Experiencing Salinger: the Letters, the Criticism, and the Characters
Too often, a writer dies and, for a moment, their works can be found everywhere as people mourn before the media moves on to the next news item. Though today marks the last day that J.D. Salinger’s letters are on public display at the Morgan Library and Museum, the spate of digital and print resources on this 20th century spokesman of American adolescence will live on. Here is a guide to further experiencing Salinger:
Online:
The real treat is re-reading classic shorts like “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (published on January 31, 1948) And “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor” (published on April 8, 1950) in their original format, complete with the very traditional advertisements from that era that mark elements of the “phony” society Salinger’s characters struggled against.
Holden Caulfield’s perambulations around New York
With this interactive map from the New York Times, Salinger fans can walk in the footsteps of The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield. Map highlights include the Edmont Hotel, home to his encounter with Sunny the hooker; the lake in Central Park, where he wondered about the ducks in winter; and the clock at the Biltmore, where he waited for his date.
Salinger: The Classical Critical and Personal Portrait, Introduced and edited by Henry Anatole Grunwald
Harper Collins has just reissued 1962’s Salinger: The Classical Critical and Personal Portrait. The collection includes essays by Updike, Joan Didion, Arthur Mizener, Alfred Kazin, Granville Hicks, and Maxwell Geismar, all introduced and edited by the late Henry Anatole Grunwald, former editor of TIME Magazine.
This collection puts the literary legend’s myth into perspective, going back to a time when Salinger was not untouchable to show readers the original critical reception of his work. You’ll see allegations that his stories are too “cute,” that he was too in love with the Glass family, too snobbishly “New Yorker” of a storyteller to be a writer of modernity in all its forms.
Typical of the opposition raised to his work, though expressed with an enjoyable zeal that does permit a bit of praise, is Joan Didion’s piece, “Finally (Fashionably) Spurious” that picks apart Franny and Zooey: “However brilliantly rendered (and it is), however hauntingly right in the rhythm of its dialogue (and it is), however hauntingly right in the rhythm of its dialogues (and it is), Franny and Zooey is finally spurious, and what makes it spurious is Salinger’s tendency to flatter the essential triviliaty within each of his readers, his predilection for giving instructions for living. What gives the book its extremely potent appeal is precisely that it is self-help copy: it emerges finally as Positive Thinking for the upper middle classes, as Double Your Energy and Live Without Fatigue for Sarah Lawrence girls.” Zing!
Grunwald’s Salinger, commissioned in 1962—before Salinger became a recluse from the public eye (his last published work was to be in 1965)—showed premonitions of his increasing flight from the limelight, and David L. Stevenson, in his critical piece “The Mirror,” saw this separatist impulse in Salinger as his greatest resource: “Salinger’s nonliterary status leaves him, as a serious writer, almost unique as a wholly free agent, unhampered by the commitments of his more dedicated contemporaries to one or another school of critics. One might guess that this is Salinger’s most precious asset. Rather than wishing quarterly significance or ‘greatness’ on him, we can be content to take him for what he is: a beautifully deft, professional performer who gives us a chance to catch quick, half-amused, half-frightened glimpses of ourselves and our contemporaries, as he confronts us with his brilliant mirror image.”
Letters
Letters by JD Salinger at the Morgan Library and Museum
While the exhibitition of Jerome David Salinger’s letters to Michael Mitchell, the commercial artist he commissioned to create the dust jacket for The Catcher in the Rye, closes today, the contents of the letters raise questions that will continue to be pondered in the weeks and months to come. Covering the forty-year period between 1951 and 1953, the letters on display at the Morgan document a time in the writer’s life where he had almost entirely removed himself from the public eye. With his celebrated sharp eye and humorous wit, his letters provide insight into the mind of one of the literary world’s most private men.
While all of the ten letters on display are memorable, perhaps the most remarked-upon in the press was the letter from May 22, 1951, in which Salinger addresses Mitchell with the Holden Caulfieldesque “Dear Buddyroos.” The letter, sent just weeks before The Catcher in the Rye was published, tells of Salinger’s trip to London, where he recounts going out with a Vogue model, being served tea at a performance of Swan Lake, and how “some gin went up my nose” at the Chelsea abode of Silver Screen royalty Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh; “I damn near left by the window,” he joked. Maybe his fear of a recurrence of the gin incident contributed to his withdrawal from society? Gin for thought.
The bulk of the letters chronicle his family life: like Holden, Salinger describes the joy he feels when watching children sleep. And, at least early on, the happiness he feels taking his children around New York City (his daughter, in particular, was delighted to learn that the suite at the Sherry-Netherland in which they stayed had once been used by the Beatles.) Yet as the years go by, the author’s withdrawal becomes more apparent, as he describes “cringing” when the phone rings. He increasingly prefers his “crummy tractor” in New Hampshire to the hubbub of New York.
Are these letters and the slim collection of published works really the last we will hear from Salinger? The Morgan letters provide some fans with hope. While Salinger last published work in 1965, his letters reveal that even into the 1980s, he rose each morning between 6 and 7 AM to write without interruption “unless absolutely necessary or convenient.” One 1966 letter to Mitchell mentions a hoarde of “ten, twelve years’ work” that includes “two particular scripts — books really — that I’ve been hoarding at and picking at for years.” For speculation about what the hell Salinger was writing at such a pace for almost thirty years, The Week’s guess is as good as mine.
Here’s hoping.
From beginning to end you nailed this post to the wall! Great Job!
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Too often, a writer dies and, for a moment, their works can be found everywhere as people mourn before the media moves on to the next news item…..