Happy Birthday, Norman Mailer and the Glass Family

Noted on January 31 in "A Book of Days for the Literary Year": This was the day, in 1948, when "A Perfect Day for Banana Fish" appeared in The New Yorker.

"Banana Fish" is the first in J.D. Salinger's "Nine Stories," and it is also the beginning of his chronicle of the Glass family, from Seymour to Franny and Zooey. And while Salinger always will be remembered primarily for "The Catcher in the Rye," the other stories and novellas are equally rich and rewarding.

As many artists have, Salinger rejected his earlier work, but some of these forgotten stories, especially "The Inverted Forest," have tantalizing moments. The only place to find descriptions of them (unless you can turn up late 1940s copies of "Cosmopolitan") is in a collection of critical essays edited by Henry Anatole Grunwald, and called, simply, "Salinger." It was published in 1962, when Salinger's work was a very hot literary topic.

The essays--not always favorable--are by a dozen writers of note, including John Updike, Joan Didion and Leslie Fiedler. But our favorite line on Salinger--not in the collection--comes from John Cheever: "Jerry Salinger could slam a cab door with more authority than any other writer in America."

And speaking of slamming cab doors, how about Norman Mailer? Mailer sent 5,000 invitations to his fiftieth birthday party (January 31, 1973) at Four Seasons in New York. Invitees were told the cost of attending would be fifty dollars a couple, with the money to be used to set up "a democratic secret police."

Only 500 people came to the party, and no one knows if Mailer got his secret police force. But maybe he did, and it's still a secret.