A Perfect Day for Bananafish by Salinger

 

J. D. Salinger

BIOGRAPHY

A PERFECT DAY FOR BANANAFISH

THERE WERE ninety-seven New York advertising men in the hotel, and, the way they were monopolizing the long-distance lines, the girl in 507 had to wait from noon till almost two-thirty to get her call through. She used the time, though. She read an article in a women's pocket-size magazine, called "Sex Is Fun-or Hell." She washed her comb and brush. She took the spot out of the skirt of her beige suit. She moved the button on her Saks blouse. She tweezed out two freshly surfaced hairs in her mole. When the operator finally rang her room, she was sitting on the window seat and had almost finished putting lacquer on the nails of her left hand.

She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty.

Salinger: Seeing the Glass Family (A Perfect Day For Bananafish)

 

J. D. Salinger: Seeing the Glass Family (A Perfect Day For Bananafish)

• By Michael Norris and David Richardson
• November 14,2011

In 1948, J.D. Salinger published the short story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” in the New Yorker. This event was a major step in his literary career. First, it brought Salinger serious critical acclaim. Second, it established a working relationship between the author and The New Yorker. The magazine offered Salinger a right of first refusal contract, and he subsequently published his new work almost exclusively in the New Yorker. Third, it marks the first published appearance of Seymour Glass, the oldest sibling in the Glass family. Salinger would go on to chronicle the lives of the Glass family siblings in a series of short stories and novellas.

J. D. Salinger / The Catcher in the Rye

J. D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye

The 100 best novels / No 72 / The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger (1951)

To my mother

1

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, an 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. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They're quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They're nice and all--I'm not saying that--but they're also touchy as hell. Besides, I'm not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. I'll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy. I mean that's all I told D.B. about, and he's my brother and all. He's in Hollywood. That isn't too far from this crumby place, and he comes over and visits me practically every week end. He's going to drive me home when I go home next month maybe. He just got a Jaguar. One of those little English jobs that can do around two hundred miles an hour. It cost him damn near four thousand bucks. He's got a lot of dough, now. He didn't use to. He used to be just a regular writer, when he was home. He wrote this terrific book of short stories, The Secret Goldfish, in case you never heard of him. The best one in it was "The Secret Goldfish." It was about this little kid that wouldn't let anybody look at his goldfish because he'd bought it with his own money. It killed me. Now he's out in Hollywood, D.B., being a prostitute. If there's one thing I hate, it's the movies. Don't even mention them to me.

 

JD Salinger

Did Salinger Go Awry?

A boxed set for the writer’s centenary confirms him as the master of possibility

BY

ADAM KIRSCH

JANUARY 02, 2019

The first literary anniversary of 2019 will be one of the biggest: Jan. 1 marks the centenary of J.D. Salinger. (To mark the occasion, his four books are being reissued in a boxed set by Little Brown.) A hundred years seems like it ought to be a long time in literary history—Salinger is as distant from a child born in 2019 as he himself was from Herman Melville. Yet somehow he doesn’t feel as far removed from us as the other writers of his generation—figures like Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, or John Updike, who also became famous in the post-World War II years. Our readerly accounts with those famous names are basically settled, but Salinger’s remains open; his achievement feels unsettled, incomplete.

 

JD Salinger

The Bathtub Kabbalah of J.D. Salinger

Two new biographical sketches depict the great recluse as agent of growth, emblem of permanent adolescence, and cipher

BY

ADAM KIRSCH

MAY 29, 2014

Kabbalah teaches that God created the universe by deliberately shrinking himself, withdrawing into himself in order to leave a space that Creation could fill. This idea, known as tzimtzum, has a weird pertinence to the life and work of J.D. Salinger—but then again, since Salinger himself was a kind of mystic, perhaps it’s not so weird. Nobody seems to know whether Salinger spent any of his years of retreat up in Cornish, N.H., reading Isaac Luria, the 16th-century Jewish sage who invented the idea of tzimtzum. His tastes seem to have run more toward Zen and Hindu mysticism, or even the Russian Orthodox Jesus Prayer, which famously obsesses Franny Glass: “If you keep saying the prayer over and over again—you only have to just do it with your lips at first—then eventually what happens, the prayer becomes self-active. Something happens after a while.”

Salinger / Rye Day

 

Rye Day

J.D. Salinger’s most famous book has its birthday

BY

ADAM CHANDLER

Today marks the anniversary of the publication of J.D. Salinger’s iconic book “The Catcher in the Rye.” The legacy of the book has been a cultural touchstone since it was first published. But as Louis Menand pointed out in an essay written around the time of the book’s 50th birthday in 2001, “The Catcher in the Rye” has come to mean more than that:

“The Catcher in the Rye” is a sympathetic portrait of a boy who refuses to be socialized which has become (among certain readers, anyway, for it is still occasionally banned in conservative school districts) a standard instrument of socialization. I was introduced to the book by my parents, people who, if they had ever imagined that I might, after finishing the thing, run away from school, smoke like a chimney, lie about my age in bars, solicit a prostitute, or use the word “goddam” in every third sentence, would (in the words of the story) have had about two hemorrhages apiece. Somehow, they knew this wouldn’t be the effect.



Supposedly, kids respond to “The Catcher in the Rye” because they recognize themselves in the character of Holden Caulfield. Salinger is imagined to have given voice to what every adolescent, or, at least, every sensitive, intelligent, middle-class adolescent, thinks but is too inhibited to say, which is that success is a sham, and that successful people are mostly phonies. Reading Holden’s story is supposed to be the literary equivalent of looking in a mirror for the first time. This seems to underestimate the originality of the book. Fourteen-year-olds, even sensitive, intelligent, middle-class fourteen-year-olds, generally do not think that success is a sham, and if they sometimes feel unhappy, or angry, or out of it, it’s not because they think most other people are phonies. The whole emotional burden of adolescence is that you don’t know why you feel unhappy, or angry, or out of it. The appeal of “The Catcher in the Rye,” what makes it addictive, is that it provides you with a reason. It gives a content to chemistry.

Despite his influence, many have seemingly been ambivalent to claim Jerome David Salinger, who was raised Jewish and bar-mitzvahed, or to list him among the Jewish greats like Roth, Bellow, Malamud, Ozick, and countless others.

While the (tale-tell) Jewish themes of isolation and ostracism were thick in his work, the identifiable Jewish experiences in Salinger’s characters were camouflaged. His biography may lend some insight. Consider that his grandfather was a rabbi and his father imported ham and kosher cheese for a living. Consider that his mother (Marie), though she was Irish-Catholic, pretended to be Jewish (Miriam) until after Salinger had his bar-mitzvah. Salinger was a mediocre student, but he excelled in the army, taking part in D-Day at Utah Beach and the Battle of the Bulge as well as liberating a concentration camp and earning the rank of Staff Sergeant. He even managed to befriend Ernest Hemingway while in Europe.

There’s plenty more to ponder about Salinger on Rye Day. It might be more fitting to do it alone.

Holden at 50 [TNY]

TABLET

Salinger's house to open up for cartoonist residency

 

JD Salinger's house to open up for cartoonist residency

This article is more than 5 years old

The reclusive author’s New Hampshire former home is being offered as a workspace for young artists after it was bought by illustrator Harry Bliss

Alison Flood
Friday 9 September 2016

Fans of the reclusive author JD Salinger, who also happen to have a penchant for art – and and four-wheel drives – are in for a treat as the former home of the late Catcher in the Rye author is to be opened up for a cartoonist residency.

JD Salinger

Why J.D. Salinger was a recluse

By Susannah Cahalan

January 30, 2011

J.D. Salinger: A Life

by Kenneth Slawenski

Random House

Is it possible to separate the artist’s sins from his art — or is it best to turn a blind eye to his private life and enjoy his creations as is? Does knowing too much about Woody Allen or Mel Gibson take away from our appreciation of “Annie Hall” or “Braveheart”?

Salinger's teenage lover challenges her 'predator' reputation

 

Joyce Maynard

JD Salinger's teenage lover challenges her 'predator' reputation

This article is more than 3 years old

Joyce Maynard, now 65, has published a new essay that asks if the #MeToo movement will allow her to tell her side of the story

Alison Flood
Thu 6 September 2018

Joyce Maynard, who was wooed as a teenager by the late JD Salinger, has spoken out about how the literary world condemned her as “a predator”.

Maynard was 18 when an essay of hers was published in the New York Times, along with a photograph. The piece led the then 53-year-old Salinger to contact her and, as Maynard writes in the New York Times, urged her to “to leave college, come live with him (have babies, collaborate on plays we would perform together in London’s West End) and be (I truly believed this) his partner forever”.

Book Review 072 / The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger

Catcher in the Rye 

by J.D. Salinger 

'I think many teenagers would be able to relate to the themes - it's a modern classic of the coming of age genre.'

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

Book Review

The 100 best novels / No 72 / The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger (1951)

Aiman A
Thu 21 June 2021

Let's just say that this book is certainly one open to a lot of controversy and debate, yet that is what makes it such an interesting read.

The Catcher in the Rye certainly wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea, however I find it an exciting and compelling read, with a gallon of brutal reality poured in along with some humour, contrasting with moments of depression.

At the End of a Dirt Road by Thomas Powers

 

JD Salinger

At the End of a Dirt Road

by Thomas Powers
Vol. 41 No. 20 · 24 October 2019

The Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour – an Introduction 

by J.D. Salinger.
Little, Brown, 1072 pp., $100, November 2018, 978 0 316 45071 3

When​ I think of J.D. Salinger now – not the books but the man – the thing I find hardest to understand is the moment when, in his early thirties, he began to hide his face. In 1952 he hired the photographer Antony Di Gesu to take a series of portraits. With his prominent nose, jaw and cheekbones he looks as ruggedly confident as a prizefighter – in early life he was a handsome man. But it wasn’t an easy shoot: Di Gesu had to work to get him to loosen up. Salinger liked the pictures but insisted Di Gesu show them to no one else, saying that he wanted them for his mother and girlfriend. The first printings of The Catcher in the Rye in 1951 came with an author photo taking up the entire rear panel of the dustjacket: Salinger’s expression is amused, generous, even sweet; the chances are good that he picked the portrait out himself from a set taken by the photographer Lotte Jacobi the previous year. But when the time came for later printings, with copies flying off the shelves, he insisted that the photo be pulled: from that moment on, none of his books appeared with an author photo. Twenty years later he tried to persuade his lover at the time, Joyce Maynard, to allow no author photo on her own first book. ‘A writer’s face,’ he said, ‘should never be known.’

Salinger’s Women

J.D. Salinger’s Women

by Deanna Schmidt

It’s no secret that J.D. Salinger was attracted to a certain “type” of woman: young, innocent, and sexually inexperienced. Even though these relationships tended to raise eyebrows from disapproving onlookers, Salinger’s intentions were arguably pure. He never wanted to hurt or take advantage of these women; he was, as I see it, simply looking for companionship. Salinger wasn’t the slighted bit interested in having sex with the women he pursued. His desires were, rather, focused on one thing: the innocence of his female companions. Salinger had succumbed to his own disease— the “Catcher In the Rye complex.” His biggest wish was to find a young girl to love, protect, and live out the rest of his life with. Salinger went through a myriad of women in search of his perfect match, struggling to find a woman who could meet his high standards. While Salinger was waiting to discover his young lover, he crafted stories filled with older men who lusted over them— an outlet that allowed him to fulfill some of the desires that he could not realize in his own life. His writing, however, was not enough to quench his thirst, and Salinger continued to search for this illusory innocent throughout his adult life.