J. D. Salinger’s noble opposition
May 18, 2012
A few years ago, in a local used/rare bookshop, I came upon the original Signet paperback edition of The Catcher in the Rye, published in March 1953. I couldn’t resist owning it for the memorable illustration of Holden Caulfield entering a squalid New York City neighborhood, carrying a suitcase and wearing his red hunting hat and scarf. The paperback was the version of the classic I read in high school, and I paid $50 at the shop for what once sold for 50 cents — a worthy investment in book nostalgia.
In Kenneth Slawenski’s biography of J.D. Salinger, I learned the legendary recluse hated that Signet paperback design. He fought it but couldn’t get it changed, having acquiesced to it in 1951, the year Little Brown first published The Catcher in the Rye. Salinger blamed Little Brown, which controlled the paperback rights, for allowing such a tawdry cover to be used by Signet, “caring nothing for the presentation of art.”
Before reading this engaging biography, my frame of reference regarding Salinger conformed to popular stories about the legend’s seclusion. Like most everyone else, Salinger to me was simply an eccentric hermit who once wrote a lasting classic novel. I was aware he fiercely fought any invasion of his privacy at his home in New Hampshire, fought (and won) in court Ian Hamilton’s unauthorized biography and suppressed the sale of another author’s sequel to The Catcher in the Rye. And then there was that embarrassing tell-all by Joyce Maynard. But in J. D. Salinger: A Life, I came to understand a person who grew into his extremes from accumulating personal experiences.
That includes his soldiering in the 12th Infantry Regiment during World War II. I was surprised to learn Salinger stormed Normandy beaches on D-Day and took part in the horrific events in the Hürtgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge. He also was among the American troops discovering Nazi concentration camps. Needless to say, the psychological and emotional impact of his war experiences were profound and enduring. Slawenski writes, “Salinger the man and the events of war are as inseparable as the author and the works that he penned.”
But it was the perceived betrayals by editors and publishers in the 1950s and 1960s that significantly contributed to Salinger’s eccentricities. Shortly after he returned to New York, after the war, he learned Lippincott Press would not publish his collection of short stories (Salinger had been told it was a “done deal”). By this time, he’d already experienced magazine editors changing his story titles and The New Yorker accepting a story and then not publishing it. Yet to happen was Harcourt Brace’s decision not to honor the verbal contract to publish The Catcher in the Rye in 1950. (That’s a famous moment in literary history – Little, Brown and Company became the publisher.) Salinger reached a point where he couldn’t trust the publishing community to value and respect his work. He became extremely difficult, refusing to let editors and publishers control the presentation and publicity of his stories and novels. He would demand, resist and fight, guarding his characters and their fictional worlds as he guarded his own privacy. “Striving as he was for perfection, the thought of allowing his work to be mangled by editors in the pursuit of profits incensed him.”
In reviewing J. D. Salinger: A Life last year, critics consistently made the point it’s impossible to write a successful biography about a writer who lived a secluded life, destroyed his letters and demanded friends say nothing about him to journalists. I agree that’s probably true; however, with what is known, and what is able to be pieced together from research, a story can still be told with significant value for readers. I believe here Slawenski triumphs, as he covers not only the WW II years but also Salinger’s privileged young years on Park Avenue with his parents, his trouble in school, his family life, his interactions with the staff at The New Yorker and his struggle between his ego and his spiritual beliefs.
Salinger’s publishing life ended in 1965 with the story “Hapworth 16, 1924,” which appeared in The New Yorker. Slawenski writes about this time and Salinger’s remaining 45 years with the same engaging detail and warmth as the more notable early years. He describes Salinger’s death on January 27, 2010, as “a kind of terrible extinction.” That description fell hard on me with its heavy truth. I especially loved this line: “J. D. Salinger was unique, and many found his noble opposition comforting.” Amen.
Random House published the hard cover edition of J. D. Salinger: A Life in 2011. I read the trade paperback edition, released this year. Kenneth Slawenski is the founder of deadcaulfields.com. In January, in Salon, he wrote this interesting article: “What was J. D. Salinger working on?”
Pick a name, write a book
July 26, 2011
Many know the short stories of O. Henry, most notably “The Gift of the Magi” or, one of my favorites, “The Last Leaf”. If not recognized for his short stories, then likely the O. Henry name brings to mind the Random House annual anthology that catalogs the year’s best short stories culled from literary magazines. Readers, however, may not realize that the man behind the O. Henry name, who lived 1862 to 1910, was not simply a literary genius but also a convicted felon named William Sydney Porter. He spent 39 months in the Ohio Penitentiary and, upon release, assumed O. Henry as his literary nom de plume to hide from his past.
William Sydney Porter’s secret life is one of 16 profiled in Carmela Ciuraru’s fascinating Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms. This is a book you’ll not easily put down because of its highly entertaining, colorful and engrossing biographies. Ciuraru delightfully pulls back the curtain on literary eccentrics whose complicated lives drove them to publish under pseudonyms and — with unusual biographical details that bring the writers to life on the page — divulges the effects that rippled through their careers and personal lives.
These are the stories of aliases assumed for essential reasons, such as the need to avoid gender prejudice or to overcome shyness; to freely publish radical or erotic prose; or to allow one’s otherwise inhibited imagination to run free. What Ciuraru’s authorial imposters, who lived between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries, all have in common, though, is their need to escape the burden of selfhood and, in some cases, take risks to publish.
Consider Lewis Carroll, a pen name for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, “a shy, eminent Oxford mathematician and lecturer” whose Alice fantasies could diminish the value of his more scholarly works; or George Eliot, a pen name for Marian Evans, whose controversial novels depicting the lives of clergymen would’ve been rejected simply because she was a woman. Also, Marian Evans was a social outcast, living openly with a married man.
What makes Nom de Plume a stand-out from mere encyclopedic rendering is Ciuraru’s enjoyment of her material, which resonates in each biography – delightful energy spiced with Ciuraru’s wit, her amusing asides and clever presentations. Each author is introduced by a page on which is scribbled a provocative, stand-alone statement. “She kept snails as pets” introduces mystery writer Patricia Highsmith, best known for her novel The Talented Mr. Ripley; and “His mother didn’t love him but he was in love with himself” introduces the prolific Georges Simenon, best known for his Inspector Maigret crime novels.
Speaking of Simenon, who in 1928 wrote an astounding 44 novels, Ciuraru describes him as a “pulp fiction factory” with “an ego the size of a small nation.” She also writes, in this marvelous gathering of literary lives, “[Simenon] makes Joyce Carol Oates look like Harper Lee.”
