Friday, June 20, 2025

Flashback, June 1965: Last J. D. Salinger Work Published in His Lifetime

When New Yorker readers received their most recent copy of the magazine 60 years ago this week, they didn’t know they were experiencing something extraordinary: not just a 26,000-word novella by J. D. Salinger that filled 50 pages in that issue, but the last time with a new work by the novelist and short-story writer what would come out in his lifetime.

Considering Salinger’s output for the prior several years, “Hapworth 16, 1924” closed out his career in an appropriate fashion: a letter by Seymour, the eldest son in the Glass family, who had also figured in Franny and Zooey (1961), and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963).

Coming from an upper-class environment, the Glass children grew up privileged, precocious and dysfunctional, a tendency borne out in the 1948 short story, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” in which a grown-up Seymour commits suicide.

A post of mine six years ago surveyed most of the course of the enigmatic writer’s career, but I didn’t concentrate on “Hapworth 16, 1924,” or what came after: silence.

If you want to encounter this last published story to date by the author of The Catcher in the Rye, you can’t find it in a collection of his work. You can’t even find it in a New Yorker anthology. Instead, you have to go to the actual physical issue of the magazine (June 21, 1965) online (if you have a subscription to the magazine and its archives) or click this YouTube link to listen to a reading.

In a March 2010 article in New York Magazine, Roger Lathbury discussed how his hopes for publishing this elusive title in book form were briefly fanned before dying.

He had sent a letter to Salinger in 1988 proposing that his tiny company, Orchises Press, issue the novella. After a quick note from the author saying he’d consider it, Lathbury heard nothing more for eight years when, out of the blue, he was contacted by Salinger’s literary agency, Harold Ober Associates. If a book were to be issued, he was told, it needed to be done “to exacting standards”—i.e., bound in buckram.

A cordial meeting at Washington’s National Gallery followed between publisher and novelist, with Lathbury acceding to Salinger’s unusual demands (e.g., limited distribution, the author’s name nowhere on the cover).

Then, the deal came unraveled after Lathbury confirmed to the press that the book would be published. Horrified by what he evidently felt was a betrayal of trust, Salinger withdrew his approval.

Six years ago, Salinger’s son Matt and widow Colleen indicated that they had since 2011 been preparing to release for publication stories written by the legendary New Hampshire recluse in the more than four decades after “Hapworth 16, 1924.” But it was an arduous process, Matt told   of the British publication The Guardian:

“[My father] wanted me to pull it together, and because of the scope of the job, he knew it would take a long time. This was somebody who was writing for 50 years without publishing, so that’s a lot of material. ... [But] there’s not a reluctance or a protectiveness: When it’s ready, we’re going to share it.”

Since then, silence—not unlike the sphinx who began it all.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Barney Miller,’ On Getting Off on the Wrong Foot With an Eyewitness)

Detective Ron Harris [played by Ron Glass, pictured]: “Miss Jacobs? Hi, I'm Detective Harris. If you'll have a seat right over there, we'll be right with you.”

Miss Jacobs [played by Ivy Bethune]: "Both of you?”

Harris: “Uh, no, I meant me.”

Miss Jacobs: “Then say what you mean, for heaven's sake!”—Barney Miller, Season 5, Episode 29, “Quo Vadis?” original air date Mar. 2, 1978, teleplay by Tony Sheehan, directed by Alex March

Thursday, June 19, 2025

Quote of the Day (Tobias Wolff, Urging a ‘Turn Away From Power to Love’)

“Mend your lives. You have deceived yourselves in the pride of your hearts, and the strength of your arms. Though you soar aloft like the eagle, though your nest is set among the stars, thence I will bring you down, says the Lord. Turn away from power to love. Be kind. Do justice. Walk humbly."—American novelist, short-story writer, and memoirist Tobias Wolff, title story from In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (1981)

Happy birthday to Tobias Wolff, born 80 years ago today in Birmingham, AL!

(The image accompanying this post, showing Tobias Wolff at an event at Kepler's in Menlo Park for his short story collection Our Story Begins, was taken Apr. 25, 2008, by Mark Coggins from San Francisco.)

Wednesday, June 18, 2025

Quote of the Day (Edmund Burke, on How One Private Citizen Can Avert a Public Crisis)

“How often has public calamity been arrested on the very brink of ruin by the seasonable energy of a single man! Have we no such man amongst us? I am as sure as I am of my being, that one vigorous mind, without office, without situation, without public functions of any kind (at a time when the want of such a thing is felt, as I am sure it is), I say, one such man, confiding in the aid of God, and full of just reliance in his own fortitude, vigor, enterprise, and perseverance, would first draw to him some few like himself, and then that multitudes, hardly thought to be in existence, would appear and troop about him.”—Anglo-Saxon statesman and father of conservatism Edmund Burke (1729-1797), “Letter to William Elliot,” May 28, 1795, in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) (1887)

The kind of person envisioned by Burke possesses not just “seasonable energy” but moral stature to influence followers. In our cynical age, who wields such authority?

If there is such a person, I hope he or she will step forward quickly.

Tuesday, June 17, 2025

Quote of the Day (Bonnie Kristian, on How to Stay Truly Well-Informed)

“Resolve to know just a few stories and to know them well. Your time and attention are limited. You can’t do justice to every issue of the day, and maintaining a broad, shallow pattern of news consumption makes you vulnerable to manipulation and confusion. So this year, pick at most half a dozen big stories to follow carefully and in depth. Read books, not just the latest headlines. Learn key names and legislation. Find trustworthy journalists to keep you up-to-date. Then remember your finitude and ignore everything else.”—American journalist and author Bonnie Kristian quoted by Tish Harrison Warren, “Resolutions That Are Good for the Soul,” The New York Times, Jan. 4, 2023

Monday, June 16, 2025

Quote of the Day (Desiderius Erasmus, on ‘Conniving at Your Friends' Vices’)

Conniving at your friends' vices, passing them over, being blind to them and deceived by them, even loving and admiring your friends' egregious faults as if they were virtues—does not this seem pretty close to folly?”— Dutch monk and Renaissance scholar Desiderius Erasmus (1469-1536), In Praise of Folly (1509)

It also seems pretty close to complicity in an emerging American autocracy.

Sunday, June 15, 2025

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Karen Armstrong, on Serenity Vs. ‘The Nervous Craving to Promote Yourself’)

“Once you gave up the nervous craving to promote yourself, denigrate others, draw attention to your unique and special qualities, and ensure that you were first in the pecking order, you experienced an immense peace.”— British religion scholar Karen Armstrong, The Case for God (2009)