With Salinger's Soul: His Personal & Religious Odyssey (Post Hill Press), author and retired journalist/editor Stephen B. Shepard explores the life of JD Salinger and the hidden core of an author who became famous for avoiding fame. We get into why Stephen decided to chase this elusive ghost, why Salinger didn't make it into his previous book about Jewish American writers, whether he believes Salinger's unpublished writing will see the light of day, and why it was important that he approach the book as biography and not literary criticism (although he does bring a reader's voice to the book). We talk about the lack of sex in Salinger's fiction, the uncanniness of Holden Caulfield's voice, Salinger's WWII trauma, his rise to fame, search for privacy, abandonment of publishing, embrace of Vedanta & ego-death, and his pattern of pursuing young women, and how it all maybe ties together. We also discuss Stephen's career as a journalist and how it influences his writing, what he learned in building a graduate program in journalism at CUNY, the ways we both started out in business-to-business magazines (he went a lot farther than I did, editing Newsweek and Business Week), how journalism has changed over the course of his career, Philip Roth's biography and what it means to separate the book from the writer, and a lot more. More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal and via our e-newsletter
The Virtual Memories Show
Episode 605 - Stephen B Shepard
(upbeat music) - Welcome to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and we're here to preserve and promote culture one weekly conversation at a time. You can subscribe to The Virtual Memories Show through iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, Google Play, and a whole bunch of other venues. Just visit our sites, chimeraobscura.com/vm or vmspod.com to find more information, along with our RSS feed. And follow the show on Twitter and Instagram at VMSPod. Well, I am off to my conference in Maryland tomorrow, and I am just wallet by a sinus infection, which you can probably hear, so that's how to make for a fun challenge. I'm just starting to feel like the conference is coming together and might not be a total humiliation for me, but there's still time for anxiety to re-rear. It's ugly head. There are a lot of moving parts to this conference meeting thing, and I'm in charge of the whole shebang, 'cause I'm a one-man show, and I got to trust the hotel and the AV guys and the restaurant and all the speakers who are presenting and the attendees, and it leaves me pretty wrecked every year. And I've gotten across over the years. I'm not exactly good about trusting people, but this is what I have to do. Last year went flawlessly. I like to hope this one is gonna go by perfectly smoothly and no one will notice me collapse at the end of Friday, but we'll see. And the plus side, the printer finished the attendee badges, posters and conference guides, so I could pick up all that stuff today and not have to do it tomorrow morning before a 250-mile drive to the hotel. On the downside, one of my speakers told me on Monday that he has a family emergency and can no longer present on Thursday, and it is a big, legit family emergency, but he can still do Friday, so I had to flip him with one of the Friday speakers, move another one slot, so he could get in early that day and then get back out. And now the conference guides that I just mentioned and two of the posters that have the big conference agenda on them are out of date, but all this stuff always happens right after you go to print. You know? The other downside of all this is that I have been so harried and rundown that I do not have a guest scheduled for next week's show, so things might be dark or you might get subjected to another interminable monologue episode. I don't think I have enough trauma or weird reverie or anything to dolt out anything like that in a hurry, but you never know. Anyway, that's all in the future. We got a conversation to share, so let's get cracking. I guess this week is Devin B. Shepherd or Steve. He has a wonderful new book out now, "Salinger's Soul, His Personal and Religious Odyssey." It's from Post Hill Press. "Salinger's Soul" explores J.D. Salinger through his biography and his writing and writing about him. It's a brief book, around 200 pages, but Steve manages to go deep on Salinger's life and what it meant to leave it all behind, to go into seclusion, but not as art at a level of seclusion as we all think of and where his, well, where soul went. Steve's love for "Salinger's Fiction" is evident throughout the book, as is the depth of his deep reading research into this. And he synthesizes a lot of facts, stories, rumors, chronology, all to put together "Salinger's Soul." And at the same time, he's doing something greater than that. He's not just recounting biography, but he's trying to find this elusive core, this missing self at the center of it all. When Ron Rosenbaum did his "Salinger" profile in the late '90s, he kind of worked around the notion of the sound of one-hand clapping. And that's what any writing that tries to get at "Salinger" ultimately has to reckon with, I guess. And I think, and it comes up in the book in this conversation that maybe "Salinger's Seclusion," the writer who stops publishing, but maybe keeps writing all along. Maybe that notion speaks to all of us today in this time where we're all posting content and leveraging our brands and trying to push ourselves out into this public sphere. And this was somebody who began to reach significant fame and a claim and decided to step away, to go into seclusion in Cornish, New Hampshire. And again, we believe keep writing the whole time, but never, never publishing. I mean, I'm not immune to any of that stuff I was goofing on about the posting content, living our brands, et cetera. I make this, for gosh sakes. I insist on putting this out in the world every week in hopes of what I'm not entirely sure. I got a nice postcard this morning from a listener who told me he was remiss and not writing me earlier to tell me about what a great run of episodes I've been on lately from the inside. I don't see any of that. So it is nice to hear and it's nice making that connection. And I mean, during my conference this week, I'm gonna be Mr. Wonderful and have this different public face that'll greet my business life. And I'll be playing up my role running this trade association and networking with everyone and trying to remember what I said to whom. But I think we all get that the mystery of silence too, and what salinger's withdrawal embodies. Anyway, the major themes that Salinger's soul gets into, as Steve puts it in our talk, is Salinger's embrace of Vedanta Hinduism and his embrace of barely legal women a lot. Steve doesn't get salacious with the details, but he does establish this longstanding trend on Salinger's part when it comes to sex and women. And all those contradictions, though the writer who won't publish the sex-forward Vedanta devotee, Vedanta being a famously almost celibate faith, as well as Salinger being a Jew who denounces his Judaism, liberates a concentration camp, marries a German woman after the war and tries to pass her off as French. All that stuff is, it fills the book, it's whirling like electrons around this invisible nucleus. And in this wonderful prose that Steve has, which comes from his 50-year-plus career as a journalist and editor, he brings us as close as we can get to that unknowable core. And the promise that Salinger kept writing all those years in absentia is maybe a notion that there's some meaning or reconciliation in the world. If we know where to look. Anyway, I'm on one of my flights. Go get Salinger's soul. It's out now from Post Hill Press by Stefan B. Shepard. It's a great read about an enigma of an author who speaks to all of us, I think. Now here's Stefan's bio, or Steve's bio. Stefan B. Shepard is the founding dean emeritus of the Craig Neumark Graduate School of Journalism at City University of New York. He served as a senior editor at Newsweek, the editor of Saturday Review, and editor-in-chief of Business Week. From 1992 to 1994, he was president of the American Society of Magazine Editors. He was also a faculty member at the Columbia Journalism School where he was co-founder and first director of the Knight Bejot B-A-G-H-O-T, I just mangled that one. The Knight Bejot fellowships, a mid-career program for working journalists. A native New Yorker, Steve graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, then received his bachelor's degree from the City College of New York and his master's degree from Columbia University. And now, the virtual memories conversation with Stefan B. Shepard. - So before I ask where Salinger began for you, where did Salinger's soul begin? When did you feel you were ready to write this? - Yeah, those are two different questions you're right. Well, in 2018, I wrote a book about the Jewish American writers, Saul Bello, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamed, Cynthia Ozick, and so on. And I thought of putting Salinger in that book. When I looked into it, his Jewishness was very, very complicated, which we can talk about. So I didn't do it, but then when COVID hit, in March of 2020, everybody was stuck at home and I pulled out the sound of material and started to write the book, which became Salinger's soul. So it's sort of a COVID book in a way. And I often think, well, if COVID hadn't happened, would I have done this book? And I don't, you know, I like to think I would have, but because I enjoyed it so much. But that's how the book started. - And where did Salinger start for you? - Oh God, well, that goes way back. - I figure. - Yeah, I mean, I wasn't quite old enough. Catching the right came out in 1951. And I was just not quite old enough to read it. But maybe five years later, I was because everybody, but everybody seemed to be reading and talking about Catching the right. So that's when it really started, I read it. My first reading of it, other people have told me this too. You know, I said, well, what's the big deal about? You know, here's this teenage kid. Everybody's screwed up with their teenagers and goes to New York, all right. So I didn't quite get it. And maybe I was just too young to get it. So I don't know, a year or two later, I went back and read it. And it was sort of dawning on me that this was really a good book. And now that I'm, you know, looking back on it from all these years, I'm rereading it now. I think, oh my God, it really is remarkable book. - Tell me about that experience. - Yeah, I have a grew on you and what it means to you. - Well, and I'm a John Hinckley sort of way, but. - Yeah. - It was Mark David Chapman. Damn it, I knew it was going to throw that word for it. - Yeah, I literally did not put it in the book. I didn't want to get into all that. And I can't even explain it anyway, why that book attracted all these crazy people, but. - No, but for me, there were two identifying issues. And one was, you know, hold and call field and the anguish of being a teenager. And it's easier to look back on the anguish of being a teenager once you've gone through it. It's all done. And he did it brilliantly. So that was very, very compelling. And I think that's why a lot of young people glommed onto it, you know, that it was their story. And oh my God, this is sort of universal. It's not just me who screwed up, you know. So there was that. And also it was the common in society at large. I mean, part of what hold and call field was rebelling against was the way he called the phoniness and the materialism and the conformity of present day America called it 1950s America, which was complacent and you know, after the war we all settled in and then the Eisenhower years. And it was a period of complacency and materialism and conformity. And that's what Holden was rebelling against and that caught on with a lot of, you know, college age students in the late 50s and others. Took probably eight, 10 years before the book became the sensation it has become. In the beginning it did all right. It was a number four on the New York Times bestseller list, but it didn't, it wasn't what it became. Yeah, then it became, you know. And the thing is selling 200,000 copies a year. This is 70 years after it was published and there are 65 million copies that have already been sold. I mean, there's nothing else like it. It's extraordinary. It's one of those things and you mention it in the book, the contemporary pushback against it. Oh, this is just some rich white kids perspective and blah, blah, blah. And why is this special? And it's something that occurred to me when I reread it a few years ago that I don't think that voice existed prior to this. And in that Harold Bloom sense, you do cite Bloom at one point, that sense of uncanniness where something is so unique, we don't recognize that it didn't exist before this, that that voice became so natural through all of us. We assumed it was always there. And this is just a pastiche as opposed to a guy actually evoked this and managed to make it work for, you know. - Well, that's because of Sound's great gift as a writing dialogue. I mean, he wasn't the best storyteller around. He's not famous for his plots. But for character and dialogue, he was unsurpassed. And Holden is a first person book written, people don't remember this, but Holden was a mental institution when he was talking this book. So you get this unique voice and this unique dialogue, that really nobody was as good as Sound your dialogue. And then I think, "Carry did everybody say, 'Oh my God, this guy, this kid is really real.'" - So tell me about bringing Sound your himself to life. - Given the absolute seclusion of his second half. - Yeah, and I didn't succeed anymore than anybody else did. I didn't even try to go up to Cornish, New Hampshire, you know, when he was alive, he died in 2010. But you know, he was in my mind earlier. But some people went and of course they got nowhere. But you just start by reading everything that's been written about them. There have been biographies before. There are plenty of newspaper and magazine articles. And there are actually PhD dissertations, some of which are quite revealing. And you can find out about them because other people have discovered them written about them before. So there's a rich field of, let's call it literature, about his literature, which is very compelling. And I learned a lot. Obviously it would have been better to talk to him. I even tried to talk to his son, Matt Salinger, who lives in Connecticut now, and is pulling together all the material that Salinger wrote but didn't publish. His last published story was in 1965 in The New Yorker. And he was writing every day for the next 45 years. So this, as Matt said, just a lot of stuff. And he's gonna release it. Been working on it for almost 10 years. It's, I don't know when it's coming out. He won't talk to me. And so it's either gonna be imminent in like a few weeks or it could be a year away. I have no idea, but he's near the end, I'm guessing. But he's like his father, like father like son. You know, he doesn't talk to anybody either. His public comments all stem from five years ago, 2019, when the New York Public Library had a nice Salinger exhibition of manuscripts and artifacts and so on. And he spoke to the press at that time. And so we have some sense of what he's up to. But it's gonna be a major event. One of these days, we're gonna wake up and read that all of Salinger's unpublished work is now available. Whether it's being published by publishers or he's just putting it out there. I don't know what's gonna happen, but it's gonna be a major big deal. - I'm still in that, that sort of Charles Portis type world where nothing really is there. You know, I still have this belief that, you know, either he was scribbling the whole time or what's there is one of those, oh my God, we can't publish this. You know, and they just kind of refer to Portis just in the lock box sort of where there's just something hidden in a chest and we'll never find the key to it. But yeah, I have no idea. - My guess is it's there, okay. The question to me, and it's probably mostly short stories 'cause that's essentially what he was. Even the catch in the eye is a sort of a challenge of the rest. Yeah, a bunch of short stories. But I, so I think the material is there. I believe that the question is how good is it gonna be? And I'm not too optimistic because his last published works were really not good. You know, his last story in 1965 in New York, Hapworth, Hapworth 16, it took up the whole issue of the New Yorker, 28,000 words or something like that. And it really was awful. - Yeah. - And even the last, yeah, even the last class stories, they weren't that bad, but they weren't really very good after Franny and race high, the roof beam carpenters, which were pretty good. And the last two seem more in introduction and obviously the other one slips my mind. - We're really not very good. So, oh, Zooey, the Zooey companion to Franny, but it was much longer and not nearly as good. So I'm just worried that we have this great expectation 'cause then he publishes all this stuff. (laughing) - Everybody just stares at it. - But I can think he always is something kind of a good, they gotta be one thing in there that's really good. If anything, there'll be more PhD dissertations. - Well, that's for sure, yeah. - But tell me about your approach when I came to the book. I mean, you take the life chronologically, but you dive in in certain ways. Talk a little about how you approach some material. - Yeah, well, I want it to be a biography, okay? Not a work of literary criticism. There's been a ton written about catching the rye and the nine stories in Franny and Zooey and so on. That is literary criticism done by scholars and so forth. And you have to acknowledge it and say what it's about. But basically, I wanted to tell his story because in my reading, that was the hardest thing to piece together. We all know he went up to Cornish, New Hampshire in 1953 and stayed there for the next 45 years. And what we don't know is what he did during that time. We have bits and pieces from here and there. So I wanted to cobble that together to tell the story of his life and seclusion and why he became famous for not wanting to be famous. That's really what happened. And I think that contributed to his success. Everybody not only was interested in reading "Catcher", but who is this guy? You know, why do you want to keep talking to the press and do something? - Well, there was one funny quote. There was a guy who never liked "Catcher" and Orion. He said, if I had written that book, I would have gone into hiding too. But that's a real minority because the book was so successful and is so wonderful. So I wanted to just explore what he did up there. And I found out quite a lot. And the two themes of the book are the religious odyssey. That is the transformation of a kid who has had a bar mitzvah, raised Jewish, had a bar mitzvah at 13. And then when they found out that their mother really wasn't Jewish, even though she pretended to be, he and his older sister, who is 19 at a time, just ended their relationship with Judaism. And he went on to these mystical, first of all, Zenism and then-- - As you and I know, you never get away from Judaism. - Well, that's right. - Which haunted in his entire life. - That's right. - About both of us, but that's right. - So, but I wanted to trace that odyssey. If you, you know, why do you embrace something like this mystical form of Hinduism called Vedanta? Which I had never heard of until I started looking into this halangist stuff. And I ask a lot of people and they'd never heard of it either. But even though there were other practitioners, including Tolstoy, once upon a time. So there's that part of the book, the religious odyssey. And the other, it interests me, is the personal odyssey, which essentially means the women in his life. And what it turned out is that he had this obsession with these post-adolescent women. And everybody knows about Joyce Manard. And she was 18 and dropped out a Yale after her freshman year to go live with him. When he was 53, everybody knows about that. But what they don't know is there were a lot of Joyce Manards. There were a lot of other women in his life who exactly fit that description. And he had this thing for, it's this obsession with these young women. It's been mentioned in various places, but not gone into detail in a lot of most of the time. So connecting the dots, or connecting the dots. Yeah, that's right. Now, why he was this way, how you can cycle analyzes with his father, his mother, all that stuff. But I don't really know. I just wanted to lay out what was happening in his life all those years. I'll tell you one of the interesting aspects of Kilmets of Dental and Funny aspects of the book to me was you represent his gateway to Vedanta is the Razor's Edge by Summer Setman. When I was 16 years old in high school, we're supposed to pick a book off the list for this term paper in my English class. And I thought instead of anything on the list, I would bring up the Razor's Edge because my mom always had it in the shelf and I'd always wanted to read it in the symphonic excuse. And my English teacher said, "No, Gil. You're not going to read that. I think you're going to pick Catcher in the Rye." I said, "No, no, Rocco. I really want to be the Razor's at No, Gil. You want to read Catcher in the Rye." So he pushed me to soundger with Moam is my backup. But yeah, I thought it was funny that Razor's Edge managed to weave its way back into my soundger story as this stuff works. The idea of pushing Catcher in the Rye on a 16 year old, I'm a little bit suspicious of what he saw in me. That he felt this was the book I needed to read. But that's... - Well, I find it interesting when I talk to women who read Catcher in the Rye and really enjoy it. 'Cause I've talked to women who say, "Yeah, that's a boy's book. That's a man's book. You know, there's no relationship to me." And I can see that argument. I mean, what happens to Holden and how he thinks it's on is very related to growing up and making the transition from boy to man and you can't get away from that. But women who like it say this universality to it, everybody goes through a transition and adolescence. The details are different and maybe they're more different for women than they are for men. But I can identify with that and I can even understand it from my point of view and relate it to my growing through this adolescence. Everybody has a problem that is by definition, you know. - That's what adolescence is. That's how we become quote unquote adults. To that end, I'm falling back on our title. Where is sound your soul? - Yeah. Well, I think it's very much in the religion, was very much in the religion. I mean, and he got into, he said as much indirectly that one of the reasons he was attracted to religion was that he thought it would help cure his depression, the depression stemming for what happened to him in World War II, which we can talk about. But he was depressed on and off for the rest of his life and his embrace of religion was an attempt by trying to understand God and have a relationship with God that it would help him. And I don't think it really did, but he got very, very into these religions. First starting with Zen Buddhism and then Vedanta, he was a serious practitioner. He was no dilettante. He did it every day. He meditated. He read the sacred texts. He went to the Vedanta Center in New York. This is for a man who didn't leave Cornish, New Hampshire very much. He was very involved. He had a relationship with the Swamis at this Vedanta Center. So he was very serious about it. And I respect that. I mean, he was trying and he wasn't half-assing it. - That's right, he was very, and it was a big part of his life. And I also think that it is one of the reasons he stopped publishing what he was writing. He never stopped writing by all accounts, but he stopped publishing after 1965. And the reason is related to Vedanta because one of the things that Vedanta preached against was acts of ego. It's not about you, it's about your relationship with God. That's the principle of the religion and you're supposed to become one with God. And he violated that. That was the only credo of Vedanta that I think he violated 'cause it was a serious practitioner. He did not agree with their edict against sex basically, except in marriage and then only for the purposes of procreation. So they didn't really sex and fun were not to be acquainted at all. And obviously, there was a lot of sex in his life. It's interesting, there's no sex in his fiction. There's nothing in catcher. I mean, there's the overtose of it 'cause he's not a lesson, and he attempts to have this relation with this prostitute, which doesn't work and so forth. But that's it. There's no description of sex in catcher in game fear with the teacher at one point. With the teacher, yeah, yeah. But yeah, you're right, it's a weirdly sexless world. And I'd wondered whether Vedanta let him to that silence or whether Vedanta gave him the excuse-- - To withdraw. - I think they were mutually relieved that he needed something to get himself out of the publishing fan. - The other thing about Salinger that I realized in writing this book is that he very, this is maybe related to sex. He almost never wrote about relationships between two mature adults. Most of the relationships in Salinger's stories are between people for whom sex is essentially ruled out, for example, between brothers and sisters or between a parent and child. Those are his relationships, and a lot of those relationships are with very young people. You know, in this simple banana fish, perfect day for banana fish, sibil who see more meats on the beach is four years old. And in the short story, Teddy, Teddy is 10, and Holden's sister, Phoebe Caulfield, is also 10, and is a brilliant description of their relationship in catching the ride. So he was very comfortable about writing about young people, and the relationships are almost always between an older person and a really, a child, basically. - Ben, again, not an a-- - Not an otherwise man. - Yeah, that's right, but he wouldn't go the next step. What about these people when they grow up? He didn't write about them. Try to imagine Holden Caulfield's, that's a girl. - Well, we seem as an executive or something weird like that, and complete sellout, but that would be the 50s, 60s, you know. But yeah, it's fascinating to me, again, that idea of the silence and of the withdrawal. At that point, you know, not having the fame, but not having the resources yet. It's one thing to say, I'm gonna withdraw when you've sold 30 million of their 65 million copies. When you withdraw-- - Wasn't even that when you had something. - When you withdraw a lot earlier, you're, it's a riskier proposition, I suppose. - Well, it was even when he did, 'cause he moved to Cornish in 1953, that's just two years after Catcher, and nine stories was just about to come out. So he wasn't, you know, he was successful, but he wasn't making a lot of money, not like what happened to him afterwards. He never had a worry about it again. So, but the, I guess the question of him, the question of, you know, what you learned about Vedanta, what did you learn about Salinger? What did the book really teach you about the, what did you learn in the process? - One of the things I learned is that he wasn't the complete recluse that everybody makes them out to be here. He left Cornish when it was convenient. He came to New York to see William Shaw on the editor of the New Yorker quite frequently. He hung out at Gotham bookmark, Mart, which was a famous bookstore with a lot of old books on 47th Street in the Garment District of New York. And he went to see his wartime buddy, John Keenan, at his retirement party, which was in New York. He once drove down from Cornish all the way to Washington, DC to meet with a guy who was interested in making a book out of, a film out of Hapworth, which was his least successful story. He actually met with this guy and he met with him in a very public place, the cafeteria at the National Gallery in Washington. Well, a real recluse does not do those things. So there are many examples of where he came out of hiding to do things. - I'll say I have friends who, they run the Cartuning Library and Museum out in Columbus and they did a big exhibition of Bill Waterson, the guy who did Calvin and Hobbs, who's been in hiding for decades. And he visited them to help with the exhibition and the three of them went to a cafeteria and my friend told me she had this moment of realizing, I'm sitting with Bill Waterson, absolutely nobody knows who he is 'cause nobody's seen a picture of this guy in 30 or 40 years and it's just, this is why he did it because the fame and the money is nice but he'll take less of that to be able to just - And people, in general, did not recognize Sanjo when he's sitting in a cafeteria. - You wouldn't think that Sanjo, you wouldn't think that and he was tall and gone to gray and, you know, but he did get out, is my point, you know? And the other thing I discovered about him that he wasn't completely the recluse that he's made out to be is just the stuff with the obsession with these young women. I mean, I just, I knew about Joyce, my ended, of course, but I just thought, well, okay, that's one, but-- - Yeah, this is like the-- - Does he believe in John Le Corre, that came out last year also, the biographer had the, when I read the biography, I felt something weird happened around the 1970s and then this book comes out and I'm like, oh, that's what happened, he found all the letters and talked to Le Corre about it. He's like, yeah, don't talk about those. And so waited until Le Corre and his wife were dead and then all of these affairs. And a lot of them begin with fan letters and people that sound interesting and then not quite the same demographic as Sanjo was pursuing, but yeah, it's the writer's life, I guess, I don't know. - And, you know, there was also the relationship between him and his two children. He had a daughter named Peggy Margaret, what's her name? And she, and a brother four years younger than she named Matt Salinger. And he ended up having a falling out with his daughter, mostly because she wrote a very nasty book about him in the year 2000, 10 years before he died, in which she blamed him for neglect and being a bad father in one way or another and it just went on, pages, it wasn't the entire book, but that's what got all that. - That's what people wanted to find out about that. - Yeah, I didn't want to find out about that. I didn't want it to be true, you know, but they never spoke to each other again. On the other hand, his relationship with his son, Matt, was very, very close. - And in the book, you mentioned that he, Matt does not feel that was an accurate representation of what their life was like. - Correct. - Well, you know, two children who grew up in the same household and have totally different views of their parents or one parent or one parent. And, you know, that it is subjective, but it could also have been different than in a different relationship with her than he did with him, who knows. But she felt that way and wrote a book. And Matt is absolutely right. I mean, whatever she felt, she should have gone public and written a book about it. I mean, what's in that, you know? - It was a world where, you know, sensationalism sells, which again, when you're raised, not way, I mean, she, her mother split with, with Zalinger, but you know, when the whole mentality you're raised around is this writer working in silence for silence that's got to mess with you in certain ways about how you relate to the outer world, I guess. - There's no question. And he wasn't saying that she was wrong to have the feeling she had about her father. This is Matt, just that she should go public with it. And I don't think she did it to make money. I just think she needed to get it out. And for her going public was a big part, but it isn't that I ain't gonna tell my brother, you know, when I felt about my father, which she did or she didn't, I have no idea. But to go public with it was really the thing that took it to another level, you know? - He never responded, of course. (laughs) - But I'm sure there's, there's, in those scraps that Matt is going through, there's probably some, some parallel version of this. - Well, maybe. - We'll find out. - Or not, or not, we won't find it out. - That's still my vibe, 'cause again, I remember, when all this started, and it was, oh, we've got these vaults of everything, I'm like, the analog I came up with, rather than this, A, there was Harold Brodke going 28 years before the runaway soul comes out, and then everybody's saying, okay, you know, and kind of shunting it off to the side. B, the documentary about Robert Crumb that came out in the early '90s, the underground cartoonist, where his brother, who, older brother, who was the one who forced all of the other children into forming their own little comics company, his children, kept drawing as he was suffering more and more mental health decline, and they show these panels, where he starts focusing on drapery in the clothing, like getting the drapery right, and then you see years later, that's all there is. It's just drapery, you can't see anything else, it's just lines and lines and lines, and this is my fear about the salvage or stuff that we're gonna come across, maybe, you know, 800 pages of Vedanta text or something that's done in the way that we can't really grasp, grasp. But it's all gonna be a mystery, and that's, you know. - Well, I think Matt is going to bring some judgment to bear on all this, and he has not said anything, but once this stuff comes out, there's gonna be two questions in "A" journals of race, which is what is this stuff that we're seeing now? Short stories, another novel, how good is it, what it critics say, blah, blah, blah, and that's gonna take time, 'cause if there's a lot of stuff, it's gonna take time for people to read all this and think about it. But the other question is, you know, is about Matt, what was the process like going through all this material, some of which were just notes and fragments of stories that pieces together? How did you do this? What took 10 years? You know, what was it like to do? Was it something that you read right away and say, "Oh, I don't have to touch this at all, "it's a finished story, it's great," whatever, or did you have a lot of piecing together to do? That's gonna be a story too. What do you do with 45 years of material from a writer like Salinger? Earlier this summer, I sat down with Marana Comstock, who was a granddaughter of Conrad Berkovichi, who apparently was this phenomenally successful writer in the interwar period into the '40s and beyond, who was now, again, we both look with blankness at his name. She came across this sort of chest with all this writing from various family members and found this book of his memoir about the Algonquin Roundtable. And figures between that and some essays, sketches, profiles of people, she would look around for a publisher, they'd jump on the Algonquin book, and it was one of those things where she was like, "The prose was perfect." I mean, I had to do a little clarifying items here and there, but he just wrote this absolutely amazing thing, and it was just sitting in this chest, never published, and, you know, so I'm hoping, yes, with Salinger, we do have some things that were finished. I wonder with Matt, the archeology of it. - That's sort of what you were saying. How were the pieces dated? How does he assemble the jigsaw puzzle of some of these things that could be written? - And is there anything he's not releasing? And if so, why? - Yeah. - You know, well, part of it-- - Well, it wasn't a complete thing or it didn't have that much merit. But then scholars will say, "No, no, we want to see everything he wrote." - Well, this gets us to the Philip Roth biography story, which, you know, the idea that Roth's notes were given to the biographer who ended up scandalized in having the biography pulled with the question of whether he was going to destroy all the notes after or leave them for other researchers to pursue is, well, it's a whole thing of, you know, what literary biography is, I guess, and how we try to rebuild these figures. - My view about it is that you have to make a distinction between the person and what's written about him, you know, and that, I forgot his name, Blake Bailey. Blake Bailey wrote this book. I thought the book was really good, okay, and I read it before, you know-- - Yeah, everything happened. - But I think it was a mistake for Norton to withdraw that book from circulation. Now, somebody else picked it up. - Yeah, I think so, of course. - And you can get it. But, you know, 'cause what they were saying was, this book doesn't stand on its own as a portrait of Philip Roth. We're taking out of circulation because this guy committed some sexual harassment or rape or whatever. Well, if that's the case, then prosecute him for rape. Why should you censor a book that he wrote? Why is censorship the appropriate punishment for a crime of rape that makes no sense to me? - Unless, and I'm with you on this, except that this is the greatest Zuckerman plot that ever exists. If Roth was going to write what happens to Zuckerman's biography, this would be the story. - That's very funny. - Yeah, 'cause that's what hit me afterwards. I'm like, "Roth couldn't have written this more perfectly." This is the, you know, he finally trusts someone, gets the biography done and then posthumously at all. - You know, and I didn't see a lot of this written. Everybody just said, "Well, the guy's a rapist, "so why should they publish this book?" - You know, they published Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler and they're not going to publish a biography of Philip Roth, which everybody said, Cynthia Ozic wrote a front page review, New York Times book review, praising this book as a very good biography, which it was, and Norton pulls it out because the author did bad things. You got to separate the book from the writer. - And we were in the middle of that, that you're almost of the MeToo era was particularly heavy. - Do you think it would be different if it happened today? - I don't know. There's some issues going on now with certain writers and accusations that are not being treated as severely as it would have been in like 2018, 2019, you know, that era. But, you know, it can also just be certain writers have fan bases. I always, as much as everybody loved David Bowie, David Bowie had some scandals in his youth that were involving underage women. And everybody kind of shunts that aside because we love David Bowie, I'm like, okay, you know, we've got our standards and double standards that we apply to a lot of these situations. Bailey and I were scheduled to record, we were planning to record that fall and then everything blew up. And I was like, well, I guess I'm not gonna hear from him. That's, you know, the book outside. - You know, I can't remember about Blake Bailey and specifically whether there were any young women in there. - Oh, there was a grooming thing. It was girls, he knew when he was teaching middle school that he was waiting for them. He didn't touch them before they were 18. - No, but it was when they were 18. - Well, that's interesting 'cause that's true of Salinger as well. He never molested anybody under 18. Never had sex with anybody who was under 18. But you can argue that he groomed them by letter writing and all of that. And then when they became of age, you know, relationship started. - In a relationship with a different time, but it's still, yeah, it's a fraud territory. - But, you know, but what's wrong and right here? I mean, if he does not touch anyone who's under 18 and waits until they're 18 and then has a consensual relationship, is that to be condemned? I mean, if he didn't, if he met them when they're 19, instead of meeting them when 14, that makes such a big difference. Even though there was no sex until they're 18 or 19. I don't know. - And to your credit, you don't go diving into or waiting into that territory so significantly, it's there as a shadow throughout, you know, that aspect of Salinger's career. - I want to ask, did you read Sergeant Salinger, the novel by Jerome Charon a couple of years ago? - You know, I think this is on the World War II. - Yeah, I don't believe I read it. - I'll voice it off on you. I've got an extra copy 'cause it's an interesting one. - I know I'm aware of it. I don't know why I didn't read it actually. I read it so much, but after you started that, I think it was 22 or 23. - Oh, so it was, yeah, yeah. - But it's, it also focuses on what we assume as the real trauma of Salinger's life, which is what happens at the end of the war. - Yeah, this is the, look, he landed at Normandy on D-Day and he was in continuous combat for the next 10 months until the war ended. He went through France and part of the liberation of Paris, they marched into, he was in the Battle of the Bulge, heard from Forrest, he saw some really serious fighting and two-thirds of the division that he was attached to was killed or wounded in the war. So they get to Germany and the war ends and then a week or two later, or maybe so we get to a four, right around the end of the war, they liberated a concentration camp, which was a sub camp of Dachau and his unit marched in there and the Germans had fled and he saw the dead Jews, the dying Jews, the emaciated Jews, he saw the whole horror of the thing and mostly all Jews in that particular place. And two weeks later, three weeks later, he had a nervous breakdown. So he got through just 10 months of a horrible fighting and death all around him seized his concentration camp and it's then that he has a nervous breakdown. So I can't prove it, but it seems to me that it's associated with the concentration camp and the Jewishness in him that triggered this. And from then on, he really was not the same person after the war, certainly after the concentration camp. And in a state on in Germany, he was a member of the Counter Intelligence Corps for the United States and he stayed in Germany. He met and married a German woman. And because he was still in the army, because it was illegal for an American soldier to marry a German, they passed her off his French, she spoke good French and started he. And he helped do some papers that made it seem as if she were really French. And then they lived together in Germany until a year later and then they went back to the United States, he brought her back and they lived it with sound his parents on Park Avenue and it lasted a month until his mother threw the hell out. She realized that she was German and that's the, you can imagine. - I understand the rebelling against one's Judaism, but that's another level to, I always wonder what that's, how conscious he was of this as a motivation for why he was doing what he was doing or was it just turned that much? - Well, there were some rooms around the time, or thereafter, there was things saying, well, her name was Sylvia Welter and that she really was affiliated with the Nazi party in some way. But there's some scholars who went back and dug through a lot of the papers in Germany and all that and concluded that she had nothing to do with the Nazis. She was German, she was an ophthalmologist actually and she went to medical school in Germany, but being German was bad enough after the war, so that's what, didn't mean anyway, and that was the end of that. It was his first marriage, amazing. - Having written this book and again, not including him in your Judaism and writers, would you replace him in that? - That pantheon? - Well-- - Do you think he is? - Yeah. - I know. - It's an interesting question. I mean, I could make the case for putting him in a book about Jewish-American writers of that era. 'Cause he was part of an era, a post-war era in the United States in which the Jewish writers were ascended in a way they never were before. I mean, there was some stuff in the '20s and '30s, but-- - But no, we're talking-- - But not 'til Bella-- - Bella was at a rotate-- - Yeah, you know, the Nobel Prizes came after the war and all that stuff, but they weren't all Jewish to the same degree. There were some observant Jews, there were people who were not Jewish at all, didn't want to have any association with it, but they never embraced another religion. Sound is different because he embraced another religion, but you can make the case that that's a kind of Jewish, that's what happened to some Jews. There were other Jews who converted too, it wasn't. He never formally converted, but there were other Jews who embraced other religions, and that was one of the Jewish outcomes in a way, there were people like that. So I could have put him in that book, and if I had it to do over again, would I? Well, I'm happy I did a separate book, so, but I can see now in retrospect that there would have been nothing wrong with putting him in that book and explaining how the book would have more focused. The chapter would have been not quite what I've done now 'cause I'm writing about his relationship with women, I'm writing about the books, I'm writing about a lot of things. If I put him in the Jewish writer's book, I would have just focused on his Jewishness and his transition to something else, and it would have been a chapter or two. It wouldn't have been this book, so it could have gone in there. I'm glad we got this one. Because I got a whole nother book. Yeah, I'm glad we got this. Then below in the other book. I do have to pick up the Jewish writer's book though, so that's gonna be my homework after this. Well, I'll give you a copy. Okay, tell me where that began for you, or the, well, tell me where that began for you. Well, that was easy, because I realized that in my formative years, which is to say, in the '50s and '60s, I mean, you know-- You were the background. Yeah, when I graduated high school in 1956, I was very young, and I was in college graduate in '61. And so I would say in those years of early college, late '50s and '60s, when Sounder was just catching on, is where I realized, in retrospect, most of the lives I was reading were Jewish. Now, I read John Updike, who was one of my favorites, and I'm Virginia Woolf, has always been one of my favorites. But a lot of them were Jewish. I mean, Saul Bell is certainly in Philip Roth, certainly in Malamud, and Cynthia Isaac Wieshev, is seeing Arthur Miller's play. Death of a salesman. I mean, Willie Lohman is not specifically Jewish, but he sure as hell is. I mean, you know, I wrote a chapter about that, actually, in the Jewish textbook. But, you know, so it just seemed to me, what was this fascination? Was it just because I was Jewish, and was reading Jewish writers, and or was it that was who was, you know, out and about in those days, which was certainly true. I mean, everybody was reading these writers. You didn't have to be Jewish to read Saul Bello, you know. Anyway, so that's what started it. And it just was natural back then. But then thinking about it in retrospect, all these years later, I said, well, what was that all about, you know? And what did it mean, you know, reading Jewish writers, and their forms of Jewishness? I mean, in the debate between Saul Bello and Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud, about what it means to be Jewish, is in one of those books. And it was just very important to read that stuff. - And how did it shape your Judaism? - And how did the writing book-- - It confirmed that it was okay to be a secular Jew. You could have a Jewish identity and be very much a Jew without being a religious person. And most of those writers were secular Jews. They were just one or two who's in the Ozic, who was among them, who was a religious person. Saul Bello certainly wasn't, Philip Roth certainly wasn't. So, you know, that's what it told me that it was okay to be a secular Jew. - And your relation to religion? - How's that a, it was not to be a secular Jew. - Well, it's not. - It has evolved partly because my wife is more observant than I am. And so, because of that, I got more engaged with it. And we have two children, we raised them as Jewish and they had born by Mitzvahs and so on. But, you know, then-- - They are in the Upper West Side. So, we are in the Upper West Side. - Well, they both live in Los Angeles as it turns out, but put this in Jews in LA too. So, you know, it very much became part of my identity. Being Jewish, unlike some religions, there's so much more to being Jewish than just the religious part of it. You know, it is a culture, it is a way of life. And culturally, you know, there's no question I identify it with it, even without being religious. And my parents were religious for time. They had a kosher home and my father went to synagogue and the holidays, I sat with them and so on. I went to Hebrew school for four years and had a bar mitzvah and so on. And so, yeah, there's no question. I am Jewish, there's no question about it, but there are many ways to be Jewish. And that's what I don't want people to forget. And I never criticize anybody in the way they are Jewish. If you're Jewish and you wanna be religious, fine. If you don't wanna be religious, they'll kill me. You wanna go to Reforms in the Gagre and Orthodox in there, it's all up to you. There are very many ways to be Jewish and it's more than just a religion. - It's like whenever I pass the Mitzvah tank, they know, they just, oh, you haven't had to fill it. I'm like, okay, you identify me, it's pretty obvious. So, you know, I go in and get a flactorita, but, you know, my little practice, but it's okay, you know. There was an interesting aspect of the book that you bring up the biography of Salinger that was written, quoting a number of his letters that basically he sued about in court and got blocked. - Oh, this is the in Hamilton book? - Yeah. So the final version of this doesn't include letters or even much paraphrasing thereof. But you mentioned that you picked up one of the review copies of this book, which does have all of the material. A, how useful was it? B, you know, how awesome is it to be one of the 65 copies that exist? - It's a galley. I have it here on my bookshelf and I'll show it to you. - Awesome. Five of them, so I feel good about having that. Now, it's interesting to see the quotes, but the issue is not the content of the quotes because they're innocuous. They're interesting because it's sound you're talking about one thing or another. And there aren't that many of them given that they were, he had almost 100 letters, so he could've done a lot more with it, but, but, but they're, they're interesting because they're sound just saying he just didn't want them in there, not because of what they said, but because he thought Hamilton had no right to his unpublished letters written as a privacy citizen to other friends of his. And, you know, he has a point and he went to court and it was a very famous case. And it is today the law of the land. If you have my unpublished letters, you can own them. I can't stop you from owning them, but legally I can stop you from polishing them in any form to this day. - And does that hold up after Salinger's death too? If they wanted to reissue that, that really would have no idea what the law. - Well, I think that the law would apply in general because the next person who is gonna bring a case is not gonna be Salinger, it's gonna be somebody else who felt his unpublished letters were taken unfairly and illegally now by somebody else for their purposes in their own book. So yeah, I think it's still the law of the land. - And this wasn't sure if Salinger's estate can still sue for that, or if after his death, it becomes fair game, but Hamilton would've, or his people would've done something by now with it, I guess, if they could've. - Well, it's a long time ago and it's a different situation, although I can imagine somebody now who's well-known who has unpublished letters that he wrote to other people and they ended up in a public library, which is what happened to those sounds for letters. I can imagine somebody saying, I don't want you to publish my letters. I don't just let it, and you don't go off, I don't want anybody else to see it. - I say, now it's all emailed, it's no drafts or anything. - Well, there's that. That's a whole other, yes. - Vearing in another direction, tell me about your journalism history. And we were commiserating before starting here about my upbringing in business-to-business magazines where you also started, but tell me about your history with journalism, your book, and where you see it headed at present. - Yeah, well, that's a huge topic. - Well, let me just start by saying, I was an engineering student in college and in graduate school, I remember NASA's degree in engineering from Columbia, turns out, and I never wanted to be an engineer. I wanted to be a journalist, but I ran away from it because it was too scary, and I quite had to do it, and I had an uncle who was an engineer, and blah, blah. So I started off on the wrong foot to begin with, and then finally made the transition by being a science writer to use the background I had, and that's when I worked on a trade magazine. It was called Product Engineering, and it was published by McGraw-Hill, and this would have been in the '60s. And then from there, it was easier, 'cause now I'm a journalist. Yes, I'm writing about science and technology, but I'm a journalist, and I switched to Business Week, first starting about writing about science and technology, and then gradually other things, and I overseas, I worked in the London Bureau for them, and I was writing about all kinds of things. So, and then just spent the rest of my career as a journalist at Newsweek and at Business Week, and was the editor-in-chief of Business Week for 20 years, and then started a graduate school journalism at the City University of New York. So I am through and through a journalist, and I loved every minute of it, and I got there in a cock-eyed way, but it worked out just fine. So it's very, you know, distressing to see what is happening to the kind of journalism I practiced. I mean, Newsweek, where I worked for five years, and my wife was the first woman senior editor at Newsweek, Lynn Povich, to see that that magazine essentially doesn't exist. It used to have three million circulation. If it exists at all today, and I never see it, it has 50,000 that most. - And I think there's some weird skin on it. - And it's so cool, that's right. - That's right, yeah, so it essentially doesn't exist. And Business Week, which does exist, only exists because Michael Bloomberg took it off the hands of McGraw-Hill for no amount of money, and decided to call it Bloomberg Business Week, and it's still being published. So that's saddens me that the traditional form of journalism has gone away, but I also understand there's a whole new form of journalism that started new outlets like ProPublica and Politico and Huffington Post, and anybody can be a journalist, and there's more journalism being done today on more platforms than any time in human history. So that's all to the good. It's just, it is in my world. I go online like everybody else, I even write online, but I grew up in a different world, and you get to a certain point, it never goes out of your head, even though you make a transition to the new way of doing things. - This was when I sat down with Clyde James back in 2015 with this recording set up, he barbled, 'cause he said, "When I was doing TV, "even if it was just an audio thing, "I'd have a whole crew, and you'd show over this little bag, "and you can do this whole recording, we're gonna be..." But what did you, I guess, what did you learn from starting the school, and trying to teach, and develop a curriculum for journalism in the 2000s as things are mutating rapidly? - What I learned is that everything I thought going in, not everything, but most everything was not quite right. - And the students know what they want, and what they wanted to do, yes. They wanna learn what I call the eternal verities of journalism, which is to say good reporting, good writing, smart analysis. The traditional form of very good interpretive journalism, and we give them that. But in addition, you gotta give 'em all this new stuff. And it's just everything, this video and audio, and all of these, what used to be different media formats, newspapers, magazines, radio, television, all different. They're all converged now. There's no difference. You write a story, stories with video. It could be a loyal written story, but it's still gonna have a video component and interactive. It's now a two-way street. When I was a journalist, we were the writers, and you were the audience. And maybe you'd write a letter to the editor every once in a while, but that was it. It was a one-way street. Now it's a two-way street. In fact, it's a multi-universe of everybody participating, and the audience talks back, and the audience of writers. Everybody's a journalist now, or at least can practice journalism, and you don't need a license like to be a lawyer. You wanna write a story, you write a story. So it's a different world, and you know, it isn't worse. It's just different. - And it agrees to which it is-- - Well, in certain instances of work, in terms of a lot of problems with the old way of doing things too. And so there are problems with this new way of doing it too. And some of it is very, very good, and some of it isn't. But that was always true. - Yeah, yeah, it's, I mean, that was part of my mid-life crisis, quitting the business to business magazine, and launching the Trade Association was the, at that point, I was 42, 43 years old, and thinking, "Ten years are gonna go by, "I'm gonna be in my early 50s, "and I'm gonna be a trade magazine under, "and this advertising base isn't gonna survive. "I'm gonna be a white guy in his 50s, "trying to find work, which as we know, "is kind of a no-man's land." So instead, I reinvented myself in this weird context, but it's still the magazine still out there. I still see the people, they do more events now, and not just the magazine itself. There's more things tied to it. There's video, there are all these other ways of trying to get eyeballs, I guess, which is the, quote-unquote, monetization of everything. - Yeah, yeah. - But you know, it'd be hard to make an argument that we as a society are less well-informed now than we were 30 years ago. - The information is there. It's a question of how willing we are to go get it. - Well, wasn't that always true in a way? - Yeah. - You didn't have to subscribe to a newspaper in the old days either, you know? And maybe you'd put on the radio and listen to music and never turn on the news. So it would always, to some degree, if you were interested yet, go get it. It is, it was a quote. If the news is important, it will find me. That's a little more true today because of all these blogs and ways of reaching you and personalizing information for your particular tastes and interests. But people are informed, it's not that, you know, if we screw up, it's not because we were uninformed, it's because we make the point decisions based on that information, definitely. - How do the journalism writing inform book writing? - No, for you. - That's a good question. - But there's a question. - For me, it isn't very different. Writing a book is an elongated form of the journalism that I did. So let's say a cover story in a news magazine is 5,000 words. This book is under 50,000 words. So call it nine 10 times as big as a cover story in a news magazine. To me, it's like nine cover stories put together. It's like "Salinger Writing Catching the Ride" by assembling a series of short stories. So I don't feel that I'm writing any differently. And if you look at the writing style, I had a couple of friends comment about this that is very much a kind of news magazine writing style in terms of those magazines were very good at what we used to call information density, packing a lot of information into a three column story, which may have been six or 700 words. But the sentences were so pregnant with information. It was that kind of good writing. And that's the way I grew up learning to write. And so I still write that way. You know, there are more flourishes when you write a book and stuff like that. - But it's surprising that it's under 200 pages. And it's got a fullness to it. - That's right. If I didn't write that way, the book would have been longer. And I don't think that would have been an advantage. I mean, because nobody says I didn't understand this. They just read it, you know. - It reminds me, when you mentioned Newsweek, that one of the first writers I ever met, David Gates, used to do book reviews for Newsweek. And these things would maybe be two or three paragraph squibs and they were just full. Everything that was that. I'm sure that's the interplay of editor and writer. But once upon a time, we knew how to convey everything we needed to convey. - In a certain amount of space was a hell of a discipline. And it led to a writing style that to me is still very good because it's very economical and gives you a lot of information. I mean, this book is filled with a lot of information and it's less than 50,000 words. That's a less than 200 pages. - Yeah, phenomenon we have with online reading where you end up basically just scanning a paragraph and pulling out the few couple of words that are actually of use as you keep scrolling up kind of the screen. You have a written fiction? - No, I wasn't sure if it was a-- - No, it's not, look, I gotta say, fiction as a work of imagination is a higher art form than journalism is. I'll be the first one to say that. And I once tried writing a play, which is where everything has to be conveyed in the dialogue. So the narrative, the characters and everything. And I couldn't do it. I really couldn't do it and I gave it up. And I've never really tried again. So the answer is no. But I have a big reader of fiction. And I went mire of fiction. But I don't, I've been very happy as a journalist. I don't lament the fact that I didn't write fiction. I really don't. Even though I see it as a higher art form. - Yeah, but not the one you're-- - That's right. It just wasn't me. And I was good at being a journalist. I had some natural instinct for it. And I like to observe particularly conflict and write about it and try to sort out the right and wrong of a particular situation. So I think that psychologically I'm very suited to being a journalist. So I recognize that. And so I don't regret not writing the great American novel. Well, I might regret not writing the great American novel. But yeah, being a fiction writer is not something-- - Great, Steven novel is not the one that we were dying for. - Usually we get from people, you must have all these great stories from all the years of work. It's like, yeah, but that's not fiction. That's not a novel. - Correct. - Although what you mentioned with the approach to journalism, again, it reminds me before we started talking about Ron Rosenbaum, who also taught me the issue in any attempt at surveying a specific field, go find the apostate, find the guy who used to believe X and now believes the opposite. Go figure out his story and you'll start getting whatever the joke is. When I started in trade magazines in 1995, I was on two different books, Juvenile Merchandising and Auto Laundry News, The Car Wash Industry Trade Journal. - This is such a thing. - Well, and this is-- - The business journey, you moved out of that world. I will say everybody has that reaction and I always say, oh no, there wasn't one Car Wash Trade magazine. There were three Car Wash Trade magazines because the moment one guy makes a dime in one of those spaces, two more guys will chisel in for a nickel. And I realized, and this is incredibly esoteric and yet somehow works, the schism for oil change places between lifts and pits is literally theological. They're literally, do you dig down into the earth? Are you elevating into the sky? And this is a mentality between guys who are pro-lift versus pro-pit. And I was like, my Rosenbaum is right, it doesn't matter how weird and mundane the topic is, you will find people who treat everything as though it's Catholic versus Protestant level of-- - There must be this human nature to want contention and disagreement and fighting. - And I have to be right, and that guy has to be wrong. - Yeah, I mean, why don't we all just get along, you know? - And it reminds me of, I'm finishing My Struggle by Canal Scard, the Norwegian writer which has a huge 400 page essay near the end about why he named it My Struggle, which goes into Hitler, Jews, World War II, and everything else. And it put me in mind reading this of whether or not Salinger renounces being Jewish, whether you and I are assimilated Jews or not, I adjust your outside, to them were Jews. It doesn't matter what we think we are or who we think we're going to be, we're always identified as something. And in this case, that identity carries with us throughout, it's not a sign that we therefore need to embrace our identity as seen by somebody else, but it is something that for us maybe means something a little different than. - Well, I agree with that. I mean, in the sense that I think that's the way it is, that people will identify people as Jewish, and it's because of what I said earlier that I think they understand that Judaism is more than just a religion. It's a culture, it's a way of life, and so on. And somebody once said, to this question, well, if you're an observant Jew or a not an observant Jew, you still would have ended up in Hitler. - Yeah, that's basically how I would have pushed that. - And then, so he said, well, why should we let Hitler be the definer of what Judaism is and who is a Jew? You know, which is, of course, true. But yeah, there are distinctions and that don't exist for other religions. But that's okay, so it's an identity. And for all these thousands and thousands of years, it was a whole question, and it was a segregated culture and lived this, you know, not hard-doing. Well, to some degree it was hard-doing, you know? Yeah, we wanted to be that way, and people wanted us out of the way over there, kind of thing, so. - But we stuck around. So there's another book you did that I'm interested in came out COVID era called Second Thoughts. And I'm one of the ongoing themes of my book, and it's why I like interviewing people older than me instead of people who are in their 20s, is that sense of retrospection. And the idea of looking back on one's life and the waves of history and how our perspectives change. So again, a book I haven't dived into yet, but tell me a little about Second Thoughts. - Well, it's a series of essays, first of all. And it was just, Second Thoughts means, essentially, at a certain age, looking back on your life. Your life is less ahead of you than there is behind you. And you're looking back, what did it all mean? What did it add up to? How did I become the person I became? You know, not, you know, judgmental in any way, just historical, just how did this happen? What was I like and so on? And so I started writing essays, and it coincided when I turned 80. My family had the idea, my daughter actually, I think, came with the idea of going back to the Bronx where I grew up and visiting my old first apartment in the Bronx with the apartment I was raised in as a boy. And we ended up doing it. We got in touch with the people in the building and got to the woman who was living in the department now at Dominican woman, Jewish then, Dominican now. That's a great, that's New York story. And we actually went, what is to say? I went, my wife went, my two children and their mates went. We all went up to the Bronx 'cause it's prearranged visit to go see my original apartment. And that's sort of, you know, what did it? I mean, I kept thinking there's more I should want to write about my parents, about my sister, about growing up, about, you know, studying engineering when I should have been a journalist and all that kind of stuff. And so I did it and then there were various parts of it and it was books I read. And I'll give you a copy if you don't have one. And I'm glad I did it, but it is not anything and I didn't try to, you know, sell it or anything. - Yeah, so I was trying to commercial publisher, it was just self-published and, but I'm glad I did it, but it was more for me and the people around me than anything else. You know, if I were a famous person, people might be interested in it. If I were J.D. Salomon, people would lap it up. Oh, that's what he was like. We may find out another year or two right now. So, you know, I'm glad I did that. I'm glad, you know, I spent my whole life as a magazine writer once I became a journalist. I really did, and I was at essentially two magazines for the bulk of the time after the Trade magazine, Newsweek and Business Week and an analytic form of journalism, weekly magazines in those days, you know. And that's all I really wanted to be. So I felt that I realized my life's ambition, which took me a long time to realize and get started, but once I did, it was easy. I'm not easy, but I felt that-- It was natural, yeah, it was natural, yeah. This is where you need it to be. I should ask, did the engineering, did the study of engineering help, not in terms of terminology and science, but in terms of breaking down what writing is? Yeah, I mean, yeah, I often thought about that. I don't have a great answer because-- Look, I'm an analytic person to begin with. So, which came first, the chicken of the egg. I mean, was I an analytic person and therefore studied engineering? What did engineering make me an analytic person? I think the engineering encouraged the analytic person in me, so I became more so. Maybe that's true. On the other hand, I became much more literary as I grew older, much more interested in literature and books and people like Salinger and the Jewish writers and so on, which is why I ended up writing about them. But I didn't write a book until my career was over. I was gonna ask, what was the-- Well, I stepped down from City University, the Graduate School of Journalism, in 2013. My first book I wrote in my last year there, was a deadlines and disruption, my turbulent path from print to digital. It was a book about journalism written as a memoir. And the three other books, including the Salinger book, Jewish writers' book, second thoughts, all were in retirement. I did not have a paying job. I just did lots of things, but one of the things was I sat at my computer and wrote some books. Do you wish you'd written them earlier, or is that simply the magazine and that form of writing was satisfactory? Yeah, I couldn't have done it and been the editor of a weekly magazine. It just would have been impossible. I would have had to take a leave and so on. I mean, it didn't occur to me to do it. I never thought I would write a book. Yeah, that's not what I wondered. Yeah, I never thought I would. And frankly, I wondered whether I could. Well, I was capable of writing something longer like that. And I came to view it as a series of magazine cover stories. You know, expanding into that. And I still think of it that way. So it's now called the book because it's 45,000 words or whatever. Working on something else? Oh boy. Don't jinx it. You don't have to say. I know this just now. Well, the answer is, yeah, the short answer is no. The better answer is I don't know because I never thought I was gonna write any of these books. So if you would ask me before I wrote this, you know, I wouldn't have said I'm gonna write a book about J.D. Sounder. I didn't know. We told whatever hit me hit me. So I don't know the answer to that. But in my age, the chances are I'm not gonna start in and do something 'cause they do even. Now I will say, Jules Pfeiffer started doing full length graphic novels in his mid 80s. 'Cause he was always doing strips and individual things and 80 something years old. Okay, let me ask you for ages. It's gonna be my thing. How long does it take to do a graphic? It depends. You know, I visited him to record, oh God, 2016 or 17. And he's drawing in a different style. He's not doing as fine as he may have done in some of his, you know, village voice strips and all that. But, you know, first, if you're doing it full time, you can make pages with some, you know, speed. But I know other guys, it's 11 or 12 years that they work on a single project because they're day job and everything else. So yeah, it varies. You know, if you're looking for someone to draw something for you, I can probably connect you. But, you know, that's a good story. - I mean, I can imagine myself writing a magazine article. I can't imagine myself writing another book at this stage in my life, you know, just 'cause it takes too long. - Yeah. - You know, you're talking, you know. - Especially with the biographical and then research down-- - That's my focus. - It was easy in the sense that all I had to do was read a lot of material. I didn't go out and interview a lot of people for the change. - Nobody around me. - He started to synthesize everything. You had to integrate and synthesize. - That's what I am when I talk about analysis. It's that analysis and synthesis is what I do. This is a work of synthesis and a work of analysis. I didn't interview JD Salinger. He's long dead, you know. And I didn't even, I would have talked to his son, but he wouldn't talk to me. So, and it wasn't really anybody else to talk to. - You just read what scholars have written and historians and biographies and so on. And then you put it all together and synthesize what interests you. And it came out the religious odyssey and the young women, that's it. (laughing) - Favorite sound-- - Sex and religion, I really know. - Yeah, that drives a lot of human history. - So, you know, a favorite sound, your story? - No, I don't, it won't sound so much a story, but the idea that he left Cornish New Hampshire-- - Well, I mean, a favorite story that he published. - Oh, that he published, sorry, sorry, sorry. - Oh, yeah, that's easy, that's easy. You want to guess which one it is? - You go banana fish. - So, sure. - Or a Franny. - For "S. May with Love and Squaller." - Right. - Which is in nine stories. I think, "New York Times Critic," I think it was Oliver Prescott, it's in the book, called "For "S. May with Love and Squaller," the best story to come out of the Second World War. Best short story, I guess, is it? And it's that, it is a remarkable story. And I think it's one of the best stories, period, best short stories, period. So, I came away thinking, yeah, banana fish was very interesting, as some of the other stories are, and some of the older stories are quite interesting, but "For "S. May with Love and Squaller" is really in a class by itself. First of all, it is a war story. It is about a wounded soldier from the Second World encountering a 13-year-old girl and a younger brother with orphan parents from the war. I mean, it just has it all, and it's so, so brilliantly done. So, that's the one I will take with me forever. - Last question, which I always ask people, I should have emailed you, was coming. What are you reading? - Oh. I figure you wouldn't know, so I didn't need to prepare-- - Yeah, well, you know, I belong to a book group. We have nine guys who've been doing it for 12 years or something. And so, I'm reading, over the summer, we try to read a longer book, 'cause we don't meet, normally we meet every month, so we don't read much over 300 pages. But this summer, I've been re-reading, actually, Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, because we picked this. It's a very long book, we picked it, but it's one of the great novels of all time. And re-reading it again is just such a pleasure. So, that's what I'm reading, but it takes a little summer. - No, no, I'm with you. That's the, it has one of my favorite lines of all of literature, and I did a blog post many years ago about, I happened to get the good translation the first time, and Elmer Maude back in the early 1900s. - Is this the first sentence? - The first sentence, it's the line when Leven sees Kitty for the first time, and I'm gonna misquote it, unfortunately, but he saw her as one sees the sun looking away, but seeing her nonetheless. And it was just this, and I went to find like every other translation of it, they're all disastrous. - Every one of them misses. - Only one translate. - Everyone misses the poetry of that moment, and it was just like, well, at least the first time I read it, I happened to come across the perfect version. - Yeah, I don't remember that, but yeah, when you say-- - No, I was at the post, too. It's pretty, it's interesting to see. - But the famous line from that book is the first line. - Oh, sure, you know. - Happy people are happy in the same way. - Yeah. - Which Nabokov throws on his axis later on. But anyway, I wanna thank you for A, for sitting now with me before. - Oh, that's great. Oh my God, we did a lot. - Oh yeah, I tend to go long. I always tell people, it's, you know, we have an hour or two, we'll have a good time, but this book is a wonder, and I really enjoyed-- - Yeah, thank you. - Getting this, well, again, the, the religion and the sex, you know, just getting all that tied together in the, you know, the literary figure of sounds or like this fantastic achievement. (upbeat music) And that was Stefan B. Shepherd. "Salinger's Soul" is an illuminating book. It's a wonderful read, and if Steve's right and the unpublished work starts to come out in the next year or so, and I'm sorry for being so dismissive about it in the conversation, but it is more interesting, I guess, to me, that notion that maybe, maybe there's nothing in the vault, you know? But anyway, if all that stuff starts to come out in the next year or two, this is gonna be a great primer for what we've got ahead of us. Now, Steve's not on social media, which we all know is for the best, but you should check out his site, StefanB. Shepherd.com, all one word, to see more about his writing, interviews, appearances, and his thoughts on journalism over the years. And that's S-T-E-P-H-E-N, the letter B, S-H-E-P-A-R-D. StefanB. Shepherd.com, all one word. Now, you can support the virtual memory show by telling other people about it. Let 'em know there's this podcast comes out every week with really interesting conversations with fascinating cultural folks. You can also help out the show by telling me what you like and don't like about it, who you'd like to hear me record with, what movie or TV show or book or piece of music, theater, art exhibition, whatever you think I should check out and turn listeners on to. You can do that by sending me an email, by sending me a postcard or a letter. My mailing address is at the bottom of the newsletter I send out twice a week, which you should be subscribing to, or you can use my Google voice number, which is 973-869-9659. That goes directly to voicemails. You don't have to worry about getting stuck in an awkward conversation with me. And messages can be up to three minutes long, so you go longer than that, you'll just have to call back and leave a second message. And let me know if it'd be okay to include your message in an upcoming episode of the show. You might have something interesting to share with listeners, but I'd never run something like that without the speaker's permission, so let me know. If you got money to spare, don't give it to me. I am gonna ask you for money when I work on the Kickstarter for my book at the end of this year into next year. You'll find out more about that when it comes. But really, give to people and institutions in need. With people, you can go through like GoFundMe, Patreon, Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, CrowdFunder. There are all sorts of crowdfunding platforms where you'll find people who need help, making rent, medical bills, car payments, veterinary bills, getting an artistic project going. There are things people need and maybe just a few dollars from you can make a real difference in their lives, so please give. Now with institutions, I give to my local food bank and World Central Kitchen every month. You can give to those sorts of things. You can give to election funds, freedom funds, Planned Parenthood, women's choice, trans protection, LGBTQIA funds and education. What I'm saying is there are a lot of things you can do to try to help build a better world. So, you know, I hope you will. Our music for this episode is "Fella" by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. You should visit my archives to check out my episode with Hal from the summer of 2018 and learn more about his art and painting. And you can listen to his music at soundcloud.com/mayforth. And that's M-A-Y, the number four, T-H. And that's it for this week's episode of "The Virtual Memories Show." Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next week with another great conversation. You can subscribe to "The Virtual Memories Show" and download past episodes at the iTunes Store. You can also find all our episodes and get on our email list at either of our websites, vmspod.com, or chimeraobscura.com/vm. You can also follow "The Virtual Memories Show" on Twitter and Instagram at vmspod at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com and on YouTube, Spotify and TuneIn.com by searching for virtual memories show. And if you like this podcast, please tell your pals, talk it up on social media and go to iTunes, look up "The Virtual Memories Show" and leave a rating and maybe a review for us. It all goes to helping us build a bigger audience. You've been listening to "The Virtual Memories Show." I'm your host, Gil Roth. Keep reading, keep making art, and keep the conversation going. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]