J.D. Salinger has died.

Link.

ADDED: "He was 91"... so a long detailed obituary was ready to go. You can read it at that link. Who here was not entranced by "Catcher in the Rye" at some point in their lives?

“Catcher” was published in 1951, and its very first sentence, distantly echoing Mark Twain, struck a brash new note in American literature: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”...

With its cynical, slangy vernacular voice (Holden’s two favorite expressions are “phony” and “goddam”), its sympathetic understanding of adolescence and its fierce if alienated sense of morality and distrust of the adult world, the novel struck a nerve in cold war America and quickly attained cult status, especially among the young. Reading “Catcher” used to be an essential rite of passage, almost as important as getting your learner’s permit.

And yes, yes, there are all those murderers who have that book in their back pocket. So don't get too entranced by it. Move on, read other things. But don't be a goddam phony.

MORE: A big question is, now that he's dead: Are there unpublished manuscripts that we'll get to see? Will we learn more about his retreat from the world?

In 1953 Mr. Salinger, who had been living on East 57th Street in Manhattan, fled the literary world altogether and moved to a 90-acre compound on a wooded hillside in Cornish, N.H. He seemed to be fulfilling Holden’s desire to build himself “a little cabin somewhere with the dough I made and live there for the rest of my life,” away from “any goddam stupid conversation with anybody.”

Or do we you really want to hear about it anymore, now that all these years have passed,  years of a hermit life almost as long as my whole life? (And I'm pretty old.)

Well, there will be no more goddam stupid conversation with anybody anymore for him, but I've got to say I hope he held up some kind of one-sided end of a conversation with us for the past quarter century and we'll get some more readings.

But was he writing? The question obsessed Salingerologists, and in the absence of any real evidence, theories multiplied. He hadn’t written a word for years. Or like the character in Stephen King’s novel “The Shining,” he wrote the same sentence over and over again. Or like Gogol at the end of his life, he wrote prolifically but then burned it all up. Ms. Maynard said she believed there were at least two novels locked away in a safe, although she had never seen them. Quote TK from Salinger’s agent about surviving manuscripts, if any, and plans for them.

Ha ha. That last sentence is now edited out of the NYT obit at the link. Come on, TK!

Mr. Salinger was controlling and sexually manipulative, [Joyce] Maynard wrote, and a health nut obsessed with homeopathic medicine and with his diet (frozen peas for breakfast, undercooked lamb burger for diner). [Margaret] Salinger said that her father was pathologically self-centered and abusive toward her mother, and to the homeopathy and food fads she added a long list of other exotic enthusiasms: Zen Buddhism, Vedanta Hinduism, Christian Science, Scientology and acupuncture. Mr. Salinger drank his own urine, she wrote, and sat for hours in an orgone box.

Ugh! Maybe I don't want to read anything more.

J.D. Salinger "instructed his estate to publish at least five additional books..."

"... some of them entirely new, some extending past work — in a sequence that he intended to begin as early as 2015."

One collection, to be called “The Family Glass,” would add five new stories to an assembly of previously published stories about the fictional Glass family....

Another would include a retooled version of a publicly known but unpublished tale, “The Last and Best of the Peter Pans,” which is to be collected with new stories and existing work about the fictional Caulfields, including “Catcher in the Rye.” The new works are said to include a story-filled “manual” of the Vedanta religious philosophy, with which Mr. Salinger was deeply involved; a novel set during World War II and based on his first marriage; and a novella modeled on his own war experiences....

The revelation comes in the new book "Salinger," and here's a clue (from the book) about why Salinger left off publishing (but not writing) all those years:

[A]fter [WWII], Mr. Salinger met a 14-year-old girl, Jean Miller, at a beach resort in Florida. For years, they exchanged letters, spent time together in New York and eventually had a brief physical relationship. (She said, in an interview in the film and book, that Mr. Salinger dumped her the day after their first sexual encounter.)

For years... How many years? I'm trying to do the math.

When the President decried and bemoaned "The Soft American."

"Throughout our history we have been challenged to armed conflict by nations which sought to destroy our independence or threatened our freedom."

The young men of America have risen to those occasions, giving themselves freely to the rigors and hardships of warfare. But the stamina and strength which the defense of liberty requires are not the product of a few weeks' basic training or a month's conditioning. These only come from bodies which have been conditioned by a lifetime of participation in sports and interest in physical activity. Our struggles against aggressors throughout our history have been won on the playgrounds and corner lots and fields of America.

Thus, in a very real and immediate sense, our growing softness, our increasing lack of physical fitness, is a menace to our security.

That was 1960. I don't think JFK wrote his own material, but I note his/"his" absurd dependence on pairing one word with another that means almost the same thing:  rigors and hardship...  stamina and strength... real and immediate. Many, many more in the full article: vigor and determination...  effort and determination... vigor and muscle tone... soft and inactive... physical development and prowess... health and vigor... vigor and vitality...

Erstwhile idiot becomes genius.

I just ran across this cartoon from the March 19, 1949 issue of The New Yorker:



That caption is: "Wouldn't you think they'd have a place for withdrawals, too?"

At the time, she was laughed at as a fool, but from our point of view, she's envisioning the ATM machine. Genius!

Why am I reading the March 19, 1949 issue of The New Yorker?, you ask.

I wanted to see the old J.D. Salinger story "The Laughing Man," because I was talking about it in the comments to yesterday's post, "With a gun against my belly, I always smile." That post was about the criticism of the Covington Catholic schoolboy's smile, which was not a natural smile, but a forced smile, and I had got to thinking about our sensitivity to smiles that don't arise out of relaxed happiness.

That moved the commenter Nonapod to say, "One of the more tragic smiles is from the silent film 'The Man Who Laughs'" and to link to this:



I said:

Thanks, Nonapod. I had never seen that before. Fantastically melodramatic and completely effective.

It made me think of the J.D. Salinger story "The Laughing Man," and I see from Wikipedia:

"The Laughing Man" is a short story by J. D. Salinger, published originally in The New Yorker on March 19, 1949; and also in Salinger’s short story collection Nine Stories. It largely takes the structure of a story within a story and is thematically occupied with the relationship between narrative and narrator, and the end of youth. The story is inspired by the Victor Hugo novel of the same name: The Man Who Laughs (L'homme qui rit)."

From Salinger's story (click to enlarge and clarify):

 

In Hugo's story...

In late 17th-century England, a homeless boy named Gwynplaine rescues an infant girl during a snowstorm, her mother having frozen to death whilst feeding her. They meet an itinerant carnival vendor who calls himself Ursus, and his pet wolf, Homo. Gwynplaine's mouth has been mutilated into a perpetual grin; Ursus is initially horrified, then moved to pity, and he takes them in. Fifteen years later, Gwynplaine has grown into a strong young man, attractive except for his distorted visage. The girl, now named Dea, is blind, and has grown into a beautiful and innocent young woman. By touching his face, Dea concludes that Gwynplaine is perpetually happy. They fall in love. Ursus and his surrogate children earn a meagre living in the fairs of southern England. Gwynplaine keeps the lower half of his face concealed. In each town, Gwynplaine gives a stage performance in which the crowds are provoked to laughter when Gwynplaine reveals his grotesque face....

Since I'm talking about the Catholic schoolboy's face again and looking into literature, I wanted to link to my son John's blog post, "Why are adults freaking out about a smiling kid?" which begins:

In the novel 1984, George Orwell wrote about a dystopian future where “to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for instance) was itself a punishable offense.” It was called a "facecrime."

From "1984":

It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called. The girl had turned her back on him again.

"[Adrienne] Salinger would approach an interesting-looking kid in a mall or on the street and ask: might she come to their home and take their picture?"

"Salinger stipulated that her subjects were not to tidy up their rooms before she arrived—as if. With sessions lasting several hours, her intention was to grant as much agency as possible to the teens involved, and to counter the inevitable power imbalance between herself and her subjects.... Another rule was that parents had to stay out of the way. Even so, their presence leaks into many of the images and interviews. Greg H., pictured at thirteen in Kirkland, Washington, in 1984, has a mural of clouds, a mobile of planet-like orbs, and a telescope, all bespeaking parental investment in cultivating a wholesome interest. Anne I., sixteen, shot in 1990, in upstate New York, sits on her bed, with a white fluffy Teddy bear by her side and wall art of Jim Morrison hanging behind her, the two aptly illustrating the tenuous cusp between childhood and adolescence.... What appealed to Salinger about portraying people of that age, she says now, was the way in which they were so uncompromising. 'When you are a teen-ager, I think, you are really clear about what your viewpoints are,' she says. 'I wanted that fierceness of having your point of view without also having to pay rent, or think about having a job, or anything....'"

From "Teen-Agers in Their Bedrooms, Before the Age of Selfies/Adrienne Salinger’s cult photography book from the nineties makes a comeback" (The New Yorker).

That's about a book of photographs published in 1995, which is being reissued — here's a commissioned-earned link.

How would you like a photographer approaching your "interesting-looking kid" and asking to photograph them in their bedroom for hours and enforcing a rule that you stay out of there? It's so creepy by present-day standards that I'm surprised to see the artist vaunted in the New Yorker without questioning the intrusion on the child.

"In a handwritten letter dated Thursday, April 14th, (1955), [J.D.] Salinger announces, in the most diffident way possible, as if to come right out and say it would be to jinx it..."

"... that he got married. 'The fact is, there was a sort of elopement around here recently, and I was one of the principals.' The bride was Claire Douglas, Salinger’s second wife and the mother of his children. He adds, 'I can give out the worst kind of information about myself, not only without flinching, but, usually, grinning like a fool. But I can’t touch happy news. It leaves me non-plussed. It drives me underground.'"

From "The Editor Who Edited Salinger/The personal archive of Gus Lobrano, a longtime editor at The New Yorker, provides a glimpse of a vanished literary past" by Mary Norris (The New Yorker).

"Any unbigoted or bigoted books on God or merely religion, as written by persons whose last names begin with any letter after H..."

"... to stay on the safe side, please include H itself, though I think I have mostly exhausted it. ... The complete works again of Count Leo Tolstoy. ... Charles Dickens, either in blessed entirety or in any touching shape or form. My God, I salute you, Charles Dickens!"

The books Seymour asked to have sent to him, in "the longest, most pretentious (and least plausible) letter from camp ever written," the last thing J.D. Salinger published. Salinger turns 90 on New Year's Day, which provides an occasion for pondering the oft-pondered question: What's he been doing all these years?

***

Hey, I wonder if Richard Hasn't-Slept-With-Althouse Cohen is impressed by Seymour's book list?

***

Have you noticed that Instapundit always has a post that goes up in the middle of the night? Think he's really up and writing then? I'm really up now, writing. Maybe old J.D. is up and writing, adding one more sheet to the stack of pages he started piling up more than 40 years ago.

UPDATE: Instapundit awakens and answers my question:

Those are scheduled posts, for the benefit of people in the other hemisphere, or people who are up late and bored.

Tigerhawk razzes:

Is there any person with more regard for his fellow man than Glenn Reynolds? He is actually concerned with the welfare of bored people all around the world! And I agree. What with all the people worried about starvation, disease, war, and poverty, somebody has to speak out for the bored. Glenn has put his stake in the ground and said "the boredom stops here!," and I am down with that.

Much as I'm gratified by the instaänswer and tigerhawkswoopery, I'm a little sad that this discussion of boredom has occurred on the J.D. Salinger post and not yesterday's Camus post where boredom — ennui — would have fit so nicely. In Reynoldsian theory, the French existentialists must rank high, as they attend to the great problem of boredom. In Althousian theory, the blogger is not here to help you with your boredom, but to delight at serendipitous juxtapositions. So here is something Jean-Paul Sartre's blogged last October:

My sleep continues to be troubled by odd dreams. Last night I dreamt that I was a beetle, clinging to the slick surface of a water-soaked log as it careened down a rain-swollen stream toward a waterfall. A figure appeared on the horizon, and as the log drew closer I could see that it was Camus. He held out a hand and I desperately reached for it with my tiny feeler. Just as the log drew abreast of Camus he suddenly wihdrew his hand, swooped it through his hair and sneered "Too slow," adding superfluously: "Psych."

It is my belief that the log symbolizes the precariousness of Existence, while the tiny feeler represents Man's essential powerlessness. And Camus represents Camus, that fatuous ninny.

Read the whole blog, Being and Nothingness, where the tags are:

bleakness
despair
ennui
existence
meaninglessness
the bourgeoisie

"Joyce Maynard Adopted Two Girls from Ethiopia Then Gave Them Up."

You remember Joyce Maynard, don't you?

[J.D.] Salinger contacted her after Maynard, at age 18, appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine wearing jeans and red sneakers. Long straight hair and bangs, large eyes and lanky arms added to her waif-like appearance.

Maynard called her cover story "An 18-Year-Old Looks Back On Life." Some 25 years later, she published her memoir, At Home in the World, which explores the Salinger relationship in riveting detail.

Here's that old cover story, from 1972. Excerpt:

I had never taken Women's Liberation very seriously. Partly it was the looks of the movement that bothered me. I believed in all the right things, but just as my social conscience evaporated at the prospect of roughing it in some tiny village with the Peace Corps, so my feminist notions disappeared at the thought of giving up eye liner (just when I'd discovered it). Media-vulnerable, I wanted to be on the side of the beautiful, graceful people, and Women's Libbers seemed--except for Gloria Steinem, who was just emerging--plain and graceless. Women's Lib was still new and foreign, suggesting--to kids at an age of still-undefined sexuality--things like lesbianism and bisexuality. (We hadn't mastered one--how could we cope with the possibility of two?)

Besides, male chauvinism had no reality for me. In my family--two girls and two girl- loving parents--females occupied a privileged position. My mother and sister and I had no trouble getting equal status in our household. At school, too, girls seemed never to be discriminated against. (I wonder if I'd see things differently, going back there now.) Our class was run mostly by girls. The boys played soccer and sometimes held office on the student council--amiable figureheads--but it was the girls whose names filled the honor roll and the girls who ran class meetings. While I would never be Homecoming Sweetheart--I knew that--I had power in the school.

And here's what the cover looked like — what J.D. Salinger saw:

"Who knows how many of [his] stories were thought up and written while Salinger sat on this throne!"

The uncleaned toilet of J.D. Salinger, on sale at eBay for $1 million.

That's almost as good as this:

"Who was the better war poet, Rupert Brooke (i.e., WWI romantic jingoism) or Emily Dickinson? Answer: Emily Dickinson."

In the comments to this morning's post about J.D. Salinger, Richard Lawrence Cohen (my ex-husband) paraphrases something Salinger once said.

That got me looking for Emily Dickinson's war poems, but I got distracted thinking about something else I read this morning, the obituary for the actress Julie Harris. She played the part of Emily Dickenson in a 1977 play called "The Belle of Amherst." A quick search on YouTube turned up a fine print of the entire 90-minute play. It probably shouldn't be there, and I won't embed it, but here it is.

"All of us on ['The Quiz Kids'] experienced to some degree ‘child star letdown,’ but we remembered the actual experience fondly. It was a high for us."

"But Joel said it destroyed his childhood. When he was 6, I was 11. The program put stress on the smallest kids. They got the most attention and were the least equipped to deal with it.... Once the show went on television they kept Joel, because he was so well known, but the general age got lower and lower. I’m guessing that experience was pretty sour for him. No real competition and no real comradeship."

Said Richard L. Williams, who was on the radio version of the show in the 1940s, quoted in "Joel Kupperman, Scarred by Success as a ‘Quiz Kid,’ Dies at 83/As a philosophy professor in adulthood, he would not speak of the World War II-era radio show (later on TV) that had made him famous and left him embittered" (NYT).

In her 1982 memoir “Whatever Happened to the Quiz Kids? Perils and Profits of Growing Up Gifted,” Ruth Duskin Feldman, the show’s literature buff (she died in 2015), noted the rampant anti-Semitism of the time. “When we moved through crowds,” she wrote, “there were loud remarks of ‘Oh, they’re all Jews!’”

The show moved to television after the war, and the cameras did not favor a maturing Joel, who stayed on until he was 16, the dutiful son to a controlling stage mother, [Joel's son] Michael Kupperman said.

Though the producers brought in younger and cuter children to field questions, Joel’s hand was always up, sometimes blocking the faces of the smaller children, which didn’t make for riveting TV, as Michael put it — a spectacle made only worse by Joel’s robotic demeanor, which made him seem priggish....

Later, Joel Feldman heard over and over from people who said they grew up hating him. He reinvented himself as a philosophy professor and taught ethics for 50 years. His wife said, "He wanted to retreat into the life of the mind, and in many ways he succeeded. He really lived in his head."

I'm familiar with work of the son, Michael Kupperman. He's a comics artist, and he figured out a way to do a graphic memoir about his father, "All the Answers":



I just added that to my Kindle.

ADDED: Was Joel Kupperman Seymour Glass?

['The Quiz Kids'] would inspire J.D. Salinger’s fictional Jewish Glass family, whose children were all featured on a fictional radio quiz show and grew into deeply neurotic adults. Like Kupperman, Seymour Glass fast tracks to a Ph.D. In his 2010 book “Theories of Human Nature,” Kupperman appeared to wink at Salinger as a kindred spirit, describing him as “a well known example of someone who retreated from his celebrity, as did the actress Greta Garbo.”

AND: Here's what that ancient TV show was like:

Anti-Trump sketches from the artist Barry Blitt that The New Yorker rejected.

Video here.

Click my "Barry Blitt" tag if you can't remember Blitt's finished work that The New Yorker has published. I love seeing the work at the sketch phase — raw and closer to a mere idea — and it's interesting to know what falls below the anti-Trumpism that permeates The New Yorker and seems to torment Blitt.

I see that The New Yorker is now running a series called "Barry Blitt's Sketchbook"... I mean: "Blitt's Kvetchbook." Here, under the headline "The Latest on J. D. Salinger Unearthed," is a drawing captioned "J.D. Salinger, moments before he became disgusted with something." You either already have a New Yorker subscription or you just became disgusted with something.

ADDED: After publishing this post, I clicked my own "Barry Blitt" tag, and I was amazed to see that I had not written a post with that tag since May 2017! To me, that says a lot about what anti-Trumpism has done to humorists who are not Donald Trump. That's the only Blitt cover about Trump that I've seen fit to blog during the Trump administration.

It shows James Comey being dragged off an airplane. And I commented back then about "the loss of a sense of humor in Trump's America":

I think Trump thinks he's funny, and I think he's funny. But when the funnyman holds vast power, he's like the classic bully whose taunt is "What's the matter, can't you take a joke?"

And yet, if political discourse loses its humor dimension, and it becomes nothing but outrage and That's not funny, many people — I feel it happening to me — will turn away. We need the leavening, most of us.

The next newest one is a cover that bears the date January 23, 2017, but it was out before the inauguration, and I blogged it on January 13th.

"It’s a big shitty world, and it gets shittier by the minute."

A nugget from the newly revealed letters of J.D. Salinger. Don't you hanker for more heaping mouthfuls of that?

He had 2 children,Peggy and Matthew.  At restaurants, Peggy had "a double portion of shrimp cocktail, dessert, and milk, with a pickle on the side, if available," while Matthew ate "lamb chops, almost exclusively."

He didn't like us too much: "Murder in my heart, daily, hourly, incessantly, and you ask if I feel as nasty as ever about planetary affairs. … How ready this wretched planet is for the bomb or more Nancy Reagan."

Imagine having such a troubled relationship with other people that you fixated on the idea of a nuclear war that would end it all, not just for you, but for everyone.

IN THE COMMENTS: Seven Machos says:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is what my kids like to eat at restaurants and what my lousy view of the world is like, and how I am occupied with thoughts of murder, and all that John Wayne Gacy kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

"I delivered talks at universities and lecture halls arguing that the fan’s capacity for enthusiasm was as holy as the works of art we lived by."

"I would quote a passage from Salinger’s 'Franny and Zooey' comparing a performer’s audience to 'Christ Himself,' a righteous entity worthy of serving. I found similar comfort in a scene from 'Manhattan' in which Woody Allen’s character asks what makes life worth living, then rattles off a mix of cultural touchstones (before landing, of course, on 'Tracy’s face'). At nineteen, I wrote in a private journal that 'the knowledge that anything I feel has already been expressed in a work of art' was my version of feeling watched over by a higher power. I still value the sanctity of the artist-audience exchange, but it worries me when conversations about artists’ misdeeds end up centering on it. When an artist is revealed to have abused someone, we ask, 'Can we still like their art? Is it still O.K. to?' These questions treat every individual’s response to art as a morality test. They confuse optics with ethics, muddying a useful distinction between reacting to a work of art—an act that, after all, is something visceral and involuntary, like laughter—and materially supporting it.... "

Writes Tavi Gevinson in "What 'Tár' Knows About the Artist as Abuser/Todd Field’s film about the downfall of a world-famous composer shows the toll that untouchability takes even on the person it supposedly benefits" (The New Yorker). 

ADDED: Here's the passage from "Franny and Zooey":

"He said at first he felt she was the 'perfect partner.' They bonded over a love of obscure blues music.... 'Then things just started to change. Or things started to reveal themselves'..."

"... he said, pointing to the fact that Heard would have 'unusual reaction' over small things, such as if he didn’t go to bed at the same time as her.... The actor said that when Heard made her allegations, people in the entertainment industry — where he never had problems over a career of 30-plus years — began to think he was a 'fraud.' ... 'Very strange, when one day you’re Cinderella, so to speak, and then 0.6 seconds [later], you’re Quasimodo. I didn’t deserve that, nor did my children, or the people who had believed in me all these years. . . . I pride myself on honesty. I pride myself on truth,' he said. 'Truth is the only thing I’m interested in. Lies build upon lies build upon lies. It’s too much to cover. I’m obsessed with the truth.'... Depp was also asked about [his text message about her]  'rotting corpse is decomposing' in the 'trunk of a Honda Civic.' Depp said his language and vocabulary was influenced by authors such as Hunter S. Thompson, Philip K. Dick, J.D. Salinger and James Joyce, and sometimes he had a tendency to exaggerate. 'I am ashamed of some of the references I made... I tend to be quite expressive in my writing and after the unfortunate words of Ms. Heard made their way into my heart and my head, those are two very opposing things...."

From "Depp takes stand, says Heard’s abuse allegations are untrue, ‘heinous’" (WaPo). 

At YouTube, there are many clips, long and short, if you want to see how he looks and sounds. He speaks very slowly, haltingly, and often touches his face.

How do you judge the testimony of an actor? He ought to be able to sell the script. Maybe you end up assessing his acting. The writer at the NY Post, Maureen Callahan sneers at his acting/testimony, in "Johnny sinks to new Depps: Star’s testimony a disaster class in acting":

"This shelf is unique — my other shelves are organized by the time in my life when I read the books. So, for example..."

"... there’s a shelf of novels I read in 1992-1993, when I was living in New York City commuting from Manhattan to my teaching job at IS 227 in Queens. There’s another shelf I read when I was nursing my first child, Maxx. There’s a shelf I read when I was going through my divorce, when I was being treated for cancer, etc. But if a book was lucky, it got relocated to this shelf! This is my 'favorite book' shelf and my No. 1 favorite book of all time is 'Franny and Zooey' by J.D. Salinger."

Writes Elin Hilderbrand, one of 9 writers at "How do you organize your books? 9 authors share their favorite shelves. Shelfies by Elin Hilderbrand, Diana Gabaldon, Garrett Graff, Vanessa Riley, Emma Straub, Hernan Diaz, Jennifer Weiner, Chris Bohjalian and Christopher Buckley" (WaPo). 

"Shelfies" is a cute coinage for photographs of ones shelves. 

"I am as troubled by the use of the word 'woman' to describe the 18-year-old object, briefly, of a 53-year-old’s affections..."

"... as I am by the use of the word 'lover' to describe my 18-year-old self, in the context of that relationship."

Writes the 59-year-old Joyce Maynard on the occasion of a documentary movie about the now-dead J.D. Salinger.

IN THE COMMENTS: T J Sawyer said:

"His was a seduction played out with words and ideas..."

Sounds like Maynard is making a strong case for withdrawing the voting privilege from 18-year-olds. Or at least the distaff portion.

(Do I need to explicitly mention 2008 and 2012?)

A witty allusion to H.V. Kaltenborn.

For reasons that need not be explained here, today's post titled "Out-olding the nouveau old" eventually gets around to the topic of what Holden Caulfield ate in "Catcher in Rye," and I quote him saying:

When I’m out somewhere, I generally just eat a Swiss cheese sandwich and a malted milk. It isn’t much, but you get quite a lot of vitamins in the malted milk. H. V. Caulfield. Holden Vitamin Caulfield.

This prompts commenter Rob to say — and I have no reason to doubt the truth of this:

I'm guessing there's damned few readers today of The Catcher in the Rye who pick up that in talking about "H.V. Caulfield" Salinger was making a witty allusion to H.V. Kaltenborn.

At the link, we learn of the radio commenter who was born in Milwaukee in 1878 and lived until 1965. Apparently, Kaltenborn could speak vividly and intelligently without a script for hours. I liked this anecdote about him and Dizzy Dean:

"'Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people,' said Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird, her book about writing."

"'It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life . . .' But it’s not a choice, really. I am sure that whatever stopped Harper Lee from writing a second book, she’d have preferred the impediment not to be there. And Salinger, in that pitiful late-snatched photograph, didn’t look like a man who was enjoying his royalty checks and a few rounds of golf. Nor could the problem have been resolved by stern self-admonishment and a determination to let things go next time around. Any perfectionist needs to stop being who they are, and that’s hard. I understand Prince and Dickens better than I understand the perfectionists."

Writes Nick Hornby, in "Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius" (Amazon).

"There’s a reason no one has ever seen a big-screen version of Catcher in the Rye or Franny and Zooey."

"In the late ‘40s, J.D. Salinger consented to have his short story Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut made into a movie retitled My Foolish Heart. He was so mortified by the swooning love story that he swore his works would never be butchered again."

From "11 Authors Who Hated the Movie Versions of Their Books."

This is a very scratched up old promo for the movie but it really puts across how dreadfully schmaltzy the thing was: