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 13, 2017 On the Shelf If You Must Spy, Do It Silkily, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Emily Hahn. Rarely does a piece of writing combine my two all-time favorite interests: midcentury cryptography and secret silk squares. Today there’s such a piece. It’s about Emily Hahn, who was once, as Taras Grescoe writes, “one of America’s most widely read, and notorious, literary adventurers.” Hahn had an affair with a Chinese aristocrat; she picked up an opium habit, because why not; she held role-playing parties in her apartment and could often be found puffing cigars. And, as Grescoe reveals, the U.S. government once suspected she was a spy: “In a file in Hahn’s papers at the Lilly Library, in Bloomington, Indiana, I’d found a square of white silk, covered from edge to edge with typewritten names, cryptic messages, and several lines of Japanese poetry. The file also contained letters, on F.B.I. stationery, indicating that customs agents had discovered the silk square sewn into a sleeve of her daughter’s dress. Hahn, suspected of spying for the Japanese, was detained and interrogated for several hours. The silk cloth was sent to Washington to be examined for coded messages. In the files, I found a letter from the Treasury Department, sent four months later, acknowledging its return. But I couldn’t be certain what, if anything, the cryptographers had discovered. I was hoping [Hahn’s daughter Carola] Vecchio could explain at least some of the messages to me.” Our editor, Lorin Stein, interviews Richard Price about the role Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn played in his genesis as a writer. Price first read the novel when he was seventeen, on an interminable bus ride to Ithaca: “I’ve always been attracted to what I guess would be loosely called social realism. Sort of urban oriented, cement and working-class and squalling babies … I always found it a little grim. It felt not so much like a novel to take you away but a novel to convince you of a certain point of view about social justice. And I always found that a little leaden. But I liked the subjects. And when I had read Last Exit to Brooklyn as a kid, and specifically the first chapter, ‘Another Day Another Dollar,’ it was like he found a way to write about the same things but in almost incantatory bebop way. He was part of that scene in the late fifties, early sixties where jazz influenced a lot of writers. He had a lyricism to the work … I just felt like, If I’m gonna write about this, if this is the subject that draws me, I wanna have rhythm. I wanna have a little Selby bebop in the way I write.” Read More
April 12, 2017 Fiction … And Other Creatures By Franz Kafka Investigations of a Dog and Other Creatures, a collection of Michael Hofmann’s new translations of Kafka stories, is out next month from New Directions. Below, three of our favorites. Rupert Bunny, Poseidon and Amphitrite, ca. 1913. Poseidon Poseidon was sitting at his desk working. The administration of all the waters was a huge task. He could have had as many assistants as he wanted, and in fact he did have a large staff, but since he took his job very seriously and went through all the calculations himself anyway, assistants were of little use to him. One couldn’t say that the work made him happy either; he only did it because it was his to do. Yes, he had often requested happier work, as he put it, but whenever they came back to him with suggestions, it turned out that nothing appealed to him as much as what he was doing. It was actually very difficult to find anything else for him. It was hardly possible to put him in charge of a particular sea, quite apart from the fact that the calculations involved were no less onerous, just more trivial, since great Poseidon was only ever in line for an executive post. And if he was offered a job in a different department, the very thought of it was enough to turn his stomach, his divine breath became restless, his bronze thorax quaked. Not that they took his complaints all that seriously: if a great power kicks up, then you have to be seen to give into him, even in the most hopeless cause; no one seriously thought of having Poseidon removed from office, he had been god of the seas from the beginning of time, and would have to remain such. Read More
April 12, 2017 Look Between Blossoms By Dan Piepenbring “Between Blossoms,” an exhibition of photographs by Shen Wei, is at Flowers Gallery in New York through April 22. Wei, born in China and now based in New York, focuses on landscapes with a pervasive, ghostly negative space. This series, he says, uses “a touch of melodrama here, a hint of seduction there” to bring out the layer of dream-life hovering just beneath reality; he aims to find “an elusive, enchanting beauty” in the everyday. Shen Wei, Watermelons, 2015, chromogenic print, 13⅜” x 20″. Read More
April 12, 2017 On the Shelf That’s One Uncomfortable Switch-Hitter, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A Topps trading card from the sixties. Pity the switch-hitter, baseball’s ambidextrous magician, for he is divided against himself. Sure, he can hit right-handed, he can hit left-handed—he seems, on the face of it, a living testament to the falseness of binaries—but those gifts are taxing to the soul. What I’m trying to say is, it’s really, really hard to be a switch-hitter. Sam Anderson, reading the memoir of the Atlanta Braves’ third baseman Chipper Jones, finds it unexpectedly wise: “Switch-hitting requires constant struggle and discipline. The brain always wants to default to the familiar … So much of what is worthwhile requires us to choose discomfort: to learn a foreign language, speak to a stranger, resist the potato chips, start a difficult conversation with someone we love. Eking out even the smallest progress means repeatedly forcing ourselves to risk failure, disappointment, and humiliation. And so the sports memoir transforms into an accidental self-help manual: Living, like switch-hitting or flossing or answering our email, is a decision that we have to make over and over again.” Selin Thomas moved to gentrifying Harlem with a “kind of guilt”—and she discovered from a ship’s manifest that her father’s grandparents, free blacks, had arrived to the same neighborhood more than a century earlier, a distance that haunts her and speaks to Harlem’s vexed and singular history: “Their nearest relative and friend in the U.S. is listed, an Afro-Caribbean man called Percy Edmead. The manifest shows they stayed with him, in a brownstone at 138 West 131st Street, ten blocks from my own apartment … In these square blocks are a fogged-up, choked-up pluralism and a potential born of the irony of the black American existence, both the resentment of the land of one’s birth and the need to identify with it. That—a split constitution—is the conflict within any descendant of America’s sordid oppression, but in Harlem this fantastic complexity is manifest in sharp relief. A man at 116th can sometimes be found screaming that he knows the smell of blood. A barbershop man called Morris Bone, perpetually unable to pay rent for all his sixty-plus years, is regarded by his grandchildren through the lens of their high degrees in social science. Women shrouded in black cloth but for their gated eyes, meeting yours, float by in groups of three and four … Harlem—this vortex—is more than ever that scene and symbol of the black American’s persistent and even inherent estrangement from his own country.” Read More
April 11, 2017 Our Correspondents The Feminine Heroic By Megan Mayhew Bergman Megan Mayhew Bergman’s column is about naturalism. This week, she discusses how women, often excluded from adventure narratives, carve out their own heroic space. Melinda Gibson, Photomontage XXIII, 2009-2011. Courtesy the artist and ROSEGALLERY/ It’s February 1959. Marilyn Monroe and Isak Dinesen have joined Carson McCullers for lunch at her home on the Hudson River in Nyack, New York. A photograph from that day shows Marilyn and Carson leaning into each other. Isak, invited to America by the Ford Foundation for what would be her first and last visit, toasts Arthur Miller, who’s nearly out of the frame. Carson wears all black and a depressed demeanor. Marilyn, in fur and a plunging neckline, tells a story about finishing pasta with a blow-dryer. Isak’s cheekbones announce themselves underneath the hem of her turban; she recalls the first time she killed a lion and ingests little more that day than oysters, grapes, and amphetamines. In eight years they will all be dead. For me, the picture is like looking at the fractal nature of womanhood: something carnal, intellectual, and willful existing inside of one body. Internal conflicts shaped Monroe, McCullers, and Dinesen as creators. Marilyn aspired to make her own films and control her image while negotiating a growing dependence on pills and fear of abandonment. McCullers, broken down by seizures, divorce, and addiction, continued to write in the shadow of the masterpiece she wrote at twenty-two. Dinesen, brave enough to face down a lion and manage a coffee farm outside of Nairobi, began to starve and diminish herself. Simone de Beauvoir wrote that “all oppression creates a state of war”—and living in a state of war is depleting, as one tries to negotiate what she owes herself against what the world wants to collect. Read More