Salinger In the CIC With Henry Kissinger

Salinger served in the CIC (Counterintelligence Corps) during The Battle of the Bulge in World War II. He was responsible for interviewing captured German soldiers as well local civilians, friend or foe. Did he witness torture and if so how did he handle it? How much was he willing to face and share, or was allowed to? War does things to the mind. His mind failed under the relentless pressure of trauma after trauma. After having thoughts of self harm, he submitted to psychiatric care. After recovering, he volunteered to return for more. He was cited for valor more than a couple of times, a bonifide hero.

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger also served in the CIC and the Battle of the Bulge. It would be interesting to know if their paths crossed during those assignments, for which they both received medals for valor. Here's the relevant Wikipedia quote about Kissinger in the CIC: 

"Kissinger was reassigned to the 84th Infantry Division. There, he made the acquaintance of Fritz Kraemer, a fellow immigrant from Germany who ...arranged for him to be assigned to the military intelligence section of the division. Kissinger saw combat with the division and volunteered for hazardous intelligence duties during the Battle of the Bulge."

Further Wikipedia comments about the CIC:

"In the European and Pacific theaters of operations CIC deployed detachments at all levels. These detachments provided tactical intelligence about the enemy from captured documents, interrogations of captured troops, and from para-military and civilian sources. They were also involved in providing security for military installations and staging areas, located enemy agents, and acted to counter stay-behind networks. They also provided training to combat units in security, censorship, the seizure of documents, and the dangers of booby traps. In some cases CIC agents found themselves acting as the de facto military government on the occupation of large towns before the arrival of Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories (AMGOT) officers. As the war in Europe came to a close, CIC were involved in the Operations Alsos, Paperclip and TICOM, searching for German personnel and research in atomic weapons, rockets and cryptography. Recruits after World War II included Klaus Barbie, also known as the 'Butcher from Lyon', a former Gestapo member and war criminal."

After recovering from shell shock, Salinger volunteered to return to postwar Germany and hunt war criminals. He married a woman and later had the marriage annulled. She was a Nazi. Did he marry her for Intelligence reasons or did he truly love her? 

Salinger's war record was so highly personal we can understand why he had to lock himself away for long periods. It meant going deep and facing shame and trauma, and facing trauma can be re-traumatizing. This is why many combat veterans end up on welfare. PTSD, untreated, can be debilitating. Salinger wrote during the war, even during combat, stories that became The Catcher in the Rye.

Can you imagine sitting down with Charlie Rose to talk about killing and death? Or with any civilian who hasn't a clue what it is like to face combat? 

Read All Quiet on the Western Front  or Slaughterhouse Five for a sample of what it is like to return home after combat. These are be the standard by which any book about infantry combat is measured. In future volumes to be published we may see how Salinger does it.

Maynard vs Salinger: Another Side to the Story

The recent PBS documentary seems to criticize J.D. Salinger for preferring the company of young women. 

These women were of age or were chaperoned, and eagerly sought his companionship. In the documentary Joyce Maynard expressed that she felt she was exploited by Salinger. Her mother even encouraged the relationship, sewing her a "sexy short dress" (her words) to wear to their first meeting. Maynard wrote a kiss-and-tell betrayal memoir and auctioned Salinger's love letters. The evidence suggests she was a highly ambitious, if not vindictive, young writer who expected to profit from a relationship with a well-known older writer. Maynard continues to benefit from her former relationship with Salinger by granting interviews on the topic to promote her writing. You can't Google "Salinger" without her name scrolling to page one.

Maynard portrayed Salinger as a despicable man who preyed on young girls. Her allegations played on public sympathies and cast a shadow over a highly respected writer's reputation. Salinger's silence can be seen not as gentlemanly conduct but a sign of guilt. The shadow has grown over the years as Maynard's repeated version of their relationship went unrebutted by Salinger himself, though not unchallenged by a few third parties. There is always more than one side to a story.

Just as there can be despicable men, there can also be misguided young women who prey on insecure older men and play the victim to avoid scrutiny. Such crimes don't leave many tracks, so the evidence is often circumstantial. You have to do some digging and connect the dots. (More on this below.)

History has shown that the title of Victim doesn't wear well with young women like Monica Lewinsky and Joyce Maynard who of their own volition court relationships with famous older men and cry "foul" when things don't go their way. Joyce received many letters from admiring male fans when her face appeared on that magazine cover; yet it was Salinger she chose to pursue. Who exploited whom?

That Maynard and Lewinsky may have been swept away starry-eyed or encouraged by their mothers may help explain, but not excuse, their behavior. They were past the age of consent and no one twisted their arms.People who at eighteen years of age are adult enough to fight in wars, purchase alcohol and vote, should be  adult  enough to take the consequences of poor relationship choices  without the "poor me" pose.

An eighteen-year-old boy in similar circumstances with a fifty-five year-old Cher Bono would be laughed out of town if he complained, and girls mature more rapidly than boys. Why is Maynard begging for and getting so much sympathy? Welder's goggles are needed against the glare of that double standard. Another glaring example is The Summer of 42, a '70s feature film and novella about a fifteen-year-old boy seduced by a beautiful young war widow played by Jennifer O'Neill. The novel was a best-seller and the film a "blockbuster" success. Harold and Maude is another highly popular mid-'70s film with an older woman opposite a teenage boy. The lack of outrage toward older women having sex with underage boys reflects a societal bias toward young women that Maynard is exploiting.

She talks about an imbalance of power, pointing to their chronological (emotional maturity is addressed below) age difference. Nothing prevented her or her mother from doing that arithmetic when she was eighteen. Maynard put on her sexy dress and made a beeline for Salinger's bed having weighed their age difference against some potential gain from a relationship with a handsome, successful, famous man.

Over the strident objections of her father, eighteen-year-old Oona O'Neill--Salinger's earlier love--married millionaire moviemaker Charlie Chaplin, a man thirty-six years her senior. Despite the odds, it was a marriage that worked. The risks paid off on both sides. Where is the outrage over that imbalanced union?

Maynard wants us to believe that she wrote her tell-all and auctioned Salinger's love letters to pay for her kid's college, and revenge had nothing to do with it. She didn't keep a sex-stained dress; she kept the intimate feelings he poured onto paper on her behalf, let them age like a fine merlot, then sold them to the highest bidder. Whatever you choose to believe, she cashed in on a bet she made when she was eighteen. Some people will respect her for that. Others will not.

Maynard said Salinger summarily dismissed her because she wanted children and he did not. Other sources say she had given out his phone number to agents and editors while marketing her work. Later--as did Martha Gellhorn and James Michener--Maynard adopted children and then handed them off to someone else to raise. There are elements here of half-truth, impulsiveness and ambition. Self-promotion is a messy process and can be embarrassingly self-revealing.

Despite his privileged origins, J.D. Salinger earned his respect the hard way, with talent and hard work and by risking his life with honorable military combat in some of the most difficult battles Americans ever fought. He sidestepped a wartime draft deferment to get into the Army and courageously volunteered to return and hunt Nazis after recovering from a nervous collapse. The blood, sweat and terror of his honorable service surges through his writing like steroids. I wonder if Maynard considered Salinger's record versus hers when she wrote her tell-all.

If anyone in this paring is due sympathy it is Jerry Salinger. Emotional maturity matters in a relationship, and there is ample evidence that he was fragile. He was socially withdrawn. He was born with one testicle, a deformity that made him extremely self-conscious and insecure in intimate settings. An inexperienced woman would be less likely to discover his freakishness and ruin the moment by laughing, or screaming. Salinger spent months in a mental ward recovering from battle fatigue. Could Maynard have sensed his fragility and sought to exploit it? She certainly knew there was no risk of him going public with his embarrassing deformity to defend his predilection toward young women.

On the other hand, where was Maynard on the scale of emotional maturity? She could have been emotionally much younger than her chronological age. Was it then a case of child-on-child mutual exploitation? It's an unanswerable question that must be considered and demands that we not judge too harshly either party.

Some men have a certain gullibility with women. Was not Salinger's demonstrated when Oona married Chaplin without so much as phone call or a "Dear John" letter to the man in uniform she had professed to love? And again later, when Salinger was a Nazi hunter in Army Intelligence and was fooled into marrying a Nazi? Insecure and devious women are drawn to powerful men they sense to be vulnerable, a profile Salinger fits.

Maybe the clincher in this lopsided romantic mystery lies between the covers of The Catcher in the Rye. Maynard wants us to see Salinger as Stradlater, Holden's sexually aggressive roommate. But as we all know, Holden, heroically fought Stradlater to protect Jane. "What a technique that guy [Stradlater] had. ...I damn near puked listening to him. His date kept saying, 'No--please. Please, don't. Please.' But old Stradlater kept snowing her in his Abraham Lincoln, sincere voice, and finally there'd be this silence in the back of the car." Does Holden, J.D.'s doppelganger, sound like a predator or a protector? There are a dozen similar instances in which Salinger, through Holden, displays a fundamentally compassionate nature incongruent with someone prone toward child exploitation.

Maynard, by contrast, has clearly demonstrated exploitation--by giving out Salinger's telephone number, by writing a tell-all memoir and auctioning love letters, by granting interviews and writing articles about their relationship to gain publicity and by playing on public sympathies toward young women to justify her exploitation of a socially withdrawn aging writer. However she tries to camouflage it, Maynard's behavior is like something from the pages of Seventeen, a magazine that to this day features revenge as a tonic for the fragile egos of jilted teenage girls.

Maynard accuses Salinger of being "seductive with words and ideas" yet her own words betray her own intent to manipulate and play to readers' sympathies. In her New York Times Sunday Magazine article, September, 2013, "Was Salinger Too Pure for This World?" she writes:  "...how can a woman say she is fully in charge of her body and her destiny, and then call herself a victim when, having given a man her heart of her own volition, he crushes it?" [emphasis added] So, if a girl ends a relationship she's just moving on, but if a guy does it it's "crushing" a "poor girl's heart." Maynard's gender bias and pandering for sympathy ripples throughout her article.  She accuses, interprets and judges, lulling the unwary reader into nodding in agreement.

Compare Joyce Maynard with the tragic case of Natalie Wood, a true example of childhood exploitation. At age sixteen while filming Rebel Without a Cause, she carried on  concurrent affairs with fellow actor Dennis Hopper and the film's director, Nicholas Ray. Hopper and Ray should have been dragged before a judge and Natalie's parents cited for neglect. Her  tortured life and tragic death can be attributed to childhood exploitation, but for Maynard to cast J.D. Salinger in a similar category with Hopper and Ray is unjust and vicious.

Maynard may have been too emotionally immature at age eighteen to have a relationship with Salinger or anyone else, and maybe it took a few months for him to figure that out. But Salinger should not be scapegoated for the inadequacies of her parents.

J.D. Salinger is gone. We will never know his side of it, but I am inclined to be wary of someone who would publicly disparage a former lover she knew could not or would not stand up for himself, and then, with all the sympathy of a pit viper for a field mouse, auction his love letters without a word of apology. At a minimum, we know there is a lot more to the story than Maynard let on.  And the more she tries to justify her actions, the worse she looks.

Women don't make themselves strong by playing victim. The young Joyce Maynard rolled the relationship dice and came up snake-eyes. We've all done that, and most of us move on and lick our wounds in silence. Choices have consequences.

Victim or viper, Maynard will go down in history as a whiner unless she writes something truly worthy of notice. She has a lot going for her; I hope she does. It takes courage to admit mistakes. What it comes down to is whether she wants to be known as a writer or as a girl dumped by a famous writer a half-century ago.

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The Effect of Salinger's Combat Experience on His Writing

In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield's unrealistic concern for "little kids" resonates with the classic layman's definition of a codependent personality--someone whose life is spinning out of control out of concern for someone with a substance abuse problem.* Holden's codependency is addressed in a separate posting, but it is worth noting here that Holden, as a doppelganger for Salinger, can reflect the author's emotional state. Codependency, the compulsion to rescue others, can be the result of having seen so many men shot, killed, wounded and maimed and the Dachau concentration camp's emaciated bodies among the smell of burning flesh.

Salinger's war experience may account for the rambling structure and overall content of The Catcher in the Rye, as the book was worked on during endless months of combat overseas. Thoughts and memories of home gave the mind relief from the blood, chaos and gore and had a lot to do with Salinger's exquisite loving attention to these details of setting and character. I suspect it kept him from going mad sooner than he did.

He was once seen typing away under a desk while his unit was under fire. Everyone else had taken cover.

It has been widely expressed that Salinger was suffering from PTSD caused by combat trauma. It is logical that an extreme need to protect the innocent could arise from witnessing over a period of years the massive destruction of humanity. Holden could represent an expression of this distorted hyper-sensitivity for the welfare of the innocent. Holden could have been a healthy way to channel and defuse overwhelming emotions, expressing a self-destructive compulsion by creating a character to act out and resolve it.

*[Wikipedia]"Codependency is defined as a psychological condition or a relationship in which a person is controlled or manipulated by another who is affected with a pathological condition (typically narcissism or drug addiction); and in broader terms, it refers to the dependence on the needs of, or control of, another.[1] It also often involves placing a lower priority on one's own needs, while being excessively preoccupied with the needs of others.[2] Codependency can occur in any type of relationship, including family, work, friendship, and also romantic, peer or community relationships.[2] Codependency may also be characterized by denial, low self-esteem, excessive compliance, or control patterns.[2] Narcissists are considered to be natural magnets for the codependent."I also STRONGLY suspect that a major factor in the rambling structure and overall content of CiTR is that it was largely written while overseas during wartime. This had a lot to do with Salinger's exquisite loving attention to the details of setting and character. That he cherished his memories of home is clearly evident in the richness of this content.

Understanding The Catcher in the Rye

What we take away from a book is a function of who we are, the sum of our life experiences--our world view. After two readings thirty years apart and a great deal of study and analysis, here are my insights.

The teenage years are when we reject our parents and look for answers outside the family/extended family circle of comfort and trust. They've lied to us about Santa Claus and the Boogey Man; what else have they been lying about? We've begun noticing their flaws and started looking elsewhere for answers. We want to be prepared for life, for making our own decisions. The hypocrisy (phoniness) within our formerly godlike inner circle of family has discredited them. Who can we trust? Where are the answers? And so today we pick up books like Dianetics and Atlas Shrugged and Hunger Games.

What I've not seen replicated elsewhere in literature is the concentrated depth and breadth of The Catcher in the Rye's socio-cultural footprint. Through the protagonist/narrator's interactions with a host of minor characters we are treated to slice after relentless slice of the world of an upper middle-class New York City teenager's life during the early 1950s.

Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and Homer's The Odyssey do something similar, but they're not as intense because they cover much more real estate. Catcher is only 220 pages. Instead of the usual linear plot line, all three of these books treat us to the adventures of a journey. It's the trip that's important, not the destination or goal.

Salinger throws us scene after scene of Holden's urban life in a near kaleidoscopic array of snapshots--current and former teachers, current and former classmates, his sister, flashbacks to his brothers and parents, cab drivers, girlfriends and former girlfriends, a teenage prostitute, doormen, chance meetings with tourists, nuns and some kids at the museum. With each engagement we learn something about Holden and we learn something about his urban life. We go to movies, a play, the park, the museum and a carnival. We ride a bus, a train, then a series of cabs with him. And we end up in a "rest home" with him.

Due to the limitations of first-person point of view there's a sparseness of literary tools such as simile, metaphor, lyricism, etc., but the reader is forced to buy into the character so quickly that literary trimmings don't matter. Were Scott Fitzgerald the author, we would be treated to brilliant descriptions of the glittering city lights and rhythms of the street. But we are in Holden's head, and he is in too much of a panic to notice much beyond his immediate crisis. 

Holden's the kind of guy that, if you met him on a bus you'd wonder what's wrong with him. Some people would move away, but I'd sit next to him and engage him in conversation. I would be curious what's wrong.

In rereading the book last fall I discovered that Holden seemed to be suffering from PTSD stemming from the death of his brother and from witnessing the suicide of a schoolmate, James Castle, who bailed out of an upstairs dorm window wearing the sweater Holden loaned him. I began noticing the symptoms of PTSD: depression, poor concentration, attention deficit, crying, rage, lack of motivation, self-isolation, sleeplessness, hyper-vigilance, etc. I'm intimately familiar with these symptoms because my own childhood trauma. I live with that same feeling Holden has of needing to protect children. 

To me Catcher is less about teenaged coming-of-age angst and more about a kid struggling against the downward spiral of mental illness. Without professional help he was doomed to submerge, and did.

Holden was barely "holdin' on."

There's a lot of cultural and psychological meat in there: a) how boys interact with each other when living in close quarters, b) particularly when two have or are dating the same girl and one feels protective of her (Jane Gallagher), c) how a sensitive boy might behave because of a deep emotional wound (e.g., the trauma of losing a younger brother and from witnessing the suicide of a classmate and d) how that boy might become neurotically protective toward his younger sister and toward children in general because of c).

Most teenagers aren't mature enough to comprehend the psychological ramifications of what I've just described unless they've been prepared for it by a mature adult who does comprehend. And there are many adults who couldn't.

Indeed, most adults have psychological defenses that don't allow even them to comprehend what I've just described. It is either too abstract, too complicated or too scary. I suspect this is the main reason the book is so controversial. Most people don't get it because they can't afford to, unless someone points the way or they experience PTSD first-hand.

Until you've been stung by a bee, "bee sting" is an abstract notion.

A greater sense of Holden Caufield through JD Salinger can be found in the film Finding Forester, which is purported to be based on Salinger's life. The film leads us to conclude that Forster's reclusiveness is rooted in the trauma of losing his beloved brother in a car crash.

In World War II, Salinger participated in tne Normandy Landing and Battle of the Bulge and other combat where his fellow troops were decimiated. He was among the first Allied forces to visit a German concentration camp. He was hospitalized for "battle fatigue." He understood the long term effects of trauma.

In a 1953 interview with a high-school newspaper, Salinger said that the novel was "sort of" autobiographical: "My boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the book ...it was a great relief telling people about it."

When writing the book, Salinger wouldn't have had a clue about PTSD, as it wasn't even in the diagnostic manual (DSM) for psychologists until decades later. He was just writing what he felt, blasting his feelings onto paper. 

Many people see Salinger as a sort of literary genius because he sold 70 million copies of one book. I'm not saying he wasn't talented and educated; he had plenty of both going for him. I'm saying he leveraged his talent on top of some inner need to get this desperate crisis part of his life onto paper and out of his head.

A great segment of the literary world has understandably attributed Holden's PTSD symptoms to teenage angst, but this is a gross oversimplification. It's his masterfully presented array of symptoms that's largely responsible for the success of the book. It's too complicated or too sensitive for English teachers to talk about mental illness; so they focus on the simple and more obvious interpretation. These teachers are missing a phenomenal opportunity to reach kids who are in crisis or know someone who is.

Bearing in mind that we're talking about a fictional character,  no one can actually diagnose Holden, but I have plenty of experience with the condition. I can spot symptoms in an instant. For example, a hyper-vigilant person likes to sit where he can see the door and with his back to a wall. He/she glances around constantly instead of holding a steady gaze while in conversation. I went through the book and itemized instances of the symptoms. Give it a shot and see if you don't reach a similar conclusion.

By wanting to save others Holden was saving himself and did so, with Phoebe's help. I see the the carousel is a metaphor for the connectedness of humanity. We see ourselves in others.

He was traumatized by the death of his brother Allie, sensitizing him to the reality of unjust death and suffering. It was personal, not just something he read about or saw in a movie.

In it's worst form PTSD originates not from a single event but from repeated trauma taking place over a period of time, months and years, as in military combat. There is a compounding effect. It can drive people crazy, make them want to commit suicide. And they sometimes do. Holden reacted voilently, breaking every window in the garage and breaking his hand in the process.

Holden had plenty of time to anticipate his beloved Allie's demise because it took place over a period of months during which he watched him deteriorate as the cancer worked its grotesque way through Allie's body. And the trauma built up in compounded layers.

Holden was in this highly sensitized state when James Castle threw himself out a dorm window, and the shock of it was too much, putting Holden into an emotional tailspin.

Innocent children were dying and it upset him, but he wasn't obsessed over protecting children's innocence; he didn't know what was wrong. He was just groping for answers, trying to regain control over his emotions, his life. 

He was lonely, depressed, sick and run-down. He had crying spells. He didn't know why and no one had any answers. He didn't understand why he couldn't concentrate on his studies and be motivated to do schoolwork. He was so distracted he even left the fencing gear on the train. He was so hyper-sensitive he exploded at the sexually experienced Stradlater over a girl they had both dated.

Holden felt lost and out of control, and his love of Phoebe and hers for him redeemed him, pulling him back from the potential disaster of running away and got him home where he would be safe.

Labels like "teenage angst" and "PTSD" can be dismissive and do not relieve readers from the duty to probe for meaning. Whatever the cause, Holden is a highly sensitive boy who's suffering and searching for relief.

No matter how hard an author tries to imbue his or her work with what is to the author a very important and obvious message about the human condition, he or she may fail simply because a reader lacks the capacity to comprehend it or misconstrues the story's basic truths. The Grapes of Wrath, for instance, was (and still is) attacked by wealthy corporate agricultural interests in California who refuse to accept it. I've heard one actually say that Steinbeck exaggerated the plight of the workers in order to sell books. It's human nature to believe what you need to believe, despite countervailing evidence.

CITR obviously meant something unusual to those two young men who had copies of the book when one killed John Lennon and the other shot President Reagan. Perhaps this meant they were looking for answers. Their value systems were running amok, and Holden's angst resonated with their sense of being lost and unable to cope with the phoniness of life.

Atlas Shrugged give a simple solution to all decisions, do only what is in your self interest. But that's in direct conflict what we are taught by most religions in the Judeo-Christian world, to do unto others as you would have done unto you and love thy neighbor as thyself. People who haven't yet learned to reconcile self interest with the common good can be thrown into mental conflict and feel angst. Maybe this is why some people don't like Holden/CITR; it doesn't offer answers. It just describes how it feels to be lost. It reminds them too much of themselves.

All that said, if you can enjoy Holden just as he is, without analyzing "every grey hair" (as someone put it) then by all means do so. But in case you want to go deeper, well here it is.

Update-The John Green Videos on Youtube:

Green is good, but he tends to regurgitate academia. Go straight to the book and pay attention to how it speaks to you. Wait a few years, then reread it. You'll be amazed at how the book seems to change. But it will be you that changes.

I don't agree, as Green alleges, that Holden was resisting adulthood. He embraced it. He did adult things, drinking and going to nightclubs and stage performances. He seems proud that he has a streak of grey hair and can pass for an adult. Seeking the company of a prostitute is adult behavior. He sought out adult company and conversation on the train and at the nightclub and with the nuns. He joked with kids at the museum. He was comfortable and confident with both children and adults. 

Green misinterprets Holden's comment at the museum that some things should  never change. Holden was talking about that deja vu feeling you get when you go to some familiar place after being away, like when you go away to college and return to the drive-in where you used to cruise. Or you visit the neighborhood you grew up in after moving away.

The diorama with the bare breasted squaw was a landmark for Holden as it is many New Yorkers to this day. It's like in Breakfast at Tiffany's when Holly Golightly goes to hang out in front of Tiffany's in the wee hours of the morning to cure "the mean reds." It was a place that made her feel secure.

We all have our favorite landmarks. That's what Holden was getting at. And yet Green cites it as evidence that Holden was resisting change, resisting maturity. It is a matter of interpretation.

Holden wanted to run away to a cabin in the woods. That' where Salinger lived, and died. Phoebe pulled him back from making what could have been a bad mistake with a lifetime of consequences. That's redemption, an adult concept.

Who Taught Salinger to Write?

It's debatable the degree to which anyone can actually be taught to write, but according to one source Salinger blossomed while taking Whit Burnett's writing class at Columbia University. Publicly, Salinger has given credit to The New Yorker for teaching him to write by virtue of their mountains of rejections. But someone had to teach him the fundamentals, and I maintain that was Whit Burnett. Following is a quote from Fiction Writer's Handbook, by Hallie and Whit Burnett.

"...there was one dark-eyed, thoughtful young man who sat through one semester of a class in writing without taking noes, seemingly not listening, looking out the window. A week or so before the semester ended, he suddenly came to life. He began to write. Several stories seemed to come from his typewriter at once, and most of these were published. That young man was J.D. Salinger, apparently indulging in purposeful reverie,'..."

Like all of us, J.D. Salinger had to start somewhere. He sat in a classroom, as we all have.  He paid attention even if it didn't look that way. He put his pants on one leg at a time, as we all do. (But his shoes will be hard to fill.)

Hallie and Whit Burnetts' little guidebook for fiction writers is still in print:  http://www.amazon.com/Fiction-Writers-Handbook-Hallie-Burnett/dp/0062731696/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1365019314&sr=8-2&keywords=fiction+writers+handbook

My copy, purchased in 1989,  is falling apart from age and use. I recommend it, as did Norman Mailer. Here's an excerpt from his Preface:

"Fiction Writer's Handbook is wise and comprehensive and surprisingly full of touches of lore. It hints of one's craft. A beginner at writing can sleep with this book. There is enthusiasm in the pages. Its author, after all, has lived with the idea of writing for the larger part of her life, and that is probably a disappearing culture. Not many can be left in that small world of a few writers and teachers and editors who believed there were not many vocations more honored than writing, nor many occupations more interesting than to encourage the talent of a young writer. 
...a lot of us had the luck to meet and be helped by that small group of editors and writers and teachers who also thought it was important to be a writer. ...One of that group was a very modest man who had a beautiful white goatee by the time I met him. I was still eighteen and wholly embarrassed by my inability to speak a single interesting word to him, and he was shy and embarrassed by his inability to draw me out. We had lunch together...the man with whom I was at lunch was a legend. And his magazine, Story, was its own legend, and young writers in the late thirties and the years of the Second World War used to dream of appearing in its pages... The man's name, of course, is Whit Burnett..."

Everyone who writes can close his/er eyes and see a crowd of people who inspired them or helped in an important way to acquire the tools to write well. Some of these are dead writers and schoolteachers. Some are still with us, published writers, writing group peers, teachers, friends.

You know you appreciate them. Remind them now and then. Let them bask in the glow of your well-deserved gratitude.