Despite the meagerness of his output, Salinger, at 42, has spoken with more magic, particularly to the young, than any other U.S. writer since World War II. . . . Some readers . . . object to the book’s italicized talkiness. But the talk, like the book itself, is dazzling, joyous, and satisfying. Above all, by sheer force of eye and ear—rather than by psychologizing, which he detests—Salinger has given them, like Holden, an astonishing degree of life, a stunning and detailed air of presence.
CHARLES POORE: Franny and Zooey is better than anything Mr. Salinger has done before. It doesn’t lean on a familiar plot structure (adventures of a runaway boy, as in The Catcher in the Rye); it has, instead, a fading sort of timeliness in that it presents retired electronic quiz demons. As children, Zooey and his sister Franny were public freaks. . . . Now, launched on their twenties, they are still freaks—and aware of that with a fearful, rueful sense of perpetual exasperation.
BLAKE BAILEY: Salinger, it bears repeating, was a sore point [for fellow New Yorker writer John Cheever]. Franny and Zooey had been published that September and had dominated the best-seller lists ever since, at a time when Cheever was struggling to get on with another novel while supporting himself, as ever, with inventive—but relatively less acclaimed (and now maimed)—short fiction for the New Yorker. Reading the [1961] Life tribute, Cheever went into a “slow burn” and began drinking heavily, until finally he phoned [William] Maxwell in a rage; he recounted his rant thus: “You cut that short story . . . and I’ll never write another story for you or anybody else. You can get that Godamned sixth-rate Salinger to write your Godamned short stories, but don’t expect anything more from me. If you want to slam a door on somebody’s genitals, find yourself another victim. Etc.”
GERALDINE McGOWAN: Catcher in the Rye was an enormous success in 1951. Nine Stories was published to serious acclaim in 1953. When Franny and Zooey was published in 1961 to even greater fanfare, the literary knives came out. In 1961 and ’62 Salinger got the harshest criticism of his entire publishing life. Joan Didion, John Updike, Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy—it seemed like there was a cabal against him, except you couldn’t even say that they were friends. You can’t even say that one knew what the other was doing.
Joan Didion.
John Updike.
Alfred Kazin.
Lionel Trilling.
DAVID SHIELDS: Updike’s review was brilliantly conceived, seemingly delivered more in sorrow than in anger, but containing within it the seeds of his competitor’s destruction.
JOHN UPDIKE: Not the least dismaying development of the Glass stories is the vehement editorializing on the obvious—television scripts are not generally good, not all section men are geniuses. Of course, the Glasses condemn the world only to condescend to it, to forgive it, in the end. Yet the pettishness of the condemnation diminishes the gallantry of the condescension.
In “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” Seymour defines sentimentality as giving “to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it.” This seems to me the nub of the trouble: Salinger loves the Glasses more than God loves them. He loves them too exclusively. Their invention has become a hermitage for him. He loves them to the detriment of artistic moderation.
JOAN DIDION: What gives [Franny and Zooey] its extremely potent appeal is precisely that it is self-help copy: it emerges finally as Positive Thinking for the upper middle classes, as Double Your Energy and Live Without Fatigue for Sarah Lawrence girls.
ALFRED KAZIN: I am sorry to have to use the word “cute” in respect to Salinger, but there is absolutely no other word that for me so accurately typifies the self-conscious charm and prankishness of his own writing and his extraordinary cherishing of his favorite Glass characters.
SEYMOUR KRIM: [Salinger’s] stories read like slow-motion close-up movies instead of conventional fiction because the flair of theater is in his bones. . . . But stop and think. If it weren’t for his shimmering night-club performance in prose, would you read him with such fascination? Hardly.
ISA KAPP: In spite of the intellectual sponginess of our time, it is still strange to see the optimistic American reader gobbling up J. D. Salinger’s stories of defeatism, self-deprecation, and nervous breakdown. . . . Salinger himself persists in a low opinion of mankind. If one of his characters happens to find a friend, the chosen person is usually between ten and fourteen years old, or dear because departed.
GERALDINE McGOWAN: Gore Vidal said Mary McCarthy was one of our greatest critics, because she was uncorrupted by compassion. She couldn’t abide writers, including Hemingway, who showed any signs of elitism; it didn’t matter how beautiful their writing was. She simply took a stand against that. McCarthy took offense to the way Salinger’s work changed, beginning with Nine Stories. People talk about how he got clobbered by the critics in 1961 and 1962 and that there was a lot of literary envy at the bottom of it. But what’s not so often said is with that huge success something happened to him: it didn’t go to his head, but it changed his writing. He went to a place that people didn’t expect him to go.
MARY McCARTHY: In Hemingway’s work there was never anybody but Hemingway in a series of disguises, but at least there was only one Papa per book. To be confronted with these seven faces of Salinger, all wise and loveable and simple, is to gaze into a terrifying narcissus pool. Salinger’s world contains nothing but Salinger, his teachers, and his tolerantly cherished audience—humanity; outside are the phonies, vainly signaling to be let in, like the kids’ Irish mother, Bessie, a home version of the Fat Lady, who keeps invading the bathroom while her handsome son Zooey is in the tub shaving. . . .
Yet below this self-loving barbershop harmony a chord of terror is struck from time to time, like a judgment. Seymour’s suicide suggests that Salinger guesses intermittently or fears intermittently that there may be something wrong somewhere. Why did he kill himself? Because he had married a phony, whom he worshipped for her “simplicity, her terrible honesty”? Or because he was so happy and the Fat Lady’s world was so wonderful? Or because he had been lying, his author had been lying, and it was all terrible, and he was a fake?
DAVID SHIELDS: In a June 16, 1962, letter to William Maxwell, McCarthy acknowledged that part of the motivation for her attack on Salinger was her anger at the New Yorker for canceling its first-look contract with her.
Mary McCarthy.
GORE VIDAL: This ghastly, self-observant family, going on and on and on about everything of importance to them, which they assume is important to all the world.
ANNE MARPLE: This “prose home movie” [“Zooey”] is unwieldy as a short story. . . . The frequent inclusion of diaries and letters in the Glass Saga indicates that Salinger is having additional mechanical difficulties with his embarrassing wealth of Glassiana.
HOWARD M. HARPER: Salinger’s skillful use of concrete details creates a certain reality in the Glass stories, but it is a surface reality. Beneath it is an essentially misanthropic view of life, in which the Glasses hold a monopoly on goodness, sensitivity, intelligence, and so on.
—
SHANE SALERNO: Donald Fiene resurfaced in 1962. Despite Salinger’s refusing to cooperate with his book, Fiene had stubbornly pressed forward and contacted Salinger’s friends, including one of the “Four Musketeers,” Jack Altaras, who was a successful lawyer in Cleburne, Texas. When Salinger learned of this intrusion, he wrote Fiene an angry letter urging him to stop his plan to publish a book on his work.
J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Donald Fiene, September 10, 1962:
Part of my mind is simply unable to believe that you plan to go ahead with this book about me despite our exchanges on the subject.
I find it almost impossible to believe that you’ve gone right on writing letters to friends and acquaintances of mine.
I beg you leave off.
—
DAVID SHIELDS: “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” and “Seymour: An Introduction” were published in the New Yorker in 1955 and 1959
, respectively, and they had been discussed in reviews in the years immediately following, but they weren’t published together as a book until 1963. It was number one on the New York Times bestseller list for ten weeks; the reviews were merciless.
ORVILLE PRESCOTT: “Seymour: An Introduction” is only a story by the most generous definition of the word. . . . [A] turgid and static discourse . . . it lacks the charm, humor, and surface brilliance which distinguish most of Mr. Salinger’s stories. . . . [Buddy] rambles, digresses, pontificates, and fails completely to make Seymour Glass seem a believable human being.
IRVING HOWE: Both of these stories [“Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” and “Seymour: An Introduction”] are marred by the self-indulgence of a writer flirting with depths of wisdom, yet coy and embarrassed in his advances. . . . And as the world of Salinger comes more fully into view, it seems increasingly open to critical attack. It is hard to believe in Seymour’s saintliness, hard even to credit him as a fictional character, for we are barely able to see him at all behind the palpitations of Buddy’s memory. The Salinger world is coated with the sentimentalism of a “love” that, in refusing to distinguish among objects and qualities, ends by obliterating their distinctive life.
JOSE de M. PLATANOPEZ: I have just finished reading “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” and “Seymour: An Introduction” and should be interested in any evidence your [the New York Times Book Review] readers can provide that J. D. Salinger is still alive and writing.
NORMAN MAILER: It is necessary to say that the four stories about the Glass family by J. D. Salinger, published in two books called Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, seem to have been written for high-school girls. The second piece in the second book, called Seymour an Introduction, must be the most slovenly portion of prose ever put out by an important American writer. It is not even professional Salinger. Salinger at his customary worst, as here in the other three stories of the two books, is never bad—he is just disappointing. He stays too long on the light ice of his gift, writes exquisite dialogue and creates minor moods with sweetness and humor, and never gives the fish its hook. He disappoints because he is always practicing. But when he dips into Seymour—the Glass brother who committed suicide, when the cult comes to silence before the appearance of the star—the principal, to everyone’s horror, has nausea on the stage. Salinger for the first time is engaged in run-off writing, free suffragette prose; his inhibitions (which once helped by their restraint to create his style) now stripped. He is giving you himself as he is. No concealment. It feels like taking a bath in a grease trap.
. . . But it’s a rare man who can live like a hermit and produce a major performance unless he has critics who are near to him and hard on him. No friend who worried about Salinger’s future should have let him publish Seymour an Introduction in The New Yorker without daring to lose his friendship first by telling him how awful it was. Yet there was too much depending on Salinger’s interregnum—he was so inoffensive, finally. So a suspension of the critical faculty must have gone on in the institutional wheels of The New Yorker, which was close to psychotic in its evasions.
SHANE SALERNO: Salinger made no public response to the criticism. Quite to the contrary, he pushed his work even further away from the style that had made him a household name. And he seemed happy not to be the popular writer everybody loved. In fact, in the spring of 1963, Jacqueline Kennedy personally telephoned Salinger, urging him to attend a White House celebration of writers and artists. In Margaret’s view, one of the main reasons he declined was Claire’s eagerness to attend. “Woman and gold.”
The only time Margaret ever saw her father cry was several months later—while watching JFK’s funeral on television.
—
MARC WEINGARTEN: Salinger was a big movie buff; he understood as well as anyone how myths were constructed. But he also knew how to do it in a way that wasn’t so transparent. It was myth-building by subtraction.
SHANE SALERNO: One of the enduring Salinger myths is that he was so disgusted by his story “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” being transformed into My Foolish Heart that he swore off Hollywood forever. In actuality, while Salinger seemingly was working to keep the world away, he was eagerly engaged in a secret film collaboration with television writer and producer Peter Tewksbury. This story has never been told.
CIELLE TEWKSBURY: My husband, Peter Tewksbury, was a most amazing man. He was my father’s best friend, and they started a community theater in a very small town in California. From there, he landed a job directing the television show Life with Father, and one of the things he did brilliantly was to work with children and young people. From there, he went to My Three Sons, again with young children. And then he landed the one thing that was kind of the pièce de résistance of his work in television: a series called It’s a Man’s World that only had thirteen episodes. He was able to produce and direct and edit and write the entire series—that was the way he wanted to work because he had full control of what was happening. It was a wonderful series about young people.
He wasn’t an easy man to work with, but he was brilliant. He was extraordinarily demanding and then could turn around and be beautifully kind, but he really made you work as a performer. The sponsors were a little nervous about the message of really interesting, passionate young people. They were not really comfortable with that. It wasn’t the cliché version of what young people were like in the ’60s. It was quite a different avenue.
He had a way of grabbing onto something and never letting go. He had a concentration and a dedication and a very strong sense of ethics, which is why, in the late ’60s, we left Los Angeles. He said, “I don’t want the rest of my life to be in this world. I want a different life.” I kid you not, he went up in the closet, pulled out the two Emmys he had won, walked straight in the backyard, threw them in the trash can, we packed up and moved to Vermont, and that was the end of his film career.
Peter adored Salinger’s work because the way the young children verbalized their world was so perfect. We were sitting at the kitchen table, very much like this one—in fact, it may have been this one—and we were reading the short stories. We’d just finished “For Esmé.” He picked up the book, looked at it, turned it over, put it down on the table, and said, “My God, this would make such an extraordinary film.” Of course, he knew Salinger’s reputation for being a recluse and, of course, he was kind of a recluse himself. I just watched that look on his face—real, real yearning.
Apparently what he did, unbeknownst to me, was to pull out two copies of what he felt were the best episodes of It’s a Man’s World, packed them up, and sent them to Salinger. He said in a letter, “This series would never have occurred had I not been so influenced by your work.” Time went on. Nothing. Peter said, “Okay, I haven’t heard from him. I am just going to have to go meet the man.” I said, “I don’t think he accepts visitors.” He said, “I have to meet him. I have to find out if there’s any way to do this film.” So we got in the car in the dead of winter. It was snowing and we drove to Cornish, New Hampshire. We got totally lost, wandering around in this little village. Finally, we stopped at a small gas station and asked for directions to Salinger’s home. The man in the store said, “Well, you’re on the right road, but those folks, they don’t much care for visitors.” Which we well knew, but on we went because that is the way Peter was. He really wanted to do that film. We found the house, took one look at it, and went, “Oh boy,” because there was an eight-foot-tall fence surrounding the house. There was a gate in the fence. Peter got out of the car and said, “Come on.” I got out of the car, we walked to the gate, we went up to the door, Peter knocked, and a very tall, lean man with incredibly penetrating eyes was standing in the doorway. Peter said, “My name is Peter Tewksbury. I sent you some films and I want to talk to you about ‘Esmé.’ ”
Salinger said, “Yeah, I got the films. I liked them. They were interesting. Come in.” It was very much like this place—u
npretentious. There was a round table, a fireplace, wood floors, old sturdy rugs on the floor. He says, “I want you to meet my wife. This is Claire, and this is my son. Now we are going in the kitchen to talk.” She was charming. She served us coffee and obviously was kind of the foil for the rather tensile quality that Salinger had. She was the softener. I’m sure she was probably very tired of intrusions like ours, but she was very gracious. She backed off. She didn’t sit down and listen to the conversations. She didn’t participate in any of what was happening. She was with her young child, with the little boy, and they were conversing in the living room while we were sitting in the kitchen. She had a lovely, nice quality, but there was a reserve. Like, “I have been through this a lot, and it is not easy to be with someone of that notoriety. It colors my relationship and it colors my life, and I wonder where my place is in this.”
I remember sitting there, looking at these two incredibly intense individuals, both of them going back and forth in conversation. He did spend quite a bit of time, Salinger did, querying Peter about the Man’s World series and why it was canceled and what he thought about it and how he saw the characters. I gather he was quite a film buff himself.
Then they got around to “Esmé.” Peter tried to explain why he thought it could be such a perfect film. He said, “You could practically lift it off the pages just the way it’s written. So filmic.” Salinger said, “Well, what do you think about Esmé?”—the character of Esmé. Peter said, “She’s right on the edge between the innocent wise child and the woman. And the whole story rests on that moment. It is like an in-breath the moment before it is an out-breath, or a minor chord that builds up to that peak moment before it becomes a major; that’s where she is.” Salinger said, “Yes.”
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