Uncle Wiggily and J.D. Salinger

Uncle Wiggily is not an Easter bunny. He is a gentlemanly old rabbit who always wears a suit and a silk top hat. 

The character was created by Howard R. Garis. I just discovered this year that Uncle Wiggily has some roots in my home state of New Jersey and even in my birthplace of Newark.

Garis was a reporter for the Newark Evening News and he wrote hundreds of children’s books, many of them as a ghostwriter. He published his first Uncle Wiggily story in a newspaper in 1910, and it was so popular that he ended up publishing an Uncle Wiggily story six days a week for more than 30 years. By the time he retired, he had written more than 10,000 stories about the rabbit. 

According to Garis' obituary in the Chicago Tribune, it was a walk in the woods in Verona, New Jersey that inspired him to write about the rabbit. I now live in the town next to Verona. The Uncle Wiggily connection is very strong with me.

I don't really remember the stories, though in my childhood the Newark Evening News was dropped on our front porch every night and I did read the comics, so it's likely I read some of those stories. I was a big fan of rabbits and we had them as pets.

I do remember playing an Uncle Wiggily game. I found the original game selling online for $100. I guess I should have kept my childhood game - and kept it in good shape.  They do sell today a much more reasonable version of the game.

Uncle Wiggily Longears - his full name - appeared in the paper every day (except Sundays) from 1910 to 1962 and Garis published 79 books in his lifetime illustrated by a variety of artists. 

I left Uncle Wiggily behind when I got a bit older, but he popped up again in my early teen years. Eloise and Walt appear in the short story "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" which is one of the stories in J.D. Salinger's collection Nine Stories which I read many times. In that story, Eloise recalls a time when she and Walt were running to catch a bus and she sprained her ankle. Walt says, referring to her ankle, "Poor Uncle Wiggily."

I guess Jerry Salinger read some of those stories. Uncle Wiggily is lame from rheumatism and uses a candy-striped walking stick.

The 1949 film My Foolish Heart was based on this story and is still the only authorized adaptation of Salinger's writings into a film. The film's plot bears little resemblance to the original story - which might be why Salinger never allowed his fiction to be used again.

The story is about how Eloise is trying to come to terms with her life with her husband Lew when her true love was Walt (a member of Salinger's favorite family, the Glass family) who died during his service in the army.

Poor Uncle Wiggily. 

Crossposted at Weekends in Paradelle

Walking With Holden Caulfield Around Manhattan

The opening of Catcher, and Holden in a snowglobe.

You can walk around New York City with Holden Caulfield (as he did in The Catcher in the Rye) via a New York Times article and map. 

Drop by Ernie's nightclub in The Village. You can go to the Edmont Hotel and look for Sunny the hooker. Try to figure out what happens to the Central Park ducks in winter. See if Mr. Antolini still lives over there on Sutton Place. Meet Luce for a drink at the Wicker Bar on 54th. See if your date shows up by the clock at the Biltmore. Go all the way north to Phoebe's school.

Okay, so now the Biltmore is an office building. And Ernie's existed only in the imaginations of J.D. Salinger and his readers. But Jerry must have had some real club in mind.

I used to have my students create maps for novels we read. Excellent problem-solving activity. For example, how do we know where Holden met Sunny? Peter G. Beidler, the author of  "A Reader's Companion to J.D. Salinger's 'The Catcher in the Rye'", did the same kind of activity. He figures that it's the Edmont in the West 50s, between Fifth Avenue and what is now officially known as the Avenue of the Americas (Holden would have known it as Sixth Avenue). How did he determine this?

“Because it is in this hotel that Holden sees ‘perverts’ and later encounters a pimp and a prostitute,” Mr. Beidler wrote, “it is likely that Salinger did not want to use the name of a real hotel.” But he gave a clue: He said it was “41 gorgeous blocks” from Ernie’s nightclub in Greenwich Village. Ernie’s, too, was a made-up place.

By the way - about those ducks - Sara Miller, the historian for the Central Park Conservancy, says that the ducks never go anywhere. They hang out all winter.

Read Salinger:
The Catcher in the Rye
Nine Stories
Franny and Zooey
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
The Complete Uncollected Stories of J.D. Salinger