Junto Pahdna

Remember her from Match Game in the 70s? The equivalent of a future Sally Hayes(1) perhaps for a pre/young teen at the time, the age of most of this blog's team members back then.

[In 1981, the actress Elaine Joyce was working on a short-lived television series called Mr. Merlin when she received an interesting piece of mail. The widow of singer Bobby Van, Joyce was 36 at the time. The letter was from J. D. Salinger. “I was doing a series,” says Joyce, “and he wrote me a letter. I get fan mail all the time, but I was shocked. I really didn’t believe it. It was a letter of introduction to me about my work.” Joyce responded, just as Maynard had; and in this case, as well, a sustained correspondence followed. “It took me forever,” she says, “but I wrote back, and then we wrote to each other quite a bit.” As he had with Maynard, Salinger eventually arranged for the two of them to meet, and they began a relationship. The couple spent a lot of time in New York. “We were very, very private,” Joyce admits, “but you do what you do when you date -- you shop, you go to dinner, you go to the theater. It was just as he wanted it.” The only real suggestion the public had that the two were involved occurred in May 1982, when the press reported that Salinger showed up for an opening night at a dinner theater in Jacksonville, Florida, where Joyce was appearing in the play 6 Rms Riv Vu. But to conceal their affair, Joyce denied knowing him. “We were involved for a few years all the way through the middle eighties,” Joyce says. “You could say there was a romance.”]

--Above excerpted from J.D. Salinger's Women --

My 14 year old niece was reading The Catcher in the Rye over Christmas. I borrowed it and read the whole thing over the course of a day, the third time I think I've read it. Very worthwhile re-reading as an adult. The book still resonates for whatever reason, perhaps because Salinger makes you both empathize for and partially identify with Holden Caulfield. The character feels so real. And he takes you on a journey that you don't want to end. It brings back all the angst and hopes and truths you knew at that certain point in your life when you still had time, lots of time...to figure it all out.

And Holden's sister Phoebe(2) is the greatest: sweet, resolute and pure, his savior...for the moment perhaps.

The book had its lousy goddam critics of course.

From left: Erik Ross, Lillian Ross, Matthew Salinger, J. D. Salinger, and Peggy Salinger, in Central Park (mid 1960s).

The book and the author remain a major influence on Wes Anderson. I thought Anderson's observation on Salinger's works as shared with Richard Brody(3) captured it best:

[Wes Anderson’s films, as their devotees know well, make wise and loving allusion to the works of J. D. Salinger. I heard from the director on the sad occasion of the writer’s death yesterday. He told me:
I remembered this passage from the F. Scott Fitzgerald story “The Freshest Boy”:
He had contributed to the events by which another boy was saved from the army of the bitter, the selfish, the neurasthenic and the unhappy. It isn’t given to us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world. They will not be cured by our most efficacious drugs or slain with our sharpest swords.
—and it occurred to me that more than everything else—more than all the things in his stories that I have been inspired by and imitated and stolen to the best of my abilities—THIS describes my experience of the works of J. D. Salinger.]

Father and child in Cornish, NH.

He wakes up at ten o’clock on Sunday and calls Sally Hayes, an attractive girl whom he has dated in the past. They arrange to meet for a matinee showing of a Broadway play. He eats breakfast at a sandwich bar, where he converses with two nuns about Romeo and Juliet. He gives the nuns ten dollars. He tries to telephone Jane Gallagher, but her mother answers the phone, and he hangs up. He takes a cab to Central Park to look for his younger sister, Phoebe, but she isn’t there. He helps one of Phoebe’s schoolmates tighten her skate, and the girl tells him that Phoebe might be in the Museum of Natural History. Though he knows that Phoebe’s class wouldn’t be at the museum on a Sunday, he goes there anyway, but when he gets there he decides not to go in and instead takes a cab to the Biltmore Hotel to meet Sally.
Phoebe is particularly influential on Holden; her name denotes and derives from the Greek Phoibe—the Greek Titaness associated with the moon, suggesting she is oracle and catalyst for the boy who sees himself as the catcher in the rye at a cliff-side rye field where children play tag, whom he catches, and saves from themselves, when they stray too near the edge. This "catcher in the rye" is an analogy for Holden, who admires in kids attributes he struggles to find in adults, like innocence, kindness, spontaneity and generosity. Falling off the cliff could be a progression into the adult world that surrounds him and that he strongly criticizes. Later, Phoebe and Holden exchange roles as the "catcher" and the "fallen"; he gives her his hunting hat, the catcher's symbol, and becomes the fallen as Phoebe becomes the catcher.
Brody's conversation with Anderson was published in The New Yorker's online version.

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"If you want to know the truth, I don't know what I think about it. I'm sorry I told so many people about it. About all I know is, I sort of miss everybody I told about. Even old Stradlater and Ackley, for instance. I think I even miss that goddam Maurice. It's funny. Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."