R.I.P J.D Salinger

kraggy

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8486169.stm

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/01/28/national/main6151160.shtml

Wow.

This book had a massive effect on me when I was a teenager. Was also always very intrigued by his reclusiveness.

Wonder will there me more insight into his life now that he's passed away?

KonFusion

Just found out a few mins ago.

RIP indeed

scriba

kraggy wrote: »

Wonder will there me more insight into his life now that he's passed away?

TV movie perhaps? Very sad news, I know Catcher in the Rye divides opinion on these boards, but I for one loved it when I read it as a teenager. Even though I've hopefully grown away from identifying with the main character doesn't mean I don't still appreciate it as a top piece of work. RIP

buck65

15 completed manuscripts in a safe! Eeenteresting.

iMax

One of my favourite books of all time. Hopefully now his estate will let them film it. (although equally hopeful they don't moderanise it/turn it into an emo flick or put Efron/Patterson in the lead)

Eliot Rosewater

I was only talking about JD Salinger last night, having recently read For Esme With Love And Squalor.

I know liking JD Salinger is somewhat of a cliche. But the sterotypical fan - the disillusioned rebelious teenager - doesnt do justice to this man. His ability to portray characters and emotions is the best there is. The realism that leaps from the page when reading his stories is quite unmatched in my experiance. It is a great author that has died.


The question now turns to the fate of his leftover works and whether his will mandates them being released.

Eliot Rosewater

Ignorant article on Salinger: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2010/0129/1224263356681.html

Ill draft a letter tomorrow to the Irish Times suggesting they get a new "literary corespondent", clearly their current one doesn't have a clue what shes talking about.

sxt

Yeah that article does seem a bit harsh and bitter

2040

Eliot Rosewater wrote: »

Ignorant article on Salinger: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2010/0129/1224263356681.html

Ill draft a letter tomorrow to the Irish Times suggesting they get a new "literary corespondent", clearly their current one doesn't have a clue what shes talking about.

That article is a disgrace. The pretentious manner in which she criticises his work is bad enough, but then she makes these cutting remarks about his personal life. Annoying person.

Let us know what you send the irish times. She deserves a kick up the arse.

Amazotheamazing

I dunno, I partly blame Salinger for the stunted sexuality we see in the Indie world today.

Hermy

Did anyone catch the piece Moncriffe did on Newstalk yesterday?
Sean and his guest repeatedly described Mr. Salinger as 'bonkers' and found this to be absolutely hilarious.
I thought it was in poor taste.

Eliot Rosewater

2040 wrote: »

Let us know what you send the irish times.

I just want to make a few minor changes before I send it tomorrow (heading out now).

Dear Editor,

I took serious exception to Eileen Battersbys dogmatic opinion piece concerning J.D. Salinger (Opinion, 29th of January). Although the central argument of the article was that Salinger is undeserving of literary attention, the only thing I learned from it was that Ms Battersby is ill-informed to judge.

Ms Battersby displays a fundamental ignorance of Salingers work. Her analysis of The Catcher in the Rye is shallow and would seem to indicate that she didn't give the novel any proper consideration. She fails to grasp that the novel is as much about the narrator Holden Caulfield as it is about the world that he describes. By having Holden and his obvious flaws the raison d'etre for the novel, Salinger gave us all a lesson in what is possible in the first person.

Yet the greatest crime in Ms Battersbys piece isn't her analysis of what she has read, rather it is her blatant disregard for what she hasn't read.

It is generally accepted that Catcher in the Rye is not Salinger at his best. It was initially a short story of his – A Perfect Day for Bananafish – that won him literary acclaim, and most of his published work is composed of shorter fiction.

For it is in this concise mode of writing that Salinger truly shines. His skills in accurately portraying characters and emotions are difficult to challenge. Beneath the literal Salinger weaves in moral lessons and cutting commentary on the human condition to produce a literary tapestry that is brief yet uncomfortably precise.

Bearing this in mind, I would suggest that the next time Ms Battersby decides to critique an author she should at least consider, in full, what that author has produced. The Salingers of this world spend large amounts of time on the smallest of details, and the least they deserve is that critics read their work and not jump to preconceived conclusions. In fact, seeing the highly dismissive way in which Ms Battersby has treated Salinger, its not hard to see why he became so reclusive in the first place.

Yours,

Any comments welcome

2040

Fair play. Good letter. I would put effort into writing a complaint but i'm in the middle of two essays at the moment so i'm a bit preoccupied. My email to Ms Battersby was as follows:

"Literary Correspondent" my arse.

:P

Monkeybonkers

RIP indeed Mr. Salinger.

I've only read 'The Catcher in the Rye' so can't comment on any of his other work but I have to say that it is and always will remain one of my favourites. I was absolutely blown away by it the first time that I read it. At 14 years old I thought that it was one of the greatest things ever written and I was extremely moved by it (mind you I was also teary-eyed at 'Black Beauty').

A very harsh article and well done Eliot for your letter. I hope it gets published. Salinger must have told her he'd ring and then didn't :P. She's very bitter.

buck65

Maybe in this case she's off the mark but she is a good journalist and one of the reasons I read the Times on Saturday. I would give her a break here, it's her opinion after all and she is entitled to it.
She is well qualified to judge Salinger btw. She is a reader therefore she is the same as all of us in that regard.

Spiritoftheseventies

so he liked three days ago. WOW. Read all his short stories as a kid and Catcher in the Rye.. One of those writers that really spoke to his audience. R.I.P

Hrududu

Dear Editor,

I took serious exception to Eileen Battersbys dogmatic opinion piece concerning J.D. Salinger

So a literary correspondant isn't entitled to her own opinion on an author and his books?

Spiritoftheseventies

this the article in full that appeared

JD Salinger died yesterday, but his celebrated book ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ is an overrated work that took over the author’s life and sent him into seclusion, writes EILEEN BATTERSBY , Literary Correspondent

HE BECAME famous on the publication of one iconic book, The Catcher in the Rye , he has remained famous ever since, largely through his efforts to ward off the outside world. JD Salinger the man died yesterday at the age of 91, but the writer “died” a long time ago, in 1965, when his last published story, Hapworth 16, 1924 , featured in the New Yorker .

The Catcher in the Rye appeared in novel form in 1951, having been serialised between 1945 and 1946. It struck a tone and caught the defiance of its time. More than that, it articulated all the frustrations of the American post-war, middle-class adolescent poised for a rebellion of sorts.

It wasn’t the first time the vernacular had been used, Ring Lardner had already been there. And before him had been Mark Twain. For every reader who claims The Catcher in the Rye as his or her personal bible, there are many, many more, myself included, who would point to Huckleberry Finn as the superior creation. But Salinger voiced the edginess. Huck is great company; Holden Caulfield is a challenge to himself and to everyone else. He doesn’t do much, and boy, does he talk. The narrative amounts to a monologue. Holden has problems. He has flunked out of school and now must face his parents.

He decides that everyone, excepting two nuns he meets at breakfast, are phonies. “Phoney” is a key word for Holden and for the book. Its message is that grown-ups are useless. The book is an odyssey. Holden spends a weekend in New York trying to make sense of life. Once he gets home he is psychoanalysed, yet another indictment of phoney grown ups.

The Catcher in the Rye could be seen as a defining gesture of rebellion. Perhaps it is. But if it is a book of its time, and it certainly is that, it is very much of that time, and reading it now is to be struck by its archness and also that fact that Holden is an irritating character whose self-absorption only relaxes in the company of his little sister. It all sound too pat, a bit corny. Huck Finn wins out every time, as does another great novel, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). Written by Harper Lee, it was her only book and yet it has stood the test of time rather better than The Catcher in the Rye .

Salinger spent the rest of his brief writing career, and his long life, on the run from that first novel. Although Nine Stories (1953), Franny and Zooey (1961) Raise High the Roof Beams , Carpenter, and Seymour: An Introduction (1963) followed, Salinger, despite his efforts to write about the Glass family, including Buddy, his alter ego, could never shake off the voice of Holden.

Salinger continued writing, just not publishing. He retreated into reclusive privacy, leaving that one book as his testament. People had some idea of what Salinger looked like, but he became a mystery. Much the same could be said of Thomas Pynchon, but behind Pynchon’s reclusiveness is a hint of playfulness, and he has continued publishing. Salinger’s privacy conveyed real desperation, a torment that went beyond keeping humanity at arm’s length.

In 1988 British poet and critic Ian Hamilton, who had written a major biography of Robert Lowell, spoke about the horrors of attempting a biography of Salinger. For Hamilton, The Catcher in the Rye had been a bible. In 1985 Hamilton had delivered a manuscript based on extensive research and more than 100 unpublished letters stored in the respective libraries of Princeton and the University of Texas. The correspondence spanned Salinger’s life from 1939 when he was 20 until 1961, 10 years after the publication of the book that made him – and some might suggest, destroyed him.

Salinger, who had expressed no interest in the biography, suddenly erupted. An injunction was sought and granted. Hamilton’s study was gutted. He wrote a second version; it too was vetoed, as was a third. Finally he wrote a very different book, an account of his experience. It was titled The Search for JD Salinger , published in 1988 and didn’t much please anyone, least of all the disgruntled Hamilton.

So JD Salinger had his moment of fame. Franny and Zooey initially sold better than The Catcher in the Rye . Was Salinger a great writer? No. But he is an original. It’s difficult to deny, though, that the book took over his life, sending him into seclusion on a 900-acre farm in New Hampshire, where he tried to write but somehow couldn’t because Holden Caulfield had already said all that Salinger had to say.

Remembering an author who ‘set a fire alight that changed the world’


Colm Tóibín, novelist

I read The Catcher in the Rye when I was about 15 or 16 in a Penguin paperback and I never looked back. It captured the creepiness of adolescence, the mixture of certainty and insecurity, the way you, like Holden, were normal and other people were weird.

I loved some of Salinger’s other titles and pondered them deeply as though they contained a whole world, especially Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters and For Esme, With Love and Squalor.

A few years ago I reread The Catcher in the Rye and loved how it handled the quirkiness of voice and the darting movements of a fragile and brilliant consciousness.

Niall McMonagle, teacher

The thing I think of first when I think of JD Salinger is the wonderful salvo in the opening page, when Holden Caulfield rejects all the David Copperfield kind of crap. Caulfield’s is one of the most distinctive voices. Of course he is cynical and of course he is disaffected, but his love for Phoebe and his response to the two nuns in the scene in Grand Central are so redeeming in terms of his personality.

As for Salinger the person, maybe it’s better to take on board the advice, “never trust the teller trust the tale”. He did everything not to be invaded by the disease in our age: the invasive celebrity culture syndrome.

There are some books you can give to any teenager. The Catcher in The Rye is one of them.

Joseph O’Connor, writer

I’ll never forget the shock and the joy of first reading The Catcher in the Rye when I was 17. You felt Holden was talking to you – perhaps to you alone – and that your responses to what he was telling you were somehow part of the novel. You even felt he was listening in whatever zone he inhabited. This was something totally new to me: fiction as friendship-assertion. It’s the book that made me want to be a writer myself.

Paul Murray, novelist

The Catcher in the Rye was an enormously influential book for me. I think Salinger has fallen out of fashion in recent times, and people regard the book as a teenager book. It was a really beautiful book and I think any time I go back to him, I’m really struck by how it was trying to get to some kind of truth.

I understand why he would want to separate his life from the work he created. At the same time I think that his decision to withhold his work from readers is harder to understand. He is one of those cult writers, and he attracted young people who were looking to him for answers. I’d imagine that is frightening.

John Banville, novelist

He was a great stylist, and he was very important to us in the 1950s and 1960s, and then he went silent in that strange way that was shocking. Sometimes people just run out of steam. EM Forster gave up at a certain point. It happens. It was strange that Salinger became such a recluse; he would have been better off talking to younger writers and so on. But that’s what happens to older writers sometimes.

Hugo Hamilton, writer

I was given the book by my mother when I was 15. It was like letting a drug dealer into the house. It caused the revolution. It was a revolution that was coming anyway, but that book speeded it up. It was the first glimpse of a young person thinking for themselves with compete freedom. People like myself just copied that and were desperate to get out of the house and away from the authoritarian rule.

He is one of the people who contributed to a whole movement of 1968 that changed the world completely. He set a fire alight that changed the world.

Theo Dorgan, poet and author

It was an important book for people who grew up through the 1960s and 1970s. Salinger was one of those who realised that teenagers had minds of their own. It seems obvious to us that teenagers are aware of being in the world and think of themselves as people, but the convention before the late 1960s was not that. The shock value of Catcher is that here you had a teenager thinking very independently and making his own choices, however flawed they might be. The Catcher in the Rye gives a preview of the youth culture to come.

Eliot Rosewater

buck65 wrote: »

She is well qualified to judge Salinger btw. She is a reader therefore she is the same as all of us in that regard.

I'm not qualified to judge Samuel Beckett as I havent read anything from him. The same is true here: although she has read his only novel, her attacks are meaningless given that many fans (such as myself) dont rate Catcher as his best work. Also given the fact that her analysis of Catcher is completely shallow.

Shes obviously entitled to her opinion, but some opinions are better based than others.

Hrududu wrote: »

So a literary correspondant isn't entitled to her own opinion on an author and his books?

Please point out where I suggested where she wasnt entitled to her opinion?

Really, please do.

Spiritoftheseventies

I think he was a very influential writer. Wouldnt say Catcher in the Rye made that big an impression on me but definitely his short stories.

Monkeybonkers

iMax wrote: »

Hopefully now his estate will let them film it.

Please don't ever let them make a film of this. I just can't see how a film could do justice to this book. It's not really a story that lends itself to film imho.

Spiritoftheseventies

Monkeybonkers wrote: »

Please don't ever let them make a film of this. I just can't see how a film could do justice to this book. It's not really a story that lends itself to film imho.

Think he took an action against someone who attempted to make a play version of his novel. He was very protective of his work. James Joyce's grandson another who is very rigid when it comes to any of of his grandfather's work being reproduced.

Eliot Rosewater

Apparently Salinger demanded that no photos be placed on the covers of his books, as the reader get might preconceptions of his characters.

I know its extreme, but I can kind of appreciate where hes coming from. The level of detail Salinger places in his characters in 9 Stories is really immense, and Im sure he wanted them to remain the way he wanted them to.

Hrududu

Eliot Rosewater wrote: »

Please point out where I suggested where she wasnt entitled to her opinion?
Really, please do.

Well you did draft a lengthy letter giving out about how someone elses opinion differed to your own.

Eliot Rosewater

Hrududu wrote: »

Well you did draft a lengthy letter giving out about how someone elses opinion differed to your own.

Yes I disagreed with her opinion, so I then voiced my opinion.

Now, please show me where I said, or even insinuated, that she "isn't entitled to her own opinion", because unfortunatly for you merely disagreeing with someone does not amount to thinking theyre not entitled to their opinion.

Unless you want to admit that post #17 was nothing more than putting words in my mouth.

Either or.


EDIT: In fact if we are to apply your logic throughly, by disagreeing with my opinion you think Im not entitled to my opinion, which results in you doing the exact thing your accusing me of. Ah internet forum logic, got to love it.

Hrududu

Hee, I'd love to see how worked up you get over something important.

Anyhoo J.D. Salinger. I always preferred Franny and Zooey to Catcher in the Rye.

Eliot Rosewater

Better not reply to that, it might insinuate I hate JD Salinger in some funny Internet logic kind of way ... 2+2=5 doesn't seem all that far off with the kind of "reasoning" seen here. And you know, trying to get someone to row back on something they said just wont happen on the Internet. Better to stick in a ...

Anyway, stupid me for being passionate about something, huh? :rolleyes:

buck65

Chillax Eliot!
All I said was she is usually a good journalist, she certainly has turned me on to writers and books I wouldn't have heard about.
She is entitled to say that "Catcher" wasn't her cup of tay. She obviously thinks he was an asshole and she could well be right there.

BaelNaMblath

I feel like I missed my opportunity to really appreciate Catcher in the Rye by not reading it when I was 17. It just seems like something that wouldn't hit me the same way now that I'm not a disaffected teen.

buck65

I would recommend Driving Miss Daisy for you grandpa.;)

jackcee

The only "literary person" I know, in the sense of being well-known in the book world, has long been a fan of Salinger - and The Catcher in the Rye.

Indeed, I can recall many occasions over the years, when he listed The Catcher in his "favourites".

Imagine my surprise last night, when in company, said critic damned Salinger with faint praise.

Just proved what I had suspected for some time recently - it has become "fashionable" to deride JDS and The Catcher.

When tackled, my "learned" friend could not give a coherent reason for his appalling volte-face.