Salinger by David Shields

Author:David Shields [Shields, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2013-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

Mary McCarthy.

GORE VIDAL: This ghastly, self-observant family, going on and on and on about everything of importance to them, which they assume is important to all the world.

ANNE MARPLE: This “prose home movie” [“Zooey”] is unwieldy as a short story. . . . The frequent inclusion of diaries and letters in the Glass Saga indicates that Salinger is having additional mechanical difficulties with his embarrassing wealth of Glassiana.

HOWARD M. HARPER: Salinger’s skillful use of concrete details creates a certain reality in the Glass stories, but it is a surface reality. Beneath it is an essentially misanthropic view of life, in which the Glasses hold a monopoly on goodness, sensitivity, intelligence, and so on.

—

SHANE SALERNO: Donald Fiene resurfaced in 1962. Despite Salinger’s refusing to cooperate with his book, Fiene had stubbornly pressed forward and contacted Salinger’s friends, including one of the “Four Musketeers,” Jack Altaras, who was a successful lawyer in Cleburne, Texas. When Salinger learned of this intrusion, he wrote Fiene an angry letter urging him to stop his plan to publish a book on his work.

J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Donald Fiene, September 10, 1962:

Part of my mind is simply unable to believe that you plan to go ahead with this book about me despite our exchanges on the subject.

I find it almost impossible to believe that you’ve gone right on writing letters to friends and acquaintances of mine.

I beg you leave off.

—

DAVID SHIELDS: “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” and “Seymour: An Introduction” were published in the New Yorker in 1955 and 1959, respectively, and they had been discussed in reviews in the years immediately following, but they weren’t published together as a book until 1963. It was number one on the New York Times bestseller list for ten weeks; the reviews were merciless.

ORVILLE PRESCOTT: “Seymour: An Introduction” is only a story by the most generous definition of the word. . . . [A] turgid and static discourse . . . it lacks the charm, humor, and surface brilliance which distinguish most of Mr. Salinger’s stories. . . . [Buddy] rambles, digresses, pontificates, and fails completely to make Seymour Glass seem a believable human being.

IRVING HOWE: Both of these stories [“Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” and “Seymour: An Introduction”] are marred by the self-indulgence of a writer flirting with depths of wisdom, yet coy and embarrassed in his advances. . . . And as the world of Salinger comes more fully into view, it seems increasingly open to critical attack. It is hard to believe in Seymour’s saintliness, hard even to credit him as a fictional character, for we are barely able to see him at all behind the palpitations of Buddy’s memory. The Salinger world is coated with the sentimentalism of a “love” that, in refusing to distinguish among objects and qualities, ends by obliterating their distinctive life.

JOSE de M. PLATANOPEZ: I have just finished reading “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” and “Seymour: An Introduction” and should be interested in any evidence your [the New York Times Book Review] readers can provide that J.

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