The Mysteries of J.D. Salinger

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.