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.
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. SF Sketch Fest will be at the Sydney Goldstein Theater on Friday, January twenty sixth, right, Chuck.
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.
That's right, and we'll see you guys in January.
Okay, welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
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.
Oh I've never heard that.
You never heard Greta Garbo say that I vanted to be alone?
No?
I haven't. Oh yeah, another recluse, right.
Yes, that's why I said that she could really probably identify with JD's Salinger.
Yeah, what Sallenger? Have you read? If any?
I read for Esme with Love and Squalor as recently as last night, and it's good.
Huh.
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.
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 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 New Yorker that you know was never put in book form or whatever. So I read a lot of stuff.
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.
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.
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 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.
Is, uh huh, he is.
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 hold for him and his writing in addition to, you know, feeling reverent toward it.
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 hear some distant construction noise today, there's nothing I can do about that.
Oh, I hope that came through in the Crane episode.
I don't think it did so.
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 they've been told it is their entire lives up to that point.
Phony.
Perhaps he started that.
Yeah, phony, He is that word a lot.
Yeah, phony, and it's hilarious. It's a hilarious word, especially when you use it earnestly.
Yeah, I agree, I like it.
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.
Or we could go back to when he was born.
Sure.
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. 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 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 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.
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 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 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.
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 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 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.
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 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
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 non starters.
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.
Yeah, you hit out in your apartment the whole day waiting to get in trouble, and nobody came.
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.
You'd be like, why do you have to say our last part? It was going so well.
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 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 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.
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, 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 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.
If you ask y, Yeah, for sure you should go ahead get such a great setup, set yourself up.
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.
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.
Yeah, it's amazing, like they basically discovered the who's who of twentieth century men writers.
Yeah, absolutely so he at well, how'd you say it, personists?
Uh?
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, 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 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.
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.
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
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.
Yeah, he stopped ending every chapter with get it.
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.
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 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, 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 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.
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.
Let's do it.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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 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, 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 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.
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 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.
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,
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.
Yeah, it's a wonderful story.
You know what.
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?
Uh? Yeah?
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. That's how it seemed to me. For Esme with Lovin Squalor.
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.
Well where he ends up on a ranch living with Trueman Cacody out west.
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 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.
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.
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.
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. 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 figure it out using like Zen, Buddhism and later on hindu Vedic spirituality.
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 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 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.
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.
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?
I would say how the West was won by Truman Capoti.
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, isn't that crazy?
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.
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.
I believe that. Man, everybody was talking about that.
Eighty million books. But yeah, number eighteen sixty five million books and still selling strong is pretty great. Yeah, so please continue.
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 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 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 like getting Catcher in the Rye out there.
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 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 hate to say, like it's an important work, but it is sure.
We won't give away the end, just suffice to say that he finds the kidney downer he needs.
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 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.
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.
For those Yeah, no, no, totally. And then like, and I'll use it as a rolling paper.
That's funny.
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.
Those are short stories, right, a collection?
Yeah, nine of them. Strangely, it could also refer to.
A specific building or something like that.
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?
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.
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.
So wait, one more thing. Well, then that's not a joke. That's just a misunderstanding.
Exactly so.
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.
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.
Oh it is, okay, forget it, forget it. Just read the book everybody.
No, no, you should say it because I think people that are like I don't want to bother please tell me.
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
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 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.
Oh we should do one on cliffs Notes. I always wonder who Cliff was.
Great, great idea.
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 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 what happened right after this, all right, So when we 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, 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 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 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.
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 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. 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 Shirley Blainey.
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, 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 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 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.
But his social life seems to have been definitely objectively curtail after that, Like he was much more social up until that point.
Oh, no, one doubts that.
Yeah, his famous quote was surely Blainey a real phony.
Was it really?
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 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 trust or he had to find you attractive.
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.
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.
Yeah, but like at least a decade before George Harrison was ever exposed to this stuff, Like this guy was doing this.
In like the mid the sixties. Oh okay, I thought it was no sixties.
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 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.
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. 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.
Which who was he in Revenge of the Nerds.
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 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.
Right, But I mean like those are pretty at odds with one another, pretty diametrical, you know.
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.
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 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.
Who's Peggy?
Peggy is his daughter Margaret?
Oh oh, that was her nickname.
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 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 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 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 to often their detriment, for his short term pleasure.
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 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 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.
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 for what eighteen eighteen years until he died.
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 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 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 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 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, 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.
And she did.
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 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.
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, so he just locked them up, and I think still has possession of them.
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 is still just as amazing as it was before. You know what I mean.
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. 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 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 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.
Off, Yeah, so what else you got anything else?
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 think that's been confirmed.
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, 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?
Yeah to me that I like to check that.
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.
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 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
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 sell the beer. So Josh was right, ever underestimate the
power of marketing. And that is from Steve.
Thanks Steve. I love it when I'm right. I especially love him when people write in to tell me I was right.
You know good stuff.
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.
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