Post by nutsberryfarm 🏜 on Nov 2, 2019 0:49:32 GMT
newrepublic.com/article/155560/jd-salinger-famous-today
Photographs are not allowed at the New York Public Library’s exhibition about J.D. Salinger. You have to leave your cellphone outside the small jewel box room where the library has installed a smattering of what some might call artifacts and others might call relics (as that term applies to, say, slivers of the True Cross). You’re not supposed to document the show because J.D. Salinger would not have liked that. But of course, J.D. Salinger would have hated this whole enterprise.
Devotees will have to reconcile their desire to respect the man’s privacy, so fiercely guarded during his life, and their curiosity. But nostalgia is potent stuff. Salinger presumably still attracts committed fans, but the show for me (and I imagine for most) is an exercise in revisiting the period when I first encountered Salinger. Rereading him now in search of the profound feeling I had poring over Franny and Zooey at age 15 is inevitably a letdown, akin to when I try to listen to The Cure: a bit of I liked this? and an embarrassed affection for the skinny gay kid in a suburban bedroom I once was. It is hard for me to believe now, but I was the sort of fan who dug around in the library for the 1965 issue of The New Yorker containing the uncollected Salinger story “Hapworth 16, 1924.”
The show gives us what I guess we always wanted: the guy’s baby pictures, a copper bowl he made one summer at camp, letters to military school chums, some sea glass he picked up from the coast of Devon while in the Army. There’s professional correspondence, and galleys, and typescripts, and a bookcase from Salinger’s bedroom containing the volumes he read at the end of his life. It’s precisely like the curtains parting to reveal the great and powerful Oz as just ... some guy. It’s all immensely valuable to scholars (maybe?) and definitely none of our business.
The exhibition contains a letter Salinger wrote to decline an appearance: “It’s an old and serious (and tiresome) principle of mine not to drop by anywhere as a writer or writerly type.” Seeing this show as an adult who also writes books for a living, I felt a yearning for an era I find impossible to imagine: when publishing was a genteel business of onionskin pages and overflowing ashtrays, and a writer could survive on the largesse of William Shawn and Raoul Fleischmann, all the while maintaining a principled objection to being a writerly type.
Photographs are not allowed at the New York Public Library’s exhibition about J.D. Salinger. You have to leave your cellphone outside the small jewel box room where the library has installed a smattering of what some might call artifacts and others might call relics (as that term applies to, say, slivers of the True Cross). You’re not supposed to document the show because J.D. Salinger would not have liked that. But of course, J.D. Salinger would have hated this whole enterprise.
Devotees will have to reconcile their desire to respect the man’s privacy, so fiercely guarded during his life, and their curiosity. But nostalgia is potent stuff. Salinger presumably still attracts committed fans, but the show for me (and I imagine for most) is an exercise in revisiting the period when I first encountered Salinger. Rereading him now in search of the profound feeling I had poring over Franny and Zooey at age 15 is inevitably a letdown, akin to when I try to listen to The Cure: a bit of I liked this? and an embarrassed affection for the skinny gay kid in a suburban bedroom I once was. It is hard for me to believe now, but I was the sort of fan who dug around in the library for the 1965 issue of The New Yorker containing the uncollected Salinger story “Hapworth 16, 1924.”
The show gives us what I guess we always wanted: the guy’s baby pictures, a copper bowl he made one summer at camp, letters to military school chums, some sea glass he picked up from the coast of Devon while in the Army. There’s professional correspondence, and galleys, and typescripts, and a bookcase from Salinger’s bedroom containing the volumes he read at the end of his life. It’s precisely like the curtains parting to reveal the great and powerful Oz as just ... some guy. It’s all immensely valuable to scholars (maybe?) and definitely none of our business.
The exhibition contains a letter Salinger wrote to decline an appearance: “It’s an old and serious (and tiresome) principle of mine not to drop by anywhere as a writer or writerly type.” Seeing this show as an adult who also writes books for a living, I felt a yearning for an era I find impossible to imagine: when publishing was a genteel business of onionskin pages and overflowing ashtrays, and a writer could survive on the largesse of William Shawn and Raoul Fleischmann, all the while maintaining a principled objection to being a writerly type.
