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