1.1 This is a work in progress. To submit revisions or new entries please email me.
1.2 While Stephen Foskett's Bananafish Pages have long served as an excellent JDS resource on the Internet, Matt Kozusko whom I fi
rst "met" on the Bananafish Mailing List then administered by Stephen, proposed and began work on this FAQ (the very first draft is still available on his site for the evolutionally incline
d)
1.3 It is our object to gather as much neutral information as is available on JDS and organize it in a useful, presentable manner. Out of respect for a man who has repeatedly indicated his displeasure with the making public of his p
ersonal life, we will refrain from speculation (for the most part) and will offer only such material as is available to the public at large. (And, no, we do not EVER plan to put up ANY pictures of JDS here.)
1.4 At least part of the purpose of this FAQ is to prevent the rehashing of what is basically fixed and stable information on the discussion list. Members new to the list will be encouraged to read the FAQ, thus preventing questions li
ke "Is JDS really Thomas Pynchon/ Giles Weaver/ Willam Wharton/ Whoever?".
1.5 We realise that JDS himself may not approve of the idea but in our view such an effort is required to counter the spread of canards about him, helped in no small measure by ill-informed too-lazy-to-check-facts media. This FAQ is f
or those who are passionate about his work and we hope that if it satisfactorily answers even some of the questions about JDS perhaps the poor old man would be left in peace by the likes of Betty Eppes and those who stalk him first and write for Esquire l
ater.
1.6 While I'll try to keep this FAQ updated and edited till such time that Matt Kozusko is back from Camp Shakespeare, if you really want to be "with it" you have no option but to join the Bananafish Mailing List, now adminis
tered and maintained by Tim O'Connor. To get an overview of the list, you could perhaps first visit the archives and then subscribe by sending the message "subscribe BANANAFISH" (without the quotation marks ofcourse and with a blank subject header)..
This list has been around (in various incarnations) since January of
1996. Since then, certain topics (most of which follow below) have been
beaten to death and beyond. As with most faqs, the idea here is to run
through a list of those especially-beaten-to-death topics so that new
list members know what not to post. For instance, after reading this
faq, you will know not to ask whether Salinger and Pynchon are the same
person, or whether somebody can please kindly send you the unpublished
stories as you've read everything else (mostly) and are anxious to see
the early work.
If you've been around the internet for a while, you know that certain
sorts of behavior are annoying. If you haven't been around for a while,
you should have a look at a netiquette site or two. And consider
"lurking" for a week or so before you post your first message. At the
very least, read this entire document before you post anything.
1. When you "quote" the message you are replying to, edit the quoted
material. There is no reason to quote 42 lines of a post that everybody
has already got and then append a two-line response to it (or a six-line
response, or a twelve-line one, etc.). Editing posts is simple
etiquette, and it also saves disk space for subscribers whose mail
resides on servers.
2. Be sure to specify who the author of the quoted material is (ie, the
person who wrote it and posted it first, not the person who quoted it before you).
3. It is a good idea to send "I agree" and "me too" replies to the
original poster only. If you are feeling especially chummy, and you
want the whole list to know how intensely you agree with somebody else's
post, find some sort of qualification to add to your emphatic
head-nodding, and avoid quoting the other post entirely.
Some think this list is for people who want to talk about Salinger, and
some think this list is for people who have an interest in Salinger to
talk about Salinger and other things. Similar debates have raged on the
usenet for decades, and nowhere does there appear to be a satisfactory
solution. Since there are lots of "lifers" on this list and something
of a list community, discussion won't stick exclusively to Salinger.
This FAQ is possible only through the support of the JDS fans around the world, mostly but not limited to the members of the Bananafish Mailing List. Without their help, this document would be pretty skimpy indeed. While I try in the body of this document
to individually credit wherever a particular piece of information stems from a particular source, it may not be possible in all the cases where my memory fails me. So,
please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: ( ( ( ( ) ) ) ) .I wish to specially hand-deliver these to: Matt Kozusko, the guiding spirit behind this project. Will Hochman, the pundit in the temple of Salinger, for his generous sharing of resources. Stephen Foskett, for making it all possible by starting Bananafish Mailing List. Tim O'Connor, who currently administers the List.
In addition, much is owed to the following books for the information available in these pages:
J.D.Salinger, Revisited by Warren French In Search of J.D.Salinger by Ian Hamilton Salinger, Ed. by Henry Anatole Grunwald Critical Essays on Salinger's Catcher in the Rye Ed. by Joel Salzberg A Religious Response To The Existential Dilemma In The Fiction of J.D.Salinger by Elizabeth N. Kurian Salinger's Glass Stories as a Composite Novel by Eberhard Alsen
Good to start with a non-question, isn't it? We firmly advocate wide propagation of the theory first propounded on the Bananafish mailing list:
From: "Jory H. John"
X-Sender: jory@surfer3.surf.scs.unr.edu
To: "'bananafish@cassatt.Mass-USR.COM'"
Subject: Conspiracy
Sender: owner-bananafish@cassatt.Mass-USR.COM
Reply-To: bananafish@cassatt.Mass-USR.COM
X-Status:
It was explained to me the other day, by a source that I am not able to
disclose, that J.D. Salinger, noted recluse, occasional author, funny guy,
is really a panel of 8 men, that convened once a month for five years,
creating Holden Caulfield, the Glasses, notables such as doomed child
prodigy Teddy, and Huckleberry Hound. I didn't believe it until I noticed
in "Raise High," the small inscription on the inside front cover that
read, "We're really 8 men." I have also heard, and don't quote me on this,
that each letter in Salinger stands for the first name of each of the
eight men. I don't think I'm paranoid, merely sensable. How, I ask you,
would one man be able to create the amount of material that the mythical
J.D. supposedly put forth? Impossible. And I do believe I've made my
point.
Jory
As for the "first" marriage, well, we just have Hamilton's account according to which she was French (Source: JDS letters) and her name was Sylvia.
"According to army friends of JDS, she was a doctor, but there was some indecision as to whether she was a psychologist or an oesteopath. 'You know one of those doctors who is almost a doctor.' They were married in September 1945. We had a glimpse of them
as a couple at Christmas 1945, idyllically happy and living in Gunzenhausen, Germany...The marriage lasted eight months. Salinger did take Sylvia back to the States probably in May 1946 when his contract would have expired. But 'she could not separate he
rself from her European ties,' a friend has explained. 'She went back to France and got a divorce.'"
Anyway, in 1952 or 1953, Salinger met Claire Douglas, daughter of a well-known British art critic Robert Langton Douglas, at one of the Cornish local get-togethers. (Hamilton's book has some interesting trivia for those so inclined) Apparently, at that ti
me the 19 year old Claire was already involved with a Harvard Business School graduate and sometime in 1954 she married him. The marriage lasted but a few months.
'The record merely states that "Franny" was published in The New Yorker on Janauary 29, 1955, and Salinger was married to Claire Douglas on February 17. The wedding took place in Barnard, Vermont, and shortly afterwards Salinger's Cornish neighbors jocula
rly elected him Town Hargreave. The title, it seems, is given to the community's "most recently married man." and the idea was that if "anybody's hogs got loose, it was the Hargreave's job to round them up and bring them back.'. Indeed some Cornish re
sidents have said that his concern for privacy was not thought to be all that remarkable until after he got married.'
The marriage lasted till 1967, when his wife obtained a divorce in Newport, New Hampshire.
From this marriage, Salinger has two kids:
1955: Daughter, Margaret Ann, Dec 10.
1960: Son, Matthew, Feb 13. Matthew Salinger at the Internet Movie Data Base
Married to Betsey Jane Becker. Two kids, Gannon and Avery)
Sometime in the 1990's Salinger is reported to be married for the third time to one Colleen O'Neil. Whether or not there is any connection to Oona (O Neil, y'see Oona O'Neil ), our gossipy selves would love to know more about, ne
ver mind JDS' silent admonishing, disapproving voice: "Stop that!"
Going by the media-coverage of auction of sundry JDS-letters to fans
waxing eloquent on Grateful Dead lyrics, Eastern mysticism et al, it
would seem that in select instances JDS does reply to mail. Going by
the latest accounts in Esquire, it would seem a good idea not to go
a-visiting, though. He might just decide to run you over with his Land
Rover, if sufficiently peeved. No, seriously, if you wanna take a
chance, write to him care of the Windsor Post Office, Windsor,
Claremont, New Hampshire..(I'll check the exact location, or maybe you
can do that--my knowledge of the US-geography is at best not even
sketchy), and who knows, you just might hear from him. Or you could
write to him c/o Harold Ober & Associates, though the chances are that
he doesn't get mail forwarded.
One sure way of hearing from him, via his lawyers, would be to have,
say, a web-site with annotated texts of his copyrighted letters. Or
something.
Recently, one Joyce Maynard, 44, a novelist and journalist has announced her decision to break a 25-year silence about her alleged nine-month relationship with JDS by writing about it in a memoir memoir she plans to publish in 1999.
Apparently, the story goes, JDS wrote to Maynard in the spring of 1972 after reading a magazine article "An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life," which was accompanied by her photograph.
According to her, she visited Salinger, then 53, in Cornish that summer and stayed until the
couple split when spring broke.
"I viewed him as my mentor and teacher and the person I trusted most in the
world," she said in an interview from her home north of San Francisco. "He was the first man I
ever loved. My purpose is not to divulge his story. I'm sticking to my own story."
Maynard told the New York Times in November 1997 that her relationship with Salinger began when he wrote her "a deeply thoughtful, very moving" one-page letter. "That precipitated a
correspondence that remained through my freshman year at Yale."
She said she has 20 to 30 letters from him, but will not quote from them in
her book. "I will refer to the ideas and thoughts in the letters."
The Times said Maynard went to visit Salinger, 78, last week for the first time in 25 years. Asked if he minded that she planned to write about him, she said, "You better ask him that. I don't for a moment think he would want me to write this."
What about the stories Salinger published before "Bananafish"?
Salinger published a total of thirty-five short stories between
1940 and 1965. Nine of them were collected in Nine Stories, in
1953, and four more have been collected since ("Franny" with
"Zooey," and "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" with
"Seymour: an Introduction"). The other twenty-two (including
1965's "Hapworth") are available to anyone with the
determination to dig through rolls of microfiche or bound
copies of older magazines at the library (don't forget about
Interlibrary Loan...).
All of the uncollected stories (as they are somewhat
affectionately known) except for two were originally published
before 1948's "A Perfect Day for bananafish." "A Girl I knew"
(2/48) and "Blue Melody" (9/48), published in Good Housekeeping
and Cosmopolitan, respectively, are the only two
post-"Bananafish" stories not included in Nine Stories, which
features (incidentally or otherwise) only New Yorker pieces.
Ian Hamilton has suggested that Salinger quite consciously
broke from the other magazines, perhaps wishing to be
associated with The New Yorker and not with Cosmo or other less
intellectual publications. For a complete list, please jump to Uncollected & Unpublished Stories
What's the skinny on Hapworth 16, 1924? "Hapworth 16, 1924," is
a (long) short story originally published on June 19, 1965, in
The New Yorker magazine. It consists primarily of a lengthy
letter home from seven-year-old Seymour Glass, who is attending
camp Hapworth. Many Salinger fans--and even more Salinger
critics--have disparaged the story, pointing to the inside
jacket of Franny and Zooey, where Salinger mentions the "real
enough danger" that he may eventually "bog down, perhaps
disappear entirely, in [his] own methods, locutions, and
mannerisms." "Hapworth's" 30,000 words of precocious
Salinger-speak are too much for them. At least as many have
enjoyed the story, though, and revere it along with the rest of
the Salinger canon. There is no reason not to read it, if you
like Salinger.
Since late 1996 when the book was first found listed at amazon.com when it was first revealed that Salinger had arranged to have the story republished in
book format by Orchises press, speculation has been rife. Details of the publication are
monumentally vague, and the actual publication has been delayed
several times. There are various conjectures --some of it less
than pleasant--as to why Salinger has chosen to republish the
story in book format, but if nothing else it makes sense:
"Franny," "Zooey," "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters," and
"Seymour: an Introduction" were all published individually in
The New Yorker before they were paired up and collected into
book form.
While the main texts have various references and allusions strewn in, particularly in Hapworth, JDS is on record to have actually named some of his favo(u)rites. The following excerpts from William Maxwell's , "J.D.Salinger," Book of the Mont
h Club News, July 1951, pp 5-6 would be interesting for those looking for literary influences on JDS. JDS was describing a visit to Sarah Lawrence short-story class. But then the interviewer was a New Yorker friend, the novelist and
editor of the New Yorker.
I enjoyed the day but it isn't something I'd ever want to do again. I got very oracular and literary. I found myself labelling all the writers I respect...A writer, when he's asked to discuss his craft,
ought to get up and call out in a loud voice just the names of the writers he loves. I love Kafka, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Proust, O'Casey, Rilke, Lorca, Keats, Rimbaud, Burns, E.Bronte, Jane Austen, Henry James, Blake,
Coleridge. I won't name any living writers. I don't think it's right.
And in another context, about writing in general, he went on to say:
I think writing is a hard life. But it's brought me enough happiness that I don't th
ink I'd ever deliberately dissuade anybody (if he had the talent) from taking it up. The compensations are few, but when they come, they're very beautiful.
While Sonny would refer you to an alternate explanation that he has worked out quite conveniently for quetions of this sort, at The Answer , Matt has the following to offer on this:
There is, of course, no single correct answer to this question. I offer at least the following suggested answer, distilled from my undergraduate thesis on the story. It is largely incomplete due to length limitations. We are (somewhat passively) seeking
alternative interpretations to offer here, so email us if you have one.
The reason for Seymour's suicide has two basic components: the spiritual depravity of the world around him, and his struggle with his own spiritual shortcomings. The spiritual problem of the outside world is mostly a matter of material greed, especially
in the west, while his own spiritual problem is more a matter of intellectual greed (or "intellectual treasure"--see "Zooey").
In addressing the suicide, we should distinguish between "See More Glass" and Seymour Glass because they are slightly different characters. Or, if you like, they are the same character in different stages of development. Whatever the case, the "reasons
" for the suicide shift slightly in emphasis as the character changes. Buddy himself seems to admit this in_S:AI_ when he confesses that the Seymour of "Bananafish" ("See-More") resembles Buddy more than the real Seymour. That is, Buddy apologizes for h
aving imposed his own erroneous interpretation of Seymour's suicide in the early story ("Bfish") as he tries to set the record straight in the later work ("Teddy" and the Glass saga).
Part of setting straight that record is the story "Teddy," which Buddy also mentions (though not by name). "Teddy" is a retelling and an explanation of "Bananafish" from a later perspective. Of course, it's a distinctive story in its own right with or
without "Bfish," but the parallels and connections are striking: the two are published in the same magazine precisely 5 years apart, to the issue; the one opens _Nine Stories_ while the other closes it; both are about the death of an intellectually and s
piritually advanced American male; both deaths are tragic, but not as far as the protagonist in either case is concerned; both involve water and a prophetic, slightly nasty young girl; etc.
"Teddy" re-tells "Bfish" by stating explicitly what "Bananafish" attempts to symbolize via clever metonymy: the apples in the Eden myth are full of "knowledge and intellectual stuff," which, if pursued with too much zeal, can prevent spiritual developmen
t. In the earlier story, apples aredisguised as bananas, apparently so as not to injure the reader withoverly-blunt symbols. As the soul progresses, it unlearns the "differences" that people--particularly westerners and especially Americans--understand
via the apple/banana. See-More has realized that he cannot get rid of enough apple-banana to make any further spiritual progress in this life, so, rather than waste time, he commits suicide. He is the bananafish who cannot escape the hole and achieve o
neness with God, so he has to start over again.
But the anti-materialism in the story also has to be considered. Salinger, perhaps still a little reluctant in 1948 to abandon anti-materialism, an early preoccupation of his, in favor of simple anti-'intellectual-treasurism,' leaves threads of the former
sticking out of the story all over the place. Muriel ("material?"), like her mother, is shallow, fashion-conscious, and unwilling to learn German in order to read delicate, world-weary poets like Rilke. Sybil's reference to the greedy tigers in "Little
Black Sambo" and her connection to Eliot's "Wasteland" also suggest a problem with material preoccupation/spiritual neglect. These strains of anti-materialism in the story complicate the suicide because they suggest that Seymour is opting out of a world
that is too materially inclined for him, instead of one in which he himself is responsible for his own unhappines and spiritual depravity. Both sets of circumstances--Seymour's own intellectual greed along with the general material greed by which he is
sur --surely contribute to his suicide, but Buddy's later qualifications and the story "Teddy" highlight the "intellectual greed" reading.
In summary: The reasons for Seymour's suicide are muddled in "Bananafish," with several different factors coming into play. As Buddy-Salinger thinks more about the character of Seymour between 1948 and 1953, he changes his interpretation a bit to favor
a vision of Seymour troubled by his own spiritual shortcomings (the result of too much intellectual treasure) as much as by the shortcomings of the people and the world around him. It would be easy enough to write off the "intellectual treasure" approach
to "Bananafish" altogether, making it exclusively a later revision by Salinger-Buddy, and making "Bananafish" a story about a man mortally wary of material pursuits in the west, except that the central symbol of "Bananafish" is a metonymic substitution f
or the Edenic apple. Thus, the apple, the intellectual treasure, is a component all along, beginning as simple "genius" in Joe Varioni and Raymond Ford and progressing through the Seymours and on into Teddy, by which time, as Zooey nicely reminds us, Sal
inger's geniuses have figured out how to be unsmart.
What is the relationship between Salinger and Thomas Pynchon?
Both are reclusive 20th-century American novelists/writers with
a certain sheen to their prose which at times suggests a
correlation. The two have very little to do with each other
outside of this, and they are most certainly not the same
person. A reasonable sampling of the work of each writer will
reveal this much.
The following article may be of some interest which appeared around the time the news of possible Hapworth publication first appeared:
"The return of J.D. Salinger, sort of: by Dwight Garner".
No one seems certain why Salinger chose next month to break his
self-imposed publishing exile - perhaps there's just something in the
air. Literary recluses Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo both have new
novels due out this year (Pynchon's ""Mason & Dixon" will be published
this spring; DeLillo's novel "Underworld" is slated for fall); who can
blame Salinger for wanting to complete this literary Bermuda Triangle?
Literary conspiracy buffs are certain to come crawling out from under
their woodpiles. Remember the old canard about Salinger and Pynchon
being the same person? Or about Pynchon being the Unabomber? Now we can
expect a new bushel of giddy theories: Salinger is really both Pynchon
and DeLillo! They've been taking turns being the Unabomber, with Ted
Kaczynski as the patsy! Let's hope Pierre Salinger - Hmm ... any
relation to J.D.? - stumbles upon the assorted Web sites.
If Salinger does have his finger to the wind, he may have noticed that
Pynchon (who hides in plain sight in New York with his wife, the
literary agent Melanie Jackson, and their young son Jackson), has begun
poking his neck from his shell in recent years. Among other things, he's
written liner notes for an album by the band Lotion. (I know one of the
band member's girlfriends, who's had coffee with Pynchon: "He's very
sweet and sort of shy," she told me. "And he looks a bit like a
rabbit.") He's also rumored to be the author of a series of wildly
cerebral letters to the editor of a small Northern California newspaper,
written under a pseudonym. These missives have recently been collected
in book form as "The Letters of Wanda Tinasky."
What's more, New York magazine's Nancy Jo Sales reported recently that
in 1994 Pynchon agreed to look over a script for the John Laroquette
Show (yikes!) that involved him. According to the show's head writer,
Don Reo, Pynchon's agent called with a few of the novelist's suggested
changes. "First, you call him Tom, and no one ever calls him Tom."
Second, the script had Pynchon giving a friend a Willy DeVille T-shirt
as a gift. The agent said that although Pynchon "likes Willy DeVille, he
would prefer if it were a T-shirt with Roky Erickson of the 13th Floor
Elevators."
Roky Erickson? Pynchon sounds like he genuinely rocks. Sales, who
surreptitiously followed the reclusive writer around for a day or two
and watched him buy health food, ultimately described him this way: "a
kind of cross between 'The Nutty Professor' (Jerry Lewis') and Caine in
'Kung Fu.'" You certainly can't say that about John Updike.
Should Salinger choose to look to Pynchon for inspiration on living the
Good Life, Hermit Division, he has a few options. He could toss off some
liner notes for the (unfortunately-named) Dublin-based band Rollerskate
Skinny, which maintains a Web site describing its members as a bunch of
"J.D. Salinger-inspired guitar abusers," whatever that means. Or, if
"Hapworth 16, 1924" wins a major book award this year, Salinger could
reprise Pynchon's prankish non-appearance at the 1974 National Book
Award ceremonies, where his novel "Gravity's Rainbow" was honored.
Instead of appearing himself, Pynchon sent Professor Edwin Corey, a
comedian and self-described "expert on everything." Corey's rambling
speech was described by the New York Times as "a series of bad jokes and
mangled syntax which left some people roaring and others perplexed."
Two that we know of. One -- My Foolish Heart -- shall we say loosely? -- based on "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" in 1949, described by Hamilton as a "travesty even by Hollywood criteria." Might put Holden's rage against the movies in some sort of a perspe
ctive when we reflect that it opened at Radio City around Christmas time, a month when "Salinger would have been half way through the novel he'd been planning for ten years." (CITR released July 1951). D.B.'s prostituting himself to Hollywood ring a bell,
anybody? Yeah, the same D.B. who became famous for, "The Secret Goldfish." There. Here's a clue for you all -- the Walrus was Paul.(See the fundamental interconnectedness of everything? Ha, private joke. Sorry)
And the second is an award winning Iranian film, Pari, supposedly based on Franny & Zooey. Sometime in the mid 90's. For more info, please see J.D.S at Internet Movie Data Base
There's been some confusion sometimes about Ramakrishna on the list
with Lord Krishna or Rama, if not both. Krishna is a mythological
reincarnation of Vishnu, one of the Trinity; the hero of The Bhagwad
Gita (inexactly alluded to as the Bible of Hindus; exact composition
date debated; but generally agreed to have been between 500 to 100 B.C,
by a sage named Ved Vyasa), Mahabharata etc. Lord Rama is another Hindu
mythological Hero of the epic Ramayana, and believed to be an earlier
reincarnation of Vishnu
Ramaksrishna, named after these two Hindu "gods" was an Indian mystic
born on Feb 18, 1836.
Mysticism is the mainstay of Hindu religiosity. The Hindu mystics are
generally w/o the restraints of their counterparts in monotheistic
religious traditions such as Judaism, Islam, and to a lesser extent
Christianity, where mystical experiences and insights must generally
be interpreted against a given dogmatic theology. Thus "God" does not
have the same significance for them. In both Upanishdic and Yogic
mysticism there is no trace of love of or yearning for communion with
God. It is only in bhakti or devotional mysticism -- Ramakrishna's
preferred form -- where the love for the "Deity" creeps in, where the
mystic's soul or "self" is finally united with God (or Goddess) in an
ecstatic surrender, which, because perhaps of its strong family
resemblance to the mysticism of the monotheistic faiths, explains
JDS' fascination for Ramakrishna.
It is on record that Freud's "Oceanic Feeling" was a Ramakrishna
meme, as one of Ramakrisna's oft-repeated metaphor is of the salt doll
which went to measure the depth of the ocean. "As it entered
the Ocean it melted. Then who is there to come back and say how
deep is the Ocean?"
JDS apparently became fascinated with Ramakrishna's philosophy sometime
in the early 50's and studied Advaita Vedanta (literally, non-dualistic
ultimate knowledge) under Swami Nikhilananda, founder of the
Ramakrishna Vivekananda Center in New York City (just around the corner
from JDS' parents' Park Avenue apartment), who is also the author of
The Gospels of Sri Ramakrishna(TGOSR). JDS is said to have become good
friends with him and his successor, Swami Adiswarananda, and was
reported to be attending lectures, summer seminars etc. till well into
the 90's.
As per Ian Hamilton, JDS is supposed to have pressed Hamish Hamilton to
publish a British edition of 1062 pages long TGOSR (HH never did) and also
endorsed Eudora Welty, Peter de Vries, S.J.Perlman & William Maxwell.
Hamilton also cites one Leila Hadley's claim to speculate that perhaps
JDS's interest in Oriental mysticism had its origins in his mysterious
first marriage as apparently JDS and the French wife were said to be
telepathically connected and had the same dreams, even after
separation. Oh, well.
