test-driven—and let’s just say it was surprising how many well-known people had their phone numbers and addresses listed in the seventies and eighties. I wrote to artists, muscians, movie directors—I didn’t gush, didn’t say I’m a huge fan, please send an autographed eight-by-ten glossy. I told them about my life, about my day at school, about being trapped in this child’s life, and about the book of poems I was working on, “An Introduction to Death with Excerpts From Life.” These were poems I wrote by hand and dutifully delivered to my mother as a kind of parental torture for her to type on her Smith Cornona with the correctable cartridge, because she can type and spell better than I, and because I want to be sure she really knows exactly how awful I am feeling. Between typing, she puts in calls to the kid-shrink. I write my poems, I write my letters, I am pen pals with everyone from Pete Towshend, of The Who, to director John Sayles, and I am writing my way out of my parents’ house, slowly but surely.

On December 8th, 1980, I am nineteen years old, suffering separation anxiety so profound I can’t manage to actually go away to college, living in my parents’ home, taking classes at American University, in Washington, D.C. December 8th, is my best friend’s birthday, she is a year and ten days older than me, and I am on the phone with her when I hear the news that John Lennon has been shot. It is late at night and quickly the news comes that Lennon is dead. I am nauseated, feeling like something horribly wrong has happened; something has pulled the basic theory of relativity out of whack. And shortly thereafter, I hear that Mark David Chapman pulled a copy of “The Catcher In the Rye” out of his pocket and stood there reading it as Lennon lay dying. It is unbearable—the psychotic misappropriation of literature—sacred stuff that belonged not just to one of us, but to all of us.

I am compelled to write, the Smith Corona that my mother typed my poems on has now become my preferred instrument—I am taking a course in playwriting, and I write a play titled “The Call-In Hour,” the story of how Holden Caulfield was a real person who long ago met J. D. Salinger on a subway train and goes on a radio call-in show to ask people to quit clinging to the book, to get on with their lives. People call in with questions, confessions, wanting to know if Holden turned out okay. The final caller is J. D. Salinger himself. I go back to the library and use Variety magazine to locate the call letters for real radio stations, etc. And then when I am done I return to the library, do some digging and come up with a list of theatres around the country, and off I go to the local copy shop and then naively send the play to theaters across the country—only to have it win the playwriting contest at the Source theatre, in Washington, D.C.

I was summoned to the theatre to meet the producers, and I remember sitting there watching them walk back and forth, checking watches, not realizing that I was the person they were waiting for. They were shocked: I may have been nineteen, but I looked twelve. They had no idea that A. M. Homes wasn’t “some guy in his forties.” As the play went into production, my dad would drive me to rehearsals, which were at night in a theatre on 14th Street, in a part of D.C. that had been burned by the riots after Martin Luther King’s assassination, and had never quite recovered. Somehow, word about the play got out, and the theatre got word from Salinger’s longtime agent, Dorothy Olding (who died in 1997 and to whom “Nine Stories” is dedicated), that we cease and desist—this was unauthorized use of Salinger’s material. The producer called someone, who called someone else who supposedly pleaded the case with the author, but word from Salinger was that he wanted his character to remain flat on the page—he had turned down offers for Caulfield breakfast cereal and a thousand other things, and I have to say I felt sympathetic. My hair began to fall out—the whole point of it for me wasn’t to piss off J. D. Salinger, but in fact to sort of tell people to leave him alone. The story was covered in The Washington Post and The Washington Times. The question all were asking was: Is Holden Caulfield a public figure? Can he be written about without permission? In essence, can he act without his author? Given that I was using no material from the book, people thought it was an interesting question, a gray area of copyright law. Personally, I had no interest in provoking the ire of my father/hero and for the purposes of the production, I changed the names, Holden became Harmon and “The Catcher In the Rye” became “Life In the Outfield.” The play opened in Washington in 1982, I was twenty-years old, still living at home, and while my Washington family, my aunt and uncle from Chicago, and many others all went to the opening, I hid at home, overwhelmed with a peculiar shyness from which I never fully recovered.

How is it possible that twenty-eight years have passed since then? It is as though I blinked and, in some strange space-time trick, went from being that industrious lost girl desperately typing her way out of Chevy Chase to being a middle-aged author/mom living in New York, still typing, like tap dancing. How is it possible that at ninety-one, Salinger is dead? Will there be something more from him—some gift from the grave, will we ever see the years or writing kept private, or is what we have already enough?

Without Salinger hiding out in Cornish, New Hampshire, his silence a kind of Buddhist echo, answering by not answering, sending the big questions back to us, I’m not sure that I want more. I’m content with what I have. And I am in awe of the strange and not so subtle way we have carried this quiet sagacious lion with us like some beloved, worn stuffed animal and have woven his words, his way of thinking, inexorably into our DNA—we are all his characters, we are all Holden Caulfield, Seymour Glass, and the whole Glass family.


Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/b ... z0e7iD2SIW

[MacCruiskeen]

Let The Happiness In
January 29, 2010


“This book belongs to Belinda Wright”

I was twelve years old when my mum gave me her own copy of The Catcher In The Rye to read, her youthful handwritten inscription across the title page. It was the Penguin Modern Classics edition with the plain silver jacket, and looking at it gave me the same feeling that I’d get when, a year or so later, I began poring over the sleeves of Joy Division records. It seemed to explain an entire world view in the very act of withholding all detail; it was austere and mysterious, hinting at new and powerful knowledge contained within. My mum, through whatever process of intuition and awareness and careful observation that parents undertake, had clearly come to a silent decision that it was time for me to read this book, though she never said as much. She just handed it to me one day and said “I think you’ll like this”. And I have blessed her for it ever since. Salinger, Shakespeare, Beckett, and Brecht, her own literary loves, each of them handed to me as a gift of her own love, at ages when I was still young enough to have no idea who they were as literary figures, no preconceptions, which meant that I plunged into the language of each like a new dark lake, immersed in the sensation without troubling myself too much over meaning. I still think it’s the best way to read. Introduce a child or an adolescent to a writer when that child is young, perhaps too young; what will remain with them forever is the profound, sensory magic of the language.

Of course, Salinger is by far the easiest to parse out of that lot, and twelve is the perfect age for an introduction: like The Cure, whose moral universe is similarly entrancing and simplistic, I think Salinger might well be one of those figures whom you have to fall for – and fall for hard – as a teenager, if the work is to go on being meaningful to you as an adult. As yesterday’s New York Times puts it, The Catcher In The Rye “remains one of the books that adolescents first fall in love with — a book that intimately articulates what it is to be young and sensitive and precociously existential, a book that first awakens them to the possibilities of literature.”

“lousy childhood”, “touchy as hell”, “goddam autobiography” – the sass and snap of the Salinger style was right there from the first page. The immediacy of tone doesn’t (at least to me) make Salinger’s work read naturalistically. Far from it. For a man who showed so much contempt for the cinema, both in his letters and his fiction, Salinger has a screenwriter’s ear for dialogue. Like the rapid-fire dialogue of screwball comedies from the 1940s, the affectation is part of the charm. You know that nobody really talks like that. Not with all the italics in every sentence to signal the inflections, and the goddam cursing all the time. And yet the chatty narrative voiceover made plausible a world which, from the perspective of a twelve year old girl in the outer suburbs of Sydney in 1993, was as archaic and utterly exotic as Elizabethan England. Prep schools and cabs and Radio City Music Hall and cocktails: part of Salinger’s great achievement was to make me (and countless other readers) care about the fate of a spoiled and wealthy teenager – to essentially invent the modern literary teenager, no less – and I cared because Holden wanted to know where the ducks on the lagoon in Central Park went to during the winter, and because his little sister Phoebe was “rollerskate skinny”. Rollerskate skinny. That, as Holden would say, kills me.

Now that I live in New York, and, coincidentally, study at the same university where, briefly, Salinger took evening classes in fiction writing, I have plenty of opportunity to walk past the big riverside apartment blocks of upper-Manhattan which were the setting for so much of his work. Liveried doormen and building superintendents and elevator drivers: the apartments themselves are a throwback to a mythical, glamorous New York as much as Salinger’s stories are. It’s just so easy, looking up at the bay windows and elaborate gables, to imagine the Glass family arguing away inside.

I’ve been thinking, since I heard of JD Salinger’s death last night, of the following speech from Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, that other key text of mid-20th century American disaffection:

George, my husband… George, who is out somewhere there in the dark, who is good to me – whom I revile, who can keep learning the games we play as quickly as I can change them. Who can make me happy and I do not wish to be happy. Yes, I do wish to be happy. George and Martha: Sad, sad, sad. Whom I will not forgive for having come to rest; for having seen me and having said: yes, this will do.

Who makes me happy and I do not wish to be happy. Albee’s middle-aged, alcoholic academics are what Salinger’s teenage truants and precocious quiz-show child stars might have become, had he ever written sequels; had the Glass children and Holden Caulfield not struggled in every chapter of Salinger’s fiction against their fear of becoming the person that might say: yes, this will do. And yet, the possibility of happiness, however transitory and however domestic, is what propels Salinger’s characters across the page. Nearly everyone thinks of ‘A Perfect Day For Bananafish’ as the representative Salinger short story – no sooner are we introduced to Seymour Glass than he shoots himself in the head, on his honeymoon vacation – but what haunts me, in the best sense, is the Seymour of ‘Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters’, who doesn’t turn up to his own wedding because he’s too happy for it.

I really called to ask her, to beg her for the last time to just go off alone with me and get married. I’m too keyed up to be with people. I feel as though I’m about to be born. Sacred, sacred day. The connection was so bad, and I couldn’t talk at all during most of the call. How terrible is it when you say I love you and the person at the other end shouts back “What?” I’ve been reading a miscellany of Vedanta all day. Marriage partners are to serve each other. Elevate, help, teach, strengthen, but above all, serve. Raise their children honourably, lovingly, and with detachment. A child is a guest in the house, to be loved and respected – never possessed, since he belongs to God. How wonderful, how sane, how beautifully difficult, and therefore true. The joy of responsibility for the first time in my life. Oppenheim is already in the sack. I should be too, but I can’t. Someone must sit up with the happy man.

The joy of responsibility. Yes, this will do. It’s this one note struck in counterpoint to the self-valorising cynicism that so preoccupies his main characters which, for me, sets Salinger apart from the countless Bildungsroman that his writing has given rise too; from the jeunesse dorée of The OC or Gossip Girl or whatever cable TV sitcom full of teenagers whose cynicism is so complete, and whose longing for responsibility is so absent, that reckless, unselfconscious, unbearable happiness can never intrude.

Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing a game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t know where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but it’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.

I’d be content if any and all remaining Salinger manuscripts were burnt. Like a band sensible enough to release only two albums and then split up, the small catalogue that remains is enough. Vale, JD Salinger.

http://populardemand.wordpress.com/2010 ... piness-in/

[Alaya]

Thank you guys for posting these.

Mac.

I am an extreme case of arrested development, I guess.

After reading some of these long-forgotten quotes from 'Catcher"

I am still Holden.

also

I am still Franny.
I am still Boo Boo.

and Buddy and Seymor will always be my brothers.

[MacCruiskeen]

Thank you guys for posting these.

Mac.

I am an extreme case of arrested development, I guess.

After reading some of these long-forgotten quotes from 'Catcher"

I am still Holden.

also

I am still Franny.
I am still Boo Boo.

and Buddy and Seymor will always be my brothers.

You're lucky, Alaya. I am still Edgar Marsalla.

[MacCruiskeen]

One of three articles in the new New Yorker:

Bearable
by Lillian Ross February 8, 2010

Related Links
Slide Show: Four photographs of J. D. Salinger taken in the nineteen-sixties, from Lillian Ross’s private collection.


From left: Erik Ross, Lillian Ross, Matthew Salinger, J. D. Salinger, and Peggy Salinger, in Central Park. COURTESY LILLIAN ROSS

At one point during the more than half century of our friendship, J. D. Salinger told me he had an idea that someday, when “all the fiction had run out,” he might try to do something straight, “really factual, formally distinguishing myself from the Glass boys and Holden Caulfield and the other first-person narrators I’ve used.” It might be readable, maybe funny, he said, and “not just smell like a regular autobiography.” The main thing was that he would use straight facts and “thereby put off or stymie one or two vultures—freelancers or English-department scavengers—who might come around and bother the children and the family before the body is even cold.”

A single straight fact is that Salinger was one of a kind. His writing was his and his alone, and his way of life was only what he chose to follow. He never gave an inch to anything that came to him with what he called a “smell.” The older and crankier he got, the more convinced he was that in the end all writers get pretty much what’s coming to them: the destructive praise and flattery, the killing attention and appreciation. The trouble with all of us, he believed, is that when we were young we never knew anybody who could or would tell us any of the penalties of making it in the world on the usual terms: “I don’t mean just the pretty obvious penalties, I mean the ones that are just about unnoticeable and that do really lasting damage, the kind the world doesn’t even think of as damage.” He talked about how easily writers could become vain, complaining that they got puffed up by the same “authorities” who approved putting monosodium glutamate in baby food.

When he had young children, and was living in Cornish, New Hampshire, he did the usual things. But he was always watching. Once, he showed me a program for the Cornish Fair. It’s innocent enough, and that’s something, he said, but even the fair was guilty of its own style of hustling. He took his children to ride on the flying swings. “I stand around and talk about schools with the other crummy parents, the summer parents,” he wrote in a letter to me. Getting back to work, he said, was “the only way I’ve ever been able to take the awful conventional world. I think I despise every school and college in the world, but the ones with the best reputation first.”

He loved children with no holds barred, but never with the sentimental fakery of admiring their “purity.” After watching his son, Matthew, playing one day, he said, “If your child likes—loves—you, the very love he bears you tears your heart out about once a day or once every other day.” He said, “I started writing and making up characters in the first place because nothing or not much away from the typewriter was reaching my heart at all.”

When I adopted my son, Erik, Jerry was almost as exuberant as I was. Unbelievable, stupendous, he said of one picture I sent: “He’s roaring with laughter. Oh, if he can only hold on to it.”

When he read a story of mine about kids skipping around a Maypole in Central Park, he wrote to me, “The first and last thing you’ve done is to redeem everything, not just make everything bearable.” He liked the way the bystanders were described, noting that they’d been given “their true and everlasting unimportance.”

Salinger was generous with writers he admired, but he was unsparing about those who had what he called “disguises.” He was hard on Kenneth Tynan. “No matter how he stuffs his readers with verbiage, it never amounts to a core of truth,” he said. Tynan bent too much to current hip opinion, he thought. “A community of seriously hip observers is a scary and depressing thing,” he said. “It takes me at least an hour to warm up when I sit down to work. . . . Just taking off my own disguises takes an hour or more.” He said he’d never “had the annoyance” of meeting Truman Capote, who apparently sicced various “crazy people” on him, people who all closed their letters by saying that Truman sent his best regards.

Emerson was a touchstone, and Salinger often quoted him in letters. For instance, “A man must have aunts and cousins, must buy carrots and turnips, must have barn and woodshed, must go to market and to the blacksmith’s shop, must saunter and sleep and be inferior and silly.” Writers, he thought, had trouble abiding by that, and he referred to Flaubert and Kafka as “two other born non-buyers of carrots and turnips.”

Over the years, Salinger told me about working “long and crazy hours” at his writing and trying to stay away from everything that was written about him. He didn’t care about reviews, he said, but “the side effects” bothered him. “There are no writers anymore,” he said once. “Only book-selling louts and big mouths.”

He liked living in New Hampshire, but he often found fun and relief by coming down to New York to have supper with me and Bill Shawn, this magazine’s editor for many years. In a note he sent after the three of us got together for the last time, he wrote, “It will set me up for months. I was at peace.” Another time he described the fun he’d had on a trip to London with his children, where he took them to see Engelbert Humperdinck in a stage version of “Robinson Crusoe”: “Awful, but we all sort of enjoyed it, and the main idea was to see the Palladium itself, because that’s where the last scene of ‘The 39 Steps’ was set.”

Salinger loved movies, and he was more fun than anyone to discuss them with. He enjoyed watching actors work, and he enjoyed knowing them. (He loved Anne Bancroft, hated Audrey Hepburn, and said that he had seen “Grand Illusion” ten times.) Brigitte Bardot once wanted to buy the rights to “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” and he said that it was uplifting news. “I mean it,” he told me. “She’s a cute, talented, lost enfante, and I’m tempted to accommodate her, pour le sport.”

He was original even in the way he found his pleasures. He told me that one day he went out and bought an iron, and had his housekeeper iron his shirts. “How it cheered me up,” he said. After he bought a Maytag washer and dryer, he was tickled that the salesman quoted Ruskin to him—something about where quality counts, price doesn’t. He was sure that the line wasn’t part of the man’s spiel. “God, how I still love private readers,” he wrote. “It’s what we all used to be.” ♦

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2010/02/0 ... _talk_ross

See also:

"A Night at the Movies", by John Seabrook

and:

"J. D. Salinger", by Adam Gopnik

[Pierre d'Achoppement]

At Home in the World: An Affair with J. D. Salinger Reveals a Sad, Angry, Predatory Man

Joyce Maynard's dazzling memoir, At Home in the World, reveals the details of her nine-month affair with J. D. Salinger when she was 18 years old.

A child-prodigy writer whose work began appearing in Seventeen magazine when she was 15, Maynard came to Salinger's attention in 1972 while a freshman at Yale, when the New York Times Sunday Magazine published her photograph on its cover in connection with her essay "An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life."

In a cover shot by Alex Gotfryd she's the classic girl-child, looking much younger than 18, with huge eyes and long-toed feet right out of Lolita. In the actual Times cover picture, she wears an oversized watch like the one worn by the flirtatious 12-year-old British girl in Salinger's short story "For Esme -- With Love and Squalor."

Salinger, then 53, began a months-long courtship by mail and telephone, which culminated with Maynard's visiting him at his farm in New Hampshire and eventually dropping out of Yale and moving in with him. She was still a virgin, and so tense that their relationship was never fully consummated.

In one scene she writes:

He takes hold of my head, then, with surprising firmness, and guides me under the covers. Under the sheets with their smell of laundry detergent, I close my eyes. Tears are streaming down my cheeks. Still, I don't stop. So long as I keep doing this, I know he will love me.

Coming across as pompous, astoundingly unfeeling, deceptive and defiantly hypocritical, Salinger indoctrinates her with his homeopathically inspired theories about food, teaches her how to induce vomiting in order to avoid absorbing "toxins," has her share a diet so austere that she stops menstruating, and generally makes himself the absolute center of not only her personal world but also life as we know it. In one scene, commenting scornfully on the Beatles and their Maharishi, he takes rueful credit for having created the Oriental philosophy fad, conveniently ignoring the Transcendentalists, Herman Hesse and Alan Watts, among others.

Salinger attempts to talk her out of cooperating in the promotion of a book that Doubleday has contracted her to write. As she senses, this would very effectively keep her from escaping into the real world he disdains and, one gathers, fears so much. After nine months, during which he encourages her to believe they will have a child, he abruptly discards her as if she were a worn- out toy, precipitating a blinding depression and a long-lasting unrequited obsession that she confronts at last in writing At Home in the World.

Salinger's career advice does have some very significant long-range benefits. He urges her to avoid pandering for the glitter of fame, warns her against falling into the dishonest traps of the publishing world and instructs her to write honestly about what she know best.

"Suppose you made your subject something you loved and admired," she recalls Salinger telling her. "Something you held precious and dear."

One wonders how he feels about that advice now.

As might be expected, the news of Maynard's plans to write about Salinger elicited the obligatory sneers. On his "Bananafish" Salinger Web site, Stephen Foskett has written, ". . . proving that money gets more important with age, she plans to publish a memoir of her relationship with Salinger and her letters from him."

Although she could hardly have been unaware of Salinger's commercial value, an objective reading affirms that Maynard's main aim was to discharge herself of pent-up pain. If she merely wanted money, she could easily have sold her 40 pages of Salinger correspondence for whatever she asked.

In any case, the star of this absorbing, funny and emotionally blistering book is not J. D. Salinger but Joyce Maynard. Although the affair with Salinger is the most newsworthy material in the book, it's the rest -- her classic baffled writer's family, her woeful failed marriage, her children, her career adventures -- that hits the hardest. Salinger is just one more exquisitely drawn character. The book would stand on its own if she changed his name and identity and just made him another gray-haired '60s guru, as writer-director Phil Alden Robinson did when he adapted Salinger's part in W.P. Kinsella's "Shoeless Joe" into the James Earl Jones character in "Field of Dreams."

This is a book that reads as if spoken. The writing is clear, eloquent and unpretentious, like Shaker furniture rendered in words. She avoids poetic effects. In this sense, Salinger's influence is very obvious, but she actually surpasses him in depth of feeling, especially at the end, when she strips off the last of her psychological bandages and walks around in raw grief, anger and overwhelmingly touching self-acceptance. She writes, "If I tell what I do, nobody else can expose me."

At one point she tells how, when the movie of her novel "To Die For" was chosen to open the Toronto Film Festival, she called her older sister Rona, a Toronto resident, expecting to be invited to stay with her three children in her sister's spacious house. This idea went over at first like a turd in the punchbowl, but then Rona called her back to offer the house after all. Rona and husband Paul would stay in a hotel, though.

Each morning during the visit, Rona and Paul came over to their house for "an enjoyable breakfast with us," Maynard writes. " 'You know, Rona," I say, "sometimes I get the feeling you don't even like me."

"No," she says slowly, in a way that makes me understand how hard it has been for her. "It's just that... you... take up... so much space."'

Indeed she does, and thanks for it. "At Home in the World" is a memoir that demands reading for the astounding pleasure to be found in a writer who has the courage to show herself inside out.

Related story: "Why Does the American Press Hate Joyce Maynard?" Maynard was ripped apart when she put her letters from Salinger on sale in order to pay for her children's education. In the aftermath of the controversy, she reported that other women contacted her who said they had been seduced and abandoned by Salinger in the same way she described.

Reviewed by Jules Siegel for the San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, September 6, 1998, At Home in the World By Joyce Maynard Picador USA; 347 pages; $25

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jules-sie ... 41253.html

[MacCruiskeen]

Well, Pierre, it doesn't surprise me that you would piss on his grave; for you, like Mr. Siegel, are nothing if not a born pisser.

[Pierre d'Achoppement]

I thought Salinger's love of virgin girl-childs "looking much younger than 18, with huge eyes and long-toed feet right out of Lolita" might be relevant to this board's interests. I'm not pissing on anyone's grave here.

[MacCruiskeen]

I thought Salinger's love of virgin girl-childs "looking much younger than 18, with huge eyes and long-toed feet right out of Lolita" might be relevant to this board's interests.

Yeah, just like you thought accusing the board of antisemitism without being able to back it up even slightly would also be "relevant to the board's interests." I call that pissing, and I call anyone who does it a pisser: "pompous, astoundingly unfeeling, deceptive and defiantly hypocritical". Know thyself.

But what the hell. Homer was a warmonger, Dante was a bigot, Kafka was neurotic, Joyce was a drunk, Brecht was a sexist (so fuck all them) while you and Mr. Siegel are, and always have been, in every way wholly and dazzlingly admirable, or at least safely anonymous.

[Pierre d'Achoppement]

I'll come back on the issue of antisemitism if you want to, although i doubt there's much point. As for the topic at hand: there's been lots of threads here discussing the evil wicked ways and/or sordid (sex)lives of various famous people, where posters couldn't wait to condemn. So it seemed fair enough to me just giving a somewhat different view on Salinger attention in a topic that's otherwise exclusively on how great he was. I've read Joyce Maynard's book before he died btw.

[MacCruiskeen]

I thought Salinger's love of virgin girl-childs "looking much younger than 18, with huge eyes and long-toed feet right out of Lolita" might be relevant to this board's interests.

Those are the words of the supercilious, prurient and predatory pisser Mr. Jules Siegel, by the way, and not Salinger's. ["Long-toed feet"???]

[nathan28]

She didn't look like a child, she looked like a freaking space alien, and "long-toed" can't explain the travesty of foreshortening by an inept, or spun-out, photographer.




But just to be clear:

RENOWNED AUTHOR AND MIDDLE-AGED MAN INTO 'AUTHENTICITY' THING ATTEMPTS AFFAIR WITH 18-YEAR-OLD GIRL

MEMOIR FROM LIKE FIFTEEN YEARS AGO RECEIVES FREE PR OVER SUDDEN DEATH OF RECLUSE MENTIONED IN BOOK

wow, news