This Day in Literary History (Birth of J.D. Salinger, Star-Struck Literary Garbo)

Jan. 1, 1919—J.D. Salinger, a star-struck youngster who became a literary Garbo by walking away from his career at the height of his fame and acclaim, was born in Manhattan in comfortable circumstances that made him uncomfortable—not unlike his most indelible character, the troubled teenager Holden Caulfield. 

Even that name of the protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye reflects Salinger’s fascination with actors: It’s a mashup of two he particularly admired, William Holden and Joan Caulfield. Holden’s older brother is a Hollywood screenwriter, a profession that, for all its glamour, fills the alienated teen with uneasiness.

Over the years, many readers have mourned the fact that The Catcher in the Rye has never been adapted for the screen. A major reason for that might have been the botch that producer Samuel Goldwyn, together with screenwriting brothers Philip and Julius Epstein, made of Salinger’s short story “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut.” That bitter satire of WASP suburbia was turned into the Susan Hayward weepie My Foolish Heart, which gave rise to an Academy Award-winning song—and widespread critical derision.

Salinger was so embarrassed to be associated with this travesty of his work that he almost automatically refused other opportunities to adapt his work. I say “almost” because Salinger, a mass of contradictions, did, for whatever reason, allow agent H.N. Swanson to make one exception to the rule: marketing the short story “The Laughing Man.” (Producer Jerry Wald rejected the overture, unsuccessfully urging Swanson to convince Salinger to let him make a film of—you guessed it—The Catcher in the Rye.)

As protective of his intellectual property as Holden Caulfield was of innocent children, Salinger might also have feared how the censorship regime that held sway in Hollywood from 1930 to 1967 might have bowdlerized or twisted his depiction of sexual exploitation in the novel. (The restrictive “Production Code” of the time was adamant about its exclusion: “Sex perversion or any inference to it is forbidden.”)

As noted in Dan Grossman’s perceptive piece in the online magazine The Millions, hints of this theme appear early on, in Holden’s fear for the safety of one of his crushes, Jane Gallagher, at the hands of her alcoholic stepfather and Holden’s prep-school tormentor, Stradlater. It culminates in Holden fleeing the apartment of the only adult authority he trusts, Mr. Antolini, because of his suspicion that the English teacher is trying to seduce him.

When I read the novel as a high-school freshman, it was possible, given Holden’s status as a not-always-reliable narrator and the implications of his psychiatric treatment at the end of the book, to see this incident as ambiguous. But the flood of child sexual-abuse incidents that have been reported in prep schools and, of course, the Roman Catholic Church makes such a reading untenable now—a fact reinforced for me after reading Caitlin Flanagan’s connection of that scene to the scandal that erupted at New York’s Horace Mann School in The Atlantic three years ago.

The details provided force the conclusion that Mr. Antolini is a cunning sexual predator—one who latches onto the product of a troubled or broken family and carefully “grooms” him to win his trust. When Holden awakens to find Mr. Antolini staring at and caressing his body, the teacher claims that Holden is imagining such a transgression, calling him a “strange boy.” 

The abundant examples of Antolini’s prior kindness, however, are enough to make Holden wonder, as he spends the night helplessly alone in Grand Central, if the pat on the head represented affection instead of perversion. “The more I thought about it,” he tells us, “the more depressed and screwed up about it I got.”

Influenced by movies, Salinger in turn would influence generations of American filmmakers. Echoes of The Catcher in the Rye, with its loose conversational lingo, its scorn for adult “phonies” and its sympathy for adolescents feeling misplaced, can be found in The Royal Tenenbaums, The Graduate, Ordinary People, Less Than Zero, Tadpole, The Ice Storm, and Igby Goes Down.

Rangy and handsome—“like a candlestick, a Giacometti statue,” according to one admirer —with a warm, funny presence, Salinger might have become an actor himself if his passion and commitment to writing had not proven so all-consuming. At summer camp as a child, he had performed in at least four plays and was voted the most popular actor by counselors and fellow campers. His son Matthew would please his father considerably by becoming an actor.

Among the celebrities drawn into his orbit as an adult were Eugene O’Neill’s daughter Oona, a beautiful teenage debutante (who would break the writer’s heart by wedding Charlie Chaplin instead) and actress Elaine Joyce (more than a quarter-century his junior when they dated in the early 1980s).

After his last story in The New Yorker, “Hapworth 16, 1924,” was published in 1965, it became common to refer to Salinger as “reclusive.” But his attitude might have been more akin to Greta Garbo, who complained that rather than wanting to “be alone,” as normally reported, she had actually said she wanted to be “left alone.”

Someone who worked every day like Salinger could not have helped but notice how one of his heroes, Ernest Hemingway, distracted by his monstrous celebrity and the image he had created, had seen his productivity and art decline. 

Ironically, Salinger’s decision to step away from the publicity machine had only made him more famous, as the World’s Most Famous Reclusive Author. 

The movies created characters from him. At least the makers of Finding Forrester came up with a different surname. 

But W.P. Kinsella even used his actual name for the character sought by Ray Kinsella in the novel Shoeless Joe. (In a sense, this was art mirroring art: Salinger had created a character named Ray Kinsella in his story “A Young Girl In 1941 With No Waist At All.”) When the novel was turned into the film Field of Dreams, changes in the character’s name (to “Terence Mann”) and race (to African-American, to facilitate adding James Earl Jones to the cast) still did not fool viewers about who was really being referred to.

After Salinger’s death in 2010, it was announced that several books on which he had worked in his decades-long withdrawal from publishing would be issued between 2015 and 2020. But no word has been released since then on any publication timetable.

(A tip of my hat to my college friend Greg, who first suggested that I write about Salinger after the writer’s death in 2010. It took a long time, but I finally got around to it, my friend. Thanks!)

This Day in Literary History (“Haircut,” Lardner’s Masterpiece of Small-Town Cruelty, Published)

March 28, 1925—The evolution of Ring Lardner—from accomplished sportswriter/editor to master of the American idiom, to, quite simply, one of the finest short-story writers of the last century—advanced another step with the publication, in Liberty Magazine, of “Haircut,” a virtuosic exercise in unreliable first-person narration.

For a long time, you could turn to almost any anthology of American fiction covering the last hundred years and find “Haircut”—or, better yet, get your hands on an entire volume of his short stories at your local library. It’s getting harder and harder to find both, at least if my experience today is any indication.

Nowadays, fiction anthologies, like history textbooks, have to cover a longer time period—and encompass ethnic and racial groups long excluded from such books. In effect, what this means is that the “Big Three” of American fiction in the first half of the last century—Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner—will remain in the anthologies, but the likes of Lardner and his East Coast contemporary, Damon Runyon, will get squeezed out.

When I finally turned up “Haircut” today, it was from 200 Years of Great American Short Stories, a volume edited by Martha Foley in 1975. It figures—that’s when I discovered Lardner, in my freshman year of high school, in another anthology of the time.

I hope American students today aren’t missing out on the chance to read Lardner. It’s not just that, like Mark Twain, he progressed from journalism to pitch-black satire. It’s also that his influence runs through the American literary pantheon over the last few decades:

* F. Scott Fitzgerald, his great and good friend, not only admired his manifold literary gifts, but also paid tribute to his friend in the 1934 novel Tender Is the Night, in the form of Abe North, the sarcastic sidekick of Dick Diver whose alcohol-fueled downward spiral foreshadows his companion’s.

* Ernest Hemingway, who used the pseudonym “Ring Lardner Jr.” when working on his high-school newspaper—and who used Lardner’s device of repetition for heightening irony in much of his early fiction, such as The Sun Also Rises.

* J. D. Salinger, whose Catcher in the Rye protagonist, Holden Caulfield, cites Lardner as one of his favorite authors—and who also employs a narrator of limited self-awareness.

Covering the Chicago White Sox exposed Lardner not just to the baseball players but to people from every walk of life everywhere they played, and he soaked up all these idioms. After he turned away, in disillusionment, from covering baseball following the “Black Sox” gambling scandal, he was left with an enduring appreciation of this motherlode of oral culture—and a more hardened cynicism about stupidity, greed, and callousness.

Nine years before “Haircut,” Lardner had started using first-person narration in what was, in effect, an epistolary novel about a baseball player, You Know Me, Al. Over the next decade, he spiced his fiction with turns of phrase that—certainly at the time—sounded fresh and new (e.g., “he gave her a look you could have poured on a waffle”).

In 1924, Lardner had come up with the collection How to Write Short Stories (With Samples). He was increasingly casting his unillusioned, Swiftian sensibility on a whole range of characters, capturing them in their raw state—unpolished, barely literate, deceptive or morally blinkered.

Which brings us to “Haircut.” Lardner gained his great fame in the 1910s and 1920s as a humorist, but this tale is really about humor’s cruel misuse. That misuse not only defiles the perpetrator, but also Whitey, the barber who narrates the tale without understanding its import.

I found only one clear instance in the story of the type of humor that Lardner’s readers had come to love. It comes when Whitey explains why, unlike other barbers, he only charges three instead of five dollars when taking on the job of shaving corpses:

“I just charge three dollars because personally I don’t mind much shavin’ a dead person. They lay a lot stiller than live customers. The only thing is you don’t feel like talkin’ to them and you get kind of lonesome.”

That anecdote comes as true relief in a story that gains in moral horror as it goes along.

An excellent analysis of “Haircut’s” meaning can be found in this analysis from the blog “Dark Party Review.” Still, some additional points can be offered on how Lardner achieves his stunning effects.

Whitey recalls to his visitor the good old days in this small town, before Jim Kendall died, when he and sidekick Hod Meyers used to regale the community: “I bet they was more laughin’ done here than any town its size in America.”

At first, we believe we’re in the presence of a person given to rough but not nasty humor (“Whitey, your nose looks like a rosebud tonight”). But already, small hints of doubt appear about what Whitey is actually telling us.

Jim’s favorite seat, for instance, is next to a spittoon, suggesting his coarseness. And why do other customers at the barbershop instantly jump out of this chair when Jim arrives? Is it because he has an honored place in the shop or, as we suspect more and more as the story proceeds, he’s a nasty piece of work that it’s best not to cross for any reason?

Each time Whitey tells us something complimentary about his customer—that he was “comical,” “a card,” “a caution”—we learn something new that immediately makes us revise everything the barber says: Jim’s a lout whose wife would divorce him if it didn’t leave her in even more dire circumstances. He loses his job as a salesman because he’s a drunk. And he’s given to nasty practical jokes that humiliate family and anyone who annoys him, even total strangers.

Jim’s comeuppance comes at the hands of a mentally challenged man on whom he has played one of his characteristically mean jokes before. The narrator remains equally clueless about how Jim met his fate and why it was so deserved.

“Haircut” was a masterpiece of its kind, a near-primer in how to alert readers that what one character says varies drastically from the facts of the case. Lardner would produce several more short-story collections and a 1929 comedy with George S. Kaufman, June Moon, before dying of a heart attack in 1933.