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 :)

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.

so this never happened huh

The mother in law is currently reading Catcher and expressing her disappointment at Holden being a teenage boy and I kinda just have to sit there and listen to her. These are the things they don’t tell you this before you tie the note

I do want to read Salinger again. I read him early and everything was kind of monumental. Holden and Phoebe walking on opposite sides of the street. Franny’s Jesus Prayer and Zoeey’s Bath. Seymour playing with Sybil. All really etched itself in me