The New York Times International - 13.08.2019

.. 2 | T UESDAY, AUGUST 13, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

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said. “I wanted people to know that, yes, he did keep writing, there’s a lot of material, and yes, it will be published.” A film producer and actor who played Captain America in a 1990 action film that was never released in United States theaters, Mr. Salinger, 59, is to some degree an unlikely representative for a re- clusive literary icon. He now has to fend off people his father called “wanters” — fans and journalists who hounded Salinger for an interview, an autograph, a photo, another book. These days, the wanters come to the author’s son, seek- ing permission for film adaptations, plays, Salinger tote bags. (Mr. Salinger said he is firmly opposed to screen adaptations and nixed the tote-bag idea.) He has agonized over some of these new initiatives, torn between wanting to honor his father’s desire for privacy and control, and wanting the books to reach a wider audience. There are signs that Salinger’s pro- found influence on generations of Amer- ican writers and readers may be wan- ing. In an essay published in The Guard- ian earlier this month, the novelist Dana Czapnik wrote of students and teachers who aren’t as enamored of Holden Caulfield, the phony-hating protagonist of “The Catcher in the Rye,” as previous generations, and an Electric Literature article published last year suggested “alternatives and supplements” to the book by female and nonwhite authors. While he rarely gives interviews, Mr. Salinger has opened up more about his father recently. He felt compelled, he said, to counter the claims in a 2013 doc- umentary and a tie-in book by David Shields and Shane Salerno, which caused a stir with the revelation that Salinger had left behind five unpublished works, along with instructions to publish them between 2015 and 2020. “So much in that book and that movie were utter fiction, and bad fiction,” said Mr. Salinger, who noted that his father “encouraged us to take our time” and didn’t give a timeline for publication.

Mr. Salerno said that the book and film were based on nearly a decade of re- search, and were legally vetted. He added that he felt vindicated by Mr. Salin- ger’s recent statements that the writer’s unpublished works will be released in coming years. “Matt Salinger finally confirmed to the world that what I wrote back in 2013 was true, and that more than 40 years of his father’s writing would be published,” Mr. Salerno said in a statement to The New York Times. For now, the contents of J.D. Salin- ger’s archives remain a closely held se- cret. His unpublished work sits in a se- cure storage facility between his son’s home in Connecticut and the New Hampshire home of the Salinger Trust’s other trustee, Salinger’s widow, Colleen Salinger. (She declined to comment for this article.) Matt Salinger has been preparing the unreleased work for publication since

He sometimes found himself get-
ting lost in the files, entranced by his fa-
ther’s voice.
The Salinger estate was among the
most stubborn holdouts against digitiza-
tion, and the arrival of his e-books will
fill a major gap in the digital library.
“This is the last chip to fall in terms of
the classic works,” said Terry Adams,
vice president, digital and paperback
publisher of Little, Brown. “All of the
other estates of major 20th century writ-
ers have made the move to e-books, but
Matt has been very cautious.”
Matt Salinger resisted requests to is-
sue e-books for years, knowing his fa-
ther’s aversion to the internet. He once
tried to explain Facebook to him and re-
members he was “horrified” by the no-
tion of digital oversharing.
“I hear his voice really clearly in my
head, and there’s no doubt in my mind
about 96 percent of the decisions I have

to make, because I know what he would have wanted,” Mr. Salinger said. “Things like e-books and audiobooks are tough, because he clearly didn’t want them.” Mr. Salinger began to consider releasing e-books around 2014, after a woman in Michigan wrote to him, saying she had a disability that made it difficult for her to read printed books. Then, during a trip to China earlier this year, he real- ized that many young people overseas read exclusively on phones and digital devices, and that e-books were the only way to get his father’s writing in front of them. He finally acquiesced to digital editions of Salinger’s four books — “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Nine Stories,” “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Sey- mour: An Introduction.” He has also explored the possibility of releasing audiobook editions but said his father abhorred the idea of his books being performed or interpreted in any way in another medium. When it comes to releasing unpublished material, Mr. Salinger feels less ambivalent. His father always made it clear that he intended to publish more one day but didn’t want to deal with the media storm, he said. “He’d say, ‘This is the year, I’m getting things together,’ and then when it came time to do it, he just couldn’t do it,” he said. “It took too much out of him, the attention was too great.” Mr. Salinger plans to proceed cau- tiously but feels the weight of his father’s legacy, the expectations that his many fans have. A woman in her 80s wrote to him, begging him to release his father’s writing so that she can read it before she dies, he said. It pains him to think of her, and that he might let her and other readers down by taking too long. “That is a kind of pressure,” he said. He thought of his father again, adding, “He would have been moved by letters like that, too.”

J.D. Salinger’s son, Matt Salinger, said it felt “weird” to publish his father’s works. “I’ve spent my whole life protecting him and not talking about him,” he said of the enigmatic writer.

PASCAL PERICH

Salinger’s books to be digitized

From left, the original cover for “The Catcher in the Rye” novel and the “centennial edition.” Matt Salinger is preparing his father’s unreleased work for publication, too.

S ALINGER,FROM PAGE 1

Anner Bylsma, an eminent Dutch cellist and a groundbreaking figure in the early music movement, the postwar effort to create performances closer to what past audiences may have actually heard, died on July 25 in Amsterdam. He was 85. The cause was a cerebral hemor- rhage, his family said. Mr. Bylsma played a wide repertory on both period and modern cellos, from Baroque concertos by Vivaldi and Boc- cherini, a composer he championed, to sonatas and chamber works by Beetho- ven, Brahms, Schumann and Messiaen. He was especially known for his ac- counts of Bach’s six suites for solo cello, which he recorded twice, in 1979 and again in 1992. He also won acclaim for trio performances with the recorder virtuoso Frans Brüggen and the harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt, both of whom became important conductors. All three were lead- ing figures of the early music movement. The movement, calling for the use of period techniques and instruments, became an established part of the concert scene and has since influenced the wider classical music world. Mr. Bylsma’s 1979 recording of the Bach suites was widely credited with being the first performed on a period instrument using gut strings, which were typical of cellos of earlier eras. Pablo Ca- sals’ historic recordings of these scores in the late 1930s, after long neglect, had brought them to wider attention. Today they are the most performed works for solo cello. Mr. Bylsma’s recording was striking for the lithe, unforced tempos he took to capture the essence of the dance genres on which most of the movements are based, and for his unmannered approach to phrasing. His tone was fo- cused and warm, with a touch of sweet- ness. One of the main challenges of the suites involves projecting the music’s contrapuntal textures. Most movements, though dominated by a long me- lodic line, suggest strands of counter- point through fragments of implied phrases and rolled chords. Mr. Bylsma was intent on projecting these strands as clearly as possible, and argued that period instruments, using mellower, lighter strings, were better suited to making them audible. For his 1992 recording of the Bach suites, he used the historic Servais Stradivarius cello. His approach this time was bolder yet disarmingly natural, as Alex Ross observed in The New York Times in reviewing Mr. Bylsma’s performance of three of the suites at Weill Recital Hall in New York in 1992: “This master of the Baroque cello avoids the extremes of severity and rev- erence, and plays instead with an ut- terly natural, almost conversational air,” Mr. Ross wrote. The cellist’s sound, he added, “can be tough on the ears,” but “the articulation of Bach’s moods is un- erring.” Mr. Bylsma was born Anne Bijlsma on Feb. 17, 1934, in The Hague. (He later changed the spelling of both his first and last names at the behest of a manager.) His parents were musicians: His father, also Anne Bijlsma, played trombone in orchestras; his mother, Petronella (van der Nagel) Bijlsma, played the violin and was a homemaker.

Mr. Bylsma took up the cello during World War II, as he later told the story, because his parents needed a cellist for a makeshift family chamber orchestra. He studied at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague with the cellist Carel van Leeuwen Boomkamp, who introduced him to period instruments. In his early 20s, Mr. Bylsma won the school’s prix d’excellence in 1957. The next year he became principal cellist with the Netherlands Opera Orchestra, and in 1958 he took first prize at the Pablo Ca- sals Competition in Mexico. He was appointed principal cello of the famed Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam in 1962 and held that post for six years. During this period he toured as a soloist and chamber musi- cian, demonstrating a versatility with both period and modern instruments that was unusual for the time. In the 1990s he performed and recorded with L’Archibudelli, a flexible string ensemble that he founded with the violist Jürgen Kussmaul and the violinist Vera Beths, whom Mr. Bylsma married and who survives him. He had earlier been married to the violinist Lucy van Dael.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by a daughter, Carine Bijlsma, a docu- mentary filmmaker; a son from his first marriage, Dr. Merijn W. Bijlsma, a pedi- atrician in Amsterdam; a stepdaughter, the actress Katja Herbers, who ap- peared in the television series “Manhat- tan” and HBO’s “The Leftovers” and “Westworld”; a brother, Henk; and two grandchildren. Mr. Bylsma performed regularly in the 1990s and recorded with the Ameri- can fortepianist Malcolm Bilson. He taught at the Royal Conservatory and also the Sweelinck Conservatory in Am- sterdam. In 1998 he published a study of the Bach suites playfully titled “Bach, the Fencing Master,” in which he unraveled, as he saw it, the “sphinx” that these seminal works had become. In the book, which has been revised several times, he set out to disabuse cellists of “three hundred years of opinions of lesser men — always lesser men than Bach,” and of the “preconceived ideas of people” who “do not even play a string instrument themselves.” This led to a series of books on Bach. After learning that he had a muscular disorder, he retired from performing in 2006, though he continued to teach and give master classes. Mr. Bylsma disliked hearing period instruments described as “authentic.” In a 1996 interview in Gramophone, he recalled being asked what is “authentic” in music. The answer, he said, comes clear “when you hear someone play a piece that you know extremely well and it suddenly appears still more beautiful than it was.”

Dutch cellist who revived

the old ways of early music

ANNER BYLSMA 1934-

BY ANTHONY TOMMASINI

Anner Bylsma in 2003. His repertory included both period and modern pieces.

HIROYUKI ITO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Sherm Poppen, who helped start the snowboarding industry in the 1960s when he bolted together his older daughter’s skis to create a stand-up board that could surf the snowy sand dunes behind their lakeside cottage in Michigan, died on July 31 at his home in Griffin, Ga. He was 89. The cause was complications of a stroke, his family said. A practical consideration — not an epiphany — drove Mr. Poppen to invent his forerunner to the snowboard. It was Christmas Day 1965, and he was at home in Muskegon when his pregnant wife, Nancy, implored him to go outside and entertain their rambunctious daughters, Wendy, 10, and Laurie, 5. “You can imagine — it’s Christmas, and my wife is pretty uptight, and she said, ‘Sherman, you’ve got to take these kids out of the house,’ ” he said in 2009 in an interview with Steamboat Pilot & To- day, a newspaper in Steamboat Springs, Colo. “We were having a huge snow- storm on the shores of Lake Michigan.” He first took out a sled, but its blades cut through the snow and got stuck in the sand beneath. Then he spotted Wendy’s child-size skis. Envisioning the dunes as surfable waves, he created a surfable board by bracing the skis with wooden cross bars. His daughters caught on quickly, and soon so did their friends, who wanted to try it themselves. His wife — who gave birth to a third daughter, Julie, three

days after Christmas — thought up a name for the board: the Snurfer, a con- traction of “snow” and “surfer.” The enthusiastic reception the board received prompted him to make im- provements. He made a second version from a single water ski that had foot grips, then added a tether to the nose of the board to help the rider steer it. In early 1966 he filed a patent applica- tion, in which he took a broad view of the Snurfer’s potential, declaring that it was for a “new sport” that incorporated “surfboarding, skate boarding and slalom water skiing.” He was prescient. Decades later the snowboard would become the basis of a major new recreational business at ski resorts and integral to extreme sports competitions and, in the 1990s, the Win- ter Olympics. Granted the patent in 1968, he li- censed the Snurfer’s manufacturing rights later that year to the Brunswick Corporation, a bowling alley equipment manufacturer with a factory in Muskegon that was expanding into con- sumer products. By Christmas, Bruns- wick was selling Snurfers made of the same laminated wood it used for bowling alleys. “Snurf’s the word,” an early print advertisement read. “Surfing’s the newest snow sport!” Over the next decade or so, Mr. Pop- pen collected royalties on the hundreds of thousands of Snurfers that Brunswick and then the Jem Corporation, which bought the rights from Brunswick in 1973, sold for $5 to $10 each (the equiva- lent of about $30 to $50 today). At those prices it was not a huge mon- eymaker for Mr. Poppen, who felt that Brunswick had not marketed it well. He

said, for instance, that the company had advertised the Snurfer in markets where it had not been stocked in stores. “They blew it so bad,” he told Skiing Heritage magazine in 2008. Sherman Robert Poppen was born in Muskegon on March 25, 1930. His father, Cyrus, was a lawyer and the city’s attor- ney. His mother, Leila (Fowler) Poppen, was a homemaker. After graduating from Northwestern

University with a bachelor’s degree in business and serving in the Navy, Mr. Poppen returned to Muskegon and found a job at Lake Welding Supply, which leased tanks of industrial gas and distributed welding supplies. He even- tually became its owner, and the company, not the Snurfer, remained the fo- cus of his career. But it was the Snurfer, not his business, that brought him renown. One of

its earliest fans was Jake Burton Car- penter, who got his first board in 1968, when he was 14. “It was a dream come true,” Mr. Car- penter said by phone. “I wanted to surf, and I knew snow because I was a skier.” Mr. Carpenter began making a more advanced kind of snowboard in the 1970s, initially calling it a snow surfer. His product had bindings and other features that Mr. Poppen’s design did not, and sales took off. His company, Burton Boards, grew to become the world’s largest snowboard manufacturer. “He saw a future that I dreamed about but didn’t dream possible,” Mr. Poppen

said of Mr. Carpenter on the FNRad snowboarding podcast in 2015. Mr. Carpenter said there was no doubt that the modern snowboard industry began with the Snurfer. “Sherman Poppen definitely didn’t feed off anything else,” he said, referring to earlier attempts at creating snowboards, like one called a skiboggan. “It was his own imagination and creativity that made the Snurfer.” In 2009, Mr. Poppen donated a Snurfer prototype, two of his manufactured boards and documents related to his invention to the Smithsonian Institu- tion’s National Museum of American History. The next year, Smithsonian magazine named the invention of the Snurfer the most important event in snowboarding history. Mr. Poppen’s first wife, Nancy (Bazar- nick) Poppen, died in 1993. He is survived by his wife, Louise (Kelly) Pop- pen; his daughters, Wendy, Julie and Laurie Poppen; a stepson, Patrick Kelly; five grandchildren; and a sister, Leila Reynolds. The creation of the Snurfer was com- memorated in downtown Muskegon in 2012 with a 14-foot bronze sculpture, called “Turning Point.” It depicts a female figure, based on Wendy, at the top of a hill and a modern-day snowboarder at the bottom. About 100 people at- tended the unveiling, and nearly all said they had snurfed as children. One of them, Sue Asmussen, brought three Snurfers for Mr. Poppen to autograph. “We would come home from school,” she told MLive, a Michigan news web- site, “change our clothes and go out snurfing, and wouldn’t come home until it got dark.”

His knack with small skis paved the way to the snowboard

SHERM POPPEN 1930-

BY RICHARD SANDOMIR

ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS

Sherm Poppen with his prototype and a pair of manufactured Snurfer boards. He donated a prototype to the Smithsonian.

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The New York Times International - 13.08.2019

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Salinger’s books to be digitized

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