On demobilisation, Salinger, for reasons which are obscure, chose to stay in Germany as a civilian working for the Defense Department. Even more puzzling, he married a German woman, Sylvia Welter, wangling her French papers (‘fraternisation’ – marriage with the former enemy – was forbidden). Sylvia is recorded as having been a fanatic anti-Semitic Nazi and the marriage dissolved almost as soon as it formed. Salinger returned to New York in 1946 and took up residence in his former stamping ground, Greenwich Village. For a few years his lifestyle was bohemian – drink, girls, cards and a dedication to the perfection of his stories. ‘Bananafish’ (published in the New Yorker, in January 1948) introduced at length the Glass family, his main subject matter over the next two decades. The saintly Seymour Glass, back from war, disgusted with the human race, commits suicide (his earlier life emerged, collage-like, in later stories). The title alludes to a story within the story, told on the beach to a little girl, Sybil, about the fabulous fish whose piggish gluttony (like the monkey’s hand in the peanut jar) is his downfall.
‘For Esmé – with Love and Squalor’ (published in the New Yorker in April 1950) also sets the fallen world of adulthood against the Wordsworthian purity of the child. In Devon, England, two months before the Normandy invasion, ‘Sergeant X’ meets a young, charmingly precocious girl, Esmé (manifestly upper class). On learning that the American writes, she lodges a request for a story, adding, ‘I’m an avid reader’:
I told her I certainly would, if I could. I said that I wasn’t terribly prolific.
‘It doesn’t have to be terribly prolific! Just so that it isn’t childish and silly.’ She reflected. ‘I prefer stories about squalor.’
‘About what?’ I said, leaning forward.
‘Squalor. I’m extremely interested in squalor.’
The story is a perfect example of Salinger’s control of idiom infused with tactful symbolism: Esmé’s father’s broken watch – her later gift to him – is the last object described in the story: time has gone wrong.
Amazingly Salinger had difficulty in getting The Catcher in the Rye accepted. One editor thought Holden ‘crazy’. Who wanted that? Holden – the ‘great phony-slayer’ (Mary McCarthy’s description) eventually appeared in print in July 1951. Only the children in Holden’s world are unphony – his dead brother Allie and his little sister, Phoebe. He has run away from school – but he will never arrive at where he is running towards, any more than Dorothy will get over the rainbow. Holden will never, in his own image, be the catcher, saving children from the ‘fall’ (the cliff on the edge of the rye field – adulthood, we deduce). What he needs – and will never get – is someone to ‘catch’ him. On the run in New York, staked by a handout from his grandmother, Holden drops out for three days: he drinks, has an unsuccessful date with an old flame, calls up a prostitute, is mugged by her pimp, and is hit on by a gay teacher (a ‘flit’), writing it all up from a hospital in California. Is it what therapists nowadays call ‘journaling’ – an exercise to facilitate cure? Or is it a memoir?
As the 1950s moved on, Salinger turned away from the literary world (‘It’s a goddam embarrassment, publishing’) into writing as pure meditation, a private, unshared act of ‘self realization’ in which readers were unwelcome intruders. The gobbets of the Glassiad which he released, grudgingly (to an increasingly disaffected New Yorker), perplexed his admirers. He did not seem to care. He found congenial cosmic reassurance in Zen and Buddhism, Taoism and Vedanta. In 1952, he left New York for Waldenesque seclusion in Cornish, New Hampshire, building a workshop in the garden (his ‘bunker’) of his 90-acre property. In 1955 he had married a woman fifteen years his junior, Claire Douglas.
It was assumed that he was working on the Glass Family saga and its seven offspring that had begun with ‘Bananafish’. Particles emerged into print with ‘Franny’ (1955), ‘Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters’ (1955), ‘Zooey’ (1957) and ‘Seymour: An Introduction’ (1959). He made the cover of Time in September 1961 and his last foray into print with a new work was ‘Hapworth 16, 1924’, a novella that took up 80 pages in the New Yorker. It takes the form of a letter from summer camp written by seven-year-old Seymour Glass (the suicidal character in ‘Banana-fish’). ‘Hapworth 16’ was received badly – and Salinger took the reception badly.
His marriage to Claire Douglas produced two children and lasted twelve years (a very long time by Salinger’s standards: his two other longest relationships were with his beloved Schnauzer Benny and his trusty typewriter). His religious prohibition on sex-for-pleasure evidently contributed to the break-up, as did the Thoreauesque life at Cornish. It seems the characters in his fiction were as real to him as any actual humans. When Elia Kazan implored him for permission to dramatise Catcher for the Broadway stage, Salinger declined on the grounds that ‘I fear Holden wouldn’t like it.’ As the years passed he buried his tracks (letters, private papers) as methodically as he could, and had a series of relationships with increasingly younger women.
Joyce Maynard, an eighteen-year-old student when he first became involved with her in 1972, published a venomous account of their early-1970s relationship, which caused him chagrin. In 1986, he used every resource of American law successfully to neutralise a biography by Ian Hamilton, who wrote a rueful un-biography instead. It confirmed a widespread suspicion that America’s most famous novelist had finally flipped. As his last public act, in 2009, Salinger again successfully used the lawyer to suppress a follow-up to Catcher in the Rye, ‘60 years on’. He married, for the third time, in 1992 – a woman forty years his junior. The bunker protected him for almost half a century. The fearsome literary estate he set up, before his death, may well keep what the bunker contained out of posterity’s view for ever.
FN
Jerome David Salinger
MRT
The Catcher in the Rye
Biog
K. Slawenski, J. D. Salinger: A Life Raised High (2010)
219. Charles Willeford 1919–1988
Like, some of these other Tankers I knew used to swap bottles of liquor with infantrymen in exchange for prisoners, and then just shoot ’em for fun. I used to say, ‘Goddamn it, will you stop shooting those prisoners!’ And they would just shrug and say, ‘Hell, they’d shoot us if they caught us!’
Willeford recalling his war-time experience as a tank commander
Charles Willeford lived more life, and a harder life, than most writers. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, his father died of TB in 1922 and his mother of the same disease shortly after. He was brought by relatives in Los Angeles and ran away, aged thirteen, hoboing through America. In 1939, he joined the army, marrying before being posted overseas to Europe in 1942. A non-commissioned tank commander, Willeford fought at the Battle of the Bulge (not too far from J. D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut), won the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, a Purple Heart and the Luxembourg Croix de Guerre. He remained in the army after the war, running a services’ radio station in Japan until 1949. His first publication, a book of poetry, was published in 1948.
Discharged, and divorced, following an unsuccessful attempt to study art in Peru, Willeford joined up again in 1949 – this time round, the US Air Force. He would remain in uniform until 1956, remarrying and publishing three novels along the way. According to his blurbs he was thereafter variously a professional horse trainer, a boxer, a radio announcer, and an artist in France. He acquired a degree and taught English from 1967 to 1985, at the Miami-Dade Community College, in Florida. He divorced for a second time in 1976. For some years Willeford had reviewed mystery novels for the Miami Herald and had himself written a handful of crime and PI potboilers. They promised nothing wonderful. But in the four last years of his life, beginning with Miami Blues (1984), he produced a cluster of works which are among the best things ever done in the genre. They feature the series hero, Detective ‘Hoke’ Moseley, and are set in a closely observed Florida criminal underworld, in the aftermath of the huge Cuban (‘Mariel’) influx of the 1970s, when a spite
ful Castro emptied his jails and asylums onto America’s shores.
The Moseley novels are tinged with a wry comedy, summed up in one of his favourite epigrams from the congenially sardonic Karl Kraus: ‘Life is an effort that deserves a better cause.’ An ironic portrait of the hero emerges over the course of the Moseley sequence. When first encountered, he lives (if that is the word) in a hotel – the Eldorado – where he has a rent-free room in return for moonlighting as hotel detective. He is barred promotion by the Homicide Division’s affirmative action policy, which favours Blacks, Latins and women. In pursuit of a psychopathic robber in Miami Blues, Hoke is beaten to a pulp, has his dentures destroyed, and his service revolver and badge stolen. The robber goes on a criminal rampage, impersonating Hoke with the stolen ID – the final insult.
One of the unusual aspects of the series is the progression in the hero’s life from one novel to another, rendering it a genuine sequence rather than a series. In New Hope for the Dead (1985; epigraph: ‘Man’s unhappiness stems from his inability to sit quietly in his room’ – Pascal), Hoke has risen somewhat. He is on active homicide duty, but has an awkward partner, Ellita Sanchez, with whom, such being life on the street, he eventually shacks up. A complication is his ex-wife dumping their two daughters on him after she has taken off with a black baseball player. Sideswipe (1987; epigraph: ‘There’s a lot of bastards out there!’ – William Carlos Williams) finds Hoke, a pregnant Ellita and his two teenage daughters living cosily in a suburban rented house. The Way We Die Now (1988; epigraph: ‘No one owns life. But anyone with a frying pan owns death’ – William Burroughs) finds Hoke still working on the ‘cold case’ file. Domestically his life is happier than it has ever been, and he is thirty-five pounds heavier on Ellita’s cooking. He has ‘all the advantages of a family man (except for a regular sex life) and few, if any, of the disadvantages.’ It cannot, of course, last.
Nor, alas, did its author. Having received a massive $225,000 advance, Willeford died as the glowing reviews were coming in. He was buried, in recognition of his distinguished war service, at Arlington National Cemetery. Epitaph: ‘A hell of a lot better writer than you might think’?
FN
Charles Ray Willeford
MRT
Miami Blues
Biog
www.dennismcmillan.com/charleswillefo/biograp.htm
220. Isaac Asimov 1920–1992
If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.
Asimov was born in Petrovichi in the USSR, the son of a prosperous miller unlucky enough to be a Jew in a savagely anti-Semitic time and place. They were luckier than some. Asimov’s family contrived to emigrate to the USA, and the infant Isaac was naturalised in 1928. Asimov Sr went on to run a candy store in Brooklyn. At home Yiddish was Isaac’s first language. He grew up a brilliant, over-achieving high school pupil, going on to take degrees in biochemistry at Columbia University, culminating in a Ph.D. in 1948. A year later, Dr Asimov (he relished the title, even more than Jewish mothers proverbially do) was appointed to a teaching post in biochemistry at Boston University. He would lecture in its school of medicine for the remainder of his professional career, with a break for war service, 1942–6. He was proud, to the point of arrogance, of the Asimov brain (and a long-serving Vice President of Mensa to certify its 200+ IQ score).
An early fan of pulp SF (much to his father’s disgust – although the Asimov candy stores had a profitable sideline in the product), Isaac came under the wing of the ferociously right-wing John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction, a man, it was said, who made Ayn Rand look like a pinko. Asimov published his first story with Campbell in 1939, an ominous year, and his first science fiction novel, Pebble in the Sky (Earth becomes radioactive, following nuclear war), was published in 1950 – a period when nuclear war was imminently expected and middle-class America was investing in fallout shelters and guns to defend them against working-class, shelterless, Americans. In that same year – 1950 – there appeared Asimov’s most famous volume, I, Robot, a collection of short stories published over previous years, expounding the author’s ‘Three Laws of Robotics’. Those involved in the relevant scientific field have always taken them seriously. The most ambitious – verging on Messianic – of Asimov’s fictional projects, the ‘Foundation’ trilogy (1951–3), followed shortly after. It aimed to emulate, with the blunter tools of science fiction, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Nothing small for Isaac Asimov.
The most prolific of writers, Asimov published some sixty works of SF, fifteen crime mysteries (which he began writing in 1956), a hundred or more popularising works of ‘science fact’, and scholarly treatises on Shakespeare, the Bible and quantum mechanics – 600 titles in all. He retired from full-time academic life to concentrate on writing in 1958, winning all the highest awards in SF with monotonous regularity. The Gods Themselves (1973) scooped up both the Hugo and the Nebula Prizes for that year. A Science Fiction Writers of America poll in 1979 voted ‘Nightfall’ the best SF story of all time (first published in 1941, it portrays a planet in which night comes only once a millennium).
Asimov was married twice and is recorded as being a ‘claustrophile’, phobic about flying (he took to the air only twice in his life), agnostic (‘Humanist’ was his term), an admirer of P. G. Wodehouse, and grotesquely malcoordinated physically. Michael White’s ‘unauthorised’ biography (1994) sprinkles some blackwash on the Asimov image. He was promiscuously unfaithful in his first marriage, although uxorious in the second. He underwent bloody tenure and promotion battles at Boston University – who never, in his view, fully ‘respected’ his genius. He tried to dodge the draft in 1941 – and, finally, his ‘Three Laws’ may not have been his original idea. None the less, Asimov’s greatness survives the odd black spot on it.
He died of Aids acquired from a bad blood transfusion during a heart bypass operation in 1983. The fact was revealed only ten years after his death, to protect the reputation of his doctors – and, one suspects, his posthumous reputation. His collected papers, donated to his Boston University alma mater, occupy 71 metres of shelf-space. Elsewhere in the Library there are printed volumes by him in nine out of the ten Dewey Decimal classification categories: a record.
FN
Isaac Asimov (born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov)
MRT
I, Robot
Biog
M. White, Isaac Asimov: A Life of the Grand Master of Science Fiction (1994; 2005)
221. Ray Bradbury 1920–
The Louis Armstrong of SF. Kingsley Amis
Ray Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois (the Green Town of his fiction), where his father worked as a telephone lineman. The family, uprooted by the Depression, moved nomadically during Ray’s childhood, mainly between Illinois and Arizona, a state whose desert landscapes influenced the author’s later depictions of Mars. Bradbury claimed to have picked up his impressive learning from ‘Carnegies’ (public libraries) and his lifelong dedication to science fiction from coming across copies of Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories at the age of six. Equally precociously, he was writing his own stories in the genre at eleven. As a child Ray was fascinated by magic and, like others of his generation, was entranced by the ‘Century of Progress’ exhibit at World’s Fair in Chicago, 1933.
Eventually the family settled in southern California in 1934. This was to be Bradbury’s home and literary base for the rest of his life. He left school at thirteen; there was no question of college. He haunted public libraries and sold newspapers on street corners. His first SF story was published in 1938 and in 1941 he attended a writing class run by Robert A. Heinlein, already a star of the genre. He would be, however, the least formulaic of writers in an overwhelmingly formulaic genre. Bradbury’s philosophy was: ‘When writing, just jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.’ Forrest J. Ackerman was helpful at this stage of Bradbury’s career, promoting him on the fanzine and word-of-mouth netw
orks which ‘SF’s number one fan’ (as Ackerman was called) had mobilised in the Los Angeles area – along with the world’s greatest collection of genre memorabilia. Bradbury was rejected for military service in the Second World War on grounds of poor eyesight. Literature was the gainer. At the same period – 1942 – he took up writing full-time, turning out a string of short stories for the pulps and slicks which were booming during the war. A favourite outlet was Weird Tales, whose title neatly defines the Bradbury style.
He married in 1947, having met his future wife, Marguerite (‘Maggie’) McClure (1922–2003) in a bookshop where, initially, she mistook him for a shoplifter – shabbily trench-coated as he was in the burning Californian sun. After marriage, Maggie helped support her husband, working in an advertising agency, while he stayed at home to write. ‘Had she not,’ as one obituary wittily put it, ‘the proverbial butterfly would have been squashed and the future of high-imaginative literature would have been altered for all time.’ They would eventually have four daughters together and, at their most populous, twenty-two cats – Mrs Bradbury loved the beasts. Judging by the eight-legged, robotically venomous Mechanical Hound in Fahrenheit 451, Ray seems to have shared a feline dislike of all things canine. Bradbury admitted infidelities to his biographer, but the marriage, which lasted fifty-six years, manifestly survived them.
Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives Page 84
