Glass, Salinger, Strunk, White

What follows is speculation:

In “Hapworth 16, 1924” (1965), J. D. Salinger’s last published work of fiction, seven-year-old Seymour Glass, writing a letter to his parents and three of his siblings from summer camp, acknowledges — at length — that he needs to improve his writing:

While bearing in mind that my loss of you is very acute today, hardly bearable in the last analysis, I am also snatching this stunning opportunity to use my new and entirely trivial mastery of written construction and decent sentence formation as explained and slightly enriched upon in that small book, alternately priceless and sheer crap, which you saw me poring over to excess during the difficult days prior to our departure for this place. Though this is quite a terrible bore for you, dear Bessie and Les, superb or suitable construction of sentences holds some passing, amusing importance for a young fool like myself! It would be quite a relief to rid my system of fustian this year. It is in danger of destroying my possible future as a young poet, private scholar, and unaffected person.

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[I]t is all too easy for a boy of my dubious age and experience to fall easy prey to fustian, poor taste, and unwanted spurts of showing off.

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I am personally very hopeful that great layers of unnatural, affected, stilted fustian and rotten, disagreeable words will drop off my young body like flies during the crucial period to come! It is worth every effort, my future sentence construction quite hanging in the balance!

That conspicuous reference to “that small book, alternately priceless and sheer crap”: could it be meant to suggest The Elements of Style? Harcourt, Brace brought out a trade edition of William Strunk’s book in 1920, just fifty-two pages long. By 1965, The Elements was well known as “the little book.” Seymour’s habits of writing are, as the above passage shows, far from Strunkian. But the target of playful mockery here might more likely be “Strunk and White,” E. B. White’s 1959 revision of The Elements of Style. It’s the 1959 text that condemns Seymour’s pet phrase “in the last analysis” (fourteen appearances in “Hapworth”) as “a bankrupt expression.” And it’s the 1959 text that cautions against over-relying on adjectives and adverbs. Seymour is crazy about adjectives, slightly less so about adverbs, and they make for delightful, hilarious, improbable sentences:

A decent, utterly frank criterion is always of splendid, temporary use to a young person.

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I am freely saddling you, one and all, parent and child, with a very long, boring letter, quite filled to the brim with my stilted flow of words and thoughts.

*

Oh, my God, you are a risible, amusing kid!

But Seymour’s doing his best to — like the man says — omit needless words:

If the rest of my letter seems a little too brisk and impersonal, please excuse it; I am going to devote the remainder of the letter to economy of words and phraseology, quite my weakest point in written construction. If I sound quite cold and brisk, remember it is for my own practice and that I am not feeling cold and brisk where you, parent and child alike, are concerned; far from it!

That a work of fiction in the form of a transcription of a 1924 letter seems to make veiled reference to a 1959 publication — well, that would hardly be the most extraordinary thing about “Hapworth 16, 1924.” That a work of such exuberance and strangeness met with such a cold and brisk reception baffles and saddens me. Personally, I’m still hopeful that this work and other, hitherto unpublished Salinger works will, in the last analysis, appear in book form in the not distant future.

Related reading
All Salinger posts (via Pinboard)
All Strunk and White posts (via Pinboard)

[It’s the 1959 text that let the common reader know the phrase “the little book”: in his introduction, White mentions it as Strunk’s way of referring to The Elements. New Yorker subscribers can find “Hapworth 16, 1924” in the June 19, 1965 issue in the online archive.]

Word of the day: nemophilous

The Oxford English Dictionary has it:

nemophilous, adj.

Etymology: < ancient Greek νέμος wooded pasture, glade (see NEMOPHILA n.) + -PHILOUS comb. form.

rare.

Fond of or frequenting woods.

The combining form -philous creates “adjectives with the sense ‘having an affinity for or thriving in (a particular kind of habitat or environment).’”

I encountered nemophilous in “Hapworth 16, 1924” (1965), J. D. Salinger’s last published fiction, which takes the form of a letter from seven-year-old Seymour Glass, away at summer camp with his younger brother Buddy, to his parents and other siblings: “To my joy and sheer wonder, your son Buddy has turned out to be utterly and thrillingly nemophilous!”

Related reading
Argyrol : Charlotte russe : Musterole : Sal Hepatica : Stopette

When comic strips do technology

[Mark Trail, August 8, 2012.]

It doesn’t always work out.

Related reading
Earlier Mark Trail posts

Le Steak de Paris

[From Harold H. Hart’s Hart’s Guide to New York City (New York: Hart Publishing, 1964).]

One more from Maeve Brennan’s Manhattan: Le Steak de Paris. Brennan writes about this restaurant several times in The Long-Winded Lady, more than about any other. In a 1967 piece, she stops in for dinner and learns that the building has been slated for demolition and that the owner, unable to find a new location in the city, is planning to move Le Steak to Long Island. Brennan then describes the restaurant:

Inside, Le Steak has hardly changed in all the years I have been going there. The walls were once covered with printed-paper murals of rustic eighteenth-century scenes. Later there was red-brick-patterned wallpaper. Now the paper imitates polished wooden planks — vertical planks — and there is a cigarette machine where the jukebox that played French records used to be. But nothing has really changed there. The menu is much the same as always — Crème Jeannette, Poulet Rôti, Shrimps Cocktail, Artichaut Froid, and so on. Even the atmosphere is the same, as though finality had stayed where it belongs — out of sight and far away.

Le Steak de Paris must have lived a very quiet life in Manhattan: if the New York Times historical index (1851–2007) can be trusted, the paper has not one reference to the restaurant — which would mean no reviews and no advertisements. The 49th Street address, now part of a skyscraper, still houses a restaurant, City Lobster and Steak.

As for the telephone exchange, CI can mean only one thing: CIrcle.

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May 8, 2017: Bobby Cole, a New Jersey historian, found a photograph of Le Steak de Paris. He’s active in the Facebook group Old Images of New York. Thank you, Bobby, for allowing me to share your find here:


[Click for a larger view.]

This photograph prompted me to take another look at the New York Times Historical Index, which now returns one article mentioning Le Steak de Paris. Here is a photograph of Guy l’Heureux, the restaurant’s owner, from a 1967 article about the many restaurants that were soon to be demolished to make way for another skyscraper. Said L’Heureux, “What can you do? C’est la vie.”


[“If Your Favorite Restaurant Is Near Sixth Avenue and 49th Street, Go to It Now or You May Be Too Late,” The New York Times, September 12, 1967.]

And here is a small ad that ran many times in the Times:


[October 10, 1966.]

“Dinner from $3.50”: I’m there.

Eighth Street Bookshop

The Eighth Street Bookshop, run by brothers Eli and Ted Wilentz, is one of the now-defunct businesses that make an appearance in Maeve Brennan’s The Long-Winded Lady. The store closed in 1979.The above advertisement appeared in the Evergreen Review 19 (July–August 1961). My copy is a used-book store find.

RealityStudio, a site devoted to the work of William Burroughs, has excellent evocations of the Eighth Street Bookshop by Jed Birmingham and Bill Reed. An excerpt from Reed:

Eighth Street’s regular clientele included Edward Albee, Uta Hagen, Herbert Berghof, Susan Sontag, Irving Howe, the curmudgeonly Joseph Campbell, essayist-novelist Albert Murray (every day), author-activist Michael Harrington, cartoonist William Steig, New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, poet-translator (later, MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient) Richard Howard, and Alger Hiss, also the store’s station[e]ry supplier. . . .

Nearly every time you turned around at Eighth Street found you rubbing literary stardust out of your eyes.

A related post
From the Evergreen Review

Pete Seeger on The Colbert Report

If you missed it last night: Pete Seeger with Stephen Colbert. The Seeger segment begins at 10:15. My favorite exchange:

“You’re ninety-three, yes, sir?”

“That’s what they tell me.”

If you turn up the volume, you’ll hear that at least some audience members are singing on the choruses.

Maeve Brennan, The Long-Winded Lady

Maeve Brennan. The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from The New Yorker. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2009. 268 pages. $15.95 (paper).

Except in our minds, there is no connection between the little American farmhouse and the Hungarian cats and the Hungarian pigeon, but in our minds these stories remind us of what we are waiting for — a respite, a touch of grace, something simple that starts us wondering. I am reminded of Oliver Goldsmith, who said, two hundred years ago, “Innocently to amuse the imagination in this dream of life is wisdom.”

From “The Farmhouse That Moved Downtown,” first published in the March 18, 1967 issue of The New Yorker.

Imagine a solitary figure in an Edward Hopper painting who turns from the usual window, moves to a desk, and begins to write of what she has seen: that would be Maeve Brennan. From 1954 to 1981, Brennan (1917–1993) contributed unsigned items to the “Talk of the Town” section of The New Yorker, each item introduced as the work of “the long-winded lady.” That name must have been a matter of a self hard at work deprecating: the fifty-six items gathered in this volume are nothing like long-winded. Almost all are just a few pages long, the work of a writer in search of something that will start her wondering, a writer given to noticing and thinking about her fellow strangers. Brennan is an observer, not a reporter: even when the people she studies seem available for questions, she asks none. She seems to speak only to tobacconists and waiters, and even then her words are implied, not stated.

“There is a great deal of virtue in feeling unseen,” Brennan writes in 1969. Feeling unseen, she looks down to the street from a high hotel-room window (she lives in a series of hotels); feeling unseen, she looks out to the street from a table in a nearly deserted restaurant (she likes restaurants with windows). Or she follows events at another table as she drinks a martini or eats a dish of coffee ice cream. Her Manhattan is a lonely town: quiet, somber blocks without the glare and hum of, say, Frank O’Hara’s city. In Brennan’s Manhattan, there is always just one thing happening, and the writer’s responsibility is to attend to it.

Brennan attends to the most modest details: an ailanthus tree, a plate of broccoli, a coffeeshop at 5:00 a.m., a Californian waiting for a Fifth Avenue bus, some boors in a bookstore, a newspaper story about cats and a pigeon. The content is sometimes slight, and reading too many of these pieces at a sitting might leave a reader too aware of their sameness. But Brennan is a maker of beautiful descriptive sentences, and that is what most draws me to her work:

Washington Square Park was being very satisfactory the other morning at six o’clock. It was a dripping green morning after a night of rain. The air was mild and fresh, and shone with a faint unsteadiness that was exactly like the unsteadiness of color inside a seashell.

*

The few people who were about wore light-colored summer clothes, and they sauntered and strolled and paused to look around like the extras in an operetta just before the principals walk on and take the center of the stage.

*

The rain that had fallen all day today had stopped, leaving the air damp and the streets wet and shiny, tinted with city lights.

I began writing with the intention to comment on these sentences and then thought to let them speak for themselves. I must though point out the adverb exactly in the first passage. Remove it and what remains is merely a strained comparison. The slightly defiant exactly commands the suspension of disbelief and is, here, exactly right. Exactly right too is the word dripping, which seems to me one specific trace of the general influence of James Joyce’s Dubliners on Brennan’s prose, the word recalling the “dark dripping gardens” of “Araby” and the “dripping tree” of “The Dead.”

To read The Long-Winded Lady in 2012 is to read about a lost Manhattan. But in this book the city is already disappearing, its three- and four-story buildings giving way to the empire of “Office Space.” The names of now-defunct restaurants and stores appear here like the names of the dead, remembered now by fewer and fewer of the living: the Adano Restaurant, Bickford’s, the Eighth Street Bookshop, International Book & Art Shop, Le Steak de Paris, Longchamps, Marta’s Restaurant, The Old Place, Schrafft’s, Zucca’s. In Maeve Brennan’s writing, these places and their city still live.


[“Maeve Brennan of HARPER’S BAZAAR looking through store window.” Photograph by Nina Leen. United States, 1945. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

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March 8, 2017: More about that farmhouse in this post.

Too early again

About two weeks ago, in the aftermath of the Aurora, Colorado, shootings, various voices in media and politics said that it was inappropriate to be discussing gun-ownership rights — not the right time, too early. In the aftermath of today’s shootings in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, it seems that once again it will be too early for such a discussion.

Stuyvesant principal resigns retires

The New York Times reports that Stanley Teitel, the principal of New York City’s Stuyvesant High School, has resigned has announced his retirement. In July the Times reported on widespread cheating at Stuyvesant, one of the city’s top high schools.

The school’s website still shows no school-wide policy concerning academic integrity, or at least none that I can find.

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September 8, 2012: The New York Times reports the school’s new principal is thinking about creating an “academic honesty policy.”

A related post
Cheating at Stuyvesant High School

[I’ve crossed out my mistakes in this post: given the situation at Stuyvesant, it’s difficult for me not to read retire as a euphemism for resign.]

Library of Congress (1945)

There’s so much to like in this Academy Award-nominated film, which celebrates reading and scholarship and humankind. The shots of patrons looking through the card catalogue speak — well, volumes. Watch too for other forms of beautiful technology and several musical surprises.

Alexander Hammid directed. The narrator is Ralph Bellamy. The book that the boy is reading at the beginning and end is Lucy Salamanca’s Fortress of Freedom: The Story of the Library of Congress (1942), available from the Internet Archive. The film is at the Archive too, but the print at YouTube is better.

Thanks to Sean at Contrapuntalism for sharing this great find.

[Correction: The film is from 1945.]