R.I.P. J.D. Salinger

[Sonic Youth]

JD Salinger letters to go on display in NYC
JD Salinger’s letters reveal caustic opinions on people and his work
Timesonline.co.uk

James Bone in New York

A newly released cache of letters by J.D. Salinger sheds fresh light on how he went from a celebrated young author who dined with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh to a recluse raging at the “big shitty world”.

The 11 letters were written by Salinger to Michael Mitchell, the commercial artist and his former neighbour, who designed the cover of The Catcher in the Rye. The letters show that Salinger maintained a stringent writing discipline for decades after his last published story in 1965, working at his desk from 6am to noon, and had at least two “scripts”, or books, he had been “picking at for years” before his death last month.

“The reason that these letters are especially good is that they are written from a literary artist to a visual artist,” said Declan Kiely, a curator at the Morgan Library in New York, which is preparing to put them on public view for the first time next week. “So they talk about what it is to struggle as an artist — to struggle with creativity.”

The first letter was written from London on May 22, 1951, just as Salinger, then 32, was about to publish The Catcher in the Rye. He was escorted around town by his British publisher Hamish Hamilton, whom he describes as an excellent host but a “professional get-together boy”.

He went to see Olivier and his wife Leigh in George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra and was invited afterwards to dine at their house in Chelsea, which he described as a “very posh evening”. In another letter written in 1983, Salinger compared Olivier unfavourably as an actor with John Wayne in The Shootist.

Salinger withdrew from public life in 1953 to a 90-acre (36ha) property in New Hampshire. In one letter, dated December 30, 1983, he rails at “some English prick” who has been commissioned to write a biography of him — a reference to Ian Hamilton, the British author of In Search of J.D. Salinger, with whom he fought a long legal battle. Perhaps his most revealing comment comes on April 6, 1985, when he laments that his life was not really “tellable in any of the normal ways that friends tell each other how things are going”.

The letters end in 1993 with him curtly rebuffing a request from Mr Mitchell to autograph a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. Mr Mitchell apparently sold the letters to a dealer soon afterwards and they found their way to the collector Carter Burden. His widow donated them to the Morgan Library, which kept them sealed until after the author’s death.

[Sonic Youth]

I first read "Cather in the Rye" when I was 11 or 12, and it was the mainstay of my adolescence. When I was furious with the injustice of how the world was treating me, I'd pick it up and inhabit the persona of Holden Caulfield as a 'fuck you' to everyone. (I had a close female friend who used 'Romeo and Juliet' for the same purposes, picturing herself as Juliet as she breaks the restraints of the family's and society's expectaions of her by running off with Romeo, and then dying to spite the cruel, heartless world which never understood her. Ah, adolescence!) In fact, I don't think I've read "Catcher" since adolescence, but last time I was in an Indian bookstore, I bought a Penguin India paperback edition for 220.40 rupees. I have it in my hand, and now there's no better opportunity to read it.

I'm afraid I'm not a very big fan of his other works, and I am worried about whether "Catcher" will hold up for me. But thanks to Franny and Zooey I did read (or more accurately, flip through) and enjoy "The Way of the Pilgrim".

It would seem this also completes a "death in threes" cycle in the category of very old American authors: Louis Auchincloss, Howard Zinn and J.D. Salinger. Gore Vidal can rest easy now.


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What's in Salinger's safe?
Jan 28, 7:26 PM (ET)
By HILLEL ITALIE

NEW YORK (AP) - So what about the safe?

The death this week of J.D. Salinger ends one of literature's most mysterious lives and intensifies one of its greatest mysteries: Was the author of "The Catcher in the Rye" keeping a stack of finished, unpublished manuscripts in a safe in his house in Cornish, N.H? Are they masterpieces, curiosities or random scribbles?

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.

Stories about a possible Salinger trove have been around for a long time. In 1999, New Hampshire neighbor Jerry Burt said the author had told him years earlier that he had written at least 15 unpublished books kept locked in a safe at his home. A year earlier, author and former Salinger girlfriend Joyce Maynard had written that Salinger used to write daily and had at least two novels stored away.

Salinger, who died Wednesday at age 91, began publishing short stories in the 1940s and became a sensation in the 1950s after the release of "Catcher," a novel that helped drive the already wary author into near-total seclusion. His last book, "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour," came out in 1963 and his last published work of any kind, the short story "Hapworth 16, 1924," appeared in The New Yorker in 1965.

Jay McInerney, a young star in the 1980s thanks to the novel "Bright Lights, Big City," is not a fan of Hapworth and skeptical about the contents of the safe.

"I think there's probably a lot in there, but I'm not sure if it's necessarily what we hope it is," McInerney said Thursday. "'Hapworth' was not a traditional or terribly satisfying work of fiction. It was an insane epistolary monologue, virtually shapeless and formless. I have a feeling that his later work is in that vein."

Author-editor Gordon Lish, who in the 1970s wrote an anonymous story that convinced some readers it was a Salinger original, said he was "certain" that good work was locked up in Cornish. Novelist Curtis Sittenfeld, frequently compared to Salinger because of her novel "Prep," was simply enjoying the adventure.

"I can't wait to find out!" she said. "In our age of shameless self-promotion, it's extraordinary, and kind of great, to think of someone really and truly writing for writing's sake."

Some of the great works of literature have been published after the author's death, and even against the author's will, including such Franz Kafka novels as "The Trial" and "The Castle," which Kafka had requested be destroyed.

Because so little is known about what Salinger was doing, it's so easy to guess. McInernay said he has an old girlfriend who met Salinger and was told that the author was mostly writing about health and nutrition. Lish said Salinger told him back in the 1960s that he was still writing about the Glass family, featured in much of Salinger's work.

But the Salinger papers might exist only in our dreams, like the second volume of Nikolai Gogol's "Dead Souls," which the Russian author burned near the end of his life. The Salinger safe also could turn into a version of Henry James' novella "The Aspern Papers," in which the narrator's pursuit of a late poet's letters ends with his being told that they were destroyed.

Margaret Salinger, the author's daughter, wrote in a memoir published in 2000 that J.D. Salinger had a precise filing system for his papers: A red mark meant the book could be released "as is," should the author die. A blue mark meant that the manuscript had to be edited.

"There is a marvelous peace in not publishing," J.D. Salinger told The New York Times in 1974. "Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure."



Edited By Sonic Youth on 1264744148

[anonymous1980]

Franny and Zoeey is one of the greatest things I've ever read. He'll be deeply, deeply missed.

That reminds me. I need to pick up that book. Well, now would be a good time.

R.I.P.

[The Original BJ]

"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish 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."

So true.

[FilmFan720]

Franny and Zoeey is one of the greatest things I've ever read. He'll be deeply, deeply missed.

Agreed wholeheartedly

[Mister Tee]

Has Catcher in the Rye been read by more Americans than any other book? I first read it when I was 14, and flipped over it (as nearly everyone I know did). I read it again in college, and this time it struck me as an incomparably sad work. Many passages I can about quote from memory.

Of the short stories, I especially love The Laughing Man, and A Perfect Day for Bananafish, but they're all good. And what titles! Just Before the War with the Eskimos; divine. And of course Franny and Zooey, and Raise High the Roof Beams... I always wished there'd been more to read, but maybe that's like wishing JFK or Marilyn had had longer lives. The finiteness of them is part of what made them so special.

[Big Magilla]

NEW YORK – J.D. Salinger, the legendary author, youth hero and fugitive from fame whose "The Catcher in the Rye" shocked and inspired a world he increasingly shunned, has died. He was 91.

Salinger died of natural causes at his home on Wednesday, the author's son said in a statement from Salinger's longtime literary representative, Harold Ober Agency. He had lived for decades in self-imposed isolation in the small, remote house in Cornish, N.H.

"The Catcher in the Rye," with its immortal teenage protagonist, the twisted, rebellious Holden Caulfield, came out in 1951, a time of anxious, Cold War conformity and the dawn of modern adolescence. The Book-of-the-Month Club, which made "Catcher" a featured selection, advised that for "anyone who has ever brought up a son" the novel will be "a source of wonder and delight — and concern."

Enraged by all the "phonies" who make "me so depressed I go crazy," Holden soon became American literature's most famous anti-hero since Huckleberry Finn. The novel's sales are astonishing — more than 60 million copies worldwide — and its impact incalculable. Decades after publication, the book remains a defining expression of that most American of dreams: to never grow up.

Salinger was writing for adults, but teenagers from all over identified with the novel's themes of alienation, innocence and fantasy, not to mention the luck of having the last word. "Catcher" presents the world as an ever-so-unfair struggle between the goodness of young people and the corruption of elders, a message that only intensified with the oncoming generation gap.

Novels from Evan Hunter's "The Blackboard Jungle" to Curtis Sittenfeld's "Prep," movies from "Rebel Without a Cause" to "The Breakfast Club," and countless rock 'n' roll songs echoed Salinger's message of kids under siege. One of the great anti-heroes of the 1960s, Benjamin Braddock of "The Graduate," was but a blander version of Salinger's narrator.

The cult of "Catcher" turned tragic in 1980 when crazed Beatles fan Mark David Chapman shot and killed John Lennon, citing Salinger's novel as an inspiration and stating that "this extraordinary book holds many answers."

By the 21st century, Holden himself seemed relatively mild, but Salinger's book remained a standard in school curriculums and was discussed on countless Web sites and a fan page on Facebook.

Salinger's other books don't equal the influence or sales of "Catcher," but they are still read, again and again, with great affection and intensity. Critics, at least briefly, rated Salinger as a more accomplished and daring short story writer than John Cheever.

The collection "Nine Stories" features the classic "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," the deadpan account of a suicidal Army veteran and the little girl he hopes, in vain, will save him. The novel "Franny and Zooey," like "Catcher," is a youthful, obsessively articulated quest for redemption, featuring a memorable argument between Zooey and his mother as he attempts to read in the bathtub.

"Catcher," narrated from a mental facility, begins with Holden recalling his expulsion from a Pennsylvania boarding school for failing four classes and for general apathy.

He returns home to Manhattan, where his wanderings take him everywhere from a Times Square hotel to a rainy carousel ride with his kid sister, Phoebe, in Central Park. He decides he wants to escape to a cabin out West, but scorns questions about his future as just so much phoniness.

"I mean how do you know what you're going to do till you do it?" he reasons. "The answer is, you don't. I think I am, but how do I know? I swear it's a stupid question."

"The Catcher in the Rye" became both required and restricted reading, periodically banned by a school board or challenged by parents worried by its frank language and the irresistible chip on Holden's shoulder.

"I'm aware that a number of my friends will be saddened, or shocked, or shocked-saddened, over some of the chapters of `The Catcher in the Rye.' Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all of my best friends are children," Salinger wrote in 1955, in a short note for "20th Century Authors."

"It's almost unbearable to me to realize that my book will be kept on a shelf out of their reach," he added.

Salinger also wrote the novellas "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" and "Seymour — An Introduction," both featuring the neurotic, fictional Glass family that appeared in much of his work.

His last published story, "Hapworth 16, 1928," ran in The New Yorker in 1965. By then, he was increasingly viewed like a precocious child whose manner had soured from cute to insufferable. "Salinger was the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school," Norman Mailer once commented.

In 1997, it was announced that "Hapworth" would be reissued as a book — prompting a (negative) New York Times review. The book, in typical Salinger style, didn't appear. In 1999, New Hampshire neighbor Jerry Burt said the author had told him years earlier that he had written at least 15 unpublished books kept locked in a safe at his home.

"I love to write and I assure you I write regularly," Salinger said in a brief interview with the Baton Rouge (La.) Advocate in 1980. "But I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it."

Jerome David Salinger was born Jan. 1, 1919, in New York City. His father was a wealthy importer of cheeses and meat and the family lived for years on Park Avenue.

Like Holden, Salinger was an indifferent student with a history of trouble in various schools. He was sent to Valley Forge Military Academy at age 15, where he wrote at night by flashlight beneath the covers and eventually earned his only diploma. In 1940, he published his first fiction, "The Young Folks," in Story magazine.

He served in the Army from 1942 to 1946, carrying a typewriter with him most of the time, writing "whenever I can find the time and an unoccupied foxhole," he told a friend.

Returning to New York, the lean, dark-haired Salinger pursued an intense study of Zen Buddhism but also cut a gregarious figure in the bars of Greenwich Village, where he astonished acquaintances with his proficiency in rounding up dates. One drinking buddy, author A.E. Hotchner, would remember Salinger as the proud owner of an "ego of cast iron," contemptuous of writers and writing schools, convinced that he was the best thing to happen to American letters since Herman Melville.

Holden first appeared as a character in the story "Last Day of the Last Furlough," published in 1944 in the Saturday Evening Post. Salinger's stories ran in several magazines, especially The New Yorker, where excerpts from "Catcher" were published.

The finished novel quickly became a best seller and early reviews were blueprints for the praise and condemnation to come. The New York Times found the book "an unusually brilliant first novel" and observed that Holden's "delinquencies seem minor indeed when contrasted with the adult delinquencies with which he is confronted."

But the Christian Science Monitor was not charmed. "He is alive, human, preposterous, profane and pathetic beyond belief," critic T. Morris Longstreth wrote of Holden.

"Fortunately, there cannot be many of him yet. But one fears that a book like this given wide circulation may multiply his kind - as too easily happens when immortality and perversion are recounted by writers of talent whose work is countenanced in the name of art or good intention."

The world had come calling for Salinger, but Salinger was bolting the door. By 1952, he had migrated to Cornish. Three years later, he married Claire Douglas, with whom he had two children, Peggy and Matthew, before their 1967 divorce. (Salinger was also briefly married in the 1940s to a woman named Sylvia; little else is known about her.)

Meanwhile, he refused interviews, instructing his agent not to forward fan mail and reportedly spending much of his time writing in a cement bunker. Sanity, apparently, could only come through seclusion.

"I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes," Holden says in "Catcher."

"That way I wouldn't have to have any ... stupid useless conversations with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something, they'd have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. I'd build me a little cabin somewhere with the dough I made."

Although Salinger initially contemplated a theater production of "Catcher," with the author himself playing Holden, he turned down numerous offers for film or stage rights, including requests from Billy Wilder and Elia Kazan. Bids from Steven Spielberg and Harvey Weinstein were also rejected.

Salinger became famous for not wanting to be famous. In 1982, he sued a man who allegedly tried to sell a fictitious interview with the author to a national magazine. The impostor agreed to desist and Salinger dropped the suit.

Five years later, another Salinger legal action resulted in an important decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court refused to allow publication of an unauthorized biography, by Ian Hamilton, that quoted from the author's unpublished letters. Salinger had copyrighted the letters when he learned about Hamilton's book, which came out in a revised edition in 1988.

In 2009, Salinger sued to halt publication of John David California's "60 Years Later," an unauthorized sequel to "Catcher" that imagined Holden in his 70s, misanthropic as ever.

Against Salinger's will, the curtain was parted in recent years. In 1998, author Joyce Maynard published her memoir "At Home in the World," in which she detailed her eight-month affair with Salinger in the early 1970s, when she was less than half his age. She drew an unflattering picture of a controlling personality with eccentric eating habits, and described their problematic sex life.

Salinger's alleged adoration of children apparently did not extend to his own. In 2000, daughter Margaret Salinger's "Dreamcatcher" portrayed the writer as an unpleasant recluse who drank his own urine and spoke in tongues.

Margaret Salinger said she wrote the book because she was "absolutely determined not to repeat with my son what had been done with me."

[danfrank]

Franny and Zoeey is one of the greatest things I've ever read. He'll be deeply, deeply missed.

I second that, though I haven't read his stuff for years. During my twenties he was my favorite writer. My hope is that during all these years of reclusiveness and stubbornness, Salinger has actually done some writing that may now come to light.

[Sabin]

Franny and Zoeey is one of the greatest things I've ever read. He'll be deeply, deeply missed.

[OscarGuy]

I haven't seen an obit yet, but the word has come down from his literary agent that he has died.