David Copperfield Kind Of Crap

I just finished Kenneth Slawenski's biography of J.D. Salinger. Before that, I'd read Salinger's books (there are only four) but knew nothing of his life.  Some things I found out:

--Jerome David Salinger was born in 1919.  His father was Jewish, his mother a gentile.  His father was an importer of meats and cheeses whose business thrived during the Depression.  By the time Salinger was a teen, growing up in Manhattan's Upper East Side, his family was safely upper middle class.

--He was known as Sonny and could do no wrong in his mother's eyes.  His father wanted to toughen him up and sent him to a military academy.  Later, when Salinger dropped out of NYU, his father sent him to Europe to learn the business.  He lived with an Austrian family that he idolized.  When he tried to find them after the war, they were all dead.

--An early mentor was Whit Burnett, who taught Salinger in a short-story writing class at Columbia.  He encouraged Salinger and was the first to pay him for a short story, which Burnett published in his Story magazine.  Burnett would publish several Salinger stories, and reject even more.  Eventually, years after Salinger had gone on to great success, they would have a falling out.  This happened with more than a few mentors and friends of Salinger.

--It took a little time, but Salinger eventually broke into the "slicks," such as the Saturday Evening Post.  His work was still rejected more often than accepted.  He liked the notoriety and money at first, but once he got a regular deal writing for The New Yorker, was happy enough to leave such magazines behind.  Many of Salinger's rejected stories from these days are lost.

--In his early 20s, Salinger was quite the young man about town.  He had a relationship with Oona O'Neill, playwright Eugene's young (16) and beautiful (and some say vapid) daughter.  He wrote her regularly when he joined the army, but she couldn't resist the attention of Charlie Chaplin--then in his 50s--and married him.  This hurt Salinger, who personally attacked the relationship, though it was apparently a happy marriage.  Years later, when Salinger was in his 50s, he'd have an affair with a teenager.

--The other debs Oona hung out with included Gloria Vanderbilt and Carol Marcus, the model for Holly Golightly.  In the early 40s, Marcus was dating playwright William Saroyan.  When Saroyan went into the military, she was afraid to write him letters, fearing they'd show her lack of education.  So she copied passages from Salingers sardonic letters to Oona and sent them to Saroyan.  This almost destroyed their relationship. After she told the truth, they reunited and married.  They later divored, remarried, and divorced again. She later married Walter Matthau.

--Salinger first saw a jeep when he was in the army.  He liked it so much it became the vehicle of choice for the rest of his life.

--Salinger was an honest to goodness war hero.  He stormed the beaches at Normandy, fought in the Battle of the Bulge and helped liberate the death camps.  He led men through great privation, fighting for months at a time in the field.  His unit had the highest death rate of any in Europe.  He also worked in Intelligence (partly because he spoke German and French) and interrogated many Germans.  In later years, one of his most prized possessions was a small casket containing battle stars and citations he'd been awarded.

--During the war Salinger kept writing, even as bombs were dropping around him.   He sold several stories dealing with the military that were highly popular, but after the war almost never wrote or spoke about his experiences.

--While serving in Europe, he sought out and met Hemingway, who was working as a journalist.  Hemingway treated Salinger as a fellow writer and they had a correspondence.  Salinger, however, wasn't a big fan of Hemingway's writing, preferring Fitzgerald's.

--He tended to write about what he knew.  What the young smart set was doing in New York, or how soldiers dealt with their problems.  As he developed his style, he had a great ear for dialogue, and believed the life of a story should be in-between the lines.

--Salinger had a short marriage to a German woman after the war.  He pretended she was French so she could get a passport and they could live in the U.S.

--Years before he published his only novel, The Catcher In The Rye, in 1951, he was writing Holden Caulfield stories. (This raises great doubt that the name "Holden Caulfield" was created to reflect the title of the novel.) In fact, Salinger wasn't sure he could write in the long form, and planned to string together several Holden Caulfield pieces for his book.

--Though he'd later be famous for his seclusion, Salinger spent time after the war partying it up in New York--in a way, continuing what he'd been doing before the war, only more so.

--Salinger had some interest in Hollywood.  One of his stories, "Uncle Wiggily In Connecticut," was sold to the studios and turned into My Foolish Heart (1949), a poorly received film starring Susan Hayward that nevertheless did decent business.  Almost all the screen story was invented. (If you've read the short story, you'd see this was necessary.) The screenplay was written by the Epstein brothers, who also wrote Casablanca.  This experience soured Salinger on Hollywood.  Later, when he needed money, Salinger would try, unsuccessfully, to sell the rights to his short story "The Laughing Man," but otherwise he stayed away from Tinseltown.  There were many offers to turn Catcher In The Rye into a movie (also a play) but he turned them all down.

--His agent in Hollywood was H.N. "Swanie" Swanson, who represented many literary giants. (BTW, I was once represented by the Swanson agency.)

--His early years with The New Yorker involved working closely with the literary editor and heavily rewriting to fit the magazine's style.  Though Salinger was willing, perhaps eager, to go through the process, in later years, when his fame was assured, he would write longer pieces and deal directly with head editor William Shawn, who'd publish his work almost as is, much to the chagrin of the literary department.

--Once Salinger was established as a major contributor to The New Yorker, they offered him a $30,000-a-year contract, pay or play, for right of first refusal on his stories.

--An editor at Harcourt, Brace encouraged Salinger to write Catcher In The Rye, and promised to publish it.  When the manuscript was delivered, however, the editor couldn't convince the company to put it out (unless Salinger rewrote it).  Eventually, it was published by Little, Brown and became a bestseller.  Meanwhile, The New Yorker didn't like the book and refused to publish excerpts.

--Jamie Hamilton was a publisher in England and a fan of Salinger.  He agreed to publish Catcher In The Rye though he had trouble getting the book out and sales were sluggish in England when it was released.  He continued to be a close friend and great champion of Salinger, until, years later, they had a falling out over a paperback cover.

--Nine Stories was Salinger's spartan title for a collection of his older work.  In England, it was entitled For Esme--With Love And Squalor And Other Stories. ("Esme" was the story that got Hamilton interested in Salinger.)

--Hamilton showed Salinger around London.  They went out to dinner with Laurence Olivier.  Salinger was somewhat embarrassed because in Catcher In The Rye, Holden mocks Olivier.  Later on that trip, Salinger was much taken by Scotland and considered moving there.

--In later years, when Salinger had the power, he would dictate exactly how his books would look, which generally was just the title and the author's name on a simple background, with no illustration and no picture of the author.  He'd even specify the fonts to be used. He also got to okay the advertising.

--In the post-war years Salinger got involved with Eastern philosophy and spiritualism. (Not a generalized spiritualism, either--he followed specific gurus and texts.) His later stories, especially about the Glass family, are his attempts to translate this spirituality for his audience.

--Soon after Catcher In The Rye was a success, he moved from New York to the little-populated Cornish, New Hampshire.  He was a popular citizen there, taking part in community activities.  Most of the locals respected his privacy and wouldn't talk to reporters.  At first he hung out with local teens (his stories almost always feature minors) and was considered a friend and mentor, but then one interviewed him for the high school paper and when the interview was published in a regular newspaper Salinger felt betrayed.

--His best friend in Cornish was Judge Learned Hand, one of the greatest American jurists of the 20th century.

--He made many improvements to his house (which wasn't much to begin with), mostly for his second wife (who'd walked out on him, taking their daughter) and his kids.  When he heard the land next door would be turned into a trailer park, he mortgaged his home to buy the property.  He built a home on the new lot and lived there after he divorced.

--In 1951, Catcher In The Rye generally received positive reviews.  In 1961, Franny And Zooey generally received negative reviews.  Many of these later reviews came from big names, Salinger by then being an established writer.

--His fame only grew in the 50s and 60s, as Catcher In The Rye kept selling, and his three other collections of stories (two of which deal solely with the Glass family) were bestsellers.  His religious beliefs were that it was wrong to hope to gain great fruits from one's labor, but he still complained about how much his publishers were making.  He also believed the writer should not get in the way of the reader's relation with the material (even though it often seemed his characters were stand-ins for Salinger himself).  A mixture of factors led him to avoid the spotlight, which became an obsession.  It's hard to say if his decision not to do publicity led to the press wanting to know more about him, or if it would have happened in any case since, for better or worse, Catcher In The Rye seemed to make him the voice of a generation.

--Much to the displeasure of his wife, he turned down a dinner at the Kennedy White House, even though Jackie called him in Cornish personally.

--Authorities contacted friends and acquaintances, including Learned Hand, wondering if Salinger might go on tours and lead seminars on behalf of the U.S government. In his days as an up-and-coming author he had once appeared at Sarah Lawrence and felt it was a disaster, so it's hard to believe he'd have gone on tour for the government (and hard to understand why the government thought they could convince him). Salinger was also offered academic posts, the first offer coming from the University of Michigan, but he believed a writer's job was to write.

--His last published work was Hapworth 16, 1924, which is mostly a letter from camp by the very precocious seven-year-old Seymour Glass.  It's a lengthy, meandering piece that took up most of an issue of The New Yorker.  The reaction was highly negative.  It's not clear why he stopped publishing.  He had planned to continue investigating the Glass family, and even had $75,000 from a publisher for his next book (which he returned).  He was always a hard worker, spending hours every day writing and revising.  Perhaps his religious scruples convinced him to leave the spotlight. Perhaps he was hurt by the negative reaction.  Perhaps he just tired of the whole business, and didn't need the money any more.  He kept writing for the rest of his life.  Some claim he finished many novels.

--Soon after Salinger stopped publishing, equally reclusive author Thomas Pynchon started, leading to the theory they were the same person.

--When some of his letters were bought by the University of Texas, Salinger requested friends and colleagues to destroy his correspondence. Many complied.

--In the 1970s, rogue Salinger fans published his uncollected stories. (This was in the old days, meaning they had to look through a lot of yellowing magazines to find them.) He filed suit and shut them down.  In the 1980s, a biography of Salinger was planning to use excerpts, and later, paraphrases, of his unpublished letters. In a significant copyright case, he sued and the appeals court prevented such use in the biography.  In 2009, there was an unauthorized sequel, of sorts, to Catcher In The Rye, catching up with Holden 60 years later.  Salinger, 90, sued to prevent its publication, and succeeded in blocking it in the U.S, though huge media companies contributed briefs for the defendant.  It's still possible the book may some day come out in America, but Salinger won't be around to see it, having died in 2010.