April 13, 2017 Arts & Culture Salinger’s Nightmare By Bill Barich An unemployed actor tracked down Salinger to get his permission to adapt The Catcher in the Rye. J. D. Salinger on November 20, 1952. Photo: San Diego Historical Society In 1953, J. D. Salinger fled Manhattan for rural Cornish, New Hampshire, hoping to protect his privacy and find the solitude he needed for his work. The Catcher in the Rye, which spent thirty weeks on the New York Times’ best-seller list, had generated immeasurable publicity and adulation for Salinger, who wanted none of it. Among his new suitors were such Hollywood bigwigs as Samuel Goldwyn and David O. Selznick, both vying for the screen rights to Catcher. They failed to secure Salinger’s approval, as did many others, in turn—but that didn’t stop Bill Mahan, an unemployed former child star and devoted fan from Los Angeles, from giving it a shot. In the early sixties, he resolved to claim the film rights himself, even if it meant disturbing Salinger at home. Mahan’s account of his unlikely adventure can be found in his papers at the University of Wyoming’s American Heritage Center. On December 1, 1961, he wrote to Salinger by registered mail to share his vision for turning Catcher into an independent feature, with the author retaining “artistic control.” At the age of thirty-one, Mahan had no credits as a producer or a director, and very little money, so he proposed to shoot the film “art-house” style, without changing a word of dialogue. Given the shoestring budget, Salinger would, of course, have to grant him the rights for free. In hopes of sealing the deal, Mahan wrote that he would arrive in Cornish on December 13, whether he’d heard from Salinger or not. Read More
April 11, 2017 Arts & Culture Paula Wolfert at The Paris Review By Emily Kaiser Thelin Paula Wolfert with the chef André Daguin. I met Paula Wolfert in 2008, when Food & Wine sent me to Morocco to profile her. She never had a restaurant, a TV show, or any of the other contemporary markers of culinary success—but over nearly four decades, from 1973 to 2011, her cookbooks and writing on the traditional foods of the Mediterranean had an incalculable influence on American grocery shelves and our approach to cooking. Paula helped popularize foods we now take for granted: the couscous, preserved lemons, and tagines of Morocco; the duck confit and cassoulet of France; and the muhammara (Syrian red pepper–nut spread), sumac, pomegranate molasses, and mild red-pepper flakes—Aleppo, Marash, and Urfa—of the Middle East. With her curiosity, her rigor, and her vision, she legitimized a reverence for place that all good chefs now embrace. Read More
April 5, 2017 Arts & Culture From The Teeth of the Comb By Osama Alomar Hans Thoma, Mond (detail). SWAMP I turned into a swamp of inactivity, and because of this no one was able to see the gems in my depths. Read More
March 27, 2017 Arts & Culture The Hundred Trillion Stories in Your Head By Benjamin Ehrlich For the father of modern neuroscience, cellular anatomy was like the most exciting fiction. Santiago Ramón y Cajal, “the father of modern neuroscience.” All images courtesy Cajal Legacy, Instituto Cajal (CSIC), Madrid. Fiction is, by definition, a world away from fact—but Santiago Ramón y Cajal, often heralded as “the father of modern neuroscience,” used it to find objective truth. Cajal spent his days at the microscope, gazing down at faint, entangled fibers that appeared to his fellow anatomists as inscrutable labyrinths. Contrary to prevailing theory, the Spaniard discerned that the nervous system, including the brain, comprises distinctly individual cells (neurons), which, he theorized, must communicate across the infinitesimal spaces between them (synapses). It was Cajal who first applied the term plasticity to the brain; he went so far as to recommend “cerebral gymnastics” for mental enhancement, presaging twenty-first century insights and trends about brain exercise. “If he is so determined,” Cajal said, “every man can be the sculptor of his own brain.” If all Russian literature comes from Gogol’s “Overcoat,” and all modern American literature comes from “a book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” then international brain research, including grand projects like the BRAIN Initiative and the Human Brain Project, emerges from the unlikely work of Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Cajal was born in 1852, high in the mountains of northern Spain; his head always seemed to belong in the clouds. The landscape of his childhood was epic. Aragonese folklore echoed through dust-colored pueblos, swept through by the specters of conquests and kings. The young Cajal idolized these legendary figures, maybe because village life was incessantly prosaic. Alto Aragón was notoriously inhospitable; the highland region that Robert Hughes, in his biography of Goya (another native son), noted for its “sour wine, straw bedding, tough meat”—“semi-troglodytic conditions.” Almost nothing grew from the callous, fissured soil; Cajal’s home was a ramshackle pile of cobblestone. “Not a flower pot in the windows,” he recalls in his autobiography, Recollections of My Life: “not the smallest decoration on the fronts of the houses, nothing in a word, to indicate the slightest feeling for beauty.” Read More
March 24, 2017 Arts & Culture Papa the Investor By Andrea di Robilant How Hemingway became a major shareholder in a venerable Italian publishing house. Ernest Hemingway, with pigeons, in Venice, Italy, 1954. Ernest Hemingway had a rough time with his Italian publisher, Einaudi, the venerable Turin-based house that still prints a good portion of his titles today. The issue, as is so often the case, was money: Einaudi, Hemingway complained, were communists looking for any excuse to withhold his overdue royalties. After 1947, he’d grown so exasperated that he refused to publish another book with them. So it’s all the more startling to discover that in the spring of 1955, he quietly agreed to convert a large part of his growing credit with the house into company stock, becoming a major shareholder overnight. Hemingway was usually very prudent with his money—and the chronically mismanaged Einaudi was hardly a safe investment. But having a stake in the publication of his own books, he hoped, would make it easier to get his hands on his growing pile of Italian cash. As an author, Hemingway had gotten a late start in Italy. During the twenties and thirties, when the Anglophone world consecrated him as one of its brightest talents, he was persona non grata in the country. His blacklisting started as early as 1923, when Hemingway, still a young reporter for the Toronto Star, described Mussolini as “the biggest bluff in Europe.” In 1927, he wrote a few sardonic sketches on Fascist Italy for the New Republic. But it was the 1929 publication of A Farewell to Arms, with its antimilitarism and its powerful description of the rout of the Italian Army after Caporetto, that made him an enemy in the eyes of the Mussolini regime—a reputation further sealed by his support for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. Read More
March 23, 2017 Arts & Culture Hugo, Inc. By Nina Martyris Les Misérables was born of one of the riskiest—and shrewdest—deals in publishing history. An 1878 caricature of Hugo from La Petite Lune. Earlier this month, Penguin Random House bid more than sixty-five million dollars for the global rights to books by Barack and Michelle Obama, breaking the record for U.S. presidential memoirs. Despite the stratospheric price tag and the international headlines, the transaction lacked a certain excitement—it was a fantastic deal, but without frisson. After all, a behemoth publisher signing an iconic political couple, brokered by a top litigation firm … it’s merely another example of the establishment in lockstep. Compare this cozy corporate pact—one that epitomizes big publishing today—with the romance and risk associated with another record-shattering deal widely regarded as the publishing coup of all time. Signed in 1861 on a sunny Atlantic island, it tied an exiled French genius to an upstart Belgian house, resulting in the printing of that perennial masterwork, Les Misérables. In a new book, The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of ‘Les Misérables’, the professor and translator David Bellos condenses tranches of research into a gripping tale about Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Read More