For Esme With Love And Squalor Text Pdf
Salinger spent the first third of his life trying to get noticed and the rest of it trying to disappear. He would have hated “J. Salinger: A Life,” Kenneth Slawenski’s reverent new biography, which comes to us just a year after the writer’s death and creditably unearths and aggregates the facts and reads them into the fiction — reanimating the corpse without quite making it sing.
If you really want to hear about it, what’s missing — and this is not necessarily Slawenski’s fault — is Salinger’s voice. I was tempted to say his inimitable voice, but of course it’s been imitated more often than that of any American writer, except possibly Salinger’s pal Hemingway, infiltrating the language of our literature and refertilizing the American vernacular from which it sprang.
Slawenski is handicapped in part by the legacy of Ian Hamilton, author of “In Search of J. Salinger” (1988). As Slawenski recounts, after being stonewalled by Salinger and his small, tight circle of friends, Hamilton tracked down a great deal of unpublished correspondence and quoted extensively from Salinger’s letters and books. When a galley of the book reached Salinger, he called in the lawyers and demanded that Random House remove quotations of unpublished letters from the text. The initial district court ruling in favor of Random House and Hamilton was overturned on appeal — with major repercussions for American copyright law and with the immediate result that Hamilton was forced to paraphrase the letters he’d relied so heavily on.
Publication Details “For Esme – With Love and Squalor” was published in The New Yorker on April 8, 1950. It was later collected in Nine Stories (1953).
Slawenski is muzzled by that 1987 ruling and also by his fastidious interpretation of fair-use copyright law in regard to quoting from the fiction, limiting himself pretty much to short phrases. The bulk of the book was written when the litigious Salinger was still alive, but I can’t help wondering if his heirs might have proved a little more relaxed about quotation. Margaret Salinger’s memoir, “Dream Catcher” (2000), to which Slawenski is heavily indebted, quotes great swatches of the prose, but she may have presumed that even J. Salinger was loath to sue his own daughter. Advertisement The most comprehensive biography to date has been Paul Alexander’s “Salinger” (1999), which was sympathetic but far from hagiographic. Slawenski is a fan, not to say a fanatic. Nicet.
For seven years he’s run a Web site called Dead Caulfields, and in a maudlin introduction he reports on his anguish upon learning of his subject’s death. “The news stared me down from my in-box through the starkest, most ugly of headers.
It read: Rest in Peace J. Impossibly, I fumbled for a sentiment that would match the man.” Readers looking for a balanced assessment may be inclined to stop here, where the page is virtually damp. Thankfully, the tone of the book itself is generally more measured.
Advertisement “After ‘The Catcher in the Rye,’ ” Slawenski proposes, “the aim of Salinger’s ambition shifted and he devoted himself to crafting fiction embedded with religion, stories that exposed the spiritual emptiness inherent in American society.” Slawenski gives sympathetic readings of “Franny and Zooey,” Salinger’s inaugural Glass family chronicles, with their curious amalgam of Christian and Eastern religious notes, in light of Salinger’s evolving beliefs. Whereas Holden had railed against phonies, Zooey Glass tells his sister Franny, who has suffered some sort of mental collapse, that even the terrible Professor Tupper is “Christ himself.” Everyone is Christ — and, as in Buddhism, all is one.
Maybe, although many of us believe that fiction is properly concerned with manyness, the particularities of identity, which Salinger once told his daughter are all Maya, or illusion. Despite its mysticism, “Franny and Zooey” was hugely popular when it was published in 1961, although critics, including Joan Didion and Updike, generally felt that Salinger, besotted with his self-contained, self-satisfied Glass family, was disappearing up his own omphalos.
This was an impression that the final book-length installment of the Glass family chronicles, “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour — an Introduction,” did nothing to dispel. Even the deeply sympathetic Slawenski seems disappointed by “Hapworth 16, 1924,” the interminable story that filled most of the June 19, 1965, New Yorker. Taking the form of an impossibly precocious letter from summer camp by 7-year-old Seymour Glass, it was Salinger’s last published work. Slawenski devotes a few short chapters to the last half of Salinger’s life, his self-imposed silent exile in Cornish, N.H.
Jd Salinger For Esme With Love And Squalor
A girlfriend of mine who met him in the Dartmouth library in the mid-’70s and subsequently had lunch with him told me that he talked mainly about his macrobiotic diet, holistic medicine and his garden. After he divorced Claire Douglas, his second wife, who was just 16 when they started dating, he conducted several affairs with young women, notably 18-year-old Joyce Maynard, whose memoir about her months in Cornish enraged the faithful and tended to confirm the suspicion that one would rather read Salinger than meet him. Salinger always told friends he was still writing, and it’s possible there’s a trove of unpublished stories and novels, although readers of “Hapworth,” in which he seems to be talking to himself rather than to fans of “The Catcher in the Rye,” may wonder whether they wish to see it. Salinger: A Life” leaves this and many other questions hanging. Though Slawenski adds to the record, Paul Alexander’s biography is, to my mind, more dramatically vivid and psychologically astute.
There will probably never be a definitive biography of Salinger, but our understanding will be modified by the actions of his executors and the release of unpublished material in the coming years. For the moment, at least, Holden’s creator might take some satisfaction in knowing the extent to which his efforts to erase his own story have succeeded.
I agree with Al that it is not dated. As to the gift of the watch, Barb, doesn't it make X a kind of symbolic father to these two kids who parents have perished? If so, Corporal X is certainly in no condition to assume such a role, however symbolic. As to the recovery of Corporal X, I'm not sure how deep it runs. Six years later, after a long correspondence with Esme to which we are not privy, X seems angry and bitter.
Esme Salinger
He happily receives an invitation via 'air mail.' I know it's 1950 but air mail for me has a lofty ring to it. And his initial exuberance is soundly squashed after a discussion with his 'breathtakingly levelheaded' wife. His elderly (58) mother-in-law, Mother Grenchen, figures into the mix. In the second paragraph the narrator makes absurd assertions, suggesting that the groom will become 'uneasy' to learn about 15 minutes of tea-sipping six years earlier when his bride-to-be was 13. And if the groom is uneasy, 'so much the better.'
Anger and bitterness. More to the point, it is childlike and childish. Now that X is 25 or 26 and Esme is 19, the romantic fantasy can gain traction (except for a certain unworthy groom). Thankfully, a breathtaking levelheadedness puts it to rest.
In England X witnesses the innocence and wisdom of children. Choir practice in the church becomes a near religious experience that could have induced some to 'experience levitation.' Moving on to France he sees (and possibly participates in) terrible atrocities that only adults are capable of. To come back from that shell-shocked breakdown he may have needed to return somewhat to a certain innocence and naivete. Adulthood sucks.
For me those first two paragraphs depict a man-child. I need help with the first sentence of the second paragraph.
All the same, though, wherever I happen to be I don't think I'm the type that doesn't even lift a finger to prevent a wedding from flatting. Also, I need help with squalor.
Where, precisely, is it? Yes Barb I like that take on the watch.
Esme Salinger Character
It's a broken watch (that may and may not still be ticking-X is afraid to find out). Watches, especially broken watches often symbolize time or the stoppage of time and deep metaphysical problems that send me scurrying, crablike, for my stash of Excedrin. Beyond the symbolism of broken men, it represents recovery as written by Esme in her letter: but this one is extremely water-proof and shockproof as well as having many other virtues among which one can tell at what velocity one is walking if one wishes. I am quite certain that you will use it to greater advantage in these difficult days than I ever can and that you will accept it as a lucky talisman. Looking back, Esme mentions in her letter that she did not remember X wearing a wristwatch. Well, he was wearing one.
Then, after synchronizing my wristwatch with the clock in the latrine, I walked down the long, wet cobblestone hill into town. Latrines don't generally have clocks. I don't get it. But I know that everything in this carefully crafted piece has meaning. As to squalor, I think wretchedness is a good synonym. My Webster's dictionary says, 1. Dirty or wretched in appearance.
Morally repulsive, sordid. I'm sure that can be attributed to warfare but somehow it doesn't quite fit. Of course, I've never been there. I don't think Esme knew the definitions of many of her ten-dollar words. Some of them work, some don't. She seemed to be tossing big words around to disguise her own emptiness over the loss of her parents which was evident in her damp palms and bitten fingernails. I wonder how much of that incredible dialogue was accurately narrated.
She was Esme (with a romantic accent over the 'e'). Yet she signs her letter to Corporal X with the rather mundane moniker of Esma.
I think it is interesting to compare his interaction with and letter from Esme to the letters he received from his wife and brother. Letters about how some local shop back home no longer provided good service or asking him to send home loot for the kids were meaningless or maybe even insulting to him. Even Z, his companion who lived through many of the same experiences as him, misread him and couldn't help him by talking about his girlfriend and Bob Hope. Esme, on the other hand, seems prescient because she recognized that he was not like the other soldiers and specifically requested that he share squalor with her.
In my opinion, that's exactly what he needed to begin his recovery. She somehow knew what kinds of things he might run into and that she might be able to help him somehow.
When he read her letter I think he remembered the vulnerability and trauma that she and her brother experienced losing their parents and how they were overcoming it and that was somehow enough for him to begin recovering his faculties. This interpretation makes her a guardian angel of sorts. Flag Abuse Flagging a post will send it to the Goodreads Customer Care team for review. We take abuse seriously in our discussion boards. Only flag comments that clearly need our attention. As a general rule we do not censor any content on the site. The only content we will consider removing is spam, slanderous attacks on other members, or extremely offensive content (eg.
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