Words from Ralph Ellison

Words from Ralph Ellison that I’ve long carried in my head started knocking around in there yesterday, so I added them to the Words to Live By in the sidebar.

If you’re reading via RSS, click through and you can see them, along with words from Heraclitus, Harvey Pekar, Marcel Proust, Eleanor Roosevelt, J.D. Salinger, and Simone Weil.

Salinger in Ohio

[Click either image for bigger news.]

I never thought I’d see more than one of these headlines. They’re real, and may be found here and here, at least until there’s a correction. But I don’t think a correction is coming.

QAnon fans take note: J.D. Salinger, too, is alive.

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Banned books, free

For a limited time, the New York Public Library is making four often-banned books available to borrow in digital form anywhere in the United States: Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, Kacen Callender’s King and the Dragonflies, Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

Details here.

Salinger in Ohio

[Click for a larger view.]

A genuine headline, not from a dream. You can find it here, as long as there’s no correction.

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T.S. Eliot = J.D. Salinger?

Last month, at Swann Galleries, New York, a first edition of Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and a first edition of The Catcher in the Rye (1951) each sold for $16,250.

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Signatures in unexpected places

Elvis, Harper Lee, J.D. Salinger: signatures found on due-date slips and in library books (CBC).

I’ve found on my library’s shelves books signed by Willa Cather and H.L. Mencken and Louis Zukofksy, all there for borrowing. Each time I headed straight to the circulation desk. “This should not be on the shelves,” said I, earnestly.

My favorite professor, Jim Doyle, once found in Harvard’s Widener Library a volume of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough with handwritten notes by T.S. Eliot. Yes, that T.S. Eliot. Jim took the book to a librarian, who promptly took it away.

Salinger’s voice

Weirdness in the news: Betty Eppes, who in 1980 secretly recorded twenty-seven minutes’ worth of conversation with J. D. Salinger, says that the tape will be cremated with her.

Without a Paris Review subscription, you can read at least the start of Eppes’s account of meeting Salinger, published in 1980: “What I Did Last Summer.” The account is anthologized in If You Really Want to Hear About It: Writers on J. D. Salinger and His Work, ed. Catherine Crawford (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006).

The Eppes–Salinger conversation is funny and sad:

“Is it true that you’ll eat fried foods only if they’re prepared in cold-pressed peanut oil?”

“Yes.”

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Martin Radtke and the NYPL

When I visited the New York Public Library’s J. D. Salinger exhibit in November 2019, I took a quick photograph of a plaque in the floor — and then forgot about it. Here, from that photo, are the words on the plaque.

Inscribed here are the words of an immigrant whose life was transformed by the Library and whose estate now enriches it.

IN MEMORY

MARTIN RADTKE

1883–1973

I had little opportunity for formal education as a young man in Lithuania, and I am deeply indebted to The New York Public Library for the opportunity to educate myself. In appreciation, I have given the Library my estate with the wish that it be used so that others can have the same opportunity made available to me.

In 1974 The New York Times published a story about Martin Radtke, his donation, and the plaque.

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News from New Hampshire

Colleen O’Neill, widow of J.D. Salinger, has offered to donate her defunct general store to the town of Cornish, New Hampshire, for use as a town library.

You can still see the store in its OPEN state at Google Maps.

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An on-screen jump-seat

[Barry Sullivan joins Ann Dvorak, Louis Calhern, and Lana Turner in a cab. From A Life of Her Own (dir. George Cukor, 1950). Click either image for a larger view.]

I know about jump-seats from reading J.D. Salinger. I was inordinately happy to see a jump-seat in a movie.

Full disclosure

The e-mail’s subject line read Glasses Disclosure. I didn’t see the sender’s name.

Full disclosure: I wear glasses. They disclose to me a world that, at a distance, would otherwise be blurred.

If J.D. Salinger’s unpublished stories about the Glass family are ever published, they would constitute a Glasses disclosure.

And there’s a Bud Powell composition, “Glass Enclosure.”

All or none of these observations might have something to do with my dream mail.

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FSRC: annual report

The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, just finished its fifth year. The club began after I retired from teaching, so the year runs from May to May. In our fifth year we read twenty-one books and a book’s worth of uncollected short stories, and we climbed one mountain, Mount Musil. In non-chronological order:

James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, The Professor

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

Robertson Davies, The Deptford Trilogy (Fifth Business, The Manticore, World of Wonders)

Eva Hoffman, How to Be Bored

Olivia Jaimes, Nancy’s Genius Plan

Robert Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies

Guy de Maupassant, Afloat

Duncan Minshull, ed., Beneath My Feet: Writers on Walking

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey, Nine Stories, Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters / Seymour: An Introduction, uncollected stories

Adalbert Stifter, Rock Crystal

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Stefan Zweig, Journeys

Credit to the translators whose work gave us access to the world beyond English: Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore, Dmitri Nabokov and Vladmir Nabokov, Douglas Parmée, Will Stone, Sophie Wilkins.

Here are the reports for 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019.

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers.]

Claudine (dir. John Berry, 1974). Diahann Carroll and James Earl Jones star as Claudine, a domestic worker and mother of six, and Roop, a charming garbage man. Their improbable first date blossoms into a relationship that seems destined to weather all challenges. The film was marketed as a comedy, but the mood shifts frequently, with considerable room made for social woes and commentary thereupon. Shark jump: one of the characters (not Roop) gets a vasectomy. ★★★

*

The Royal Tenenbaums (dir. Wes Anderson, 2001). Having reread all of J.D. Salinger, I wanted to see this film again to look for the Salinger overtones, which I vaguely remembered were supposed to be there. And they are: in the name Tenenbaum (the married name of Glass daughter Boo Boo is Tannenbaum), in the family of wunderkinder, in the sorrows at the heart of family life, in Margot’s (Gwyneth Paltrow) fur coat, cigarettes, and bathroom retreats (shades of Franny and Zooey). But these are surface elements. The Tenenbaums in other respects are wholly themselves, fragile, dysfunctional, and at home. ★★★★

*

Danger Zone (dir. William Berke, 1951). It appears on a DVD titled Forgotten Noir — forgotten for good reason. This B-movie stars Hugh Beaumont as a fellow who runs a charter-boat business but spends more time involved in capers. Capers, plural: the movie is made of two utterly separate stories, which sound to me as if they began life as episodes of a radio serial. Fun to hear Beaumont talk like someone from a Raymond Chandler novel, and fun to see Tom Neal (of Detour) as a hood, but this film is little more than a curiosity. ★

*

The Big Chase (dir. Arthur Hilton and Robert L. Lippert Jr., 1954). Also forgotten, and not even close to noir, with a veteran cop telling the story of a rookie who chases down a criminal gang (the gang includes Lon Chaney Jr., who doesn’t speak a single line). The chase, which takes up almost twenty minutes of this hour-long movie, involves cars, boats, a helicopter, and a second director, but it’s sadly lacking in suspense. The production values at times recall Ed Wood: watch the opening scene for instant confirmation, as the veteran cop offers a cigarette to a visitor, who declines, after which the cop removes two cigarettes from a pack, lets one roll off his desk, lights the other, which is unlit in subsequent shots, and then lights his cigarette a second time. One redeeming feature: many shots of plain, unglamorous Los Angeles, wide boulevards, auto repair shops, billboards, and fences. ★

*

Vivre sa vie (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1962). The story made me think of Zola — a woman’s slide from store clerk to prostitute. The intertitles, separating twelve short segments, made me think of silent films and Brecht’s epic theater: we know what will happen before it does (a meta kind of determinism). The café conversation about speech and writing made me think of Brassai (the camera angle) and Derrida. Seeing Anna Karina for the first time made me think of the other times I’ve come to someone’s work only after they’re gone. ★★★★

*

Jane Wants a Boyfriend (dir. William Sullivan, 2015).
Jane (Louisa Krause), who mends and tends to costumes for a theatrical company, is a young woman on the autism spectrum. Her sister Bianca (Eliza Dushku) is an actess with the same company. Alas, this film again and again places its focus on Bianca (and her journalist boyfriend, and her friends, and her role in A MIdsummer Night’s Dream, and her cranky director), when Jane and her misadventures and adventures in dating would be the appropriate focus. Perhaps the movie should have been called Jane’s Sister Wants Equal Time. ★★★

*

Small Town Christmas (dir. Maclain Nelson, 2018). We had to watch one Hallmark Christmas movie straight (and I do mean straight) through. Here, bestselling newbie writer Nell Phillips ends her book tour in the two-bit small town that inspired her novel, a town she’s never before visited, where she reconnects with handsome former co-worker Emmett Turner, whose stories of Christmas inspired her writing and who ghosted years ago when they both lived in the big city and were supposed to go on a date. Emmett now runs the town’s bookstore (named for his late sister, Paige Turner), and he has an explanation for why he ghosted, a good one. The best name here though belongs not to a character but to an actor: Preston Vanderslice, who plays the obligatory developer out to alter a town’s way of life. ★★

*

Wuthering Heights (dir. William Wyler, 1939). The 1958 television production prompted our household to read the novel, which in turn prompted us to watch this version. I think 1958 does a better job of suggesting (if only suggesting) the novel’s larger-than-life-and-death sado-masochistic torments. As Heathcliff and Catherine, Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon are too restrained. But still, they’re Olivier and Oberon, and David Niven as Edgar Linton makes a perfect beta-male to Heathcliff’s alpha. ★★★★

*

Little Women (dir. Greta Gerwig, 2019). I came to this movie as a novice, recalling little more than Beth’s death in the 1994 version, so my judgment is unclouded by prior allegiance, unaided by prior knowledge. The acting is almost uniformly excellent, though Florence Pugh looks like a time traveler, ready to text the future at any moment. The decision to tell the story in a non-linear way baffles me, as it leaves the film, early on, with little momentum — just one vignette after another. My favorite scenes: the brief conversation about anger between Jo (Saoirse Ronan) and Marmee (Laura Dern), and the montage of Jo writing in the attic (even though her handwriting looks like something from the inspirational wall art sold at Wal-Mart). ★★★

*

The Public (dir. Emilio Estevez, 2018). Any movie about library life is a movie I’ll root for. This one has good intentions: Estevez plays a librarian who finds himself in deep sympathy with the homeless men who refuse to leave a Cincinnati library for a night outdoors in brutally low temperatures. Estevez and other cast members really look like library people. But too much is contrived or questionable here: the all-male occupying force, the absence of tobacco and substances, the near-absence of alcohol, a sub-plot with a city official’s family, and a bit of performance art that left me saying yeesh. ★★

*

Danger Signal (dir. Robert Florey, 1945). Faye Emerson is Hilda Fenchurch, a bespectacled public stenographer and typist, taking dictation and typing at the office, and then typing some more at home, where she lives with her mother. Zachary Scott is Ronnie Mason, a ne’er-do-well — or worse — writer who takes a room as a boarder in the Fenchurch house, where he ingratiates himself with Hilda, Hilda’s younger sister, and their mother. Strong echoes of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, but the film doesn’t fulfill its promise. What appears to be a significant plot device (a ring, as in Hitchcock) ends up forgotten, and the ending is too abrupt and improbable to satisfy. ★★★

*

Safety Last! (dir. Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, 1923). Here’a a genius at work. Harold Lloyd is “The Boy,” a young man looking to make good in a Los Angeles department-store. His brilliant scheme: have a friend climb the building, which will bring hundreds of people to the store. Endlessly inventive comedy, on the selling floor and up in the air, with many genuine thrills. ★★★★

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Today’s Saturday Stumper

I found today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Greg Johnson, exceedingly difficult. It was a forty-six-minute puzzle for me, with an especially difficult northwest corner. I started with 8-A, seven letters, “Preparing to steal, perhaps” and 8-D, eight letters, “Out of sight.” Some gimmes helped:

33-D, eight letters, “Battle of the Bulge forest.” In the news, but also in my head from reading about J.D. Salinger.

39-A, five letters, “Whom Aristotle mentions in ‘On the Parts of Animals.’” Ancients? animals? Easy to guess.

56-A, seven letters, “‘Daughter of the wind’ plant.” Well, I think it’s a gimme. YGMV: Your Gimmes May Vary.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

14-D, seven letters, “New Yorker’s hero.” Clever, and for me at least, pretty arcane lingo.

17-A, seven letters, “Press passes?” Groan.

18-A, seven letters, “     weather.” Nicely dowdy.

24-D, eleven letters, “Kid’s art supply.” I just liked seeing this supply in a puzzle.

42-A, eleven letters, “Fog machine user of yore.” I will take the constructor’s word for it.

48-D, five letters, “Inedible spreadable.” Once again a Newsday puzzle chooses concision over farfetched cuteness in a tricky clue for a common word. Bravo.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

“The Standing Family Joke”

Seymour’s take on his brother Buddy’s fiction:


J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction (1963).

Buddy Glass, writer, bears a more than passing resemblance to a certain Salinger.

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“So nice and yellow! ”

Buddy Glass says that his brother Seymour loved horseplay from younger siblings. And:


J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction (1963).

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“He was a chiropodist”

I’ll set the stage, or the cab. It’s June 4, 1942. Seymour Glass has failed to show for his wedding to Muriel Fedder. In the aftermath, Seymour’s brother Buddy (the only Glass in attendance) finds himself in a cab with the Matron of Honor and her husband, Helen Silsburn (a Fedder family friend), and Muriel’s father’s uncle. The Matron of Honor is furious: “I’d like to get my hands on him for about two minutes. Just two minutes, that’s all.” Buddy has not let these people know that Seymour is his brother. “We were boys together,” he has explained. What, the Matron of Honor wants to know, did Seymour do before the war?


J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (1963).

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Sailing out of Walden Pond

Bessie Glass has just left the bathroom where she’d been talking to her son Zooey, who is still in the bathtub, on the other side of the shower curtain. So many wonderful bits of phrasing in this passage:


J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (1961).

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In Maniac Ridge

I was in Maniac Ridge, New Jersey, uncertain whether maniac was an adjective or a noun. The car needed gas, so I pulled into the garage of a Sunoco station. I popped the gas cap and an attendant filled the tank. (No self-service in New Jersey.) The garage was filled with vehicles in need of repair: a golf cart, a sedan, a bus. I had thirty-one papers with me, all of which needed grading, and I needed to find a place to work.

This is the eighteenth teaching-related dream I’ve had since retiring, and the third with grading. All the others: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17.

[The number of papers probably owes something to J.D. Salinger’s Zooey : “Advanced Writing 24-A loaded me up with thirty-eight short stories to drag tearfully home for the weekend.”]

At the movies

Holden Caulfield is killing time at Radio City. The stage show has ended, and “the goddam picture” begins:


The Catcher in the Rye (1951).

The summary that follows — an amnesiac duke, a failing publisher, a meet-cute, a sudden bestseller, the return of an old fiancée, the end of amnesia, temporary complications, happy endings all around — sounds an awful lot like a Hallmark Christmas movie. It’s still 1951, in some ways, and people still hate-watch the goddam movies. They really do.

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