Showing posts with label Salinger. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Salinger. Show all posts

Sunday, September 29, 2024

Did Salinger Go Awry?

 


JD Salinger


Did Salinger Go Awry?

A boxed set for the writer’s centenary confirms him as the master of possibility

BY
ADAM KIRSCH
JANUARY 02, 2019


The first literary anniversary of 2019 will be one of the biggest: Jan. 1 marks the centenary of J.D. Salinger. (To mark the occasion, his four books are being reissued in a boxed set by Little Brown.) A hundred years seems like it ought to be a long time in literary history—Salinger is as distant from a child born in 2019 as he himself was from Herman Melville. Yet somehow he doesn’t feel as far removed from us as the other writers of his generation—figures like Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, or John Updike, who also became famous in the post-World War II years. Our readerly accounts with those famous names are basically settled, but Salinger’s remains open; his achievement feels unsettled, incomplete.

The Bathtub Kabbalah of J.D. Salinger

 

JD Salinger


The Bathtub Kabbalah of J.D. Salinger

Two new biographical sketches depict the great recluse as agent of growth, emblem of permanent adolescence, and cipher

BY
ADAM KIRSCH
MAY 29, 2014


Kabbalah teaches that God created the universe by deliberately shrinking himself, withdrawing into himself in order to leave a space that Creation could fill. This idea, known as tzimtzum, has a weird pertinence to the life and work of J.D. Salinger—but then again, since Salinger himself was a kind of mystic, perhaps it’s not so weird. Nobody seems to know whether Salinger spent any of his years of retreat up in Cornish, N.H., reading Isaac Luria, the 16th-century Jewish sage who invented the idea of tzimtzum. His tastes seem to have run more toward Zen and Hindu mysticism, or even the Russian Orthodox Jesus Prayer, which famously obsesses Franny Glass: “If you keep saying the prayer over and over again—you only have to just do it with your lips at first—then eventually what happens, the prayer becomes self-active. Something happens after a while.”

Salinger / Rye Day

 


Rye Day

J.D. Salinger’s most famous book has its birthday

BY
ADAM CHANDLER


Today marks the anniversary of the publication of J.D. Salinger’s iconic book “The Catcher in the Rye.” The legacy of the book has been a cultural touchstone since it was first published. But as Louis Menand pointed out in an essay written around the time of the book’s 50th birthday in 2001, “The Catcher in the Rye” has come to mean more than that:

“The Catcher in the Rye” is a sympathetic portrait of a boy who refuses to be socialized which has become (among certain readers, anyway, for it is still occasionally banned in conservative school districts) a standard instrument of socialization. I was introduced to the book by my parents, people who, if they had ever imagined that I might, after finishing the thing, run away from school, smoke like a chimney, lie about my age in bars, solicit a prostitute, or use the word “goddam” in every third sentence, would (in the words of the story) have had about two hemorrhages apiece. Somehow, they knew this wouldn’t be the effect.



Supposedly, kids respond to “The Catcher in the Rye” because they recognize themselves in the character of Holden Caulfield. Salinger is imagined to have given voice to what every adolescent, or, at least, every sensitive, intelligent, middle-class adolescent, thinks but is too inhibited to say, which is that success is a sham, and that successful people are mostly phonies. Reading Holden’s story is supposed to be the literary equivalent of looking in a mirror for the first time. This seems to underestimate the originality of the book. Fourteen-year-olds, even sensitive, intelligent, middle-class fourteen-year-olds, generally do not think that success is a sham, and if they sometimes feel unhappy, or angry, or out of it, it’s not because they think most other people are phonies. The whole emotional burden of adolescence is that you don’t know why you feel unhappy, or angry, or out of it. The appeal of “The Catcher in the Rye,” what makes it addictive, is that it provides you with a reason. It gives a content to chemistry.

Despite his influence, many have seemingly been ambivalent to claim Jerome David Salinger, who was raised Jewish and bar-mitzvahed, or to list him among the Jewish greats like Roth, Bellow, Malamud, Ozick, and countless others.

While the (tale-tell) Jewish themes of isolation and ostracism were thick in his work, the identifiable Jewish experiences in Salinger’s characters were camouflaged. His biography may lend some insight. Consider that his grandfather was a rabbi and his father imported ham and kosher cheese for a living. Consider that his mother (Marie), though she was Irish-Catholic, pretended to be Jewish (Miriam) until after Salinger had his bar-mitzvah. Salinger was a mediocre student, but he excelled in the army, taking part in D-Day at Utah Beach and the Battle of the Bulge as well as liberating a concentration camp and earning the rank of Staff Sergeant. He even managed to befriend Ernest Hemingway while in Europe.

There’s plenty more to ponder about Salinger on Rye Day. It might be more fitting to do it alone.

Thursday, November 2, 2023

Salinger's house to open up for cartoonist residency

 



JD Salinger's house to open up for cartoonist residency

This article is more than 5 years old

The reclusive author’s New Hampshire former home is being offered as a workspace for young artists after it was bought by illustrator Harry Bliss




Alison Flood
Friday 9 September 2016

Fans of the reclusive author JD Salinger, who also happen to have a penchant for art – and and four-wheel drives – are in for a treat as the former home of the late Catcher in the Rye author is to be opened up for a cartoonist residency.

Why J.D. Salinger was a recluse

JD Salinger


Why J.D. Salinger was a recluse



By Susannah Cahalan

January 30, 2011

J.D. Salinger: A Life
by Kenneth Slawenski
Random House
Is it possible to separate the artist’s sins from his art — or is it best to turn a blind eye to his private life and enjoy his creations as is? Does knowing too much about Woody Allen or Mel Gibson take away from our appreciation of “Annie Hall” or “Braveheart”?

Salinger's teenage lover challenges her 'predator' reputation

 

Joyce Maynard

JD Salinger's teenage lover challenges her 'predator' reputation

This article is more than 3 years old

Joyce Maynard, now 65, has published a new essay that asks if the #MeToo movement will allow her to tell her side of the story


Alison Flood
Thu 6 September 2018

Joyce Maynard, who was wooed as a teenager by the late JD Salinger, has spoken out about how the literary world condemned her as “a predator”.

Maynard was 18 when an essay of hers was published in the New York Times, along with a photograph. The piece led the then 53-year-old Salinger to contact her and, as Maynard writes in the New York Times, urged her to “to leave college, come live with him (have babies, collaborate on plays we would perform together in London’s West End) and be (I truly believed this) his partner forever”.

Sunday, November 20, 2022

Book Review 072 / The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger




Catcher in the Rye 

by J.D. Salinger 

'I think many teenagers would be able to relate to the themes - it's a modern classic of the coming of age genre.'



Aiman A
Thu 21 June 2021


Let's just say that this book is certainly one open to a lot of controversy and debate, yet that is what makes it such an interesting read.

The Catcher in the Rye certainly wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea, however I find it an exciting and compelling read, with a gallon of brutal reality poured in along with some humour, contrasting with moments of depression.

Monday, September 26, 2022

At the End of a Dirt Road by Thomas Powers

 

JD Salinger

At the End of a Dirt Road


by Thomas Powers
Vol. 41 No. 20 · 24 October 2019

The Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour – an Introduction 

by J.D. Salinger.
Little, Brown, 1072 pp., $100, November 2018, 978 0 316 45071 3


When​ I think of J.D. Salinger now – not the books but the man – the thing I find hardest to understand is the moment when, in his early thirties, he began to hide his face. In 1952 he hired the photographer Antony Di Gesu to take a series of portraits. With his prominent nose, jaw and cheekbones he looks as ruggedly confident as a prizefighter – in early life he was a handsome man. But it wasn’t an easy shoot: Di Gesu had to work to get him to loosen up. Salinger liked the pictures but insisted Di Gesu show them to no one else, saying that he wanted them for his mother and girlfriend. The first printings of The Catcher in the Rye in 1951 came with an author photo taking up the entire rear panel of the dustjacket: Salinger’s expression is amused, generous, even sweet; the chances are good that he picked the portrait out himself from a set taken by the photographer Lotte Jacobi the previous year. But when the time came for later printings, with copies flying off the shelves, he insisted that the photo be pulled: from that moment on, none of his books appeared with an author photo. Twenty years later he tried to persuade his lover at the time, Joyce Maynard, to allow no author photo on her own first book. ‘A writer’s face,’ he said, ‘should never be known.’

Salinger’s Women




J.D. Salinger’s Women
by Deanna Schmidt

It’s no secret that J.D. Salinger was attracted to a certain “type” of woman: young, innocent, and sexually inexperienced. Even though these relationships tended to raise eyebrows from disapproving onlookers, Salinger’s intentions were arguably pure. He never wanted to hurt or take advantage of these women; he was, as I see it, simply looking for companionship. Salinger wasn’t the slighted bit interested in having sex with the women he pursued. His desires were, rather, focused on one thing: the innocence of his female companions. Salinger had succumbed to his own disease— the “Catcher In the Rye complex.” His biggest wish was to find a young girl to love, protect, and live out the rest of his life with. Salinger went through a myriad of women in search of his perfect match, struggling to find a woman who could meet his high standards. While Salinger was waiting to discover his young lover, he crafted stories filled with older men who lusted over them— an outlet that allowed him to fulfill some of the desires that he could not realize in his own life. His writing, however, was not enough to quench his thirst, and Salinger continued to search for this illusory innocent throughout his adult life.

Salinger’s Pursuit of Teen Girls Gets Renewed Attention After ‘Allen v. Farrow’

Actress Michelle Williams arrives at the 2012 Independent Spirit Awards clutching a 'Catcher in the Rye' accessory. (Photo by Frazer Harrison

 

JD Salinger’s Pursuit of Teen Girls Gets Renewed Attention After ‘Allen v. Farrow’


Rae Alexandra
April 2, 2021

Yesterday, Vanity Fair published a compelling essay by prolific author Joyce Maynard. In it, she drew a parallel between Woody Allen and J.D. Salinger, saying both men harbored obsessions with very young women. Maynard was inspired to write the piece after watching recent HBO documentary series, Allen v. Farrow. But her motivation was born from the fact that, when she was a teenager, she had a relationship with the then-53-year-old Salinger.

Sunday, September 18, 2022

Hapworth Revisited / On J.D. Salinger’s Most Inscrutable Short Story


JD_Salinger

Hapworth Revisited: On J.D. Salinger’s Most Inscrutable Short Story

Christian Kriticos
June 11, 2015

Fifty years ago this month, The New Yorker published a bizarre short story by J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye, written in the form of a 28,000-word letter from a seven-year-old child at summer camp. No one could know it at the time, but this story was to mark one of the longest and most fascinating silences in literary history. Shortly after the story appeared, Salinger retreated into his reclusive rural New Hampshire home, and never published anything again in his lifetime.

Salinger's Letter From Camp Returned to Sender

JD Salinger


J.D. Salinger's Letter 

From Camp Returned to Sender

by Stuart Mitchner

Ten years ago the news was broken by a reporter for the Washington Business Journal: a new book by J.D. Salinger was scheduled for publication. It was even listed on Amazon for $15.95. Because the author of The Catcher in the Rye had been submerged in the silence of his self-imposed exile for 34 years, the promised spring 1997 appearance of Hapworth 16, 1924 was a literary event of some magnitude. Except that it never happened. Check online and you'll find that the same book was supposedly on its way into the world again in 2002. Even now a site called FetchBook lists it for January 2009, but don't hold your breath.

Betraying Salinger

 



Betraying Salinger


The first letter I got from J.D. Salinger was very short. It was 1988, and I had written to him with a proposal: I wanted my tiny publishing house, Orchises Press, to publish his novella Hapworth 16, 1924. And Salinger himself had improbably replied, saying that he would consider it.

Wednesday, September 7, 2022

Salinger / De Daumier-Smith´s Blue Period


J. D. Salinger
De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period

IF IT MADE any real sense--and it doesn't even begin to--I think I might be inclined to dedicate this account, for whatever it's worth, especially if it's the least bit ribald in parts, to the memory of my late, ribald stepfather, Robert Agadganian, Jr. Bobby--as everyone, even I, called him--died in 1947, surely with a few regrets, but without a single gripe, of thrombosis. He was an adventurous, extremely magnetic, and generous man. (After having spent so many years laboriously begrudging him those picaresque adjectives, I feel it's a matter of life and death to get them in here.)

Salinger / Teddy


J. D. Salinger
Teddy

I'LL EXQUISITE DAY you, buddy, if you don't get down off that bag this minute. And I mean it," Mr. McArdle said. He was speaking from the inside twin bed--the bed farther away from the porthole. Viciously, with more of a whimper than a sigh, he foot-pushed his top sheet clear of his ankles, as though any kind of coverlet was suddenly too much for his sunburned, debilitated-looking body to bear. He was lying supine, in just the trousers of his pajamas, a lighted cigarette in his right hand. His head was propped up just enough to rest uncomfortably, almost masochistically, against the very base of the headboard. His pillow and ashtray were both on the floor, between his and Mrs. McArdle's bed. Without raising his body, he reached out a nude, inflamed-pink, right arm and flicked his ashes in the general direction of the night table. "October, for God's sake," he said. "If this is October weather, gimme August." He turned his head to the right again, toward Teddy, looking for trouble. "C'mon," he said. "What the hell do you think I'm talking for? My health? Get down off there, please." Teddy was standing on the broadside of a new looking cowhide Gladstone, the better to see out of his parents' open porthole. He was wearing extremely dirty, white ankle-sneakers, no socks, seersucker shorts that were both too long for him and at least a size too large in the seat, an overly laundered T shirt that had a hole the size of a dime in the right shoulder, and an incongruously handsome, black alligator belt. He needed a haircut--especially at the nape of the neck--the worst way, as only a small boy with an almost full-grown head and a reedlike neck can need one.