The Mysteries of J.D. Salinger

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.

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.