Word has gone out that J. D. Salinger is dead at 91. The story was broken by his agent, Harold Ober Associates, whose job since the early sixties has been to cash checks and discourage biographers; Salinger has published nothing in recent years. One pictures his house filled with boxes of stories he disliked as soon as he'd written them, unless he burned them to warm the house in the New Hampshire winters.
His Cornish neighbors protected him as carefully as his agents did. Is it the business of an author to be a public personality? Catcher in the Rye inspired teenage rebels and at least one assassin, but was Holden Caulfield a self-portrait? Salinger attracted disciples, most of them young. One of them wrote a memoir about her creepy adolescent relationship with the famous novelist. It was a bestseller; but which of them was creepier?
Salinger was once a rebellious teen, but he also also put on a clean shirt and worked as a recreation director on a cruise ship, mustering a phony bonhomie for the prosperous vacationers. He wrote a story about a kid named Holden Caulfield, which was scheduled to run in the New Yorker when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, suddenly making his story too trivial to publish.
He joined the army, and landed in Normandy on D-Day. He met Hemingway in Paris, and spent Christmas 1944 fighting in the Battle of the Bulge. He celebrated his 26th birthday in deep snow, under enemy fire. Then he came home and wrote "the novel" and nothing was the same for him again. He became, in a way, the Roger Maris of American letters. It's all he needed to be. J. D. Salinger appears six times in A Book of Ages.
Showing posts with label J. D. Salinger. Show all posts
Showing posts with label J. D. Salinger. Show all posts
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Friday, December 18, 2009
Merry Christmas from Richard Nixon
On this day in 1972 President Nixon announced the Christmas bombing of North Vietnamese cities. Nixon appears 12 times in A Book of Ages. That's not counting the times he appears in other people's anecdotes. I'm thinking of Paul Newman discovering he was on the president's enemies list. Nixon spent Christmas 1972 in Florida with his old friend Bebe Rebozo. At the last moment he uninvited loyal acolyte Henry Kissinger who'd planned to join him. Who is invited to whose Christmas party has always been an interesting mark of favor and popularity. As we look back on Christmases past we remember each year by who we were with and how we celebrated, Christmases spent in a war zone far from home or in a balmy climate with friends or stuck in an airport somewhere. When he was 19 George Washington spent Christmas alone, aboard ship returning from Barbados. J. D. Salinger spent his 25th Christmas in deep snow in the Ardennes, fighting the Battle of the Bulge.
Monday, December 7, 2009
A Day That Will Live In Infamy
Leafing through A Book of Ages, you begin to realize how many lives were changed by the events of that one day. Courses changed, careers delayed or created, stories rewritten.
Churchill gained an ally and Hitler an enemy. The war in Europe had transformed Churchill from a back number into the indispensable leader, and December 7th made it likelier he would prevail, because FDR suddenly had the ability to act. FDR became a war president. Douglas MacArthur, George Patton and Dwight Eisenhower had a reason to put their boots on. (MacArthur's most recent engagement had been against World War I veterans camped on the Capitol Mall.)
Men at arms were relevant, and thousands of people who never thought of themselves as military men (or women) were put into uniform. Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal and Kurt Vonnegut would write war novels out of the experience. J. D. Salinger's story about a prep school boy named Holden Caulfield was slated to appear in the New Yorker that December. After Pearl Harbor was attacked the editors set it aside for the duration; it suddenly seemed frivolous. Salinger would see action on D-Day and meet Hemingway in Paris, and fight in the Battle of the Bulge. The war would send echoes down through his subsequent work, in characters' disrupted lives and sudden suicides in postwar living rooms.
Hemingway had seen World War I as a teenager; now he was too old to fight, but he outfitted his fishing boat to hunt submarines. In 1944 he single-handedly liberated the Ritz Bar in Paris. Edward R. Murrow became "Edward R. Murrow" reporting on a war that America was half interested in. That too changed. Walter Cronkite cut his journalistic teeth as a war correspondent, and Martha Gellhorn outran most of her male counterparts to get the big story. Her professional rivalry with Hemingway ended their marriage.
Richard Nixon's war was spent playing cards in the Pacific; he won enough from poker to win a seat in Congress. James Michener would write stories about his own experiences in the Pacific, and Rodgers and Hammerstein would make a musical from them. James Stewart enlisted and rose through the ranks to become a bomber pilot over Germany. John Wayne, a near contemporary, made the decision to stay home and play war heroes in movies. Bandleader Glenn Miller lost his life over the English Channel. On FDR's death Harry Truman was transformed from an obscure figure to the most powerful man in the world, burdened with the decision to deploy the atomic bomb. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who marshaled the hundreds of scientists to create that weapon, was dismayed by what he had created. Charles Schulz discovered first-hand how inhuman humanity could be; he would express this cynicism in a comic strip.
The most galvanizing event in American life in the 20th century was triggered by the events of this day 68 years ago on an obscure island in the Pacific. Nobody's life would be the same again.
Churchill gained an ally and Hitler an enemy. The war in Europe had transformed Churchill from a back number into the indispensable leader, and December 7th made it likelier he would prevail, because FDR suddenly had the ability to act. FDR became a war president. Douglas MacArthur, George Patton and Dwight Eisenhower had a reason to put their boots on. (MacArthur's most recent engagement had been against World War I veterans camped on the Capitol Mall.)
Men at arms were relevant, and thousands of people who never thought of themselves as military men (or women) were put into uniform. Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal and Kurt Vonnegut would write war novels out of the experience. J. D. Salinger's story about a prep school boy named Holden Caulfield was slated to appear in the New Yorker that December. After Pearl Harbor was attacked the editors set it aside for the duration; it suddenly seemed frivolous. Salinger would see action on D-Day and meet Hemingway in Paris, and fight in the Battle of the Bulge. The war would send echoes down through his subsequent work, in characters' disrupted lives and sudden suicides in postwar living rooms.
Hemingway had seen World War I as a teenager; now he was too old to fight, but he outfitted his fishing boat to hunt submarines. In 1944 he single-handedly liberated the Ritz Bar in Paris. Edward R. Murrow became "Edward R. Murrow" reporting on a war that America was half interested in. That too changed. Walter Cronkite cut his journalistic teeth as a war correspondent, and Martha Gellhorn outran most of her male counterparts to get the big story. Her professional rivalry with Hemingway ended their marriage.
Richard Nixon's war was spent playing cards in the Pacific; he won enough from poker to win a seat in Congress. James Michener would write stories about his own experiences in the Pacific, and Rodgers and Hammerstein would make a musical from them. James Stewart enlisted and rose through the ranks to become a bomber pilot over Germany. John Wayne, a near contemporary, made the decision to stay home and play war heroes in movies. Bandleader Glenn Miller lost his life over the English Channel. On FDR's death Harry Truman was transformed from an obscure figure to the most powerful man in the world, burdened with the decision to deploy the atomic bomb. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who marshaled the hundreds of scientists to create that weapon, was dismayed by what he had created. Charles Schulz discovered first-hand how inhuman humanity could be; he would express this cynicism in a comic strip.
The most galvanizing event in American life in the 20th century was triggered by the events of this day 68 years ago on an obscure island in the Pacific. Nobody's life would be the same again.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Paul Meets George
In September 1954, 12 year-old Paul McCartney met 11 year-old George Harrison on a Liverpool bus. A Book of Ages is full of crossed paths and lucky meetings. John Lennon meeting Yoko Ono at a gallery opening when he was 26; Elvis meeting the Beatles when he was 30 (he didn't know their names and couldn't tell them apart). Elvis meeting President Nixon. Che Guevara meeting Castro, Gertrude Stein meeting Alice B. Toklas, Lillian Hellman meeting Dashiell Hammett, J. D. Salinger meeting Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain meeting Sigmund Freud, Freud meeting Jung, Freud meeting Salvador Dali, Lincoln meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, T. S. Eliot meeting Groucho Marx, Charles Lindbergh meeting Hitler. Sylvia Plath meeting Ted Hughes at a party in Cambridge; she bit his cheek till it bled. Rodgers meeting Hammerstein, Astaire meeting Rogers, Rolls meeting Royce. When partners meet there is an electric spark. It can happen anywhere, at any age.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
The Good War
Seventy years ago today Germany invaded Poland, assuming Britain and France wouldn't care about it any more than they had cared about Czechoslovakia. They did care this time. Neville Chamberlain was soon on his way out and Churchill, that irresponsible war-monger and back-number, was in Number 10 within the year. War would make him the man of the century.
But it's hard to call any war that killed 70 million people a good war. The heroes were heroic, mostly, and the villains were recognizable as monsters. The great novelists and artists of the 20th century set foot in this war. J.D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut fought in the Battle of the Bulge. Ernest Hemingway liberated the Ritz Bar in Paris. James Michener wrote some tales about the South Pacific and Rodgers and Hammerstein would make a musical about it. Norman Mailer was a rifleman in that same theater of the war. Graham Greene missed being killed by a German bomb because he was sleeping with his mistress at the time. Evelyn Waugh was an officer so hated by his men that he had to be reassigned for his own protection.
Joseph Heller flew combat missions. So did James Stewart. Afterwards he could no longer play wide eyed innocents. War added a layer of grit and cynicism and suppressed anger to his civilian roles. It was John Wayne, roughly the same age as Stewart, who stayed home to play war heroes on film. Heller's novel distilled war's insanity into a phrase: Catch 22. Vonnegut lived the firebombing of Dresden and wrote a novel around it. Salinger took a bullet out of the war and once everybody was home and safe he put it in the brain of Seymour Glass.
These personalities and their own particular versions of WWII are each included in A Book of Ages, as are Eisenhower and MacArthur and Patton and Roosevelt and Truman and Hirohito and Hitler, the people who made it happen. And Anne Frank, the quiet 14 year-old girl who died at Bergen Belsen.
But it's hard to call any war that killed 70 million people a good war. The heroes were heroic, mostly, and the villains were recognizable as monsters. The great novelists and artists of the 20th century set foot in this war. J.D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut fought in the Battle of the Bulge. Ernest Hemingway liberated the Ritz Bar in Paris. James Michener wrote some tales about the South Pacific and Rodgers and Hammerstein would make a musical about it. Norman Mailer was a rifleman in that same theater of the war. Graham Greene missed being killed by a German bomb because he was sleeping with his mistress at the time. Evelyn Waugh was an officer so hated by his men that he had to be reassigned for his own protection.
Joseph Heller flew combat missions. So did James Stewart. Afterwards he could no longer play wide eyed innocents. War added a layer of grit and cynicism and suppressed anger to his civilian roles. It was John Wayne, roughly the same age as Stewart, who stayed home to play war heroes on film. Heller's novel distilled war's insanity into a phrase: Catch 22. Vonnegut lived the firebombing of Dresden and wrote a novel around it. Salinger took a bullet out of the war and once everybody was home and safe he put it in the brain of Seymour Glass.
These personalities and their own particular versions of WWII are each included in A Book of Ages, as are Eisenhower and MacArthur and Patton and Roosevelt and Truman and Hirohito and Hitler, the people who made it happen. And Anne Frank, the quiet 14 year-old girl who died at Bergen Belsen.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Catcher in the Rye
On July 16, 1951, J. D. Salinger published A Catcher In The Rye. He was 32. He'd created the character of Holden Caulfield ten years earlier, and The New Yorker was about to publish the first Holden story when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Salinger would take part in the Normandy landings, fight in the Battle of the Bulge and meet Ernest Hemingway in Paris before he saw New York again. Salinger appears six times in A Book of Ages. I believe J. D. Salinger is the only American novelist to ever lose a girlfriend to Charlie Chaplin or to serve as a recreation director aboard a cruise ship.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Today is the birthday of the most influential novelist America has ever produced. Never mind J. D. Salinger and John Updike. Hemingway persuaded Americans to write shorter sentences, but Twitter would have done that eventually. Melville's novel didn't result in a ban on whaling. No, the most influential novelist in American history was a mother of seven from Cincinnati.
Harriet Beecher Stowe was born on June 14th, 1811, in Litchfield, Connecticut, the daughter of an abolitionist preacher. In 1852 she published Uncle Tom's Cabin. She was 40 years-old. The book went on to sell over a million copies. It was the first American novel to do so. It sold 10,000 copies in the first week, an astonishing thing considering there were no superstores then, no Amazon. In place of the author tour of radio stations and television talk shows, though, there were abolitionist lectures and meetings all across the North, where Uncle Tom's Cabin was talked about and quoted. It supplied the mythic underpinnings to the moral outrage that led to the American Civil War. A decade later, in 1862, there was the famous meeting between Harriet Beecher Stowe and Abraham Lincoln, when Lincoln said "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War!" It was true.
Harriet Beecher Stowe appears on page 154 in A Book of Ages.
Harriet Beecher Stowe was born on June 14th, 1811, in Litchfield, Connecticut, the daughter of an abolitionist preacher. In 1852 she published Uncle Tom's Cabin. She was 40 years-old. The book went on to sell over a million copies. It was the first American novel to do so. It sold 10,000 copies in the first week, an astonishing thing considering there were no superstores then, no Amazon. In place of the author tour of radio stations and television talk shows, though, there were abolitionist lectures and meetings all across the North, where Uncle Tom's Cabin was talked about and quoted. It supplied the mythic underpinnings to the moral outrage that led to the American Civil War. A decade later, in 1862, there was the famous meeting between Harriet Beecher Stowe and Abraham Lincoln, when Lincoln said "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War!" It was true.
Harriet Beecher Stowe appears on page 154 in A Book of Ages.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
T. S. Eliot and Groucho have dinner
On June 3, 1964, T. S. Eliot sent a car to London’s Savoy Hotel to bring Mr. and Mrs. Groucho Marx to dinner. Eliot told Groucho that their friendship had greatly enhanced his credit with the grocer across the street. Eliot was 75, Groucho 73. Both were masters of the wisecrack, coiners of famous epigrams, now measuring out their lives in coffee spoons.
A Book of Ages is full of people meeting who you'd never thought met each other, or perhaps wondered if they had. Freud giving advice to Mahler, having his portrait drawn by Salvador Dali, Salinger meeting Hemingway in Paris, Marilyn Monroe having tea with Isak Dinesen at Carson McCullers's apartment, William F. Buckley Jr. meeting John Kenneth Galbraith for the first time in an elevator on the way to Truman Capote's Black & White Ball. Life is full of crossed paths. You never know who you might meet tomorrow.
A Book of Ages is full of people meeting who you'd never thought met each other, or perhaps wondered if they had. Freud giving advice to Mahler, having his portrait drawn by Salvador Dali, Salinger meeting Hemingway in Paris, Marilyn Monroe having tea with Isak Dinesen at Carson McCullers's apartment, William F. Buckley Jr. meeting John Kenneth Galbraith for the first time in an elevator on the way to Truman Capote's Black & White Ball. Life is full of crossed paths. You never know who you might meet tomorrow.
Monday, May 25, 2009
Memorial Day
I associate Memorial Day with the small town parade of my childhood. Old men in carefully preserved uniforms. Small flags at the cemetery. It wasn't until I'd grown older that I realized what was on the minds of those old men in uniform. They'd grown old while comrades of theirs had not. What would those other lives have been like if events had turned out differently? Roles reversed. It's the kind of speculation the other bystanders are incapable of. They say crisis pulls all of history into a single moment. I wrote my book as a collection of moments, funny, sad, tragic, heroic and commonplace. Many of them take place in wartime, with lives suddenly put in the balance.
It's hard to visualize J. D. Salinger wading ashore on D-Day or caught up in the Battle of the Bulge, but he was there; the most searing episodes of his fiction were shaped there. Unlike Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, James Michener or Kurt Vonnegut, Salinger didn't write war stories; the war unfolds for his characters when they have arrived back home. Heller invented a term for the everyday insanity of military protocol: He called it Catch 22. He flew 60 missions as a bomberdier. War takes on a strange abstraction from thousands of feet in the air.
Like Salinger, Vonnegut was on the ground at the Battle of the Bulge. He was captured and shipped to Dresden where he experienced the firebombing of that city, an experience that reappears in his novel Slaughterhouse Five. Norman Mailer and James Michener experienced the war in the Pacific. The soldiers who came home alive read those novels in the backyards of their suburban homes.
One of the greatest war novels every written describes a Civil War that ended six years before the author was born. Stephen Crane wrote the Red Badge of Courage in 1895 when he was 24. 24 year-old J. R. R. Tolkien spent four months of 1916 in the trenches at the Battle of the Somme. Hospitalized, recovering from wounds, he passed the time writing stories about goblins and elves. Ernest Hemingway was an 18 year-old ambulance driver on the Italian Front in 1918, when he received 200 bits of shrapnel rescuing a soldier under fire. A Farewell to Arms would be written a decade later. The intervening period was written in the voice of Nick Adams who says very little about his war experiences. How do you describe such scenes without diminishing them?
War is heroism and foolishness, vast organization characterized by mass inefficiency, enormous effort in an important cause and an enormous waste of time and money, it is the seizing and avoidance of responsibility. When we visualize World War II we often imagine a soldier who looks like John Wayne because he spent so much time in uniform in movies; but he never served. James Stewart was a contemporary of Wayne's when he was flying bomber missions over Europe, age 35, but afterward avoided roles playing soldiers. He'd done that, lived it.
Harry Truman was 34 years-old when he commanded Battery D in the 129th Field Artillery. We have a picture of a man in steel-rimmed glasses and a panama hat; it's hard to imagine him in uniform. At age 60 he had the lives of millions of American soldiers and sailors on his mind when he decided to drop the A-bombs on Japan. There are no easy decisions in wartime. On the evening of June 5, 1944 Dwight Eisenhower went to bed knowing the failure or success of the next day's invasion of France, and the future of the free world, would probably be decided by the weather over the English Channel. Even so, he had a letter in his pocket taking full responsibility for whatever might unfold.
It's hard to visualize J. D. Salinger wading ashore on D-Day or caught up in the Battle of the Bulge, but he was there; the most searing episodes of his fiction were shaped there. Unlike Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, James Michener or Kurt Vonnegut, Salinger didn't write war stories; the war unfolds for his characters when they have arrived back home. Heller invented a term for the everyday insanity of military protocol: He called it Catch 22. He flew 60 missions as a bomberdier. War takes on a strange abstraction from thousands of feet in the air.
Like Salinger, Vonnegut was on the ground at the Battle of the Bulge. He was captured and shipped to Dresden where he experienced the firebombing of that city, an experience that reappears in his novel Slaughterhouse Five. Norman Mailer and James Michener experienced the war in the Pacific. The soldiers who came home alive read those novels in the backyards of their suburban homes.
One of the greatest war novels every written describes a Civil War that ended six years before the author was born. Stephen Crane wrote the Red Badge of Courage in 1895 when he was 24. 24 year-old J. R. R. Tolkien spent four months of 1916 in the trenches at the Battle of the Somme. Hospitalized, recovering from wounds, he passed the time writing stories about goblins and elves. Ernest Hemingway was an 18 year-old ambulance driver on the Italian Front in 1918, when he received 200 bits of shrapnel rescuing a soldier under fire. A Farewell to Arms would be written a decade later. The intervening period was written in the voice of Nick Adams who says very little about his war experiences. How do you describe such scenes without diminishing them?
War is heroism and foolishness, vast organization characterized by mass inefficiency, enormous effort in an important cause and an enormous waste of time and money, it is the seizing and avoidance of responsibility. When we visualize World War II we often imagine a soldier who looks like John Wayne because he spent so much time in uniform in movies; but he never served. James Stewart was a contemporary of Wayne's when he was flying bomber missions over Europe, age 35, but afterward avoided roles playing soldiers. He'd done that, lived it.
Harry Truman was 34 years-old when he commanded Battery D in the 129th Field Artillery. We have a picture of a man in steel-rimmed glasses and a panama hat; it's hard to imagine him in uniform. At age 60 he had the lives of millions of American soldiers and sailors on his mind when he decided to drop the A-bombs on Japan. There are no easy decisions in wartime. On the evening of June 5, 1944 Dwight Eisenhower went to bed knowing the failure or success of the next day's invasion of France, and the future of the free world, would probably be decided by the weather over the English Channel. Even so, he had a letter in his pocket taking full responsibility for whatever might unfold.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Chaplin, O'Neill, Salinger
Today is the birthday of Charles Chaplin. Born to theatrical parents in south London in 1889, Chaplin entered the family business on the English music hall circuit, but soon went to America where he was discovered by the motion picture industry. It was on film that he created his alter-ego, a splay footed, moustached, baggy-pantsed figure called "The Little Tramp."
Chaplin left England an obscure comedian in 1910. When he returned in 1921 he was the most famous man in the world. Arriving at Waterloo Station he was lifted onto the shoulders of a large crowd and cheered by thousands along the three-mile cab ride to the Ritz Hotel. He was 32.
Chaplin appears on pages 79 and 112 in A Book of Ages, but he also appears in other people's stories, as in 1941 when he begins dating Oona O'Neill, the daughter of the famous playwright and the girlfriend of J. D. Salinger. This is part of the fun of the book, the crossed paths, the intersecting lives of famous people.
Chaplin left England an obscure comedian in 1910. When he returned in 1921 he was the most famous man in the world. Arriving at Waterloo Station he was lifted onto the shoulders of a large crowd and cheered by thousands along the three-mile cab ride to the Ritz Hotel. He was 32.
Chaplin appears on pages 79 and 112 in A Book of Ages, but he also appears in other people's stories, as in 1941 when he begins dating Oona O'Neill, the daughter of the famous playwright and the girlfriend of J. D. Salinger. This is part of the fun of the book, the crossed paths, the intersecting lives of famous people.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
