RIP JD Salinger

Catcher in the Rye was my mother's favorite book. It came out the year I was born, and whenever she was feeling blue, she would take a long bath and reread an often soggy paperback. I don't remember when I first read it myself, and that may be because I thought I had inherited it imbedded in my memory since birth, rather than having acquired it like other books.

The book of his that became my solace, in college, was Franny and Zooey. I treasured every sentence of Nine Stories; I was moved by the finality of Seymour, An Introduction, but above all I loved -- and still do -- Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters, probably because its about a Manhattan much like the post-war city in which my parents had met. Adding to that patina of false nostolgia, I learned for the first time from his obituaries today, that Salinger had landed on Utah Beach at D-Day, where my mother's only brother had come ashore in the first wave. I always knew that I probably wouldn't have known Uncle Frank if it had been Omaha instead. Now I imagine (with a mind's eye totally saturated by "Saving Private Ryan") the Captain and the Sergeant passing like ships in the night on the battlefield.

What is also ironic -- but not surprising -- is what I just read in the NYT today about how Harcourt (the company where I first worked in publishing) rejected Catcher in the Rye. For proof of "the more things change the more they remain the same," check out the David Itzkoff's blog:

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/how-the-catcher-in-the-rye-eluded-one-editor/?scp=1&sq=giroux&st=cse

Holiday Reading (and listening)

If you grew up watching Amahl and the Night Visitors on NBC (as I did), and you long nostogically for a Christmas more about giving than buying, you should be aware that several CD's of the opera are available, including the original 1951 cast album. If you like Operettas, you can't do much better than "This is my box."

I picked up some biographies for reading over the holidays, among them Jay Parnini's William Faulkner, and like all the best such books, it is making me want to go back and reread my favorite novels, and to catch up on the ones I only knew from movies, like his autobiographica, final novel, The Reviers.

I also didn't know that the 23-26 yr old Faulkner ran the Ole Miss campus postoffice very incompetentl (because he spent most days shut in his office writing), and you have to wonder if his fellow Missisippian Eudora Welty might not have had an inside joke in mind when she wrote "Why I live at the PO."