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SPEAKER_09: 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 24th at the Paramount Theater.
SPEAKER_07: It's huge. That's right. And then on to Portland on January 25th 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 Sketchfest. We'll be at the Sidney Goldstein Theater on Friday, January 26th. Right, Chuck?
SPEAKER_09: That's right. And remember, you can go to stuffyoushouldknow.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.
SPEAKER_07: And we'll see you guys in January. Okay?
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
SPEAKER_07: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. Jerry's here too. We just vant to be alone, which makes this stuff you should know. That's right. That was Greta Garbo doing JD Salinger. Oh, I'd never heard that. You never heard Greta Garbo say that? I vant to be alone. No, I haven't. Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_09: Another recluse, right? Yes.
SPEAKER_07: That's why I said that. She could really probably identify with JD Salinger.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. What Salinger have you read, if any? I read For Esme with Love and Squalor as recently as last night, and that was it.
SPEAKER_07: Oh.
SPEAKER_09: That's good, huh? It was great.
SPEAKER_07: I actually feel like I really missed out not reading Salinger 20 years ago or 30 years ago, something like that. I just didn't, and I don't know why. But yeah, he was really good. He was really good.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I was an English major, so I read a lot of his stuff. Catcher in the Rye was one that I'm actually due because I was doing a thing where I was kind of rereading it every 10 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 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 the stuff that was popular and widely available and wasn't just like something in The New Yorker that was never put in book form or whatever. So I read a lot of stuff.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, and it sounds like your relationship with Salinger kind of mirrors my relationship with the early works of Adam Sandler. I rewatch Happy Gilmore probably every 10 years to revisit it, see how it's changed, because I've changed, you know.
SPEAKER_09: Oh, that's really funny. But Adam Sandler isn't as complicated and potentially troublesome and problematic as J.D. Salinger was as a person, and we'll get to all that stuff.
SPEAKER_07: 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 J.D. Salinger. I just knew he was a revered writer, a recluse. And now I realize he was a really great writer, too, in the most approachable way. But the thing that struck me about reading about J.D. 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, he is beloved by like literati types as well. Normally he would be pooh-poohed and looked 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 in his writing, in addition to feeling reverent toward it.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. And I also think the disappearing act added a lot to his legend. I mean, I'm not the only one that thinks that, 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.
SPEAKER_09: And by the way, if you hear some distant construction noise today, there's nothing I can do about that.
SPEAKER_07: Oh, I hope that came through in the Crane episode. I don't think it did.
SPEAKER_07: So yeah, if you've never heard of J.D. Salinger, we should probably give you a little background. He published The Catcher in the Rye in 1951. 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.
SPEAKER_09: He used that word a lot. Yeah, phony.
SPEAKER_07: And it's hilarious. It's a hilarious word, especially when you use it earnestly.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I agree. I like it. But that was like the protagonist of Catcher in the Rye, probably his favorite word.
SPEAKER_07: Holden Caulfield's favorite word was phony. And that's pretty much all you need to know. We can end the episode here, really.
SPEAKER_09: Or we could go back to when he was born. Sure. Jerome David Salinger in Manhattan, New York in 1919 on New Year's Day to Miriam Salinger and Sol Salinger. He has a sister named or had a sister named Doris that was seven years older that he remained close to. And he was he was sunny to his parents and his sister. His dad was Jewish and was he was an executive.
SPEAKER_09: 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 1920s and 30s father who just wasn't much of a father, wasn't around much, didn't invest a lot of time in 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 24 years old. Dedicated catcher to his mom. And there's this very sweet story that Dave found. He read a full biography, I think, of him for this episode. But when he was 18, 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 $1,000 in the mail. Curtis Publishing Company.
SPEAKER_07: Pretty neat. Pretty great.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, so he was raised, I guess, upper middle class. And I mean, like, that's a that's a pretty typical, like, 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 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.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, absolutely. He would end up going by Jerry to his friends and people that he knew personally and enrolled initially at a place called McBurney Preparatory School, a private school on the Upper West Side. And he was kind of a wiseacre, a little sardonic, a 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 Catcher in the Rye, of Holden Caulfield's Pensey 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 Caulfield for sure. But he was a big, he like, he did great. That was one of the big differences is Holden Caulfield was not happy at Pensey Prep. And it seemed that J.D. Salinger really got a lot out of Valley Forge and was very, very active.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, 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. It was a real distinction between his experience and Holden Caulfield'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 thrived 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 the class. And that can be really difficult. It's difficult for everybody at first, typically, but it can be like a nonstarter for some people who are ironically nonstarters.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I remember in college I was eager and I was all in. You skip your first class and then you're like, oh, wait a minute. You can do that. Nobody, nobody.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah. You hid out in your apartment the whole day waiting to get in trouble and nobody came.
SPEAKER_09: 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 are 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 did you have to say the last part?
SPEAKER_07: It was going so well.
SPEAKER_09: 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 1937 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 1938 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.
SPEAKER_07: He tried college again. He went to a place called Ursinus, Ursinus, Ursinus. That's what I'm going with near Valley Forge in Pennsylvania. And didn't work out again. Then 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 NYU or Columbia. I can't remember which one. I think Columbia. And he lucked out by taking a class given by the editor Whit Burnett. And Whit Burnett had a knack along with his wife, who also edited this magazine, Story magazine, his wife, Haley. They had discovered or would go on to discover some pretty, like a pretty amazing stable of writers, if you ask me. Yeah.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, for sure. You should go ahead. You have such a great set up. Set yourself up.
SPEAKER_07: Oh, oh, thanks. There was Williams, Tennessee, Truman Capote, who is well known for his his rough and tumble westerns and Norman Mailer, who wrote the Jeffersons.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. If you've got, you've got Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and J.D. Salinger on your list of writers you've discovered, you're doing pretty well. Yeah, that's amazing. Like they basically discovered the who's who of 20th century men writers.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, absolutely. So he at, how'd you say it? Ursinus?
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_09: At Ursinus, it was sort of like other college. He wasn't taking it super seriously until one day, as the story goes, Whit 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 Salinger, something about that really grabbed a 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. I want the reader to discover the emotion and the meaning by reading it. And, you know, maybe a podcaster one day will read Catcher in the Rye every 10 years and take a different meaning because I haven'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.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah. The thing is, is, is I don't know if it's his attention to detail or his eye for detail or his ability to describe things in detail without becoming bogged down by them. Who knows? But I just think that is 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, that's probably one of the best epiphanies a writer can possibly have. And you don't, 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, not everybody has that kind of thing.
SPEAKER_09: 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
SPEAKER_07: 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.
SPEAKER_09: 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 1940 edition of Story, in which he was paid 25 bucks, which is a little more than 500 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 91 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 until he died. He always wanted to be published in The New Yorker. That was his big dream. They turned him down seven times until they accepted Slight Rebellion off Madison in 41, which had the character of Holden Caulfield, 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.
SPEAKER_07: 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 J.D. Salinger in the war. Let's do it.
SPEAKER_08: And
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SPEAKER_07: Okay, so J.D. Salinger, when war broke out, when America entered World War II, he signed up, he enlisted. He actually tried to go to officer school and they were like, nah, you're a little too fresh for us. So he ended up- I think nowadays you have to have a college degree to get into OCS.
SPEAKER_09: I don't know if it was the case back then. It could have been, who knows.
SPEAKER_07: But he just went from 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 he wrote, wrote, wrote. Um, and then it wasn't until, um, I think 1944 that he ended up on in Europe and his, his movements and the participation of the events that he took place in from, um, June of 1944 through, um, winter of 1945, he was basically at every major event in the European theater. Everything from landing on Utah beach in D-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, 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.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, that reminds me of, uh, maybe Jerry can bleep this. The great line from Rushmore when Max first meets, uh, Bill Murray's character and he says he was in Vietnam. He goes, were you in the, yeah, I was in the, it's a good line. J.D. Salinger certainly was, uh, like you said. And, uh, interestingly he had, when he stormed the beach at, uh, Utah beach on D-Day, he had, uh, the beginnings of Catcher in the Rye and his knapsack. He was working on that book already. Uh, he only wrote about the war, uh, through the short story, the magic fox hole, uh, where he wrote about D-Day. Uh, 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. Uh, but, uh, I think two thirds of his, uh, regiment, uh, died within the first few weeks, close to two thirds, uh, after D-Day. So it was pretty brutal stuff. Uh, you know, the bleakest battles you can imagine, uh, being pinned down in the Hurkien forest in Germany. Thousands of people were freezing to death. He survived that. Uh, and then, like you said, at Dachau, uh, in 1945, apparently on the same day that Hitler, uh, shot himself, uh, 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, uh, against, uh, the
SPEAKER_08:
SPEAKER_07: Germans in world war II, where 75,000 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. Um, he, he was there for all of it 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 lived 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, and pretty heavy stuff.
SPEAKER_09: And for all of this, uh, and on VE day, he, they say, stick around, uh, we don't want you to go home. Uh, 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 12th regimen and the friends he had met there and he got depressed and, you know, he was clearly affected with PTSD. They called it battle fatigue at the time. And he checked himself into a hospital at Nuremberg for PTSD treatment. And, uh, eventually, uh, well, you read it for SMA with love and squalor, uh, is a story about a World War II vet recovering from PTSD in Germany.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, it's a wonderful story. Um, it, uh, you know what, I just realized his stories are, at least the one I read, but from reading about other stories, they seem to have kind of like a 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, uh, for SMA with love and squalor.
SPEAKER_09: Well, catch her in the right. Well, we can talk about the ending a little bit. We don't want to give it away too much. I guess we are kind of going to give it away a little bit.
SPEAKER_07: Where he ends up on a ranch, living with Truman Capote out west.
SPEAKER_09: 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 his family, 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 1940s, 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.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah. Just one, one little note on Sylvia, his first wife. She was a Nazi party official who he arrested during his denazification project and ended up marrying her. And he referred to her as saliva for the rest of his life. Whenever he talked to her. Yeah, they, his son was like, because there were rumors that he had written stories about
SPEAKER_09: 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. Right. So his, his hitting the nightclubs and picking up the dames is not doing it for him.
SPEAKER_07: 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.
SPEAKER_09: 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. It's too loud. I need more peace and quiet. I need to be able to meditate. And so he left. He left New York City in 1949 and went to Westport, Connecticut. And he finished Catcher in the Rye there, his obviously seminal work. And there was a biographer who said J.D. Salinger spent 10 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.
SPEAKER_07: Yes. So just a little bit on that on the publishing of Catcher in the Rye, right? Like it was just an immediate hit from what I can tell. Like people had been sitting around waiting for it. It almost seems like and to date it sold something like 65 million copies. 65 million copies, Chuck, about a half a million every year still.
SPEAKER_09: So I got a couple of stats for you, if I may. Yeah, yeah, please. That's number 18 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 is? Novel?
SPEAKER_07: Not book, novel?
SPEAKER_09: Novel.
SPEAKER_07: So not the Bible.
SPEAKER_07: Right, right. I would say How the West Was Won by Truman Capote.
SPEAKER_09: No, Don Quixote. Really? Which makes sense because it was sort of one of the first great novels. Okay. 500 million copies, which is more than double the next. The Tale of Two Cities is next at 200 million. Then Lord of the Rings, The Little Prince, and The Hobbit. And then Harry Potter, dude, owns numbers 11 through 16. Wow. Isn't that crazy?
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, I mean, imagine being a living writer who's just written those things in the last like 20 or so years and you own that many on the top list. That's nuts.
SPEAKER_09: Well, imagine being Dan Brown then because he's the modern writer at number 10. The Da Vinci Code is the number 10 best selling novel.
SPEAKER_07: I believe that. Man, everybody was talking about that.
SPEAKER_09: 80 million books. But yeah, number 18, 65 million books and still selling strong is pretty great. So please continue. And he was able to live off of royalties for the rest of his life.
SPEAKER_07: 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 1965? I don't know. But he never needed to work again from that point on, essentially. So when he wrote it, there was a biographer that likened it to a war novel disguised as a coming of age story.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah.
SPEAKER_07: 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 II behind him as best he could, enough at least to get on with his life. Right? And like you said, what he experienced from World War II 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.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I think so. And you know what? Let's not spoil the ending except to say that it does end with some hope.
SPEAKER_07: It does.
SPEAKER_09: Because I don't think we should 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 friend Joey Sierra, who did, with his brother Andy, did the theme song to the Stuff You Should Know show. He collects Moby Dicks, and he's, like, obsessed with the 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. But Catcher in the Rye is 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.
SPEAKER_07: We won't give away the end. Just suffice to say that he finds the kidney donor he needs.
SPEAKER_09: 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 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 believe, 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 Catcher in the Rye that were in his knapsack
SPEAKER_07: when he stormed Normandy would be worth? Surely they're still out there somewhere. I cannot imagine how much some tech billionaire would pay for those.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, no, no, totally. And then, like, I'll use it as a rolling paper.
SPEAKER_08: That's funny.
SPEAKER_09: Nine stories came next. That's a great one, too. Most of those were written before Catcher was actually published, but that was also a bestseller. Those are short stories, right?
SPEAKER_07: A collection?
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, nine of them, strangely. It could also refer to a specific building or something like that.
SPEAKER_09: No, no, no, it could. I was joking because we talked about this. Weans are 10 golden country greats. Didn't have 10 songs. That's so awesome. It was because it was the guys they played with. There were 10 of them. Or was it 12? Why can't I remember? I don't remember.
SPEAKER_07: I don't know. It's not even a question of my memory failing me. I didn't have the foreknowledge to lose to begin with.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, it's 12 golden country greats, but there's not 12 songs. And people thought that was Ween making a joke, but they were like, no, the 12 golden country greats were these old timers from Nashville who played with us. So wait, one more thing.
SPEAKER_07: 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.
SPEAKER_09: 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?
SPEAKER_07: Sure, because it's in the book. Oh, it is. Okay, forget it. Forget it. Just read the book, everybody. No, no, no. You should say it because I think people that are like, I don't want to bother.
SPEAKER_09: Please tell me.
SPEAKER_07: Oh, okay. Well, then the people who don't want to bother. So 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 Murder 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, CliffsNotes. Oh, we should do one on CliffsNotes.
SPEAKER_09: I always wondered 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 the sage delivering wisdom to like 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.
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SPEAKER_09: For more information, visit teladochealth.com slash what's your why. That's T E L A D O C health dot com slash what's your why. 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. His anonymity? Well, I don't think he wanted to be anonymous necessarily because he published work, but he definitely wanted privacy. Okay. If you want to be anonymous, he would have published under a pen name, I would imagine. Truman Capote.
SPEAKER_09: In 53, though, he bought a 90-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 Salinger, 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 live 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 we'll get into the problematic nature of that later. But there was a group of teenagers from the high school there. He was in his early 30s, and he had connected with young people in his life, and that's why he could write in that voice so easily, I think. And they thought he was one of the gang, and they loved his advice, and so they would all hang out here and there. And so it's not like he disappeared completely at that point.
SPEAKER_07: 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, being like, get off my property. It depended, I'm sure, on 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 was actually one specific incident that triggered that reclusiveness that hadn't been there before. And he stayed in Cornish. He 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.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. So she was a teenager who worked for the school newspaper or wrote for the school newspaper and said, can I 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 believed in that kind of thing. Instead, it was published in the regional newspaper, the Daily Eagle Twin 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 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 curtailed after that.
SPEAKER_07: Like he was much more social up until that point. Oh, no one doubts that. Yeah. His famous quote was Shirley Blainey, a real phony.
SPEAKER_09: Was it really?
SPEAKER_07: It wouldn't surprise me. It would be great. So he becomes that kind of recluse. And to some people that was like, oh, we got to really find him now. There was a 1961 Life article on him where they, 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 saw connection with certain people. I think it was just you had to earn his trust or he had to find you attractive.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. It was a pretty small circle. He got together with a young woman named Claire Douglas. They had met when she was 16 and he was 32. And they kept in touch via letters and things. And they started dating when she was 19 at Radcliffe, a student at Radcliffe. They bonded over religion. You've mentioned early the 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 and 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.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah. But like at least a decade before George Harrison was ever exposed to this stuff. This guy was doing this in the mid-50s. It was in the 60s.
SPEAKER_09: Oh, okay. I thought it was in the 60s. No.
SPEAKER_07: He and Claire got married in 1955. So he was into it in the early mid-50s at the latest. So yeah. He was definitely into that. No, his daughter, who we'll meet in a second, later said that she believes that he got in over his head, essentially. He took it all 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 it doesn't matter what the religion was. It was the degree.
SPEAKER_09: 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'd grown up really loving her father. Whereas Matt Salinger, who played Captain America in the 1990 film Captain America. Really? And was in Revenge of the Nerds. Which, who was he in Revenge of the Nerds?
SPEAKER_07:
SPEAKER_09: He was one of the guys in the frat. The hot frat. Yeah. With Booger. Not the nerd frat. And Ted. Yeah, yeah. And the guy from Married with Jon. No, Ted, what was his last name?
SPEAKER_09: Oh, I don't remember. He's great though. I love that guy. He's wonderful. But yeah, Matt Salinger was an actor and producer for a while. But he says that his sisters, there's a great article from The Guardian from a few years ago, 2019, 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.
SPEAKER_07: Right. But I mean, like, those are pretty at odds with one another, pretty diametrical, you know?
SPEAKER_09: I agree. I don't think Matt said he was some great dad either because he would, he built a bunker basically to write 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.
SPEAKER_07: One, it's Ted McGinley. Ted, yeah. Two, the image of J.D. Salinger that people popularly hold is still very much widespread. The one that 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 Peggy-esque view that his daughter has of him started to emerge in the 90s. Peggy wrote a book called Dreamcatcher, which you mentioned. I think it came out in 2000. Who's Peggy? Peggy is his daughter, Margaret.
SPEAKER_09: Oh, that was her nickname, right? Yeah.
SPEAKER_07: And in the book, she talks, she talks at length about how her mother was treated and her mother was that Radcliffe 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. She, they got divorced in 1967 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 19 and he was in his early mid 30s. So the stuff that has come out about him starting in about the late 90s and then continuing on as different women in his 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 experience as a, as an older person to control and manipulate younger girls to his, to often their detriment for his short-term pleasure, essentially. Chris Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_09: It seemed 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 they're, when they're legally able to do so. So that happened a few different times. There was a 14 year old named Jean Miller. He was 30 at the time. He pursued her via friendship and letters. And then when they, when she was 19, 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 1998. 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 92. He was to a woman named Colleen O'Neill. She was, she was like my age basically at the time. She was 21 years old and he was 69 years old. And they stayed married for what, 18 years until he died. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07: 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. A good example I saw was that he had gone very much deaf 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 what somebody had just said to him when they were out and about in town or whatever. So, you know, 21 year old, 69 year old type stuff. But she apparently is, I guess the least affected of all of his wives or girlfriends. She is co-trustee of his work with his son, Matt. So she's still very much in the J.D. Salinger, pro Salinger camp clearly. But I guess kind of the antithesis to her would be Joyce Maynard, who was a freshman at Yale, and she has written about their relationship so much that people have come to look at her as a 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 literate it girl all of a sudden. 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 your 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 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 move to Cornish, New Hampshire with him. And she did. She was 19 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 Maynard has gone through a bit of a reform over the last several years, at least as far as some people are concerned. Soterios Johnson Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_09: And you mentioned Tech Bros buying things. Maynard, she sold 14, she auctioned 14 personal letters from Salinger and Peter Norton of Norton Antivirus bought them for $200,000. He offered to give them back to J.D. Salinger 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. Jon Moffitt Yeah, and supposedly that was a dime a dozen kind of thing.
SPEAKER_07: Other women came forward 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? Jon Moffitt Yeah, I mean, he quit publishing completely.
SPEAKER_09: And like I said, kept writing. In 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 know I'm known as strange, as a strange aloof 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 Matt Salinger 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 2010 and 2015, there will be five new novels. And none of that has happened yet. Nothing has come out. And Matt Salinger is just like, you know, it's going to take as long as it's going to take. Like there's tons of stuff. And I respect my father's work. And we're never going to license stuff. You're never going to see a Catcher in the Rye 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.
SPEAKER_07: So what else you got? Anything else?
SPEAKER_09: I got nothing else. I mean, new stuff's going to come out at some point. Very curious to see what that looks like. I bet some will be about the Glass family. I think for sure that was the family in many of those short stories that he wrote about recurring characters, Franny and Zoe and stuff like that. So I imagine there's more Glass family stuff in there. I think that's been confirmed.
SPEAKER_07: Dave turned up a really great analysis of J.D. Salinger's writing by a guy named Michiko Kakutani. It's really insightful and also just as approachable as J.D. Salinger's writing is really, really good stuff. So I thought it was a pretty good introduction to J.D. Salinger and the whole 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. Send me that. I'd 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 that means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this red stripe confirmation for Josh.
SPEAKER_09: Hey, guys, you mentioned red stripe beer on the recent episode about scuba. It reminded me of a story. I worked at a country club in Grainger, Indiana, as a banquet chef. I think it said shift. I know it's not shift, 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 and stood at 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 movie 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, but that recognition from the movie really helped sell the beer. So Josh was right. Never underestimate the power of marketing. And that is from Steve.
SPEAKER_07: Thanks, Steve. I love it when I'm right. I especially love it when people write in to tell me I was right, you know?
SPEAKER_09: Good stuff.
SPEAKER_07: If you want to be like Steve and tell me that I was right, bring it on. You can send it via email to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.
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