December 5, 2023 • 53 mins
J.D. Salinger was a complicated and problematic human who stopped publishing soon after creating one of the great works of literature. Listen in today to learn the good, bad and ugly sides of the man who got famous, then dropped out.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, we want to let you know that we
are doing our traditional Pacific Northwest Swing for our live
show next year, in fact, the end of January next year,
very early next year, and.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
We're starting out in Seattle, Washington on January twenty fourth
at the Paramount Theater. It's huge, that's right, and then
on to Portland on January twenty fifth at Revolution Hall,
the place we always are. It's kind of our home
away from home in Portland. And then we're going to
wrap it all up at the thing that started the
Pacific Northwest Tour in the first place all those years back.
(00:34):
SF Sketch Fest will be at the Sydney Goldstein Theater
on Friday, January twenty sixth, right, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
That's right, And remember you can go to stuff youshould
Know dot com click on tours in order to get
to the correct ticket link or go to the venue
page only. Do not go to scalper sites.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
That's right, and we'll see you guys in January.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Okay, welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, there's Chuck.
Jerry's here too. We just want to be alone, which
makes this stuff. You should know. That's right. That was
Greta Garbo doing JD. Salinger.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Oh I've never heard that.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
You never heard Greta Garbo say that I vanted to
be alone?
Speaker 3 (01:25):
No?
Speaker 1 (01:26):
I haven't. Oh yeah, another recluse, right.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Yes, that's why I said that she could really probably
identify with JD's Salinger.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Yeah, what Sallenger? Have you read? If any?
Speaker 2 (01:37):
I read for Esme with Love and Squalor as recently
as last night, and it's good.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Huh.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
It was great. I actually feel like I really missed
out not reading Salinger twenty years ago or thirty years
ago something like that. I just didn't and I don't
know why. But yeah, he was really good.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
Yeah. I was an English major, so I read a
lot of his stuff. Catcher in the Rye was one
that I'm actually do because I would. I was doing
a thing where I was kind of rereading it every
ten years or so, because that's a book wherein your
perspective as a reader can really change how you view
(02:22):
the book. And I found that after I reread it
the second time, and I was like, hey, wait a minute,
I should reread this thing like every decade or so
so I'm definitely due. And then I read nine Stories.
I read almost all of the Glass Family stuff. I
read most of this stuff that was popular and widely
available and wasn't just like, you know, something in the
(02:44):
New Yorker that you know was never put in book
form or whatever. So I read a lot of stuff.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Yeah, and it sounds like your relationship with Salinger kind
of mirrors my relationship with the early works of Adam Sandler.
Rewatch Heavy Gilmore probably every ten years to revisit it,
see how it's changed, because I've changed.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
You know, that's really funny. But Adam Sandler isn't as
complicated and potentially troublesome and problematic as JD. Salinger was
as a person. And what we'll get to all that stuff.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
That sounds like somebody who hasn't really looked into Adam
Sandler's early works. Okay, so yeah, I had no idea
about the problematicness of JD. Salinger. I just knew he
was a revered writer, a recluse, And now I realized
like he was a really great writer too, in the
most approachable way. But the thing that struck me about
(03:45):
reading about JD. Salinger, which is one of my favorite
things to do, like reading about a good movie or
reading about an author or something like that, so I
got to do that researching this episode. One of the
things that struck me is as approachable and almost like
folksy as his writing.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Is, uh huh, he is.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Beloved by like literati types as well. Yeah, Normally he
would be pooh pooed and look down upon, And I
think maybe he was during his career, his actual career,
by some of the more like literati types, but today
he's as revered as anybody, maybe even more so, because
I think there's also a bit of affection that people
(04:26):
hold for him and his writing in addition to, you know,
feeling reverent toward it.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Yeah, and I also think the disappearing act added a
lot to his legend. I mean, I'm not the only
one that thinks set but it's impossible to say what
that would have looked like had he just kept publishing
stuff and stayed in the public eye. But when you disappear,
you're going to add a lot of mystique and interest,
I think, yeah, exactly. And by the way, if you
(04:53):
hear some distant construction noise today, there's nothing I can
do about that.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
Oh, I hope that came through in the Crane episode.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
I don't think it did so.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
Yeah, if you've never heard of JD. Salinger, we should
probably give you a little background. He published The Catcher
in the Rye in nineteen fifty one. It dropped like
a neutron bomb on America and essentially created the current
popular image of a teenager, especially disaffected, disillusioned teenagers who
are starting to realize like the world is not what
(05:24):
they've been told it is their entire lives up to
that point.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Phony.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Perhaps he started that.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
Yeah, phony, He is that word a lot.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Yeah, phony, and it's hilarious. It's a hilarious word, especially
when you use it earnestly.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Yeah, I agree, I like it.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
But that was like the protagonist of Ketcher in the
Rye is probably his favorite word. Holden Callfield's favorite word
was phony. And that's pretty much all you need to know.
We can end the episode here, really.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Or we could go back to when he was born.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
Jerome David Salinger and Manhattan, New York in nineteen nineteen
on New Year's Day to Miriam Sallenger and Soul Sallenger.
He has a sister, named Or had a sister named Doris.
It was seven years older that he remained close to,
and he was Sonny to his parents and his sister.
His dad was Jewish and was he was an executive.
(06:19):
He worked for a meat and cheese importing business and
was not super close to his son. He didn't get
his writing. He was sort of that, you know, kind
of what you would think of the nineteen twenties and
thirties father who just wasn't much of a father, wasn't
around much, didn't put a lot, didn't invest a lot
of time and his children, while his mom, Miriam, was
(06:41):
the opposite. She was a very doting mother, Irish Catholic
woman who loved Sonny. Young j D. Thought he was
going to be a great writer. He would joke at
one point to his friend that she walked me to
school until I was twenty four years old. Dedicated Ketcher
to his mom. And there's this very sweet story that
(07:02):
day found he read a full biography. I think of
him for this episode, but when he was eighteen, he
was working at writing. He wrote from the time he
was very young, and his mom slipped a little message
under the door that said, I accept your story. Consider
it a masterpiece. Check for one thousand dollars in the
mail Curtis Publishing Company. Pretty neat, pretty great.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Yeah. So he was raised I guess upper middle class,
and I mean, like that's a that's a pretty typical combination,
like a distant father and a doting mom. Yeah, that
produces a certain kind of kid, and it seemed to
have produced J. D. Salinger pretty pretty predictably. But the
(07:47):
fact that he grew up on Park Avenue in Manhattan
and went to camp with other Jewish kids every summer,
like he had like a very typical I guess childhood,
but that seemed to have converged with like a pretty
sensitive type. Like he was a sensitive person and that
(08:07):
allowed him to kind of see things for you know,
what they really were, and he also had a talent
for putting that into understandable language, and all of that
put together made him the amazing writer that he became.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Yeah. Absolutely, he was going by Jerry to his friends
and people that he knew personally, and enrolled initially at
a place called McBurnie Preparatory School, a private school on
the Upper West Side, And he was kind of a
kind of a wise acre little sardonic, little sarcastic. He
(08:41):
did not make great grades. They pulled him out after
his sophomore year and sent him to military school, Valley
Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania. And this was a direct
model for if you've read Ketcher and the Rye of
Holden Callfield's Pencey Prep School. It was a very kind
of autobiographical in some ways. Take you know, we'll also
(09:02):
talk about some ways where he diverged from Holden call
Field for sure, but he was a big he like,
he did great. That was one of the big differences
his Holden Callfield was not happy at Pency Prep. And
it seemed that jad Salinger really got a lot out
of Valley Forge and was very, very active.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Yeah, he was. He joined the drama club. He found acting,
which apparently was something I think he discovered acting at
camp one year and was like, I love this. So
he did every play he possibly could. At Valley Forge.
He was the editor of the yearbook. I mean, like,
you know, disaffected, isolated types don't usually become editors of
the yearbook at their school. Yeah, for sure. It was
(09:40):
a real distinction between his experience in Holden Callfield's experience
When he got to college, though, it was a different story,
and probably because Valley Forge was very structured and rigid
and he knew what to expect and he thrived in that.
As we'll see, he also seemed to have drive fairly
(10:00):
well in the Army. In college, one of the first
things you realize is like nobody's keeping tabs on you,
Like you have to motivate yourself to get up into
a class, and that can be really difficult. It's difficult
for everybody at first typically, but it can be like
like a non starter for some people who are ironically
(10:21):
non starters.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Yeah. I remember in college, I was eager and I
was all in. But you skip your first class and
then you're like, oh, wait a minute, you can do that,
and nobody nobody.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Yeah, you hit out in your apartment the whole day
waiting to get in trouble, and nobody came.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Sometimes the teachers keep track. I remember in college some
of them kept a certain amount of absences were allowed
or whatever, but some didn't at all. The big classes
and the teachers like, hey, you don't have to be
here if you don't want to. It's like it's to
your detriment, and you will learn that.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
You'd be like, why do you have to say our
last part? It was going so well.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
He found that, like you said, at college, he went
to NYU, but there in Greenwich Village there were too
many other things going on at that time. He flunked out,
and his father was like, all right, you should get
into business, like you know, follow your old man into
the meat and cheese business. So he shipped him off
to Poland in nineteen thirty seven to study under the
(11:17):
bacon king of Poland, not the sausage king of Chicago.
And Salinger was like, this is gross. I'm not doing this.
He went to Vienna and lived with a Jewish family
and fell in love. He learned German and fell in
love with their daughter, and very sadly that family did
not make it through the war. He left in nineteen
(11:38):
thirty eight, just before the Nazis came into power, and
that family did not survive, and he wrote a short
story a sort of fictionalized version of that many years later,
called A Girl I Knew.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Yeah, he tried college again here going to a place
called Ursinius, Orsinius Ursinus. That's what I'm going with your
valley Fords in Pennsylvania and didn't work out again. Then
he when he came back home, he said, all right,
I'm just going to become a writer. And his mom
was like, all right, that's cool, and his dad was like, no,
(12:14):
you're going to get in the ham and cheese business,
like I said. And apparently they came up with a
compromise that he would take writing classes at NY you
were Columbia. I can't remember which one. I think Columbia
and he locked out by taking a class by given
by the editor Whitburnett. And Whitburnett had a knack along
(12:34):
with his wife, who also edited this magazine Story Magazine,
his wife Hallie or Hayley, they had discovered or would
go on to discover some pretty like a pretty amazing
stable of writers.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
If you ask y, Yeah, for sure you should go
ahead get such a great setup, set yourself up.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Oh oh thanks. There was Williams Common Tennessee mm HM
Truman Capote who well known for his his rough and
tumble westerns, and Norman Mahler who wrote The Jeffersons.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
Yeah, if you've got you've got Norman Maylor, Treatman Compodi Tennessee,
Williams and J. D. Salinger on your list of writers
you've discovered, you're doing pretty well.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Yeah, it's amazing, like they basically discovered the who's who
of twentieth century men writers.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
Yeah, absolutely so he at well, how'd you say it, personists?
Speaker 2 (13:33):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (13:34):
Or yeah, yeah, at ersiness. It was sort of like
other college He wasn't taking it super seriously until one day,
as the story goes, wit Burnett was reading aloud the
Faulkner short story that evening sun and he didn't apparently
didn't like read it very dramatically. He just sort of
read it straight, just read the words as they were,
(13:56):
and Sallenger something about that really to hold of him,
and he said, this is the way forward for me.
I want to write in a way that doesn't get
in the way of a reader want I want the
reader to discover the emotion and the meaning by reading
it in you know, maybe a podcaster one day. We'll
read Catcher in the Rye every ten years and take
(14:18):
a different meaning because I han't explicitly sort of said
what the meaning is, and like you were saying that
his writing was. It wasn't fancy. It was very sort
of plain and accessible, and that's I think why he
got through to so many people.
Speaker 4 (14:33):
Yeah, The thing is is, I don't know if it's
his attention to detail or is I for detailers as
ability to describe things in detail without becoming bogged down
by them.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
Who knows, But I just think that it's such an
amazing epiphany to realize that probably up to that point
he'd been trying to lead readers along around by the
nose feel this, like you should be feeling this right now.
Instead to realize like, no, you can write in a
way where you leave it up to the reader, Like, yeah,
that's probably one of the best epiphanies a writer can
(15:08):
possibly have. And I haven't run across that very often,
Like it's rare, I think to see there's a specific
epiphany that creates the writer that everybody comes to love.
That's not everybody has that kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
Yeah, he stopped ending every chapter with get it.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
What's funny is he didn't. He decided to just kind
of get out of the reader's way and let them
figure it out for themselves. But he was also the
king of italics to emphasize points like oh this word,
this is an important word. That's what italics says, and
he used italics like constantly.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Yeah. So he failed that class, but he re enrolled
in that same class, this time with a little more spunk,
I think, and gave Burnett some of his stories, and
Burnett immediately knew that he had a pretty sharp talent
on his hands and mentored young Salinger and published his
first work, called The Young Folks in the spring nineteen
(16:07):
forty edition of Story, in which he was paid twenty
five bucks, which is a little more than five hundred today,
not bad. And he just kept writing, just writing and
writing and writing. One thing has been made clear about J. D.
Salinger up to his death at ninety one years old
is that he loved to write and wrote and wrote
and wrote and wrote always. He didn't publish a lot,
(16:30):
and we'll get to all that, but doesn't mean he
wasn't writing. He was writing from the time he was
a teenager un till he died. He always wanted to
be published in the New Yorker. That was this big dream.
They turned him down seven times until they accepted Slight
Rebellion off Madison and forty one, which had the character
of Holden call Field, the first story that had Holden
(16:51):
and very disappointingly after Pearl Harbor, they shelved the story
for five years, and you know, it just wasn't a
time to publish a story like that.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
I guess, yeah, no, for sure. They said, don't you know,
there's a war going on, and I say, we take
a break and come back and join JD. Salinger in
the war.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Let's do it.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
Okay, So JD. Salinger when war broke out, When America
entered World War Two, he signed up, He enlisted. He
actually tried to go to Officers School and they were like, nah,
you're a little a little too fresh for us.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
So we ended up think you nowadays you have to
have a college degree to get into OCS. I don't
know if it was the case back then.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
It could have been, who knows, but he was. He
just went from you know, base to base, just doing
mundane stuff, probably not loving life too much, but I'm
sure he had a lot of free time to write
and wrote wrote. And then it wasn't until I think
nineteen forty four that he ended up on in Europe
(18:19):
and his movements and the participation of the events that
he took place in from June of nineteen forty four
through the winter of nineteen forty five. He was basically
at every major event in the European theater, everything from
landing on Utah Beach in Day Day to liberating the
(18:42):
camp at Dachau. Like he was literally there and participated
in all of that stuff. And the fact that he
survived is intense. Like he was in some of the
most intense fighting that the entire war saw over the
course of like you know, a year.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Basically, Yeah, that reminds me of how maybe Jerry can
bleep this The great line from Rushmore when Max first
meets Bill Murray's character and he says he was in Vietnam.
He goes, were you in the Yeah, I was a
good line. J. D. Salinger certainly was, like you said.
And interestingly he had when he stormed the beach at
(19:23):
Utah Beach on D Day, he had the beginnings of
Ketcher and the Rye in his knapsack. He was working
on that book already. He only wrote about the war
through the short story The Magic Foxhole, where he wrote
about D Day. He did not talk about it much.
It is clear that it informed the rest of his life, though,
(19:44):
And we'll talk about you know, those moments you know
as we go along through his life, but I think
two thirds of his regiment died within the first few weeks,
close to two thirds after D Day. So it was
pretty brutal stuff, you know, the bleakest battles you can imagine.
Being pinned down in the hurricane forest in Germany, thousands
(20:08):
of people were freezing to death. He survived that, and then,
like you said, at Dachau in nineteen forty five, apparently
on the same day that Hitler shot himself, they came
upon Dachau and he talked about never in your life
not being able to, you know, get the smell of
burning flesh out of his nose.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
Yeah. He was also in the Battle of the Bulge
that finally turned the tide against the Germans in World
War Two, where seventy five thousand German soldiers died. Like
this was over the course of weeks, tens and tens
of thousands of people dying all around you all the time.
He was there for all that, and he eventually became
(20:50):
I guess, an officer at the very Yeah, he was
a counterintelligence officer. His specialty was interrogating people. He used
the German that he picked up when he with that
family in Vienna just before the Nazis came to power
to interrogate Nazis that he ended up capturing, you know,
less than a decade later. Quite a turn of events
if you think about it.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Yeah, and pretty heavy stuff. And for all of this,
on V Day they say stick around. We don't want
you to go home. We'd like you to stick around
for a denazification mission. So all of a sudden he
was pulled away from his twelfth Regiment and the friends
he had met there, and he got depressed, and you know,
(21:33):
he was clearly affected with PTSD. They call it battle
fatigue at the time, and he checked himself into a
hospital at Nuremberg for PTSD treatment and eventually, well you
read it for Esme with love and Squalor is a
story about a World War two vet recovering from PTSD
in Germany.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
Yeah, it's a wonderful story.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
You know what.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
I just realized his stories, or at least the one
I read, But from reading about other stories, they seem
to have kind of like an O Henry quality of
things surprisingly turning out for the best in the end.
Is that correct?
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Uh? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (22:11):
Like he was optimistic, hopeful, like eventually he was hopeful.
It seems like in most of his stories, maybe not
a good day for banana fish, but some of the
other ones. All the most of the other ones, he
seemed to just be a sentimentalist. I guess where it
just didn't end too bleakly like it was bleak and
then in the end it got better at the very least.
(22:33):
That's how it seemed to me. For Esme with Lovin Squalor.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
Well Catcher and the Rye. Well, we can talk about
the ending a little bit. We don't want to give
it away too much. I guess we are gonna give
it away a little bit.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
Well where he ends up on a ranch living with
Trueman Cacody out west.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
We'll give a spoiler warning when that comes up. Okay,
So he finally got to go home, but he wasn't
coming home. He was discharged, but he told us fly, Hey,
I'm going to stay in Germany. I fell in love
with a woman named Sylvia and we got married. But
they were not married long. It was only eight months,
and he did not write during that period. So he
(23:11):
eventually would go back to New York and started to
sort of throw himself into the you know, the nightclubs
of the nineteen forties New York and sort of sleeping
around with women in New York. But he was you know,
he was suffering from PTSD at this time for sure.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
Yeah. Just one one little note on Sylvia, his first wife.
She was a Nazi party official who he arrested during
his denotification project and ended up marrying her, and he
referred to her as Saliva for the rest of his
life whenever he talk.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
Yeah. They his son was like, because there were rumors
that he had written stories about that marriage, and his son,
Matt was like, that's a joke. Like that didn't even
register in his life hardly. He did not write about it.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
So his his hitting the nightclubs and picking up the
dames is not doing it for him. It's not numbing things.
He's he realizes at some point that he needs a
different a different way forward. And I'm not sure where
he picks it up, but he started with Zen Buddhism.
(24:20):
I don't know where he was exposed to that, maybe
just in Greenwich Village in general, I'm not sure, but
that was that was the first step on a path
toward a lifelong search for enlightenment. And as we'll see,
he came to view writing as ultimately his path toward
enlightenment and therapy. But he started out by trying to
(24:41):
figure it out using like Zen, Buddhism and later on
hindu Vedic spirituality.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
Yeah. Absolutely, And part of the sort of spiritual awakening included, Hey,
I need to get out of New York if I
want to write and I want to finish this book
I'm working on this novel. New York is too distracting,
is too loud. I need more peace and quiet. I
need to be able to meditate. And so he left.
He left New York City nineteen forty nine and went
(25:12):
to Westport, Connecticut, and he finished A Catcher in the
Rye there, his obviously seminal work. And there was a
biographer who said J. D. Salinger spent ten years writing
The Catcher in the Rye and the rest of his
life regretting it. And that kind of puts the nail
on the head, because that was that book was such
(25:35):
a big deal and it put him in such a
spotlight that A he didn't like that spotlight, and b
he hated the book in publishing industry and everybody in it.
It seemed like almost.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Yes, So just a little bit on the publishing of
Catcher in the Rye right, like it was just an
immediate hit from what I can tell, people had been
sitting around waiting for it, it almost seems like. And
to date it sold something like sixty five million copies.
Sixty five million copies chuck about a half a million
every year.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
Still, So I got a couple of stats for you
if I may. Yeah, yeah, please, that's number eighteen all
time for novels. And I was kind of curious, do
you have any idea what the number one best selling
novel of all time in novel, not book, novel, novel
so not the Bible, right right?
Speaker 2 (26:33):
I would say how the West was won by Truman Capoti.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
No don Quixote, really, which makes sense because it was
sort of one of the first great novels. Okay, five
hundred million copies, which is more than double the next.
The Tale of Two Cities is next at two hundred million,
then Lord of the Rings, the Little Prince and the Hobbit,
and then Harry Potter dude owns numbers eleven through sixteen. Wow,
(27:03):
isn't that crazy?
Speaker 2 (27:04):
Yeah? I mean, that's imagine being a living, a living
writer who's just written those things in the last like
twenty or so years, and you own that many on
the top list. That's nuts.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
Well, imagine being Dan Brown then, because he's the modern
writer at number ten, the Da Vinci Code is the
number ten best selling hub.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
I believe that. Man, everybody was talking about that.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
Eighty million books. But yeah, number eighteen sixty five million
books and still selling strong is pretty great. Yeah, so
please continue.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
And he was able to live off of royalties for
the rest of his life. It was like, that's it.
I just struck. I'm fine for the rest of my life.
I'm not sure how long it took for that to
become clear. Maybe nineteen sixty five, I don't know, but
he did. He never needed to work again from that
point on, essentially, so when he wrote it, So there
(27:55):
was a biographer that likened it to a war novel
disguised as a coming of age story. Yeah, And what
they were saying was that, like, at least if you're
looking at it through the lens of J. D. Salinger,
the writer himself writing it like this was his spiritual Catharsis.
This was him finding a way to put World War
(28:19):
two behind him as best he could enough at least
to get on with his life, right. And like you said,
what he experienced in World War two informed the rest
of his life or colored the rest of his life
for the rest of his life. But this was like
this got out the darkest, gunkiest, worst stuff. It seems
(28:40):
like getting Catcher in the Rye out there.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
Yeah, I think so. And you know what, let's not
spoil the ending except to say that it does end
with some hope it does, because I don't think we
should even even say like people should read it. It's
just one of those books I think that like people
should read. I'm about to do that with Moby Dick.
I've never read it. And my buddy, our our friend
(29:05):
Joey Ciara, who did with his brother Andy, did the
theme song to this stuff you should know show. He
collects Moby Dick's and he's like obsessed with a book
and he's like, dude, just read it, just trust me
and read it. And I was like, all right, I'll
read it, okay. But Catcher in the Rise another one
I think where you know, just give it a read.
It's a great book, and it's just one that's I
(29:26):
hate to say, like it's an important work, but it
is sure.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
We won't give away the end, just suffice to say
that he finds the kidney downer he needs.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
That's right. So he has doesn't have a good experience
with the publishing process. Like I said, he hated it.
He fought with the editors. He didn't like the cover
of the book. The original cover was that kind of
kind of weird looking drawing of a carousel horse with
a little small bit of the New York City skyline
(30:00):
in the lower left. He didn't like his photo on
the back. He eventually, I believed, was able to get
that removed in the third printing. You can get a
lot of money if you got that first edition Catcher,
then you're holding on to something pretty valuable.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
Can you imagine, Chuck, how much those pages of Ketcher
and the Rye that were in his knapsack when he
stormed Normandy would be worth if surely they're still out
there somewhere. I cannot imagine how much some tech billionaire
would pay.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
For those Yeah, no, no, totally. And then like, and
I'll use it as a rolling paper.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
That's funny.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
Nine stories came next. That's a great one too. Most
of those were written before Ketcher was actually published, but
that was also a bestseller.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Those are short stories, right, a collection?
Speaker 1 (30:49):
Yeah, nine of them. Strangely, it could also refer to.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
A specific building or something like that.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
No, no, no, it could. I was joking because Ween, we've
talked about this. Ween's or ten Golden Country Greats didn't
have ten songs so awesome? It was because it was
the guys they played with. There were ten of them?
Or was it twelve? Why can't I remember?
Speaker 2 (31:09):
I don't remember. I don't know, all right, it's not
even a question in my memory, failing me. I didn't
have the four knowledge to lose to begin with.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
Yeah, yeah, it's twelve Golden Country Greats, but there's not
twelve songs. And people thought that was Ween making a joke.
But they were like, no, the's twelve Golden Country Greats
with these old timers from Nashville who played with us.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
So wait, one more thing. Well, then that's not a joke.
That's just a misunderstanding.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
Exactly so.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
About the actual title though, of Ween of the Catcher
in the Rye, we should tell people about that, because
I didn't know until yesterday.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
I guess yeah, this is also a spoiler. So if
you don't want to know, then don't listen to this part.
Go ahead. Is it a spoiler, sure, because it's in
the book.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
Oh it is, okay, forget it, forget it. Just read
the book everybody.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
No, no, you should say it because I think people that
are like I don't want to bother please tell me.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
Oh, okay, well, then the people who don't want to bother.
The Catcher in the Rye is taken from a Robert
Burns poem where he talks about when a body meets
a body coming through the rye, when a little body
catch a body, will somebody die? I think that's how
it ends, at the very least that's how David Niven
sings it in Murdered by Death. But what he's referring
(32:18):
to is the catcher in the Rye is him. He's
catching little kids from going off a cliff, little kids
playing in a field of rye, and as they're at
their most free and reckless in their abandonment, they are
in danger of going off this cliff, which would be
becoming adults, losing their childhood. And he sees himself as
(32:40):
the catcher, the person catching them from going off that
cliff so that they can remain children or innocent essentially forever.
Nice summation, Thank you, thank you, cliff Notes.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
Oh we should do one on cliffs Notes. I always
wonder who Cliff was.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
Great, great idea.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
So maybe we'll take a break here in a minute,
but we'll just finish by saying that over the next
decade after Catcher, he's publishing other things. But that is
when things got started to get a little weird for him,
in that he was a sensation, and there were reporters
knocking on his door, and he was just receiving tons
and tons of mail from kids who thought he was
(33:23):
this guru and like this sage delivering wisdom to a
younger generation. And all these other younger writers were inspired
to take up writing, and it was just a little
too much for someone who was seeking solitude and spiritual enlightenment.
So we will take a break and let you know
(33:44):
what happened right after this, all right, So when we
(34:08):
left J. D. Salinger was a literary sensation. The walls
were closing in on him as far as his privacy
and his sort of search for spirituality anonymity. Well, I
don't think he wanted to be anonymous, necessarily because he
published work, but he definitely wanted privacy. If you want
to be anonymous, he would have published it under a
pen name. I would imagine Truman Capodi. In fifty three, though,
(34:33):
he bought a ninety acre property in Cornish, New Hampshire.
It's about four hours from Manhattan, a very lovely, quiet
farming community back then it probably still is. And he left.
But Dave is keen to point out, and as our
biographers of Salalinger, this wasn't him saying I'm removing myself
from the world. I'm going to be a recluse. He
just wanted to get out of the hustle and bustle
(34:54):
and lived the quiet life. He had friends there. He
went into town and got his mail, he went and
ate the local lunch place called Harrington Spa. He had friends,
He had adult friends. He also had teenage friends, which
you know, we'll get into you know, the problematic nature
of that later, But there was a group of teenagers
(35:15):
from the high school there. He was in his early thirties,
and he had connected with young people in his life
and kind of that's why he could write in that voice.
So easily, I think, and he just you know, they
thought he was one of the gang, and they loved
his advice, and so they would kind of all hang
out here and there. And so it's not like he
disappeared completely at that point.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
No, he didn't need to. He just was getting away
from the people who really wanted something from him, and
instead he introduced himself to a place where he could
just be Jerry basically. And it's not like the people
there didn't know who he was. They just weren't necessarily
as starstruck or seeking him as a guru like other
people were, and people would still come visit him from
(35:55):
time to time. He was known to sometimes just be like, look,
I'm not a guru. I don't know anything that you
don't know. I just wrote a book. I can't give
you anything. To answering the door with a shotgun, you know,
and being like, get off my property. It depended, i'm sure,
in his mood. But he had fashioned a life for
himself and he wasn't the recluse that he's famous for now.
(36:17):
Like you were saying, there, there was actually one specific
incident that triggered that reclusiveness that hadn't been there before
and he stayed in Cornish. She didn't move from Cornish.
But if a person can withdraw from the world more
than he had by moving to Cornish, he did it masterfully.
And it all is to blame on a girl named
(36:38):
Shirley Blainey.
Speaker 1 (36:39):
Yeah. So she was a teenager who worked for the
school newspaper or wrote for the school newspaper and said,
kind of interview you for the school newspaper. And he
did not do press at all, but he was like, sure,
I'll do this thing for the local school paper. And
because he you know, he believed in that kind of thing. Instead,
it was published in the regional newspaper, the Daily Eagle,
(37:02):
Twins State Telescope, and that was it for him. He
was like, I can't even trust this kid to interview
me for a school paper. Everybody wants something from me.
It's unforgivable. It was a betrayal and so that was it.
He built a fence around his property. He quit going
into town, he quit throwing and going to parties. When
(37:24):
those his little teenager buddies would come around to hang out,
he wouldn't come to the door anymore. And that's when
his life as the recluse started, even though his son
Matt will say, you know, all this is written about
his reclusiveness and he just didn't want to be around.
I mean, that's what a recluse is. But he said
(37:45):
they made it out to be like he was just
this crazy hermit, and he was like, he just didn't
want to be bothered and he just wanted to write
without all the noise. Yeah, was his son's take.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
But his social life seems to have been definitely objectively
curtail after that, Like he was much more social up
until that point.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
Oh, no, one doubts that.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
Yeah, his famous quote was surely Blainey a real phony.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
Was it really?
Speaker 2 (38:10):
No, it wouldn't surprise me, it'd be great. So he
becomes that kind of recluse, and to some people that
was like, oh, we gotta really find him now. There
was a nineteen sixty one Life article on him where
they the I guess the author came to his house
and took pictures of his mailbox, got a picture of
(38:32):
him working in his yard, like really intrusive stuff. People
felt like, okay with doing that just because he was
a recluse, you know what I mean. Yeah, and that's
a really difficult thing to deal with for him, but
he still sought connection with certain people. I think it
was just you had to you had to earn his
(38:52):
trust or he had to find you attractive.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
Yeah, it was a pretty small circle. He got together
with a young woman named Claire Douglas. They had met
when she was sixteen and he was thirty two, and
they kept in touch via letters and things, and they
started dating when she was nineteen at Radcliffe student at Radcliffe.
They bonded over religion. You mentioned early Vedanta and Hinduism.
(39:22):
That is what they really got into at that point,
and he really immersed himself into sort of that sort
of religious study in philosophy, and the basic tenets of
which are that God is in everything, God is everywhere,
God is you, God is me. That kind of thing
very George Harrison, I think.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
Yeah, but like at least a decade before George Harrison
was ever exposed to this stuff, Like this guy was
doing this.
Speaker 1 (39:49):
In like the mid the sixties. Oh okay, I thought
it was no sixties.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
He and Claire got married in nineteen fifty five, so
like he was into it in the early midfifth at
the latest. So yeah, yeah, he was definitely into that,
and his son I think no. No. His daughter, who
will meet in a second, later said that she believes
that he got in over his head. Essentially, he took
(40:15):
it all to too much to heart, and he turned
his back on the world and became a quote strange
man because of the degree to which he exposed himself
to religion. I get the impression. Doesn't matter what the
religion was, it was the degree.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
Yeah, I mean his kids have two different takes. His daughter,
Margaret would write a book that was not very flattering,
said that, you know, he basically held my mom hostage there.
He did disturbing things. He drank urine, he spoke in tongues.
He became a very strange man that she didn't recognize.
(40:51):
And this is she had grown up really loving her father.
Whereas Matt Sallenger who played Captain America No the nineteen
ninety film Captain America and was in Revenge of the Nerds.
Speaker 2 (41:04):
Which who was he in Revenge of the Nerds.
Speaker 1 (41:07):
He was one of the guys in the in the frat,
the hot frat, Yeah, with not the nerds. Hell yeah.
Married what was his last name? Oh, I don't remember.
He's great though I love that guy, wonderful. But yeah,
Matt s Allener was an actor and producer for a while.
But he he says that his sisters. There's a great
(41:31):
article from The Guardian from a few years ago, twenty nineteen.
I think with Matt where he said his sister Margaret,
he loves her and respects her. But he says those
accounts are gothic tales. So it's kind of one of
those things where two kids have two different takes on
their famous slash weird parent.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
Right, But I mean like those are pretty at odds
with one another, pretty diametrical, you know.
Speaker 1 (41:53):
I agree. I don't think Matt said he was some
great dad either, because he would He built a bunker
basically to write it in a writing studio, and was
not a doting father, and you know, writing was his
most important thing. He used to say, do not disturb
me unless this, unless the house is burning down, like
leave me alone, family, so I can do my important work.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
So two things, One, it's Teed McGinley. Two, the image
of JD. Salinger that people popularly hold is still very
much widespread, the one that they've they've held forever, essentially
since he became a recluse, but like a brilliant writer
and blah blah blah. The I guess a different kind
(42:38):
of piggy esque view that his daughter has of him
started to emerge in the nineties. Peggy wrote a book
called Dream Catcher, which you mentioned. I think it came
out in two thousand.
Speaker 1 (42:52):
Who's Peggy?
Speaker 2 (42:53):
Peggy is his daughter Margaret?
Speaker 1 (42:55):
Oh oh, that was her nickname.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
Yeah, And in the book she talks she talked at
length about how her mother was treated and her mother
was that Ragcliffe co ed Claire, right, is it Claire Douglas, Yes,
Claire Douglas And apparently J. D. Salinger drove Claire Douglas
(43:16):
like to the brink of insanity. They got divorced in
nineteen sixty seven, and according to her side of the story,
he was extremely emotionally abusive to her. He would tell
her that he didn't love her. He made her like
live in this like it wasn't necessarily her choice to
live without heat or hot water and grow their own
(43:40):
food and be quiet because we're thinking about, you know, enlightenment.
Like she went along with it because she was nineteen
and he was in his early mid thirties. So the
stuff that has come out about him, starting in about
the late nineties and then continuing on as different women
in his life life over time have kind of come
(44:01):
forward and been like yes, and there's also this, there's no,
there's not like a smoking gun, right, it's not like
anything like on a Harvey Weinstein level. But his image
has definitely turned a little bit because it has become
clear that he used his age and experiences as an
older person to control and manipulate younger girls to his
(44:27):
to often their detriment, for his short term pleasure.
Speaker 1 (44:32):
Essentially, yeah, absolutely, it seem like the move was, like,
I mean, it's called grooming, is what the word we
use today. But find someone in their mid teens and
begin a friendship with them and write letters and pay
them a lot of attention and stuff like that, and
then get together, try and get together with them at
(44:55):
least or get together with them in a physical way
when when they're legally able to do so. So that
happened a few different times. There was a fourteen year
old named Jane Miller. He was thirty at the time.
He pursued her via friendship in letters and then which
she was nineteen, they had sexual intercourse, and he dumped
(45:16):
her immediately afterward. She came out and wrote about it
after he died. She said that she didn't want to
write about it while he was still alive. And then
he eventually started dating a freshman at Yale named Joyce
Maynard in nineteen ninety eight. She wrote a lot about
their relationship. I think they were together about a year.
(45:37):
Said he was very manipulative and that he would take
advantage of naive young women, and then I believe he
finally married remarried again in ninety two. He was to
a woman named Colleen O'Neil. She's like my age basically
at the time, she was twenty one years old and
he was sixty nine years old. And they stayed married
(45:58):
for what eighteen eighteen years until he died.
Speaker 2 (46:01):
Yeah, and she was a nurse and apparently was also
a bit of a nurse to him as well as
a wife from what I can tell. Like a good
example I saw was that he had gone very much
death essentially very hard of hearing, but he was too
vain to wear a hearing aid, so she would have
to repeat to him in a louder voice with somebody
(46:21):
you know had just said to him when they were
out and about in town or whatever. Right, so, you know,
twenty one year old, sixty nine year old type stuff.
But she apparently is I guess, the least affected of
all of his wives or girlfriends. She co is co
(46:42):
trustee of his work with his son Matt. She's still
very much in the JD. Salinger pro Sallenger camp, clearly,
but I guess kind of the antithesis to her would
be Joyce Maynard, who was the freshman at Yale, and
she has written about their relation ship so much that
(47:02):
people have come to look at her as an opportunist,
somebody who's basically just trading on the one year she
spent with J. D. Salinger. She's been trying to make
money off of that or get fame or publicity off
of it for years. Another interpretation that's kind of come
around lately is that she's been telling the story of
a victim who was manipulated by an older man, and
(47:25):
when you dig into her story, she was like suddenly
the hot New York literati it girl all of a sudden.
When when they met, she had just been on the
cover of New York magazine, on the cover with a
cover story, but they also put her picture on the cover,
and he got in touch with her and said like, hey,
(47:45):
I think you're writing's great, and they started to write
letters back and forth. He convinced her to drop out
of Yale with just a few months before graduating, to
give up her her job working as a New York
Times writer, which she'd just gotten, and to blow off
a book tour that was going to start her career
and instead moved to Cornish, New Hampshire with him.
Speaker 1 (48:03):
And she did.
Speaker 2 (48:04):
She was nineteen at the time, very much like Claire
Douglas and at the very least, even if he wasn't
overtly manipulating her like her life went off the rails
because she got involved with this incredibly revered older man
who she thought loved her, and after a year he
was done with her and she moved out. Apparently it
(48:27):
was over kids or something. Ostensibly she wanted kids, he didn't,
and they were like, no, this isn't going to work.
But yeah, Joyce Mayard has gone through a bit of
a reform over the last several years, at least as
far as some people are concerned.
Speaker 1 (48:42):
Yeah. Absolutely, And you mentioned tech bros buying things Maynard,
she sold fourteen. She auctioned fourteen personal letters from Salinger,
and Peter Norton of Norton Antivirus bought them for two
hundred thousand dollars. He offered to give them back to JD.
Soudlenger or to burn them, and I think wasn't even answered,
(49:03):
so he just locked them up, and I think still
has possession of them.
Speaker 2 (49:06):
Yeah, and supposedly that was a dime a dozen kind
of thing other women came for and was like, I
had treasured letters that he wrote to me too. It
was Yeah, So he's become a study in one of
those things where it's like, Okay, this guy was a
little more complicated and like you said, at the outset
problematic than anyone knew or realized, and yet his work
(49:28):
is still just as amazing as it was before. You
know what I mean.
Speaker 1 (49:34):
Yeah, I mean he quit publishing completely and like I said,
kept writing. In a one later interview, he did not
do many but he said, there's a marvelous piece in
not publishing. It's peaceful. Still, publishing is a terrible invasion
of my privacy. I like to write, I love to write,
but I write just for myself. And my own pleasure.
(49:56):
I pay for this kind of attitude. I'm known as strange,
as a strange loof kind of man. But all I'm
doing is trying to protect myself and my work. And
that article with Matt Salinger, like there is a lot
of work that he did, and he, Matt Sallenger, is
going to publish some of it. Apparently he was directed
to publish some of it. I read an article years
(50:16):
ago right after he died where they said between twenty
ten and twenty fifteen, there will be five new novels.
And you know, none of that has happened yet, nothing
has come out, and Matt Salinger is just like you
know it. It's gonna take as long as it's gonna take.
Like there's tons of stuff, and I respect my father's work,
and it's we're never gonna license stuff. You're never gonna
(50:38):
see it catching the right coffee mug. It's not going
to be a movie. But like, I want to publish
this stuff correctly, and that takes a lot a lot
of time, and like back.
Speaker 2 (50:48):
Off, Yeah, so what else you got anything else?
Speaker 1 (50:54):
I got nothing else? I mean, new new stuff's going
to come out at some point. Curious to see what
that looks like. I bet some will be about the
Glass Family. I think for sure that was the family
and many of those short stories that he wrote about
recurring characters Franny and Zooey and stuff like that. So
I imagine there's more Glass Family stuff in there. I
(51:16):
think that's been confirmed.
Speaker 2 (51:17):
Dave turned up a really great analysis of JD. Salinger's
writing by a guy named Michichi Michiko Kakutani. It's really
insightful and also just as approachable as JD. Salinger's writing is.
It's really really good stuff. So I thought it was
a pretty good introduction to JD. Salinger and the whole
It takes a look at like the whole his whole career,
(51:40):
from you know, how lauded it was to how it
kind of at the end some of the last stuff
he published, people were like, what's going on here? Like
this is a little odd, you know what I mean?
Speaker 1 (51:52):
Yeah to me that I like to check that.
Speaker 2 (51:53):
I will send it to you. Since Chuck asked me
to send something and we're out of stuff to talk
about J D. Salinger, I think think that means it's
time for a listener, mayl.
Speaker 1 (52:03):
I'm going to call this Red Stripe confirmation for joshus. Hey, guys,
you mentioned red Stripe beer on the recent episode about
scuba and reminded me of a story worked at a
country club in Granger, Indiana as a banquet ship. I
think it said shift, I know it's not scheft. By
the way, We did a Caribbean Island themed event for
the members and the bar manager, and the bar manager
(52:26):
ordered a couple of cases of Red Stripe, told the
bartenders to push it so it would sell through. The
first guy to a bottle tasted it and said it
was terrible instead of the bar and told everyone not
to get it. We only sold two bottles. A few
months later, we did an invitational event just after it
was in the movie The Firm, where two guys were
drinking it before they went scuba diving as part of
(52:48):
an escape plan. As Josh mentioned, the bartenders were asked
again to push the Red Stripe and I was putting
out appetizers and one of the first guys to come
off the golf course said, Hey, that's that beer they
were drinking in that and he said it was pretty
good and was telling his buddies about the movie and
Red stripe and it sold out in an hour, same
group of people. That recognition from the movie really helped
(53:11):
sell the beer. So Josh was right, ever underestimate the
power of marketing. And that is from Steve.
Speaker 2 (53:18):
Thanks Steve. I love it when I'm right. I especially
love him when people write in to tell me I
was right.
Speaker 1 (53:23):
You know good stuff.
Speaker 2 (53:25):
If you want to be like Steve and tell me
that I was right, bring it on. You can send
it via email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (53:37):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, everybody, we want to let you know that we
are doing our traditional Pacific Northwest Swing for our live
show next year, in fact, the end of January next year,
very early next year, and.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
We're starting out in Seattle, Washington on January twenty fourth
at the Paramount Theater. It's huge, that's right, and then
on to Portland on January twenty fifth at Revolution Hall,
the place we always are. It's kind of our home
away from home in Portland. And then we're going to
wrap it all up at the thing that started the
Pacific Northwest Tour in the first place all those years back.
(00:34):
SF Sketch Fest will be at the Sydney Goldstein Theater
on Friday, January twenty sixth, right, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
That's right, And remember you can go to stuff youshould
Know dot com click on tours in order to get
to the correct ticket link or go to the venue
page only. Do not go to scalper sites.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
That's right, and we'll see you guys in January.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Okay, welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, there's Chuck.
Jerry's here too. We just want to be alone, which
makes this stuff. You should know. That's right. That was
Greta Garbo doing JD. Salinger.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Oh I've never heard that.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
You never heard Greta Garbo say that I vanted to
be alone?
Speaker 3 (01:25):
No?
Speaker 1 (01:26):
I haven't. Oh yeah, another recluse, right.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Yes, that's why I said that she could really probably
identify with JD's Salinger.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Yeah, what Sallenger? Have you read? If any?
Speaker 2 (01:37):
I read for Esme with Love and Squalor as recently
as last night, and it's good.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Huh.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
It was great. I actually feel like I really missed
out not reading Salinger twenty years ago or thirty years
ago something like that. I just didn't and I don't
know why. But yeah, he was really good.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
Yeah. I was an English major, so I read a
lot of his stuff. Catcher in the Rye was one
that I'm actually do because I would. I was doing
a thing where I was kind of rereading it every
ten years or so, because that's a book wherein your
perspective as a reader can really change how you view
(02:22):
the book. And I found that after I reread it
the second time, and I was like, hey, wait a minute,
I should reread this thing like every decade or so
so I'm definitely due. And then I read nine Stories.
I read almost all of the Glass Family stuff. I
read most of this stuff that was popular and widely
available and wasn't just like, you know, something in the
(02:44):
New Yorker that you know was never put in book
form or whatever. So I read a lot of stuff.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Yeah, and it sounds like your relationship with Salinger kind
of mirrors my relationship with the early works of Adam Sandler.
Rewatch Heavy Gilmore probably every ten years to revisit it,
see how it's changed, because I've changed.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
You know, that's really funny. But Adam Sandler isn't as
complicated and potentially troublesome and problematic as JD. Salinger was
as a person. And what we'll get to all that stuff.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
That sounds like somebody who hasn't really looked into Adam
Sandler's early works. Okay, so yeah, I had no idea
about the problematicness of JD. Salinger. I just knew he
was a revered writer, a recluse, And now I realized
like he was a really great writer too, in the
most approachable way. But the thing that struck me about
(03:45):
reading about JD. Salinger, which is one of my favorite
things to do, like reading about a good movie or
reading about an author or something like that, so I
got to do that researching this episode. One of the
things that struck me is as approachable and almost like
folksy as his writing.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Is, uh huh, he is.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Beloved by like literati types as well. Yeah, Normally he
would be pooh pooed and look down upon, And I
think maybe he was during his career, his actual career,
by some of the more like literati types, but today
he's as revered as anybody, maybe even more so, because
I think there's also a bit of affection that people
(04:26):
hold for him and his writing in addition to, you know,
feeling reverent toward it.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Yeah, and I also think the disappearing act added a
lot to his legend. I mean, I'm not the only
one that thinks set but it's impossible to say what
that would have looked like had he just kept publishing
stuff and stayed in the public eye. But when you disappear,
you're going to add a lot of mystique and interest,
I think, yeah, exactly. And by the way, if you
(04:53):
hear some distant construction noise today, there's nothing I can
do about that.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
Oh, I hope that came through in the Crane episode.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
I don't think it did so.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
Yeah, if you've never heard of JD. Salinger, we should
probably give you a little background. He published The Catcher
in the Rye in nineteen fifty one. It dropped like
a neutron bomb on America and essentially created the current
popular image of a teenager, especially disaffected, disillusioned teenagers who
are starting to realize like the world is not what
(05:24):
they've been told it is their entire lives up to
that point.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Phony.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Perhaps he started that.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
Yeah, phony, He is that word a lot.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Yeah, phony, and it's hilarious. It's a hilarious word, especially
when you use it earnestly.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Yeah, I agree, I like it.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
But that was like the protagonist of Ketcher in the
Rye is probably his favorite word. Holden Callfield's favorite word
was phony. And that's pretty much all you need to know.
We can end the episode here, really.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Or we could go back to when he was born.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
Jerome David Salinger and Manhattan, New York in nineteen nineteen
on New Year's Day to Miriam Sallenger and Soul Sallenger.
He has a sister, named Or had a sister named Doris.
It was seven years older that he remained close to,
and he was Sonny to his parents and his sister.
His dad was Jewish and was he was an executive.
(06:19):
He worked for a meat and cheese importing business and
was not super close to his son. He didn't get
his writing. He was sort of that, you know, kind
of what you would think of the nineteen twenties and
thirties father who just wasn't much of a father, wasn't
around much, didn't put a lot, didn't invest a lot
of time and his children, while his mom, Miriam, was
(06:41):
the opposite. She was a very doting mother, Irish Catholic
woman who loved Sonny. Young j D. Thought he was
going to be a great writer. He would joke at
one point to his friend that she walked me to
school until I was twenty four years old. Dedicated Ketcher
to his mom. And there's this very sweet story that
(07:02):
day found he read a full biography. I think of
him for this episode, but when he was eighteen, he
was working at writing. He wrote from the time he
was very young, and his mom slipped a little message
under the door that said, I accept your story. Consider
it a masterpiece. Check for one thousand dollars in the
mail Curtis Publishing Company. Pretty neat, pretty great.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Yeah. So he was raised I guess upper middle class,
and I mean, like that's a that's a pretty typical combination,
like a distant father and a doting mom. Yeah, that
produces a certain kind of kid, and it seemed to
have produced J. D. Salinger pretty pretty predictably. But the
(07:47):
fact that he grew up on Park Avenue in Manhattan
and went to camp with other Jewish kids every summer,
like he had like a very typical I guess childhood,
but that seemed to have converged with like a pretty
sensitive type. Like he was a sensitive person and that
(08:07):
allowed him to kind of see things for you know,
what they really were, and he also had a talent
for putting that into understandable language, and all of that
put together made him the amazing writer that he became.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Yeah. Absolutely, he was going by Jerry to his friends
and people that he knew personally, and enrolled initially at
a place called McBurnie Preparatory School, a private school on
the Upper West Side, And he was kind of a
kind of a wise acre little sardonic, little sarcastic. He
(08:41):
did not make great grades. They pulled him out after
his sophomore year and sent him to military school, Valley
Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania. And this was a direct
model for if you've read Ketcher and the Rye of
Holden Callfield's Pencey Prep School. It was a very kind
of autobiographical in some ways. Take you know, we'll also
(09:02):
talk about some ways where he diverged from Holden call
Field for sure, but he was a big he like,
he did great. That was one of the big differences
his Holden Callfield was not happy at Pency Prep. And
it seemed that jad Salinger really got a lot out
of Valley Forge and was very, very active.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Yeah, he was. He joined the drama club. He found acting,
which apparently was something I think he discovered acting at
camp one year and was like, I love this. So
he did every play he possibly could. At Valley Forge.
He was the editor of the yearbook. I mean, like,
you know, disaffected, isolated types don't usually become editors of
the yearbook at their school. Yeah, for sure. It was
(09:40):
a real distinction between his experience in Holden Callfield's experience
When he got to college, though, it was a different story,
and probably because Valley Forge was very structured and rigid
and he knew what to expect and he thrived in that.
As we'll see, he also seemed to have drive fairly
(10:00):
well in the Army. In college, one of the first
things you realize is like nobody's keeping tabs on you,
Like you have to motivate yourself to get up into
a class, and that can be really difficult. It's difficult
for everybody at first typically, but it can be like
like a non starter for some people who are ironically
(10:21):
non starters.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Yeah. I remember in college, I was eager and I
was all in. But you skip your first class and
then you're like, oh, wait a minute, you can do that,
and nobody nobody.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Yeah, you hit out in your apartment the whole day
waiting to get in trouble, and nobody came.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Sometimes the teachers keep track. I remember in college some
of them kept a certain amount of absences were allowed
or whatever, but some didn't at all. The big classes
and the teachers like, hey, you don't have to be
here if you don't want to. It's like it's to
your detriment, and you will learn that.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
You'd be like, why do you have to say our
last part? It was going so well.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
He found that, like you said, at college, he went
to NYU, but there in Greenwich Village there were too
many other things going on at that time. He flunked out,
and his father was like, all right, you should get
into business, like you know, follow your old man into
the meat and cheese business. So he shipped him off
to Poland in nineteen thirty seven to study under the
(11:17):
bacon king of Poland, not the sausage king of Chicago.
And Salinger was like, this is gross. I'm not doing this.
He went to Vienna and lived with a Jewish family
and fell in love. He learned German and fell in
love with their daughter, and very sadly that family did
not make it through the war. He left in nineteen
(11:38):
thirty eight, just before the Nazis came into power, and
that family did not survive, and he wrote a short
story a sort of fictionalized version of that many years later,
called A Girl I Knew.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Yeah, he tried college again here going to a place
called Ursinius, Orsinius Ursinus. That's what I'm going with your
valley Fords in Pennsylvania and didn't work out again. Then
he when he came back home, he said, all right,
I'm just going to become a writer. And his mom
was like, all right, that's cool, and his dad was like, no,
(12:14):
you're going to get in the ham and cheese business,
like I said. And apparently they came up with a
compromise that he would take writing classes at NY you
were Columbia. I can't remember which one. I think Columbia
and he locked out by taking a class by given
by the editor Whitburnett. And Whitburnett had a knack along
(12:34):
with his wife, who also edited this magazine Story Magazine,
his wife Hallie or Hayley, they had discovered or would
go on to discover some pretty like a pretty amazing
stable of writers.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
If you ask y, Yeah, for sure you should go
ahead get such a great setup, set yourself up.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Oh oh thanks. There was Williams Common Tennessee mm HM
Truman Capote who well known for his his rough and
tumble westerns, and Norman Mahler who wrote The Jeffersons.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
Yeah, if you've got you've got Norman Maylor, Treatman Compodi Tennessee,
Williams and J. D. Salinger on your list of writers
you've discovered, you're doing pretty well.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Yeah, it's amazing, like they basically discovered the who's who
of twentieth century men writers.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
Yeah, absolutely so he at well, how'd you say it, personists?
Speaker 2 (13:33):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (13:34):
Or yeah, yeah, at ersiness. It was sort of like
other college He wasn't taking it super seriously until one day,
as the story goes, wit Burnett was reading aloud the
Faulkner short story that evening sun and he didn't apparently
didn't like read it very dramatically. He just sort of
read it straight, just read the words as they were,
(13:56):
and Sallenger something about that really to hold of him,
and he said, this is the way forward for me.
I want to write in a way that doesn't get
in the way of a reader want I want the
reader to discover the emotion and the meaning by reading
it in you know, maybe a podcaster one day. We'll
read Catcher in the Rye every ten years and take
(14:18):
a different meaning because I han't explicitly sort of said
what the meaning is, and like you were saying that
his writing was. It wasn't fancy. It was very sort
of plain and accessible, and that's I think why he
got through to so many people.
Speaker 4 (14:33):
Yeah, The thing is is, I don't know if it's
his attention to detail or is I for detailers as
ability to describe things in detail without becoming bogged down
by them.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
Who knows, But I just think that it's such an
amazing epiphany to realize that probably up to that point
he'd been trying to lead readers along around by the
nose feel this, like you should be feeling this right now.
Instead to realize like, no, you can write in a
way where you leave it up to the reader, Like, yeah,
that's probably one of the best epiphanies a writer can
(15:08):
possibly have. And I haven't run across that very often,
Like it's rare, I think to see there's a specific
epiphany that creates the writer that everybody comes to love.
That's not everybody has that kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
Yeah, he stopped ending every chapter with get it.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
What's funny is he didn't. He decided to just kind
of get out of the reader's way and let them
figure it out for themselves. But he was also the
king of italics to emphasize points like oh this word,
this is an important word. That's what italics says, and
he used italics like constantly.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Yeah. So he failed that class, but he re enrolled
in that same class, this time with a little more spunk,
I think, and gave Burnett some of his stories, and
Burnett immediately knew that he had a pretty sharp talent
on his hands and mentored young Salinger and published his
first work, called The Young Folks in the spring nineteen
(16:07):
forty edition of Story, in which he was paid twenty
five bucks, which is a little more than five hundred today,
not bad. And he just kept writing, just writing and
writing and writing. One thing has been made clear about J. D.
Salinger up to his death at ninety one years old
is that he loved to write and wrote and wrote
and wrote and wrote always. He didn't publish a lot,
(16:30):
and we'll get to all that, but doesn't mean he
wasn't writing. He was writing from the time he was
a teenager un till he died. He always wanted to
be published in the New Yorker. That was this big dream.
They turned him down seven times until they accepted Slight
Rebellion off Madison and forty one, which had the character
of Holden call Field, the first story that had Holden
(16:51):
and very disappointingly after Pearl Harbor, they shelved the story
for five years, and you know, it just wasn't a
time to publish a story like that.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
I guess, yeah, no, for sure. They said, don't you know,
there's a war going on, and I say, we take
a break and come back and join JD. Salinger in
the war.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Let's do it.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
Okay, So JD. Salinger when war broke out, When America
entered World War Two, he signed up, He enlisted. He
actually tried to go to Officers School and they were like, nah,
you're a little a little too fresh for us.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
So we ended up think you nowadays you have to
have a college degree to get into OCS. I don't
know if it was the case back then.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
It could have been, who knows, but he was. He
just went from you know, base to base, just doing
mundane stuff, probably not loving life too much, but I'm
sure he had a lot of free time to write
and wrote wrote. And then it wasn't until I think
nineteen forty four that he ended up on in Europe
(18:19):
and his movements and the participation of the events that
he took place in from June of nineteen forty four
through the winter of nineteen forty five. He was basically
at every major event in the European theater, everything from
landing on Utah Beach in Day Day to liberating the
(18:42):
camp at Dachau. Like he was literally there and participated
in all of that stuff. And the fact that he
survived is intense. Like he was in some of the
most intense fighting that the entire war saw over the
course of like you know, a year.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Basically, Yeah, that reminds me of how maybe Jerry can
bleep this The great line from Rushmore when Max first
meets Bill Murray's character and he says he was in Vietnam.
He goes, were you in the Yeah, I was a
good line. J. D. Salinger certainly was, like you said.
And interestingly he had when he stormed the beach at
(19:23):
Utah Beach on D Day, he had the beginnings of
Ketcher and the Rye in his knapsack. He was working
on that book already. He only wrote about the war
through the short story The Magic Foxhole, where he wrote
about D Day. He did not talk about it much.
It is clear that it informed the rest of his life, though,
(19:44):
And we'll talk about you know, those moments you know
as we go along through his life, but I think
two thirds of his regiment died within the first few weeks,
close to two thirds after D Day. So it was
pretty brutal stuff, you know, the bleakest battles you can imagine.
Being pinned down in the hurricane forest in Germany, thousands
(20:08):
of people were freezing to death. He survived that, and then,
like you said, at Dachau in nineteen forty five, apparently
on the same day that Hitler shot himself, they came
upon Dachau and he talked about never in your life
not being able to, you know, get the smell of
burning flesh out of his nose.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
Yeah. He was also in the Battle of the Bulge
that finally turned the tide against the Germans in World
War Two, where seventy five thousand German soldiers died. Like
this was over the course of weeks, tens and tens
of thousands of people dying all around you all the time.
He was there for all that, and he eventually became
(20:50):
I guess, an officer at the very Yeah, he was
a counterintelligence officer. His specialty was interrogating people. He used
the German that he picked up when he with that
family in Vienna just before the Nazis came to power
to interrogate Nazis that he ended up capturing, you know,
less than a decade later. Quite a turn of events
if you think about it.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Yeah, and pretty heavy stuff. And for all of this,
on V Day they say stick around. We don't want
you to go home. We'd like you to stick around
for a denazification mission. So all of a sudden he
was pulled away from his twelfth Regiment and the friends
he had met there, and he got depressed, and you know,
(21:33):
he was clearly affected with PTSD. They call it battle
fatigue at the time, and he checked himself into a
hospital at Nuremberg for PTSD treatment and eventually, well you
read it for Esme with love and Squalor is a
story about a World War two vet recovering from PTSD
in Germany.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
Yeah, it's a wonderful story.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
You know what.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
I just realized his stories, or at least the one
I read, But from reading about other stories, they seem
to have kind of like an O Henry quality of
things surprisingly turning out for the best in the end.
Is that correct?
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Uh? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (22:11):
Like he was optimistic, hopeful, like eventually he was hopeful.
It seems like in most of his stories, maybe not
a good day for banana fish, but some of the
other ones. All the most of the other ones, he
seemed to just be a sentimentalist. I guess where it
just didn't end too bleakly like it was bleak and
then in the end it got better at the very least.
(22:33):
That's how it seemed to me. For Esme with Lovin Squalor.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
Well Catcher and the Rye. Well, we can talk about
the ending a little bit. We don't want to give
it away too much. I guess we are gonna give
it away a little bit.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
Well where he ends up on a ranch living with
Trueman Cacody out west.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
We'll give a spoiler warning when that comes up. Okay,
So he finally got to go home, but he wasn't
coming home. He was discharged, but he told us fly, Hey,
I'm going to stay in Germany. I fell in love
with a woman named Sylvia and we got married. But
they were not married long. It was only eight months,
and he did not write during that period. So he
(23:11):
eventually would go back to New York and started to
sort of throw himself into the you know, the nightclubs
of the nineteen forties New York and sort of sleeping
around with women in New York. But he was you know,
he was suffering from PTSD at this time for sure.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
Yeah. Just one one little note on Sylvia, his first wife.
She was a Nazi party official who he arrested during
his denotification project and ended up marrying her, and he
referred to her as Saliva for the rest of his
life whenever he talk.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
Yeah. They his son was like, because there were rumors
that he had written stories about that marriage, and his son,
Matt was like, that's a joke. Like that didn't even
register in his life hardly. He did not write about it.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
So his his hitting the nightclubs and picking up the
dames is not doing it for him. It's not numbing things.
He's he realizes at some point that he needs a
different a different way forward. And I'm not sure where
he picks it up, but he started with Zen Buddhism.
(24:20):
I don't know where he was exposed to that, maybe
just in Greenwich Village in general, I'm not sure, but
that was that was the first step on a path
toward a lifelong search for enlightenment. And as we'll see,
he came to view writing as ultimately his path toward
enlightenment and therapy. But he started out by trying to
(24:41):
figure it out using like Zen, Buddhism and later on
hindu Vedic spirituality.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
Yeah. Absolutely, And part of the sort of spiritual awakening included, Hey,
I need to get out of New York if I
want to write and I want to finish this book
I'm working on this novel. New York is too distracting,
is too loud. I need more peace and quiet. I
need to be able to meditate. And so he left.
He left New York City nineteen forty nine and went
(25:12):
to Westport, Connecticut, and he finished A Catcher in the
Rye there, his obviously seminal work. And there was a
biographer who said J. D. Salinger spent ten years writing
The Catcher in the Rye and the rest of his
life regretting it. And that kind of puts the nail
on the head, because that was that book was such
(25:35):
a big deal and it put him in such a
spotlight that A he didn't like that spotlight, and b
he hated the book in publishing industry and everybody in it.
It seemed like almost.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Yes, So just a little bit on the publishing of
Catcher in the Rye right, like it was just an
immediate hit from what I can tell, people had been
sitting around waiting for it, it almost seems like. And
to date it sold something like sixty five million copies.
Sixty five million copies chuck about a half a million
every year.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
Still, So I got a couple of stats for you
if I may. Yeah, yeah, please, that's number eighteen all
time for novels. And I was kind of curious, do
you have any idea what the number one best selling
novel of all time in novel, not book, novel, novel
so not the Bible, right right?
Speaker 2 (26:33):
I would say how the West was won by Truman Capoti.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
No don Quixote, really, which makes sense because it was
sort of one of the first great novels. Okay, five
hundred million copies, which is more than double the next.
The Tale of Two Cities is next at two hundred million,
then Lord of the Rings, the Little Prince and the Hobbit,
and then Harry Potter dude owns numbers eleven through sixteen. Wow,
(27:03):
isn't that crazy?
Speaker 2 (27:04):
Yeah? I mean, that's imagine being a living, a living
writer who's just written those things in the last like
twenty or so years, and you own that many on
the top list. That's nuts.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
Well, imagine being Dan Brown then, because he's the modern
writer at number ten, the Da Vinci Code is the
number ten best selling hub.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
I believe that. Man, everybody was talking about that.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
Eighty million books. But yeah, number eighteen sixty five million
books and still selling strong is pretty great. Yeah, so
please continue.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
And he was able to live off of royalties for
the rest of his life. It was like, that's it.
I just struck. I'm fine for the rest of my life.
I'm not sure how long it took for that to
become clear. Maybe nineteen sixty five, I don't know, but
he did. He never needed to work again from that
point on, essentially, so when he wrote it, So there
(27:55):
was a biographer that likened it to a war novel
disguised as a coming of age story. Yeah, And what
they were saying was that, like, at least if you're
looking at it through the lens of J. D. Salinger,
the writer himself writing it like this was his spiritual Catharsis.
This was him finding a way to put World War
(28:19):
two behind him as best he could enough at least
to get on with his life, right. And like you said,
what he experienced in World War two informed the rest
of his life or colored the rest of his life
for the rest of his life. But this was like
this got out the darkest, gunkiest, worst stuff. It seems
(28:40):
like getting Catcher in the Rye out there.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
Yeah, I think so. And you know what, let's not
spoil the ending except to say that it does end
with some hope it does, because I don't think we
should even even say like people should read it. It's
just one of those books I think that like people
should read. I'm about to do that with Moby Dick.
I've never read it. And my buddy, our our friend
(29:05):
Joey Ciara, who did with his brother Andy, did the
theme song to this stuff you should know show. He
collects Moby Dick's and he's like obsessed with a book
and he's like, dude, just read it, just trust me
and read it. And I was like, all right, I'll
read it, okay. But Catcher in the Rise another one
I think where you know, just give it a read.
It's a great book, and it's just one that's I
(29:26):
hate to say, like it's an important work, but it
is sure.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
We won't give away the end, just suffice to say
that he finds the kidney downer he needs.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
That's right. So he has doesn't have a good experience
with the publishing process. Like I said, he hated it.
He fought with the editors. He didn't like the cover
of the book. The original cover was that kind of
kind of weird looking drawing of a carousel horse with
a little small bit of the New York City skyline
(30:00):
in the lower left. He didn't like his photo on
the back. He eventually, I believed, was able to get
that removed in the third printing. You can get a
lot of money if you got that first edition Catcher,
then you're holding on to something pretty valuable.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
Can you imagine, Chuck, how much those pages of Ketcher
and the Rye that were in his knapsack when he
stormed Normandy would be worth if surely they're still out
there somewhere. I cannot imagine how much some tech billionaire
would pay.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
For those Yeah, no, no, totally. And then like, and
I'll use it as a rolling paper.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
That's funny.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
Nine stories came next. That's a great one too. Most
of those were written before Ketcher was actually published, but
that was also a bestseller.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Those are short stories, right, a collection?
Speaker 1 (30:49):
Yeah, nine of them. Strangely, it could also refer to.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
A specific building or something like that.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
No, no, no, it could. I was joking because Ween, we've
talked about this. Ween's or ten Golden Country Greats didn't
have ten songs so awesome? It was because it was
the guys they played with. There were ten of them?
Or was it twelve? Why can't I remember?
Speaker 2 (31:09):
I don't remember. I don't know, all right, it's not
even a question in my memory, failing me. I didn't
have the four knowledge to lose to begin with.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
Yeah, yeah, it's twelve Golden Country Greats, but there's not
twelve songs. And people thought that was Ween making a joke.
But they were like, no, the's twelve Golden Country Greats
with these old timers from Nashville who played with us.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
So wait, one more thing. Well, then that's not a joke.
That's just a misunderstanding.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
Exactly so.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
About the actual title though, of Ween of the Catcher
in the Rye, we should tell people about that, because
I didn't know until yesterday.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
I guess yeah, this is also a spoiler. So if
you don't want to know, then don't listen to this part.
Go ahead. Is it a spoiler, sure, because it's in
the book.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
Oh it is, okay, forget it, forget it. Just read
the book everybody.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
No, no, you should say it because I think people that
are like I don't want to bother please tell me.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
Oh, okay, well, then the people who don't want to bother.
The Catcher in the Rye is taken from a Robert
Burns poem where he talks about when a body meets
a body coming through the rye, when a little body
catch a body, will somebody die? I think that's how
it ends, at the very least that's how David Niven
sings it in Murdered by Death. But what he's referring
(32:18):
to is the catcher in the Rye is him. He's
catching little kids from going off a cliff, little kids
playing in a field of rye, and as they're at
their most free and reckless in their abandonment, they are
in danger of going off this cliff, which would be
becoming adults, losing their childhood. And he sees himself as
(32:40):
the catcher, the person catching them from going off that
cliff so that they can remain children or innocent essentially forever.
Nice summation, Thank you, thank you, cliff Notes.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
Oh we should do one on cliffs Notes. I always
wonder who Cliff was.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
Great, great idea.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
So maybe we'll take a break here in a minute,
but we'll just finish by saying that over the next
decade after Catcher, he's publishing other things. But that is
when things got started to get a little weird for him,
in that he was a sensation, and there were reporters
knocking on his door, and he was just receiving tons
and tons of mail from kids who thought he was
(33:23):
this guru and like this sage delivering wisdom to a
younger generation. And all these other younger writers were inspired
to take up writing, and it was just a little
too much for someone who was seeking solitude and spiritual enlightenment.
So we will take a break and let you know
(33:44):
what happened right after this, all right, So when we
(34:08):
left J. D. Salinger was a literary sensation. The walls
were closing in on him as far as his privacy
and his sort of search for spirituality anonymity. Well, I
don't think he wanted to be anonymous, necessarily because he
published work, but he definitely wanted privacy. If you want
to be anonymous, he would have published it under a
pen name. I would imagine Truman Capodi. In fifty three, though,
(34:33):
he bought a ninety acre property in Cornish, New Hampshire.
It's about four hours from Manhattan, a very lovely, quiet
farming community back then it probably still is. And he left.
But Dave is keen to point out, and as our
biographers of Salalinger, this wasn't him saying I'm removing myself
from the world. I'm going to be a recluse. He
just wanted to get out of the hustle and bustle
(34:54):
and lived the quiet life. He had friends there. He
went into town and got his mail, he went and
ate the local lunch place called Harrington Spa. He had friends,
He had adult friends. He also had teenage friends, which
you know, we'll get into you know, the problematic nature
of that later, But there was a group of teenagers
(35:15):
from the high school there. He was in his early thirties,
and he had connected with young people in his life
and kind of that's why he could write in that voice.
So easily, I think, and he just you know, they
thought he was one of the gang, and they loved
his advice, and so they would kind of all hang
out here and there. And so it's not like he
disappeared completely at that point.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
No, he didn't need to. He just was getting away
from the people who really wanted something from him, and
instead he introduced himself to a place where he could
just be Jerry basically. And it's not like the people
there didn't know who he was. They just weren't necessarily
as starstruck or seeking him as a guru like other
people were, and people would still come visit him from
(35:55):
time to time. He was known to sometimes just be like, look,
I'm not a guru. I don't know anything that you
don't know. I just wrote a book. I can't give
you anything. To answering the door with a shotgun, you know,
and being like, get off my property. It depended, i'm sure,
in his mood. But he had fashioned a life for
himself and he wasn't the recluse that he's famous for now.
(36:17):
Like you were saying, there, there was actually one specific
incident that triggered that reclusiveness that hadn't been there before
and he stayed in Cornish. She didn't move from Cornish.
But if a person can withdraw from the world more
than he had by moving to Cornish, he did it masterfully.
And it all is to blame on a girl named
(36:38):
Shirley Blainey.
Speaker 1 (36:39):
Yeah. So she was a teenager who worked for the
school newspaper or wrote for the school newspaper and said,
kind of interview you for the school newspaper. And he
did not do press at all, but he was like, sure,
I'll do this thing for the local school paper. And
because he you know, he believed in that kind of thing. Instead,
it was published in the regional newspaper, the Daily Eagle,
(37:02):
Twins State Telescope, and that was it for him. He
was like, I can't even trust this kid to interview
me for a school paper. Everybody wants something from me.
It's unforgivable. It was a betrayal and so that was it.
He built a fence around his property. He quit going
into town, he quit throwing and going to parties. When
(37:24):
those his little teenager buddies would come around to hang out,
he wouldn't come to the door anymore. And that's when
his life as the recluse started, even though his son
Matt will say, you know, all this is written about
his reclusiveness and he just didn't want to be around.
I mean, that's what a recluse is. But he said
(37:45):
they made it out to be like he was just
this crazy hermit, and he was like, he just didn't
want to be bothered and he just wanted to write
without all the noise. Yeah, was his son's take.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
But his social life seems to have been definitely objectively
curtail after that, Like he was much more social up
until that point.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
Oh, no, one doubts that.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
Yeah, his famous quote was surely Blainey a real phony.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
Was it really?
Speaker 2 (38:10):
No, it wouldn't surprise me, it'd be great. So he
becomes that kind of recluse, and to some people that
was like, oh, we gotta really find him now. There
was a nineteen sixty one Life article on him where
they the I guess the author came to his house
and took pictures of his mailbox, got a picture of
(38:32):
him working in his yard, like really intrusive stuff. People
felt like, okay with doing that just because he was
a recluse, you know what I mean. Yeah, and that's
a really difficult thing to deal with for him, but
he still sought connection with certain people. I think it
was just you had to you had to earn his
(38:52):
trust or he had to find you attractive.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
Yeah, it was a pretty small circle. He got together
with a young woman named Claire Douglas. They had met
when she was sixteen and he was thirty two, and
they kept in touch via letters and things, and they
started dating when she was nineteen at Radcliffe student at Radcliffe.
They bonded over religion. You mentioned early Vedanta and Hinduism.
(39:22):
That is what they really got into at that point,
and he really immersed himself into sort of that sort
of religious study in philosophy, and the basic tenets of
which are that God is in everything, God is everywhere,
God is you, God is me. That kind of thing
very George Harrison, I think.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
Yeah, but like at least a decade before George Harrison
was ever exposed to this stuff, Like this guy was
doing this.
Speaker 1 (39:49):
In like the mid the sixties. Oh okay, I thought
it was no sixties.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
He and Claire got married in nineteen fifty five, so
like he was into it in the early midfifth at
the latest. So yeah, yeah, he was definitely into that,
and his son I think no. No. His daughter, who
will meet in a second, later said that she believes
that he got in over his head. Essentially, he took
(40:15):
it all to too much to heart, and he turned
his back on the world and became a quote strange
man because of the degree to which he exposed himself
to religion. I get the impression. Doesn't matter what the
religion was, it was the degree.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
Yeah, I mean his kids have two different takes. His daughter,
Margaret would write a book that was not very flattering,
said that, you know, he basically held my mom hostage there.
He did disturbing things. He drank urine, he spoke in tongues.
He became a very strange man that she didn't recognize.
(40:51):
And this is she had grown up really loving her father.
Whereas Matt Sallenger who played Captain America No the nineteen
ninety film Captain America and was in Revenge of the Nerds.
Speaker 2 (41:04):
Which who was he in Revenge of the Nerds.
Speaker 1 (41:07):
He was one of the guys in the in the frat,
the hot frat, Yeah, with not the nerds. Hell yeah.
Married what was his last name? Oh, I don't remember.
He's great though I love that guy, wonderful. But yeah,
Matt s Allener was an actor and producer for a while.
But he he says that his sisters. There's a great
(41:31):
article from The Guardian from a few years ago, twenty nineteen.
I think with Matt where he said his sister Margaret,
he loves her and respects her. But he says those
accounts are gothic tales. So it's kind of one of
those things where two kids have two different takes on
their famous slash weird parent.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
Right, But I mean like those are pretty at odds
with one another, pretty diametrical, you know.
Speaker 1 (41:53):
I agree. I don't think Matt said he was some
great dad either, because he would He built a bunker
basically to write it in a writing studio, and was
not a doting father, and you know, writing was his
most important thing. He used to say, do not disturb
me unless this, unless the house is burning down, like
leave me alone, family, so I can do my important work.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
So two things, One, it's Teed McGinley. Two, the image
of JD. Salinger that people popularly hold is still very
much widespread, the one that they've they've held forever, essentially
since he became a recluse, but like a brilliant writer
and blah blah blah. The I guess a different kind
(42:38):
of piggy esque view that his daughter has of him
started to emerge in the nineties. Peggy wrote a book
called Dream Catcher, which you mentioned. I think it came
out in two thousand.
Speaker 1 (42:52):
Who's Peggy?
Speaker 2 (42:53):
Peggy is his daughter Margaret?
Speaker 1 (42:55):
Oh oh, that was her nickname.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
Yeah, And in the book she talks she talked at
length about how her mother was treated and her mother
was that Ragcliffe co ed Claire, right, is it Claire Douglas, Yes,
Claire Douglas And apparently J. D. Salinger drove Claire Douglas
(43:16):
like to the brink of insanity. They got divorced in
nineteen sixty seven, and according to her side of the story,
he was extremely emotionally abusive to her. He would tell
her that he didn't love her. He made her like
live in this like it wasn't necessarily her choice to
live without heat or hot water and grow their own
(43:40):
food and be quiet because we're thinking about, you know, enlightenment.
Like she went along with it because she was nineteen
and he was in his early mid thirties. So the
stuff that has come out about him, starting in about
the late nineties and then continuing on as different women
in his life life over time have kind of come
(44:01):
forward and been like yes, and there's also this, there's no,
there's not like a smoking gun, right, it's not like
anything like on a Harvey Weinstein level. But his image
has definitely turned a little bit because it has become
clear that he used his age and experiences as an
older person to control and manipulate younger girls to his
(44:27):
to often their detriment, for his short term pleasure.
Speaker 1 (44:32):
Essentially, yeah, absolutely, it seem like the move was, like,
I mean, it's called grooming, is what the word we
use today. But find someone in their mid teens and
begin a friendship with them and write letters and pay
them a lot of attention and stuff like that, and
then get together, try and get together with them at
(44:55):
least or get together with them in a physical way
when when they're legally able to do so. So that
happened a few different times. There was a fourteen year
old named Jane Miller. He was thirty at the time.
He pursued her via friendship in letters and then which
she was nineteen, they had sexual intercourse, and he dumped
(45:16):
her immediately afterward. She came out and wrote about it
after he died. She said that she didn't want to
write about it while he was still alive. And then
he eventually started dating a freshman at Yale named Joyce
Maynard in nineteen ninety eight. She wrote a lot about
their relationship. I think they were together about a year.
(45:37):
Said he was very manipulative and that he would take
advantage of naive young women, and then I believe he
finally married remarried again in ninety two. He was to
a woman named Colleen O'Neil. She's like my age basically
at the time, she was twenty one years old and
he was sixty nine years old. And they stayed married
(45:58):
for what eighteen eighteen years until he died.
Speaker 2 (46:01):
Yeah, and she was a nurse and apparently was also
a bit of a nurse to him as well as
a wife from what I can tell. Like a good
example I saw was that he had gone very much
death essentially very hard of hearing, but he was too
vain to wear a hearing aid, so she would have
to repeat to him in a louder voice with somebody
(46:21):
you know had just said to him when they were
out and about in town or whatever. Right, so, you know,
twenty one year old, sixty nine year old type stuff.
But she apparently is I guess, the least affected of
all of his wives or girlfriends. She co is co
(46:42):
trustee of his work with his son Matt. She's still
very much in the JD. Salinger pro Sallenger camp, clearly,
but I guess kind of the antithesis to her would
be Joyce Maynard, who was the freshman at Yale, and
she has written about their relation ship so much that
(47:02):
people have come to look at her as an opportunist,
somebody who's basically just trading on the one year she
spent with J. D. Salinger. She's been trying to make
money off of that or get fame or publicity off
of it for years. Another interpretation that's kind of come
around lately is that she's been telling the story of
a victim who was manipulated by an older man, and
(47:25):
when you dig into her story, she was like suddenly
the hot New York literati it girl all of a sudden.
When when they met, she had just been on the
cover of New York magazine, on the cover with a
cover story, but they also put her picture on the cover,
and he got in touch with her and said like, hey,
(47:45):
I think you're writing's great, and they started to write
letters back and forth. He convinced her to drop out
of Yale with just a few months before graduating, to
give up her her job working as a New York
Times writer, which she'd just gotten, and to blow off
a book tour that was going to start her career
and instead moved to Cornish, New Hampshire with him.
Speaker 1 (48:03):
And she did.
Speaker 2 (48:04):
She was nineteen at the time, very much like Claire
Douglas and at the very least, even if he wasn't
overtly manipulating her like her life went off the rails
because she got involved with this incredibly revered older man
who she thought loved her, and after a year he
was done with her and she moved out. Apparently it
(48:27):
was over kids or something. Ostensibly she wanted kids, he didn't,
and they were like, no, this isn't going to work.
But yeah, Joyce Mayard has gone through a bit of
a reform over the last several years, at least as
far as some people are concerned.
Speaker 1 (48:42):
Yeah. Absolutely, And you mentioned tech bros buying things Maynard,
she sold fourteen. She auctioned fourteen personal letters from Salinger,
and Peter Norton of Norton Antivirus bought them for two
hundred thousand dollars. He offered to give them back to JD.
Soudlenger or to burn them, and I think wasn't even answered,
(49:03):
so he just locked them up, and I think still
has possession of them.
Speaker 2 (49:06):
Yeah, and supposedly that was a dime a dozen kind
of thing other women came for and was like, I
had treasured letters that he wrote to me too. It
was Yeah, So he's become a study in one of
those things where it's like, Okay, this guy was a
little more complicated and like you said, at the outset
problematic than anyone knew or realized, and yet his work
(49:28):
is still just as amazing as it was before. You
know what I mean.
Speaker 1 (49:34):
Yeah, I mean he quit publishing completely and like I said,
kept writing. In a one later interview, he did not
do many but he said, there's a marvelous piece in
not publishing. It's peaceful. Still, publishing is a terrible invasion
of my privacy. I like to write, I love to write,
but I write just for myself. And my own pleasure.
(49:56):
I pay for this kind of attitude. I'm known as strange,
as a strange loof kind of man. But all I'm
doing is trying to protect myself and my work. And
that article with Matt Salinger, like there is a lot
of work that he did, and he, Matt Sallenger, is
going to publish some of it. Apparently he was directed
to publish some of it. I read an article years
(50:16):
ago right after he died where they said between twenty
ten and twenty fifteen, there will be five new novels.
And you know, none of that has happened yet, nothing
has come out, and Matt Salinger is just like you
know it. It's gonna take as long as it's gonna take.
Like there's tons of stuff, and I respect my father's work,
and it's we're never gonna license stuff. You're never gonna
(50:38):
see it catching the right coffee mug. It's not going
to be a movie. But like, I want to publish
this stuff correctly, and that takes a lot a lot
of time, and like back.
Speaker 2 (50:48):
Off, Yeah, so what else you got anything else?
Speaker 1 (50:54):
I got nothing else? I mean, new new stuff's going
to come out at some point. Curious to see what
that looks like. I bet some will be about the
Glass Family. I think for sure that was the family
and many of those short stories that he wrote about
recurring characters Franny and Zooey and stuff like that. So
I imagine there's more Glass Family stuff in there. I
(51:16):
think that's been confirmed.
Speaker 2 (51:17):
Dave turned up a really great analysis of JD. Salinger's
writing by a guy named Michichi Michiko Kakutani. It's really
insightful and also just as approachable as JD. Salinger's writing is.
It's really really good stuff. So I thought it was
a pretty good introduction to JD. Salinger and the whole
It takes a look at like the whole his whole career,
(51:40):
from you know, how lauded it was to how it
kind of at the end some of the last stuff
he published, people were like, what's going on here? Like
this is a little odd, you know what I mean?
Speaker 1 (51:52):
Yeah to me that I like to check that.
Speaker 2 (51:53):
I will send it to you. Since Chuck asked me
to send something and we're out of stuff to talk
about J D. Salinger, I think think that means it's
time for a listener, mayl.
Speaker 1 (52:03):
I'm going to call this Red Stripe confirmation for joshus. Hey, guys,
you mentioned red Stripe beer on the recent episode about
scuba and reminded me of a story worked at a
country club in Granger, Indiana as a banquet ship. I
think it said shift, I know it's not scheft. By
the way, We did a Caribbean Island themed event for
the members and the bar manager, and the bar manager
(52:26):
ordered a couple of cases of Red Stripe, told the
bartenders to push it so it would sell through. The
first guy to a bottle tasted it and said it
was terrible instead of the bar and told everyone not
to get it. We only sold two bottles. A few
months later, we did an invitational event just after it
was in the movie The Firm, where two guys were
drinking it before they went scuba diving as part of
(52:48):
an escape plan. As Josh mentioned, the bartenders were asked
again to push the Red Stripe and I was putting
out appetizers and one of the first guys to come
off the golf course said, Hey, that's that beer they
were drinking in that and he said it was pretty
good and was telling his buddies about the movie and
Red stripe and it sold out in an hour, same
group of people. That recognition from the movie really helped
(53:11):
sell the beer. So Josh was right, ever underestimate the
power of marketing. And that is from Steve.
Speaker 2 (53:18):
Thanks Steve. I love it when I'm right. I especially
love him when people write in to tell me I
was right.
Speaker 1 (53:23):
You know good stuff.
Speaker 2 (53:25):
If you want to be like Steve and tell me
that I was right, bring it on. You can send
it via email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (53:37):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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