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Lot 240
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J. D. Salinger Two Fabulous Letters, One Signed in Full!
J. D. Salinger Two Fabulous Letters, One Signed in Full!
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Description:

Salinger J. D.


J. D. Salinger Two Fabulous Letters, One Signed in Full

 

J. D. SALINGER, small archive of three letters between Salinger and Rose-Ellen Currie, April-July 1953. 4 pp. + 2 envelopes.

 

Highlights and Excerpts:

 

-Rose-Ellen Currie, Typed Letter Signed, to J. D. Salinger, April 11, 13, 1953. Two copies of the same letter, with minor typographical differences. 2 pp., 5.75" x 7.75". Expected folds; very good.

 

“This is not going to be a good letter—partly because I am not articulate in admiration, but mostly because I am young enough not to risk appearing absurd. Still write you some sort of letter I must.”
“I know this feeling of intense personal relevance is not unique—or rather that it is unique to artists of your stature but not of course special to me among your readers—but it is a rare and important feeling, and even a sustaining one—like having someone to talk to in the middle of the night. I may never be a writer Mr. Salinger, but if I am, you in some complicated and involuntary way will bear part of the responsibility.”
“This is clumsy and meaningless, I know, but for a long time I have had to take some sort of token action in the Salinger situation and hearing a friend speak of you as a friend made me realize that you are after all flesh, and not a sort of pink light, and so might understand a need to say thank you.”

 

 -J. D. Salinger, Typed Letter Signed, to Rose-Ellen Currie, April 27, 1953, Windsor, Vermont. 1 p., 8.5" x 11" + envelope. Expected folds; some staining; envelope torn on opening.

 


“Thank you for troubling to write again.... Thank you especially for forbearing to ask those questions about this or that story character. That was kind of you. It isn’t easy to be written to out of the blue, and I’m disproportionately grateful for small considerations and almost any kind of restraint.”

 

 -J. D. Salinger, Typed Letter Signed in Type “Whitey,” to Rose-Ellen Currie, July 14, [1953?], Windsor, Vermont. 1 p., 8.5" x 11" + envelope. Expected folds; several tears on folds; discolored.


“I was up to the magazine a couple of weeks ago and nearly maimed myself to death crawling from window ledge to window ledge in an effort to pass Hollis Alpert’s dirty little cubicle without him seeing me. Wouldn’t you know he’s the type who leaves his door open so that he can See Into the Passageway.”
“The book’s still going. I may call it Nine Novels, if I get it done in this incarnation.”
“I started to build a stone wall around the house, thinking it might be becoming to my style of neurosis, but lost interest in the project very quickly.... To top everything off, one of my neighbors, whose children I love, drove up here one morning and told me – after a nodding acquaintance of weeks – that she thinks she’s falling in love with me, and should she tell her husband. My first and only honest impulse was to bludgeon her to death with a lead pipe, but I suppose I just laughed musically, like Nan Bobbsey, and ran. It means I can’t go swimming in her brook or play with her pretty children any more....”
“I’m tired and bored. Write me a note of cheer when or if you feel up to it. If possible, keep it pornographic.”

 


Hollis Alpert (1916-2007) was an assistant fiction editor for the New York Times from 1950 to 1956 and also worked as a freelance film and book reviewer for several other publications.
Salinger published Nine Stories, a collection of short stories, in 1953.
Nan Bobbsey was one half of one set of the Bobbsey Twins, the principal characters in a series of 72 books published between 1904 and 1979 by multiple authors.

 


J. D. Salinger (1919-2010) was born in Manhattan into a Jewish family, though his mother was a convert. He graduated from the Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania in 1936 and attended New York University for part of a year. He studied the meat-importing business in Poland and Austria, but left just a month before Nazi Germany annexed Austria. Returning to the United States, he briefly attended Ursinus College and Columbia University. He published his first short story in the magazine "Story" in 1940.  He began submitting short stories to "The New Yorker", which rejected most, but accepted “Slight Rebellion off Madison” about a disaffected teenager named Holden Caulfield. However, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor left the story “unpublishable,” and it did not appear until 1946. Salinger was drafted in 1942 and saw combat in Europe on D-Day, and at the Battle of the Bulge and other battles. He later served in counter-intelligence in the interrogation of prisoners and in Denazification duty in Germany for six months after the war ended. In 1948, he published “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” which received critical acclaim and earned him a contract with "The New Yorker" for future work. A 1949 film adaptation of one of his short stories failed, and Salinger never permitted film adaptations to be made from his stories. He published his most famous work, "The Catcher in the Rye", in 1951, about protagonist Holden Caulfield’s experiences in New York City after his expulsion from a college preparatory school. Although it was widely taught in schools, other schools banned it for its use of swear words and coarse language. Salinger became an adherent of Hinduism in 1952 and gradually withdrew from public view, publishing only a few stories for the rest of the decade. In the early 1960s, he published two volumes of short stories previously published in "The New Yorker". His last published work appeared in 1965. For the next forty-five years, he lived a reclusive life in New Hampshire.

 

Rose-Ellen Currie (1930-2012) was born in New York, the daughter of an electrician and his Scottish wife. In the late 1950s, she wrote and published several short stories, including at least one in The New Yorker. Around the same time, she left the manuscript of her first novel in a taxi and never recovered it. She worked as a copywriter and vice president for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency for twenty-four years. Currie published her only novel, Available Light, in 1986, and a collection of short stories, Moses Supposes, in 1994.

 

This item comes with a Certificate from John Reznikoff, a premier authenticator for both major 3rd party authentication services, PSA and JSA (James Spence Authentications), as well as numerous auction houses.

 

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