The Mysteries of J.D. Salinger

Sitcom narratives? Which ones? Or just, somehow, in general?

I have heard it jestingly said that Salinger is Pynchon. I think I must assume that no-one *seriously* says it. But it does remind me of one thing: JDS seems to me (as I suggested above) to be a remarkably modern writer, a herald of emergent tone and voice (literary, and perhaps more broadly). That is - his goofy sarcasm indeed seems to me to prime the tone of Pynchon - or of a whole generation (like Farina, whose novel I have not read, but looking at it reminds me of what I don't like about TP; or like Vonnegut, say, though that's being generous - Vonnegut is funnier than Pynchon, if memory is not playing me false) - anyway, the 1960s goofy Yank generation: Salinger's children?.

I don't have any answers to your questions but my reckoning is that Salinger is probably still writing his Glass chronicles and that they will probably never see the light even after his death.

As for the Glass Family, there are some Glass stories that are pretty great - A Nice Day For Bananafish for instance. But yes, Seymour: An Introduction is interminable and Hapworth is unreadable. I think an evergrowing sollipsistic approach to fiction led to him writing himself into a corner - we can't follow Salinger into his fantasy family because there's no real way in for an outsider. "Hapworth" is supposedly a transcription of a letter that Seymour as a child wrote to his parents - in other words the writer and his audience both become Glass protagonists in a hermetically-sealed world of fantasy. Salinger finds the Glasses endlessly charming and fascinating in the same way one finds one's own children endlessly charming or our own dreams endlessly fascinating, despite the fact that no one else does.

OTM

It was another reminder that these things are so subjective. I found reading Catcher in the Rye was a bit like watching Brando in The Wild One, you could see why it would have been sensational if you first encountered it as a teenager in the 1950s but encountering it in in a later period (and not 'til my 20s) it had lost a lot of its power. I was far more interested in Franny and Zooey, despite its flaws. Why his fascination with the Glass family? Well, I don't know much about Salinger's life but have always understood there is a strong autobiographical element to F&Z. What could be more fascinating than your own family? If - like S - you are using your story to work out personal issues there is an obvious logic to setting it within a version of your own family. The importance of privacy is an important theme in the story. The marring of F&Z by the "lecture" element arises because S by then seems more interested in spiritual or philosophical matters than artistic ones. That in itself gives the beginning of an explanation for S's remaining output both in terms of its quantity and quality - he has no talent as an original thinker on spiritual or philosophical matters - his interests and his talents stopped co-inciding.

That's well said, Jonathan Z.

Of course, past the age of 22 almost all of Salinger is pretty hard to take seriously. Bananafish, Esme, Teddy--ah yes, children are wee little innocent godprophets and adults are fallen and sullied.

Kids good; war bad. Repeat as necessary.

i can see what everyone means about the glass stories being overly precious, but i honestly feel like they're not all THAT much so. this criticism seems leftover from the '60s, when everyone and his brother seemed eager to rip on JDS for being popular (i.e., norman mailer, mary mccarthy, john updike, george steiner, leslie fiedler, etc, etc, etc). faulkner and nabokov (either of whom is worth a million updikes) both admired salinger immensely, and i'd say they were right.

i should note though that i AM 22, so it's possible that in 3 months i'll end up hating all of it.

This does not answer any questions. Neither does this:

I like(d) Franny and Zooey.

Z's point about reductivenessm is correct also, I think; and so, I think, is his overall judgement.

(thanks, bellefox, btw)

Just not sure I can take their underlying message seriously.

"catcher in the rye" i liked when i read it but have had no desire to read again; "9 stories" i think are quite delightful in general, though a couple drag on.

i've also quite hated all the pynchon i've read so maybe JD's theory holds up!!

OTM! I think I read it too late as well because my reaction was tepid. It seemed nice enough in its way, but hardly earth-shattering. I still don't really understand what all the fuss is about. Voltaire hoed this row much better a couple hundred years ago in Candide.

*but i'm another one who never got more than (the ascii equivalent of) a couple pages through hapworth. and i've never liked "teddy".

leslie fiedler in his gloomy-gloomy fiction-now back from the 50s ('Waiting For The End'?) takes the attitude that we should have no sympathy for these priveleged people who don't have any genuine problems - which i can't remember if it is specifically a complaint about the glass family, actually.

alan garner (60s - present british kid's novelist) used to talk about one of his subjects in his fiction being how (well, this is collapsing it into a specific example, from 'red shift', where the same relationships are played out with trios of characters centuries apart, argh it's complicated, nevermind) how these days ("these days") you could do the same sort of damage to someone via dinner-table conversation as you could by violence. & the horrible first scene in that is on a sort of similar ground to lots in salinger, p'haps.

i am thinking now of an old ile thread, perhaps about pynchon in fact, where the 'popcorn test' was mentioned: 'perhaps i wanted a resume of the mies en scene', 'it was about the horrors of modern existence', etc. i wonder if it would be incredibly apt or unapt to say that it is, as a start, enough to say that those stories of salinger's are about the difficulties of modern existence.

(for the little things are usually taken as connected to the wider setting, no?)

i am well aware of how banal i am trying to become here.

Actually, the first is a retrospective on Catcher, wondering why it has lost its charm by the late 1950s, and positing a 'smart' audience to whom JDS perhaps panders. But then there are two pieces on the Glass books, which are quite savagely critical though they strive to be polite and make allowances.

If he steps forward he will invariably disappoint when he is revealed as human and fails to live up to Holden Caufield standards some freaky fan has set for themselves.

The same holds for further publication. The critics are like hungry lions just waiting to devour him.

Catcher is required reading in like every high school in america, Nine Stories in maybe half of all colleges and junior colleges. On those royalties alone Salinger doesn't have to write ever again.

I understand his sitting back and doing his thing in the distance without critics, without freaky fans, with only himself and perhaps a few trusted friends.

What remains to be seen is when he dies and is lost to us all forever is if anything will be waiting.

a key thing to remember about the glass stories is that we haven't seen all of them, since JDS abruptly stopped publishing in 1965 but apparently continues to write. the ones we have don't quite add up to a full picture - the seymour in "seymour an introduction" is unrecognizable as the character in "perfect day for bananafish," for example.

the problem is that the seymour of "bananafish" is an interesting character, and the seymour of "seymour" (heh) and "hapworth" isn't even a character at all - but then, those stories are barely even stories.

Good Salinger:
Catcher
Nine Stories (minus Teddy)
Franny

Mediocre Salinger:
Zooey
Raise High

Bad Salinger:
Teddy
Seymour
Hapworth

i rather like the barely-even-stories factor, or recall liking it, or trying to like it.

kind of want to say that the not-publishing or just stopping writing is a logical next step after denouncing one's portrait of one's central character as inaccurate and then making one's next portrait of central character completely ineffective qua portraiture. but am unconvinced by this myself, frankly.

Yes Hapworth is the Seymour's reading list one. It's wilfully unreadable.

It's here, if anyone's interested:
http://www.freeweb.hu/tchl/salinger/hapworth.html

"There isn't anyone anywhere that isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. Don't you know that? Don't you know that goddam secret yet? And don't you know--listen to me, now--don't you know who that Fat Lady really is? . . . Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy."

For joy, apparently, it was all Franny could do to hold the phone, even with both hands.

What was that Oscar Wilde line about how you'd have to have a heart of stone not to read the death of Little Nell without laughing?

Anyway, David Samuels wrote a re-review of F & Z called "Marginal Notes on the Inner Lives of People with Cluttered Apartments in the East Seventies" which I suspect is kind of great. You smartsy-pants types wil have to look it up and draw your own conclusions.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenter is my favorite Salinger of all! Otherwise, I mostly agree with that list.

Ahoy everyone: this veers from the topic, but some of you might be amused by this --

Humbert: An Introduction
Jerome David Salinger, Author of Lolita

I was surprised to stumble across this in the Village Voice -- a Borges-styled crackpot-letter bit drawing lines between Salinger and Nabokov.

I'm obsessing over the Glasses now, and re-reading everything, backwards this time, starting with Hapworth 16, 1924, which I found absolutely delightful. It reminded me a bit of William Gaddis's J.R. I followed that with reading various uncollected stories on the web, Nine Stories, then F & Z. I thought I had exhausted everything Glass-related and then I remembered Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour, an Introduction. I'm right now in the middle of poor Buddy sitting uncomfortably with the wedding party that has disappointed by his brother Seymour. Looking forward to reading Seymour, but then I feel like I have to go back and read everything again, as all the stories seem to illuminate the others, except when they contradict them.

This is the article that rekindled my interest, "Still Paging Mr. Salinger":

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/31/books/31sali.html?incamp=article_popular_5

I rather like "Bananafish" and "Esme" - always have - while hating Catcher in the Rye.

It's been decades since I read the other Glass stuff, but I remember a lot of attention paid to things like ankles. There's a lot of vulnerability and pain and humor, if you can overlook the sometimes-too-twee element. Seeing the tweeness more in cultural context (as a reaction to wartime machismo and postwar Leave it to Beaverishness) can make it less annoying. He does overplay Glassian intelligence - there's an unearned quality to it; as if declaring his characters smart makes them so. But Salinger can still be refreshingly fun to read. Certainly more fun than, say, Mailer.

is there a kind soul who could tell me where to get this Hapsworth pdf? has it been released since the original '05 post up there?

um, forget that because for some reason I forgot to justfuckinggoogleit.com :)

when everyone and his brother seemed eager to rip on JDS for being popular (i.e., norman mailer, mary mccarthy, john updike

I've read McCarthy's essay on Salinger, and her criticism wasn't aimed at his popularity, though his popularity surely provoked it. It was in line with what Jonathan Z. wrote above (though more ruthless). When McCarthy wrote about Salinger's "closed circuit" and when Z. writes about his "hermetically-sealed world of fantasy" they're referring to the same thing.

I've read Updike on Salinger too. He describes the uncanny feeling the reader gets that the omniscient narrator is another male presence in the room with Franny and her boyfriend, feeling protective of Franny and hostile to the boyfriend. That's not a point made about Salinger's popularity either.

I don't "get" Salinger, especially the religious stuff, which his style makes silly-sounding, and the hammer-like emphasis couched in informal speech. And both McCarthy's and Updike's criticism rings true for me.

being disliked by a writer as awful as updike surely has to be some sort of recommendation.

^^that's the kind of post that makes me love Updike

as opposed to the books he writes...? (Updike, that is)

"I've read Updike on Salinger too. He describes the uncanny feeling the reader gets that the omniscient narrator is another male presence in the room with Franny and her boyfriend, feeling protective of Franny and hostile to the boyfriend."

— is this really much of a criticism?

(besides which I don't even know if it is accurate. I came across the line in which Updike compares a vagina to a ballet shoe sometime in my mid-teens; I always wondered what he was doing fucking a ballet shoe.)

I guess you've never seen a vagina, huh?

never without thinking "plié! plié!"

Maybe not, thomp, as I took it out of context (and across years). Here's the complete essay.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/04/06/lifetimes/updike-r-franny.html

The passage I remembered was this:

In "Hoist High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" (the first and best of the Glass pieces: a magic and hilarious prose-poem with an enchanting end effect of mysterious clarity), Seymour defines sentimentality as giving "to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it." This seems to me the nub of the trouble: Salinger loves the Glasses more than God loves them. He loves them too exclusively. Their invention has become a hermitage for him. He loves them to the detriment of artistic moderation. "Zooey" is just too long; there are too many cigarettes, too many god-damns, too much verbal ado about not quite enough.

The author never rests from circling his creations, patting them fondly, slyly applauding. He robs the reader of the initiative upon which love must be given. Even in "Franny," which is, strictly, pre-Glass, the writer seems less an unimpassioned observer than a spying beau vindictively feasting upon every detail of poor Lane Coutell's gaucherie. Indeed, this impression of a second male being present is so strong that it amounts to a social shock when the author accompanies Franny into the ladies' room of the restaurant.

I think that's pretty just.

(Also, I'm not here to defend Updike's fiction. I like his Bech books, and Centaur somewhat, but don't have much time for others.)

janet malcolm, for the defense:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/14272

Today "Zooey" does not seem too long, and is arguably Salinger's masterpiece. Rereading it and its companion piece "Franny" is no less rewarding than rereading The Great Gatsby. It remains brilliant and is in no essential sense dated. It is the contemporary criticism that has dated. Like the contemporary criticism of Olympia, for example, which jeered at Manet for his crude indecency, or that of War and Peace, which condescended to Tolstoy for the inept "shapelessness" of the novel, it now seems magnificently misguided. However—as T.J. Clark and Gary Saul Morson have shown in their respective exemplary studies of Manet and Tolstoy[7]—negative contemporary criticism of a masterpiece can be helpful to later critics, acting as a kind of radar that picks up the ping of the work's originality. The "mistakes" and "excesses" that early critics complain of are often precisely the innovations that have given the work its power.

i'm leery of rereading salinger, because i completely loved, felt moved by, spoken to, etc., by 'franny and zooey' but also the other stories, 'for esmé', etc., when i was like sixteen. at which point i didn't quite see the point in the great gatsby.

also, i detested catcher in the rye at twelve and at sixteen, but dug it a great deal at twenty.

also:

<a href=http://penrod-pulaski.livejournal.com/47646.html>;<img src=http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/wp-content/2008/12/robin%20in%20the%20rye.jpg>;</a>

http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/wp-content/2008/12/robin%20in%20the%20rye.jpg

oops

J.D. thank you for linking to that typically excellent Janet Malcolm piece, which I'd not read before

thank you also for slagging off the truly awful updike

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5144/5615659523_fedc200a9f.jpg

Looking at this long rich threahttp://blog.devstone.com/images/emote_ellipsis.gifeel like one could spenhttp://blog.devstone.com/images/emote_ellipsis.gifot of time following up its links and ideas.

the fuck happened there with your 'd's?

I like the animated ellipses

whatever it is...I like it

wow

Maybe the d's are being reclusive.

Or recursive, do u see?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/us/10prayer.html

I read Salinger mostly in high school, Pynchon mostly in college (both a long time ago). Enjoyed them very much then, haven't tried re-reading. I don't remember much of Catcher, do remember many bits (especially zingers and other kinds of hooks) from Nine Stories. "I mean, it was nothing you couldn't read while clipping your toenails, but...", zinc oxide on the nose v sunburn, ""Sex Can Be Great---Or Hell" He calls me Miss Spiritual Tramp of 1947", all those other setups and steps and step-ins, all of them unmistakably necessary, as it turns out in "Bananafish"--also, "I guess he's got a sense of humor, he laughs at comic strips"; "He says it's so beautifully written. He can't admit he likes it because it's about two guys who starved to death in an igloo"(note to self: google L. Manning Vines) Who could forget: vomit in the military wastebasket; the remains of a dry chicken sandwich not disposed of, not quite yet; a dead voice, "rudely, almost obscenely quickened for the occasion" (which of course works, as in the King James Bible's "the quick or the dead". whether you bother with "quick" once meaning "alive" or not) "his--his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s"--and the hits just keep coming! sorry.

Whatever may have become of Pynchon (the opening pages of his latest slithered with self-consciousness--maybe also "rudely, almost obscenely quickened"), he once tried to take a hard look at his earlier work, in the introduction to Slow Learner, the incomplete collection of his apprentice fiction. He seemed genuinely embarrassed by it, reminded me of having read that he didn't want Lot 49 to be published as a book (another magazine story he wasn't thrilled with) Also, said re one of the stories in SL and apparently V as well, that he'd misunderstood entrophy, in physics terms. Then again, he's also written that computers were based on misunderstandings of how the (organic) brain works, but that humans adapted to/became more like their distorted mechanical image. H'mmm creative misprision in both cases? Anyway, I think "Zooey" is Salinger trying to achieve some perspective (incl linking the characters from Nine Stories, acknowledging and extending their relatedness--everything, including "Franny" is "pre-Glass"., as Updike says, before this explicit family tree is drawn). Zooey's lecturing, and his flailing around, is Salinger trying to adjust his voice,warning and challenging his followers and himself. (Also, none of Nine Stories was actually narrated by his child characters, right? Unless you count the excellent Daumier-Smith, who was looking back, like Salinger's other narrator/witnesses, to times of blue and gold) The lectures seemed to take over and become self-mesmerized in Raise High/Seymour, though I might try to re-read those, at least.

What are some titles of uncollected stories, other than "Hapworth", which I should Google?

I don't know - I haven't even read that one.

Thanks for your thoughts! You seem like a considerable expert on Salinger - frankly I barely remember any of those moments that you seem to have at your fingertips.

TP says people have adapted to be like computers? ... doesn't sound quite right. We've adapted to be *around* computers, maybe - as in 'don't bother remembering it, you can google anything' - but that might be the opposite of what TP is supposed to have said (because we might have annexed things off to computers).

Yes, TP put down CL49, and it seems to me that he was wrong, as authors sometimes are about their work. (Admittedly there are some things in it that I don't like, but they're the things that resemble the many big and irritating things in his other work like GR. From my POV it's crazy to say 'I wrote CL49 and it was bad, but then I wrote GR and that was good' as for me the values are roughly reversed.)

I don't think I ever read Updike on Salinger - but I did read Kermode!

(btw I can't see any Salinger reference in that link about the nuts in the church, which if anything is a relief)

(btw I can't see any Salinger reference in that link about the nuts in the church, which if anything is a relief)

― the pinefox, Monday, July 11, 2011 2:06 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

Been puzzling me today. Feeling like I missed a Glass reference? Really have no clue.

there was not one; it reminded me of franny glass and the jesus prayer.

That book she got it from, The Pilgrim On His Way or something like that, and its sequel, The Pilgrim Continues His Way (pretty sure that's exact title) were re-issued, in the 70s I think, used to see ads (in the Atlantic, and other publications which students might read, way back then)

(pinefox, my impression at the time was that Pynchon didn't hate Crying of Lot 49, he mainly thought it shouldn't be presented as a "novel" to stand on its own with V.--this was before Gravity's Rainbow)

Maybe he meant to save it for something like Slow Learner, or some better collection, although as I said, several stories remain uncollected, and I don't think Slow Learner was his idea either, or he didn't seem too happy with it.

If that's what he thought, I still think he was wrong. The idea that CL49 of all things didn't deserve to stand as a text in its own right is bonkers.

He died 18 months ago... I'm surprised nothing at all has come out about the unpublished manuscripts he's supposed to have stowed away in a room-sized safe. You'd think by now someone would have at least confirmed or denied their existence.

I agree! Was just thinking about that the other day.

He died 18 months ago... I'm surprised nothing at all has come out about the unpublished manuscripts he's supposed to have stowed away in a room-sized safe.

Last year a theater group in Brooklyn performed a hilarious play on that exact topic, as well as the Salinger-cult and some of his predilections.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOifA73EOi8
http://plasticflamingotheatre.blogspot.com/2010/05/rip-jd-celebration-of-death.html

yeah surprised there hasn't been at least a little hint of his unpublished stuff
maybe it was all this when they opened the safe
http://www.overthinkingit.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/all_work.jpg
except, you know, the jesus prayer.

I suspect there's something there. Maybe not the 15 finished manuscripts that's he'd supposedly written. Maybe just 40 years of notes on the Glass family. But something at least. It's remarkable that not a whisper of whatever he left behind has made it into the media. Surely his literary executors could be goaded into saying something as to what will happen to his papers.

Surely his literary executors could be goaded into saying something as to what will happen to his papers.

i think the point in them is that they couldn't!
there were some v beautiful things thrown up in the aftermath of his death - oral history from people in his community who deterred & confused visitors looking to find him, describing how the salingers would give out pencils to trick or treaters; a story from the guy whose job it was to read salinger fanmail; another from the guy who almost managed to issue hapworth - & even a bunch of his letters, which in a way seem like the weirdest thing to be reading, intended as they were as articles of private correspondence w/one person, from a guy who didn't want any of his stuff read. but though i would read this guy's boiler maintenance instructions gladly, it feels like his preference that his work not be read is pronounced and un-nuanced enough as to accept that we have what we have. read the newspaper & magazine stories if you haven't, but pulling his private work off the shelf would seem kinda a step too far.

although this seems like a longer shot than the unpublished manuscripts, i really hope someday we see a book of JDS's collected letters. the ones we've seen have been so fascinating, and i suspect they're the closest anyone will ever get to understanding what the man was actually like. which of course is exactly what he didn't want.

The more I read about his personal life, the less respect I have for him, but that goes for any public figure I guess. Joyce Maynard's memoir was devastating, and she didn't seem like any great prize herself. His daughter Margaret's account was also very sad.

who will be the 21st century max brod?

The whole idea of writing a novel that you don't want strangers to read is pretty wackadoo

yeah i've tried to ignore most of that stuff, his daughter's book, the maynard memoir etc. i did read the recent bio, which was good -- not a candy coated portrayal, but not a hatchet job either.
what's interesting to me about the alleged volumes of unpublished stuff is that salinger, out of all authors, seemed to really write to his reader -- the Buddy Glass stuff is so aware of the audience. so what does an author like that sound like when he's writing for no one but himself?

I wanted to read the recent bio, but it seemed bogged down in WWII battles . . . maybe I will try it again. I think I read (or heard somewhere, I can't remember) that the Paul Alexander bio is better (though I haven't read that one either).

A teacher of mine once said Salinger's literary voice was sort of the ultimate in reader manipulation . . . so I really can't imagine him not writing with that kind of emotionally charged narrator, but his later ('60s!) work does see him going further and further up his own ass, as it were.

yes, author of the newest bio (blanking on his name) goes to great lengths to make WWII the focus of pretty much all of Salinger's life/work...and is fairly convincing about it, I suppose. the one story where one of the characters swears not to talk about the war after it's over is important it seems--salnger's subsequent work was in a lot of ways an attempt to talk about it without really talking about it, maybe?

That's pretty interesting. When I worked in a college library a couple of students were doing papers on Salinger's supposed P.T.S.D. and its connection on his work.

yeah it was interesting. though tbh he seems like he was kind of a weird dude before the war too.

The whole idea of writing a novel that you don't want strangers to read is pretty wackadoo

i think there's a pretty substantial history of writers writing for others that aren't necessarily strangers.

The whole idea of writing a novel that you don't want strangers to read is pretty wackadoo

i seem to recall JDS said somewhere (prob in one of those memoirs by other ppl) that the reason he'd chosen to stop publishing was the flood of invasive publicity that accompanied each new book. if that's the case, then his decision to just write for himself (and presumably posthumous publication) seems understandable to me. it's not like he needed the money.

the joyce maynard book is very weird, not least because maynard didn't seem to have really processed her experiences even like 30 years later. my gf went to school with her kids.

I suspect that the reason there is no material is that Salinger had nothing left to say, beyond notating Chinese medicine treatments, but I would love to be proven wrong.

he mentioned in a few of the letters that he had finished several book-length manuscripts, and some other accounts seem to back that up.

who will be the 21st century max brod?

max brod is fuckin satan incarnate and I spit when I hear his name

hack-ptooie max brod

What'd he do to you?

he invented the concept of putting prose before bros

OK, that's pretty funny.

who will be the 21st century max brod?
Dmitry Nabokov.

Here's an account of answering his mail (it was her job):
http://www.slate.com/id/2243299/ Note links on to other Slate pieces on Salinger; should be something like A Salinger Companion (Salinger: A Hermit's Companion ?), with contributors from academic to indie intelligentsia to whackiedoodle, like some of the better Dyliania collections.

"Dylaniana", I guess (should be something better)

Also, re unpublished Salinger manuscripts at Princeton ( NPR had also somebody else's account of reading this story, I but can't find it; other guy said he thought "Bowling Balls" was great while he was reading it, but cooled off later)
http://nassauweekly.com/articles/1217/ In the 70s, a bootleg collection of unpublished Salinger stories was reviewed in the Voice; with comments on even more unpub, not included in the boot. Reviewer really liked some of these tales, but said most tended to confirm his suspicion re Salinger's inability/resistance to face getting older (as a motivation for not exposing his stories to further criticism and/or increasingly cult-like fandom)

he invented the concept of putting prose before bros

― love in a grain elevator (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Wednesday, July 13, 2011 9:27 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

a+

so what does an author like that sound like when he's writing for no one but himself?

Sadly, he probably sounds like the Hapworth story - the Glasses become not only the subject matter but the audience as well.

I can't believe Salinger would have wanted his manuscripts (if they exist) destroyed, and even if he did I can't imagine anyone would do it. There's probably someone appointed by his literary agency sorting through his papers as we speak, but it'll take years and years and nothing will be prepared for publication for another two decades or something.

Reportedly, in Nassau Weekly link above, the Princeton stash can't be published until 2060.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41y1uNPrtPL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

Any word on new Salinger yet? (This question needs to be asked like once a month until they finally release something.)

Poor Holden doesn't seem very poular these days... Young people often seem to regard him as spoiled, obnoxious, self pitying, whiny, self indulgent,Self centered etc... My response to this is that while there may be some or even a lot of truth to these accusations, for heaven sake- he is a TEENAGER... What do people expect of him? That he have the wisdom and maturity and emotional strength of an adult? Holden isn't supposed to be a saint or a role model, he is simply a troubled, confused, sensative adolecent... GIVE HIM SOME SLACK PEOPLE!

haven't read catcher since high school (liked it then), but over the last few weeks i've read or re-read just about everything else he's published, and if there aren't more glass stories waiting to be released someday the remainder of my life will be poorer for it

fair bit of news back in January

this isn't a poke, aero, but can I ask, just wrt your anti max brodism hate campaign, where you stand on this kind of thing, specifically regarding salinger? asking because, as someone who is generally ambivalent about that kind of ethics debate, salinger's the only guy who I have a weird sense of revenance towards, & an awkward sense of intrusion when I'm reading about. I was living near an archive holding some letters he wrote in the nineties, last summer, so went & read them, & like obviously I did it, so any qualms are beside the point, but it all feels particularly dubious to me given how the one line bio the guy spent his lifetime peddling was just "I don't want people to know this stuff". the touches of information you get about his army years or the beginning of his step away from publishing are always so tantalising, but at the same time whenever I've seen one of the books at the library or w/e I don't have the heart to read them.

yeah totally fair question - I was only thinking about Salinger because I'd been thinking again about how I want to reanimate Max Brod so I can punch him in the face. with Salinger we know that he wanted privacy - so I think he ought to have been afforded that in his daily life, which, thanks to some awesome neighbors from what I hear, he generally got. I think that Joyce M. book was a total bullshit move, just in general human terms (though so is an old dude writing to the girl he sees in the NY Times magazine and saying "let's talk, young writer" when what he seems to've meant is "you're hot, I'll give you access to the inner sanctum if you swing by") - but just gut level (and this is an inconsistency, I guess, or an indication of something malfunctioning with me spiritually), I care less about people's personal privacy after death than I do about their wishes for their work. Publishing, living a public life by choosing to make your work public, seems to me a type of consent for biography, maybe? It seems so to me: if you put your stuff out there, and it moves people, people are gonna wanna know your story, and tell it. "Leave me the fuck alone" seems fair and should be respected, but especially after you die: you published. You put yourself out there, nobody made you do that. People are gonna wanna tell your story.

With the work it's different: I don't think anybody has any right to publish/release/make available an author's work without his/her explicit imprimatur. I think Emily Dickinson's sister got it right: she asked her sister to burn her correspondence, which she did. She was right to do so. E.D. said nothing like this about her poetry, so her sister published it. We don't really know what Salinger said about his work; if he had a will stipulating "destroy anything remaining," then it should be destroyed unread. He can be biographised as much as anybody likes now that he's dead as far as I'm concerned, it's really a different issue to me.

hey ty for that. idk if i am anywhere similar - i guess it perhaps isn't so much that someone should accept that they might prompt a biography that sways me, so much as it is that it's a stretch to think you should have such far-reaching control over other people's writing. but that's fair. i kinda just can't believe there's a film, though, & wrt there being footage & whatnot involved i'd imagine it runs into the same weird grey area as the excerpts from his letters, ie things that were specifically generated with an intended & limited audience in mind being made public.

it is all so interesting though. there was a piece in the guardian after he died with some shots & remembrance by lillian ross, including this pic of them at the beach, & goddamn if this isn't just down to the colour of the towel how i picture/d seymour when i read bananafish a million years ago. the work stands as tall as anything i think but the mess of details regarding the guy's own peculiarities & the temperaments of his characters are fascinating.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ml9vub3JGHU/S4sBEDKSCpI/AAAAAAAABII/qFXckuuieck/s400/Salinger+and+sister.jpg

What a picture!

With the work it's different: I don't think anybody has any right to publish/release/make available an author's work without his/her explicit imprimatur. I think Emily Dickinson's sister got it right: she asked her sister to burn her correspondence, which she did. She was right to do so. E.D. said nothing like this about her poetry, so her sister published it. We don't really know what Salinger said about his work; if he had a will stipulating "destroy anything remaining," then it should be destroyed unread. He can be biographised as much as anybody likes now that he's dead as far as I'm concerned, it's really a different issue to me.

― not feeling those lighters (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Monday, March 25, 2013 2:18 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wait, if ED never explicitly consented to the posthumous publishing of her poetry, and her sister published it, how is that getting it right? (from your perspective)

i feel obliged to link to this article, even though i can't honestly recommend that anyone read it, because it more or less confirms my long-held suspicion that ron rosenbaum is the single most long-winded blowhard writing today:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_spectator/2013/06/j_d_salinger_and_eastern_religion_are_there_any_lost_books_still_in_the.single.html

feel like a predisposition to just ignoring all salingerism arising from now on is gonna be real useful. i watched the trailer for the weinstein movie, it looks like offensive, rooting-through-trashcan garbage.

yes, that documentary looks pretty shitty -- leaning hard on the 'his books inspired ppl to KILL!' angle is especially gross and stupid. the only thing i can imagine making it worthwhile is if they found a recording of salinger's voice -- i've always wondered what he sounded like.

i feel obliged to link to this article, even though i can't honestly recommend that anyone read it, because it more or less confirms my long-held suspicion that ron rosenbaum is the single most long-winded blowhard writing today:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_spectator/2013/06/j_d_salinger_and_eastern_religion_are_there_any_lost_books_still_in_the.single.html

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Monday, July 1, 2013 2:03 PM (25 minutes ago)

ugh what a total prick

Slate readers might recall the series of stories I wrote to persuade the late writer’s son Dmitri to cease his three decades of dithering and finally make a decision as to whether he would burn his father’s last incomplete draft of a novel (The Original of Laura) as his father had instructed him—or publish it. (By the time Dmitri went ahead and published it and thanked me in the acknowledgements for the campaign I’d waged, I had decided it was a mistake; he should have burned it.)

I blame whatever happened to this brave and gifted man on account of Hitler. I would, wouldn’t I—I wrote a book called Explaining Hitler.

I’m not always one to find the solution to literary enigmas in biography—my Shakespeare book did not concern itself with who the Dark Lady of the Sonnets was.

i mean there's his being entitled to salinger's work but then there's his shitting on "zooey" and "seymour". diaf

Enough with the posthumous books already

http://www.slate.com/dont/justdont/youalreadykn/dontdoit/okayiguessyouget/arts/j_d_salinger_and_eastern_religion_are_there_any_lost_books_still_in_the.single.html

I’d been tracking the question of the ghost manuscripts—do they exist, will they ever see the light of day—for some time. And recent developments put me back on the case, this time with a new approach. A direct appeal, like the one I used with the Nabokov estate.

i think this guy watches too much tv

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QLcwIu2m5F8#at=5429

1 hour 29 minutes in

umm

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/08/25/business/media/film-on-j-d-salinger-claims-more-books-coming.html?from=homepage

holla at the publishing insider interviewed who dares to speculate that these could be one of the publishing events of the year

One collection, to be called “The Family Glass,” would add five new stories to an assembly of previously published stories about the fictional Glass family, which figured in Mr. Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey” and elsewhere, according to the claims, which surfaced in interviews and previews of the documentary and book last week.

*explodes*

look god, i'll go to church every week, just let that be true

how do i shot rosary

finding it amusing & nice how occasionally remembering & considering this has fixed 2015 in my head, like it is the abstract & unknowable future but now I see myself strutting around with his religious-manual-cum-novel under my arm, nbd, it's just 2015 & I'm reading some impossibly tangible new JD Salinger volume

what k3vin said, that paragraph kinda made me tear up with excitement

tbh after like four half-assed biographies and all those memoirs and shit i feel like i really really really don't want to hear any more about salinger's life, just give me the damn unpublished stories already and let this guy rest in peace

I read this review and....ugh yeah definitely gasface abt the bio & doc

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/08/26/books/a-biography-from-david-shields-and-shane-salerno.html

The authors contend that Salinger “was born with only one testicle” and they argue that this caused him enormous embarrassment — that it was “surely one of the many reasons he stayed out of the media glare” so as “to reduce the likelihood that this information would emerge,” and that it amplified his psychological need “to create flawless art.” This assertion, however, is based on anonymous sources: two unnamed women who the authors say “independently confirmed” hearsay that Salinger suffered from this anomaly.

Fuck. Off.

haha jesus christ that's worse than i expected.

in a way stuff like this just emphasizes how incredibly little we really know about salinger's actual life, there's absolutely nothing in that article -- apart from the bit quoted above haha -- that you couldn't have gleaned from joyce maynard's book or his daughter's book or, you know, the wikipedia article. i can't imagine we'll ever really learn that much more about JDS unless his estate authorizes a real book and lets the author quote from his letters, unpublished papers, etc. maybe in a hundred years.

Mr. Shields and Mr. Salerno even suggest that “Catcher” in some way played a role in the killings of John Lennon and the young actress Rebecca Schaeffer, and the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. These terrible acts, the authors write, “are not a coincidence; they constitute frighteningly clairvoyant readings of ‘Catcher’ — the assassins intuiting the underlying postwar anger and violence in the book.”

and jesus christ this is so fucking stupid. chapman killed john lennon because he was crazy, not because the true meaning of salinger's book is that you should kill people.

makes me wish *I* was a fucking hermit

nice piece by adam gopnik, probably one of the very few non-irritating articles on salinger we'll see for a while:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/09/who-was-jd-salinger.html

Shields, of course, has written an entire testament, the manifesto-like book called “Reality Hunger,” in defense of the chop-shop approach to prose, with a high-minded po-mo appeal to the constant recycling of other people’s words as itself a kind of originality. Like many other capitalist ventures, though, this involves taking intricate handiwork done by other people, breaking it up, and selling it off again without permission, not to mention payment. If you have persuaded yourself that invention and recycling are the same thing, then you can’t begin to make sense of someone who would spend seven or eight hours a day laboring over a single line.

gopnik eviscerated this guy

hoo, the last paragraph. brutal

so good

can't stand David Shields. That someone who so completely fails to get reading should be paid to write multiple books about how to read is depressing.

npr did an interview with him last weekend and i was just like, please stop talking to him. and that smug squeeness over he MAY be publishing new material...the more I read i'm not gonna take that as news from YOU

http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/09/translating-catcher-in-the-rye-if-holden-caulfield-spoke-russian.html?utm_source=tny&utm_campaign=generalsocial&utm_medium=twitter

god, this second translator makes holden sound like juno

ran across that salinger book in a bookstore yesterday. happen to be reading part of "seymour" atm and this passage reminded me of some of the criticism of the film/book posted upthread

I surely think, at any rate, that if I were to ask the sixty odd girls (or, that is, the sixty-odd girls) in my two Writing for Publication courses-most of them seniors, all of them English majors - to quote a line, any line from ' Ozymandias', or even just to tell me roughly what the poem is about, it is doubtful whether ten of them could do either, but I'd bet my unrisen tulips that some fifty of them could tell me that Shelley was all for free love, and had one wife who wrote ' Frankenstein' and another who drowned herself.

so I guess three unpublished stories have made it out?

?

uh

tried finding something on google news and the first thing that came up was something about how jonathan franzen thinks he's 'overrated.'

if he's talking about himself, franzen otm

this is my favourite kind of ilx threadbump, just one line in the lindbergh baby thread, "oh huh so they figured it out?" & then you go on vacation for two weeks

protip search twitter for breaking news u phonies

BuzzFeed ‏@BuzzFeed 1h
Three Unpublished J.D. Salinger Stories Have Allegedly Leaked Online
http://www.buzzfeed.com/summeranne/three-unpublished-jd-salinger-stories-have-allegedly-leaked

*phoneys

fonerz

no need to be a goddamn knowitall about it, jeez

don't you think about that story about salinger & the paris review editor guy's wife just all the time

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/04/13/salingers-nightmare/

Seven years after his death and still not a word about the supposed manuscripts in the vault. I'd have thought some journalist would have followed this up by now, if only to write a story about being stonewalled by the estate. But someone must know something!

Great story, thanks for the link JD.

And I've wondered that frequently myself Zelda. I don't think we're any further than this rather unreliable talk of a 2015-2020 release time frame.

apparently there's a JDS biopic out right now, looks even more appalling than i would've expected

also has what is easily one of the single worst movie titles i've ever seen

Uggh. Rural Juror in the Rye.

So Where Are the New J.D. Salinger Books We Were Promised?

The movie is one of the year's worst atrocities.

really feel like the strong possibility is there is no vault & never was, which makes for a mystery, which I like.

That's how I feel! And his son is playing along really nicely.

Alfred, I'll take your word for it and not watch that movie. That bad huh?

Given the eyewitness accounts of quite a few people, I think it's very unlikely there's nothing there, although what's there may well be an unpublishable mess. I think it's more likely that his will stipulates that nothing can be published for 50 years or something and also that the literary executors are not allowed to talk about it. Also, given his hatred of Ivy League colleges, his papers are unlikely to go to Harvard or wherever, he's probably given them to some obscure meditation group or something that will zealously restrict access and we'll be talking about the lost Salinger novels for years to come, just like the Kafka papers that have been sitting in a suitcase in someone's flat in Tel Aviv for the last however many decades...

imo, Salinger isn't worth the amount of speculation he generates. He's a minor American author. He's a Kenneth Fearing, not a Pound or a Frost.

gtfo

If something did get published 10 or 25 or 50 years from now, how would it ever be authenticated?

I agree w/Aimless but have only read Catcher & Nine Stories. He has a definite style that's better than his detractors say it is, but his range is pretty severely limited imo. He does a thing, it's pretty good. He's like the Vader or Manowar of 20th century AmLit. If you love what he does then he's gonna seem like a total badass. If you think what he does is pretty good he's never gonna surprise you by venturing out into places you didn't think he'd go.

Nine out of 10 times I want to reread writers. Salinger is the one I don't.

the glass stories are on my desert island list. agree he has a style that can be polarizing, but the same can be said about lots of great artists

^^ ding ding, same here

dunno about frost but salinger is certainly better than f'ing pound

Admit to being a Salinger non-fan, suspect I very much didn't read him when I was young enough to forgive his flaws

(the story I mentioned in this ol' post later leaked to the Net; ditto Three Early Stories)

Also, re unpublished Salinger manuscripts at Princeton ( NPR had also somebody else's account of reading this story, I but can't find it; other guy said he thought "Bowling Balls" was great while he was reading it, but cooled off later)http://nassauweekly.com/articles/1217/
In the 70s, a bootleg collection of unpublished Salinger stories was reviewed in the Voice, with comments on even more unpub, not included in the boot. Reviewer really liked some of these tales (despite many typos, and who knows what other slippage), but said most tended to confirm his suspicion re Salinger's inability/resistance to face getting older (as a motivation for not exposing his stories to further criticism and/or increasingly cult-like fandom)

― dow, Wednesday, July 13, 2011(He also mentioned good stories not incl.)

I finally re-read Nine Stories for the first time since high school in the 60s, and liked it as much as and in the same way I did then, basically agreeing with Joan Crawford Loves Chachi's take. May never read any others (got off the bus after Franny and Zooey).

More from before re-reading the collection:
I read Salinger mostly in high school... I don't remember much of Catcher, do remember many bits (especially zingers and other kinds of hooks) from Nine Stories. "I mean, it was nothing you couldn't read while clipping your toenails, but...", zinc oxide on the nose v sunburn, ""Sex Can Be Great---Or Hell" He calls me Miss Spiritual Tramp of 1947", all those other setups and steps and step-ins, all of them unmistakably necessary, as it turns out in "Bananafish"--also, "I guess he's got a sense of humor, he laughs at comic strips"; "He says it's so beautifully written. He can't admit he likes it because it's about two guys who starved to death in an igloo"(note to self: google L. Manning Vines) Who could forget: vomit in the military wastebasket; the remains of a dry chicken sandwich not disposed of, not quite yet; a dead voice, "rudely, almost obscenely quickened for the occasion" (which of course works, as in the King James Bible's "the quick or the dead". whether you bother with "quick" once meaning "alive" or not) "his--his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s"--and the hits just keep coming! sorry.

― dow, Sunday, July 10, 2011 6:23 PM (six years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

...I think "Zooey" is Salinger trying to achieve some perspective (incl linking the characters from Nine Stories, acknowledging and extending their relatedness--everything, including "Franny" is "pre-Glass"., as Updike says, before this explicit family tree is drawn). Zooey's lecturing, and his flailing around, is Salinger trying to adjust his voice,warning and challenging his followers and himself. (Also, none of Nine Stories was actually narrated by his child characters, right? Unless you count the excellent Daumier-Smith, who was looking back, like Salinger's other narrator/witnesses, to times of blue and gold) The lectures seemed to take over and become self-mesmerized in Raise High/Seymour, though I might try to re-read those, at least.

― dow, Sunday, July 10, 2011

(Never finished Raise High/Seymour)

assuming the descriptions of some of the unpublished works from a few years back were accurate, they sounded p different from the books we know -- there was supposed to be a war novel, i think.