Thumbing through a copy of Ian Hamilton's 1988 book "In Search of J.D. Salinger", a VERY unauthorized biography that Salinger went to court (in PERSON, no less!) to try to prevent from being published. (Salinger did win a court ruling that prevented Hamilton from being able to include any of Salinger's unpublished letters in the book.) It ends up being both a biography AND a book about Salinger's attempts to prevent publication. Very good reading if you're fascinated by recluse types. That's just the thing, really. Salinger WANTED you to be fascinated by his silence, by his mystique. His story is the literary equivalent of a guy like Bob Dylan going into seclusion right after "Freewheelin'", and NEVER returning! A stunt like that would have sold an awful lot of "Freewheelin'" albums, and it DID sell an awful lot of copies of Catcher. See, I think this "recluse" act was a very deliberate, very calculated ruse to MANUFACTURE the kind of mystique that would sell books, and provide the unprolific author a steady income for life without ever having to publish ANYTHING during the last 45 years.



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 2010-01-29 01:31 by tatters.

This is from Salinger's 1986 court deposition. Funny stuff. He was 67 years old at the time.

Q: Mr. Salinger, when was the last time you wrote any work of fiction for publication?

A: I'm not sure exactly.

Q: At any time during the past 20 years, have you written a work of fiction for publication?

A: That has been published, you mean?

Q: That has been published.

A: No

Q: At any time during the past 20 years, have you written any fiction which has not been published?

A: Yes.

Q: Could you describe for me what works of fiction you have written which have not been published?

A: It would be very difficult to do ...

Q: Have you written any full-length works of fiction during the past 20 years which have not been published?

A: Could you frame that a different way? What do you mean by a full-length work? You mean ready for publication?

Q: As opposed to a short story or a fictional piece or a magazine submission.

A: It's very difficult to answer. I don't write that way. I just start writing fiction and see what happens to it.

Q: Maybe an easier way to approach this is, would you tell me what your literary efforts have been in the field of fiction within the last 20 years?

A: Could I tell you or would I tell you? ... Just a work of fiction. That's all. That's the only description I can really give it.... It's almost impossible to define. I work with characters, and as they develop, I just go on from there.

Now if that's not a guy yanking everyone's chain, and TRYING to wrap himself up in a shroud of mystery, I don't know what is.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2013-08-31 15:16 by tatters.

WOW! This is something, I am shocked....I thought he died years ago.

Thumbs way up to tatters for doing a PERFECTO job on filling us in on the reclusive Mr. Salinger. If and when the consolidation happens I'd be happy to have my thread be the "caboose" of the 3. Bravo to tatters for the A1 job !!!! Helter

Supposedly the manuscripts labeled "red" are ready to publish and the writings with "blue" still need editing.

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tatters
Thumbing through a copy of Ian Hamilton's 1988 book "In Search of J.D. Salinger", a VERY unauthorized biography that Salinger went to court (in PERSON, no less!) to try to prevent from being published. (Salinger did win a court ruling that prevented Hamilton from being able to include any of Salinger's unpublished letters in the book.) It ends up being both a biography AND a book about Salinger's attempts to prevent publication. Very good reading if you're fascinated by recluse types. That's just the thing, really. Salinger WANTED you to be fascinated by his silence, by his mystique. His story is the literary equivalent of a guy like Bob Dylan going into seclusion right after "Freewheelin'", and NEVER returning! A stunt like that would have sold an awful lot of "Freewheelin'" albums, and it DID sell an awful lot of copies of Catcher. See, I think this "recluse" act was a very deliberate, very calculated ruse to MANUFACTURE the kind of mystique that would sell books, and provide the unprolific author a steady income for life without ever having to publish ANYTHING during the last 45 years.

do you believe this or are you just imitating Helter? I can't tell...

I think his reclusiveness was real, as real as his misanthropy. Did anyone really buy his books for his reputation as a recluse?--I would say not, but rather for his reputation as an "important" writer.

Catcher in the Rye is a good young adult novel, that's about it. His other stuff is nearly forgotten.

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cc

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tatters
Thumbing through a copy of Ian Hamilton's 1988 book "In Search of J.D. Salinger", a VERY unauthorized biography that Salinger went to court (in PERSON, no less!) to try to prevent from being published. (Salinger did win a court ruling that prevented Hamilton from being able to include any of Salinger's unpublished letters in the book.) It ends up being both a biography AND a book about Salinger's attempts to prevent publication. Very good reading if you're fascinated by recluse types. That's just the thing, really. Salinger WANTED you to be fascinated by his silence, by his mystique. His story is the literary equivalent of a guy like Bob Dylan going into seclusion right after "Freewheelin'", and NEVER returning! A stunt like that would have sold an awful lot of "Freewheelin'" albums, and it DID sell an awful lot of copies of Catcher. See, I think this "recluse" act was a very deliberate, very calculated ruse to MANUFACTURE the kind of mystique that would sell books, and provide the unprolific author a steady income for life without ever having to publish ANYTHING during the last 45 years.

do you believe this or are you just imitating Helter? I can't tell...

I think his reclusiveness was real, as real as his misanthropy. Did anyone really buy his books for his reputation as a recluse?--I would say not, but rather for his reputation as an "important" writer.

Catcher in the Rye is a good young adult novel, that's about it. His other stuff is nearly forgotten.

There's a passage in Hamilton's book, I'll try and look for it tomorrow, where it's established that Salinger himself believed much of the fascination with his small body of work was due to his reputation as a recluse. He even made statements to that effect in the court documents. It's kind of a Syd Barrett type of situation. The intense interest in his work is due, to a large degee, to the fact that there is so little of it.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2010-01-29 06:42 by tatters.

is there intense interest in his work?

I would say there's widespread awareness of his work, which is somewhat different. And widespread awareness of his reclusiveness, which is like a cultural myth. He may believe this led to high sales, but I would need to see evidence. Having Catcher in the Rye on many h.s. and college syllabuses for decades will buy you a nice New England compound.

So sad....but he lived a long life, not far from my brother's place in NH.

Can;t wait til they open his vaults!

I've always loved Salinger. One of my favorite all-time books is Raise High the Roofbeams Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction. My favorite short story is "To Esme, with Love and Squalor."

Either you dig his style, voice, perspective/point of view, and his characters or not. I love it all.

I couldn't bear to look at A Catcher in the Rye after John Lennon was killed. (fuccking Mark David Chapman had a copy of it with him)

But Salinger was a great writer and a dear man.

To quote Seymour as a way of bidding goodbye and thank-you to Mr Salinger: "I privately say to you, old friend (unto you, really, I'm afraid), please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: ( ( ( ( ) ) ) )."

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tatters
Q: Mr. Salinger, when was the last time you wrote any work of fiction for publication?
A: I'm not sure exactly.
<snip>
Q: Maybe an easier way to approach this is, would you tell me what your literary efforts have been in the field of fiction within the last 20 years?
A: Could I tell you or would I tell you? ... Just a work of fiction. That's all. That's the only description I can really give it.... It's almost impossible to define. I work with characters, and as they develop, I just go on from there.

Now if that's not a guy yanking everyone's chain, and TRYING to wrap himself up in a shroud of mystery, I don't know what is.

hmmm...I can see how you could see it that way. But Salinger was naturally somewhat inscrutable, and not in a game play-y way. He wasn't a linear writer, liner thinker, or person. What he says above, tho cryptic seeming, was completely honest -- and accurate -- in describing or not describing his work.

Read the opening paragraphs he wrote in Zooey, for example:

THE facts at hand presumably speak for themselves, but a trifle more vulgarly, I suspect, than facts even usually do. As a counterbalance, then, we begin with that everfresh and exciting odium: the author's formal introduction. The one I have in mind not only is wordy and earnest beyond my wildest dreams but is, to boot, rather excruciatingly personal. If, with the right kind of luck, it comes off, it should be comparable in effect to a compulsory guided tour through the engine room, with myself, as guide, leading the way in an old one-piece Jantzen bathing suit.

To get straight to the worst, what I'm about to offer isn't really a short story at all but a sort of prose home movie, and those who have seen the footage have strongly advised me against nurturing any elaborate distribution plans for it. The dissenting group, it's my privilege and headache to divulge, consists of the three featured players themselves, two female, one male.

etc.

So in 1957 he likens the literary "experience" (my word not his) of Zooey to a guided tour through an engine room, himself as narrator/tourguide in a preposterous old-fashioned one-piece bathing costume. Also describes Zooey as "a sort of prose home movie."

If one rejects his tongue in cheek assessment of what Zooey is, and insists on more conventional classification....what would it be?: some kinda novella? a long short story? part 2 of a two-part novel? a fictional nonfiction essay?

He was a funny guy. Brilliant.

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swiss
So sad....but he lived a long life, not far from my brother's place in NH.

In the 1960s, he would often cross the Connecticut & eat at Nap's Lunch, a now-defunct burger joint in Windsor, VT. My uncle used to see him there all the time. Supposedly, JD liked to talk to high school students, just not the media.

Greetings from the Jersey Shore.

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misterfrias

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swiss
So sad....but he lived a long life, not far from my brother's place in NH.

In the 1960s, he would often cross the Connecticut & eat at Nap's Lunch, a now-defunct burger joint in Windsor, VT. My uncle used to see him there all the time. Supposedly, JD liked to talk to high school students, just not the media.

misterfrias...that's cool and sweet. he really liked kids before they'd get to that point of being "ruined" by adulthood. I can kinda of understand what he means, but it's tragic since everyone eventually grows up.

Melbourne AGE - 30 January 2010



ROCKMAN

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tatters

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cc

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tatters
Thumbing through a copy of Ian Hamilton's 1988 book "In Search of J.D. Salinger", a VERY unauthorized biography that Salinger went to court (in PERSON, no less!) to try to prevent from being published. (Salinger did win a court ruling that prevented Hamilton from being able to include any of Salinger's unpublished letters in the book.) It ends up being both a biography AND a book about Salinger's attempts to prevent publication. Very good reading if you're fascinated by recluse types. That's just the thing, really. Salinger WANTED you to be fascinated by his silence, by his mystique. His story is the literary equivalent of a guy like Bob Dylan going into seclusion right after "Freewheelin'", and NEVER returning! A stunt like that would have sold an awful lot of "Freewheelin'" albums, and it DID sell an awful lot of copies of Catcher. See, I think this "recluse" act was a very deliberate, very calculated ruse to MANUFACTURE the kind of mystique that would sell books, and provide the unprolific author a steady income for life without ever having to publish ANYTHING during the last 45 years.

do you believe this or are you just imitating Helter? I can't tell...

I think his reclusiveness was real, as real as his misanthropy. Did anyone really buy his books for his reputation as a recluse?--I would say not, but rather for his reputation as an "important" writer.

Catcher in the Rye is a good young adult novel, that's about it. His other stuff is nearly forgotten.

There's a passage in Hamilton's book, I'll try and look for it tomorrow, where it's established that Salinger himself believed much of the fascination with his small body of work was due to his reputation as a recluse. He even made statements to that effect in the court documents. It's kind of a Syd Barrett type of situation. The intense interest in his work is due, to a large degee, to the fact that there is so little of it.

"Although it was true that he had no thoughts of ever publishing the letters, he nonetheless claimed that they were worth a lot of money, and didn't see why someone else should pick up any part of it. His 'past literary successes,' 'particularly in context with twenty years of public inaccessibility, or silence' rendered his letters 'most uncommonly valuable literary property.'"

-Ian Hamilton, discussing Salinger's 1986 court affidavit

"If over the past twenty or so years this man of mystery had ever made gratified reference to the money value of his 'silence' and 'inaccessibility,' a large lump of his mystique would have evaporated."

-Ian Hamilton, expressing doubt that the words in Salinger's affidavit are really Salinger's, since he would have greatly eroded his own mystique if he were to have admitted that his 'silence' had a monetary value, and that this is why he sought to maintain it by preventing Hamilton from including his unpublished letters in the unauthorized biography.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2010-01-30 00:23 by tatters.

How JD Salinger created the original rock starThe literary legend, who died this week, inspired the modern idea of the rock'n'roll rebel with his character Holden Caulfield, the outsider antihero from The Catcher in the Rye

Forever young ... JD Salinger's Holden Caulfield continues to inspire generations.

The death of JD Salinger has naturally got everyone reminiscing about his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, one of those rare books that virtually everyone read when they were a teenager. Its distinctive mood – that mix of sarcasm, pathos and pained nostalgia for lost youth – never quite leaves you (it also has the dubious distinction of being the only book Ricky Gervais has ever read).

It's ironic that a book which pre-dated rock'n'roll has gone on to influence generations of rock lyricists, but then The Catcher in the Rye has an uncanny knack of staying forever young, speaking to successive waves of teenagers. In recent years, it's variously been a hipster bible and a sort of emo set text. To own a copy when you're young is to signal that you're something of an unquiet soul – an underachiever but brainy with it, a misfit but not a nerd.

It's often said that the character of Holden Caulfield invented the teenager. I'd argue that, in some sense, Caulfield also set the mould for our modern notion of the rock star – damaged, hyper-sensitive, infinitely cool, creative, hungry for sensation, an authentic voice in a world of phonies. Kurt Cobain, Nebraska-era Bruce Springsteen, Richey Manic, Gerard Way are all Holden Caulfields in their own way. Even Thom Yorke, with his "lost child" shtick, on songs such as Street Spirit (Fade Out) – the thin-skinned loner wandering the streets at night, adrift in a sea of heartless modernity.

The power of The Catcher in the Rye is its ability to make the reader feel Holden Caulfield is speaking exclusively to them. This, of course, has its downsides, as it's sometimes used as lazy lyrical shorthand for outsider status by the kind of American pop-punks who, you suspect, haven't really read many other books. To be "like Holden Caulfield" is in fact a cliche of that genre, invoked to lend literary weight to what would otherwise be mere navel-gazing angst (see The Offspring's Get It Right). Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong, in the song Who Wrote Holden Caulfield, seems to misread the protagonist as a kind of pot-smoking 1990s slacker ("There's a boy who fogs his world and now he's getting lazy/There's no motivation and frustration makes him crazy"); Caulfield, a restless and fretful street-walker, has many problems, but laziness is not one of them.

The most wrong-headed "tribute" of all, however, must be Guns N' Roses' The Catcher in the Rye, from their long-delayed comeback album Chinese Democracy. Axl Rose clearly fancies himself as something of a Salinger-style recluse, maintaining a dignified silence down the years – rather forgetting that dignified recluses tend not to become embroiled in childish feuds with Dr Pepper, or announce lucrative world tours.

Still, you can see why Salinger's approach to creativity – one unrepeatable work of brilliance, followed by decades of crabby silence – might appeal to past-it rock stars. Salinger published his last work in 1965. You wonder if just occasionally the Rolling Stones, the Cure's Robert Smith, Lou Reed, or any other artist doomed to churn out albums of diminishing quality long after the creative fires have sputtered out, wish they'd made a similar decision, and quit while they were ahead.

[www.guardian.co.uk]

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Sir Craven of Cottage
If JD Salinger had never existed John Lennon would still be alive - not confrontational , just an observation

I don't see the point of mentioning in the same sentence a great talent and a 4th rate songwritter. Salinger was spared the burden of having a Yoko around his neck. He kept his life AWAY from mass-medias whereas LennonOno couldn't take a crap without calling a TV crew.

Don't you think it's wonderful that in the Twitter webonanist age there's NO recent pic of J.D.
Thomas Pynchon keep on being elusive!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2010-01-30 00:29 by dcba.

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Edith Grove

Still, you can see why Salinger's approach to creativity – one unrepeatable work of brilliance, followed by decades of crabby silence – might appeal to past-it rock stars. Salinger published his last work in 1965. You wonder if just occasionally the Rolling Stones, the Cure's Robert Smith, Lou Reed, or any other artist doomed to churn out albums of diminishing quality long after the creative fires have sputtered out, wish they'd made a similar decision, and quit while they were ahead.

He didn't quit writing. He just quit sending his manuscripts to publishers, which is even more bizarre than if he had stopped writing altogether. Can you imagine completing a book, or an album, or a film, and you think it's the best thing you've ever done in your life, and then putting it in a safe to never be looked at by anyone for as long as you remain alive? That is a mighty peculiar behavior. Most people, after completing a piece of work that they think is really good, can't wait for other people to see it.

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Rockman


Melbourne AGE - 30 January 2010

Geez, and that was over 20 years ago! I'll say this, the man looked very fit and healthy for that age. Anything recent showing up anywhere?

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Rockman

"I thought I told you kids to stay the hell off my lawn!"



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2013-09-01 03:05 by tatters.

I really liked everything he did if you want to know the truth. I really did.

RIP

THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN - 30-31 January 2010



ROCKMAN

tatters - One of the reasons I admire Lennon is because he was NOT a phoney he had conviction. I am on the opposite end of the spectrum but I can respect someone when I feel that they are being honest and have conviction though I always wonder how he wrote Imagine no posessions and he died with an estate estimated at a value of 235 million dollars but I believe he believed in what he was doing.

Swiss, you have great taste.

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slew
tatters - One of the reasons I admire Lennon is because he was NOT a phoney he had conviction. I am on the opposite end of the spectrum but I can respect someone when I feel that they are being honest and have conviction though I always wonder how he wrote Imagine no posessions and he died with an estate estimated at a value of 235 million dollars but I believe he believed in what he was doing.

Not sure if you understood my post. I said I couldn't understand why MDC thought Lennon was phoney and that imo Lennon could not have been LESS phoney. I guess phoney in this context means to be a hypocrite, and maybe this is what MDC thought, that because Lennon said "imagine no possessions" and then moved into a fabulous apartment building like the Dakota, he must be a hypocrite, or, in the language of Salinger, a "phoney". Imagine is a beautiful song, but I don't think Lennon really believed that its ideals were realistically attainable, by him, or by anyone else. He was just being a "dreamer". MLK died because someone didn't like his dream. Lennon died because someone thought he was failing to live his life according to his own dream.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2010-02-01 04:08 by tatters.

I would add that Lennon died because a guy with a long-term psychosis thought he was Lennon for a while and decided to travel from Hawaii to NYC
to shoot him.

Here is the well-known cover of Salinger's first book:

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misterfrias

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swiss
So sad....but he lived a long life, not far from my brother's place in NH.

In the 1960s, he would often cross the Connecticut & eat at Nap's Lunch, a now-defunct burger joint in Windsor, VT. My uncle used to see him there all the time. Supposedly, JD liked to talk to high school students, just not the media.

Ah yes this 'reclusive' business Salinger was a recluse because he did not do interviews, hobnob w/the Literati and Gliterati, etc., but wa always around for High School kids and other locals at diners, etc, in new England.

Greta Garbo was a 'recluse' who lived in densely populated Manhattan forgoing the 'hobnobbing,' while regularly interacting with the average unknown person on the street.

Apparently Salinger may have been shell-shocked from service in WW2 which fueled his literary creativity.

I can not blame him from making a buck and wanting to avoid the jet-set lime-light while still interacting with ordinary people without the flashbulbs of B.S..

Sad Sad News. Thanks for posting, as I missed this news item. The Catcher in the Rye is still my all-time favorite book, narrowly edging out Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury.

An excerpt from a NY Times article:

One year later, in 2000, Mr. Salinger's daughter, Margaret, came out with a memoir, "Dream Catcher," that revealed previously unknown and deeply intimate aspects of her father's life. Ms. Salinger said her father was pathologically self-centered, and that nothing could interrupt his work, which he likened to a quest for enlightenment. Ms. Salinger said her father was also abusive to his second wife and her mother, Claire Douglas, keeping her a virtual prisoner in his house in Cornish, N.H., refusing to allow her to see friends and family.

Mr. Salinger pursued Scientology, homeopathy and Christian Science, according to the daughter. He also drank urine, and sat in a Reichian orgone box, Ms. Salinger wrote. He spoke in tongues, fasted until he turned greenish and as an older man had pen pal relationships with teenage girls.

Read More...

Mr. Salinger was born Jerome David Salinger, the son of Miriam and Sol Salinger, who became a prosperous food merchant in New York. He grew up on the Upper West Side and Park Avenue and attended the Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania.

According to Ms. Salinger, her father always thought his parents were Jewish but when he was a teenager he discovered that they hid from him that his mother was Irish Catholic. Still, Mr. Salinger experienced anti-Semitism, from which he developed his aversion, expressed by his characters, for the Ivy League, for "phonies."

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misterfrias
In the 1960s, he would often cross the Connecticut & eat at Nap's Lunch, a now-defunct burger joint in Windsor, VT. My uncle used to see him there all the time. Supposedly, JD liked to talk to high school students, just not the media.

Befriended, Then Betrayed

In the fall of 1953 he befriended some local teenagers and allowed one of them to interview him for what he assumed would be an article on the high school page of a local paper, The Claremont Daily Eagle. The article appeared instead as a feature on the editorial page, and Mr. Salinger felt so betrayed that he broke off with the teenagers and built a six-and-a-half-foot fence around his property.