DAVID SHIELDS: Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, the 2008 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, said Salinger had influenced him more than any other writer.
MICHIKO KAKUTANI: Some critics dismissed the easy surface charm of Mr. Salinger’s work, accusing him of cuteness and sentimentality, but works like “Catcher,” “Franny and Zooey,” and his best-known short stories would influence successive generations of writers. . . . Like Holden Caulfield, the Glass children—Franny, Zooey, Buddy, Seymour, Boo Boo, Walt, Waker—would emerge as avatars of adolescent angst and Mr. Salinger’s own alienated stance toward the world. Bright, charming and gregarious, they are blessed with their creator’s ability to entertain, and they appeal to the reader to identify with their braininess, their sensitivity, their febrile specialness. And yet as details of their lives unfurl in a series of stories, it becomes clear that there is a darker side to their estrangement as well: a tendency to condescend to the vulgar masses, an almost incestuous familial self-involvement and a difficulty relating to other people that will result in emotional crises and in Seymour’s case, suicide.
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STEPHEN METCALF: Lost along the way, much as it had been lost when Holden was taken up as a hero of the counterculture, was the precise nature of Salinger’s genius. He was the great poet of post-traumatic stress, of mental dislocation brought upon by warfare. Salinger himself broke down under the strain of Utah Beach, and all of his best, most affecting work gives us a character whose sensitivities have been driven by the war to the point of nervous collapse. That very balance—between the edge of sanity, and a heightened perception of being—is echoed formally in Salinger’s best writing, his short stories. In these, Salinger brought together a most distinctly unprophetic form—the classic New Yorker story, in which tight WASP propinquities are displayed neatly upon a small canvas—with at least the possibility of prophecy. I find (and am ready to stand corrected) very little assertion by Salinger on behalf of his characters’ holiness—their status as special creatures vis-à-vis another world—though much is made of their piety, their tendency to, their thirst for, belief. For Salinger, this was an after-effect of the war. His characters look at the world, at the implacable surface of post-war affluence, and cannot believe nobody else sees the cracks veining slowly through it. What will pierce the surface of things? Jesus? The Bodhisattva? Psychosis? He never said.
JOHN ROMANO: It was always there in Seymour: he had to commit suicide. I refuse to describe it as a cause for mourning; I think that was the internal momentum of a voice. The prediction was in the writing. It’s not entirely unreasonable that the voice should have in some way confounded itself, and caught itself up, and finally come to silence.
LESLIE EPSTEIN: I think what happened is that when Salinger wrote about Seymour’s suicide the equivalent had to take place for him, and the equivalent was to withdraw, to become a recluse, to become a hermit, to leave life the same way that Seymour left life. The character became the author, rather than the other way around. I think there was something inevitable about what’s happened with Salinger. Something endemic in his work forced him into being a recluse.
MICHAEL TANNENBAUM: I have never been bothered by Salinger’s withdrawal from public view, because in following his own heart he reiterated that becoming an icon is not an inherently virtuous achievement. Sometimes you have to kill what others make of you.
ANABELLE CONE: Everyone is trying to keep this fable going. It’s kind of funny, this legend. The media, they want to maintain an aura about this mysterious hermit.
CHARLES McGRATH: Depending on one’s point of view, he was either a crackpot or the American Tolstoy, who had turned silence itself into his most eloquent work of art.
MYLES WEBER: One of Salinger’s lawyers maintained that we have the right to free expression, but that he had a First Amendment right not to speak. He had a First Amendment right not to be an author, and I’d say he wasn’t an author. In a fair universe he wasn’t an author, but in our universe it turns out he was an author. Everyone insists upon him being an author. They insist that he was—I don’t even know what to call it, not publishing—but he created this major fifth text of his. He had four books published, but it seems like he had this fifth text that just keeps growing and growing and growing, and that was his silence.
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A. SCOTT BERG: There’s a high artistic price to be paid if you seclude yourself. For all we know, everything he’s writing is no good. Maybe it has all the air sucked out of it. Maybe he’s become tone-deaf. We saw this in another medium with Stanley Kubrick in the last twenty years of his life. His films were just out of sync in a way. They didn’t fit in with reality. Perhaps that has happened to Salinger. I presume he has a television. I presume he keeps reading. It’s not as if one is completely shut off from the world. I’m presuming that he knows what’s going on in the world, that there are a handful of people he communicates with. But perhaps he is cut off and perhaps his fiction reflects that.
ROBERT BOYNTON: There are essentially three possibilities. One is that the safe is entirely empty and the last forty-plus years of silence have been a charade. The second possibility is that the safe in which he kept his work is stocked full of great manuscripts and Salinger’s promise will be redeemed and all of his fans will be delighted. The third, and I think most likely, possibility is that there is some work in there. Some of it is brilliant, and most of it probably isn’t all that great, because that’s the way it is for most writers.
DAVE EGGERS: My own pet theory is that he dabbled with stories for many years, maybe finished a handful, but as the distance from his last published work grew longer, it became more difficult to imagine any one work being the follow-up; the pressure on any story or novel would be too great. And thus the dabbling might have continued, but the likelihood of his finishing something, particularly a novel, became more remote. And so I think we might find fragments of things, much in the way [Nabokov’s] The Original of Laura was found. But there’s something about the prospect of actually publishing one’s work that brings that work into focus. That pressure is needed, just like it’s needed to make diamonds from raw carbon.
Of course, the possibility most intriguing—and fictional-sounding—would have Salinger having continued to write for fifty years, finishing hundreds of stories and a handful of novels, all of which are polished and up to his standards and ready to go, and all of which he imagined would be found and published after his death. That, in fact, he intended all along for these works to be read, but that he just couldn’t bear to send them into the world while he lived.
DEAN SIMONTON: It may be the case that J. D. Salinger didn’t want criticism. He wanted to speak his mind, but he didn’t want anybody to say, “This is terrible.” He wanted to get the last word and the best way of getting the last word is to do exactly what he did: write these things and lock them up in the vault for posterity.
HILLEL ITALIE: Jay McInerney said he has an old girlfriend who met Salinger and was told that the author was mostly writing about health and nutrition.
DAVID SHIELDS: The writer Richard Elman got to know Salinger in the early 1980s, when both of them had children at a private school in Lake Placid. He said Salinger told him that it’s “really nice not to have to publish anything until the work is completed.”
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT: The myth doesn’t interest me. Can somebody just sneak me the writing?
MICHAEL McDERMOTT: Why wasn’t he more generous with those words? Sharing them with us? I know other artists who create work just for themselves. I understand that he liked to write for himself. I just don’t understand why he didn’t want to share the work with all of the huge, loving, adoring fans.
LESLIE EPSTEIN: You son of a bitch, why won’t you give us more? Why won’t you give us the rest of it?
GORE VIDAL: How can someone write eighteen hours a day and then not publish for forty years? Well, thank God he didn’t, is all I can say.
DAVID SHIELDS: The problem with
the vault is that it’s directed toward the next world, whereas we’re living in this world. The impulse not to publish seems to be, above all, a futile attempt to transcend the ego. Most of Salinger’s work—certainly everything from Nine Stories onward—is about the Glasses striving to get past the prison of the ego.
JOHN WENKE: I believe Salinger was writing. I think he was writing for an audience of one. That one might have been himself; it might have been an image of God. I think he wrote for that person; it had to do with a belief that a public silence is a work of art, or a form of art. I think he moved closer to what we normally think of as a mystic.
JOHN C. UNRUE: Salinger’s decision to stop publishing was heavily influenced by his Vedanta Buddhism. He was very eager to bring as little attention to himself as possible, to give up his ego. He was also eager not to continue to make himself a target of critics who were often ruthless in their attacks on him. He moved more and more toward silence.
JOHN LEGGETT: It’s a lovely idea that there’s a vault in his mysterious stockade in Cornish and that it holds two or three Salinger masterpieces and it’s quite credible from what I know of Salinger that there is such a book or books waiting for us all. But from what I know of Salinger it’s not necessarily the truth. It is just as likely that there will be nothing there but an old box of Saltines. My money would be on the Saltines.
JONATHAN SCHWARTZ: There’s no question he’s written. On that Fourth of July weekend in 1971, my friend Susan saw the vault, so I know that it exists. I strongly believe that writing exists—writing of an important nature that will touch people, get under our skin in so many different ways, in that voice that communicates so intimately and so dramatically. I would just have to say, if there is nothing there, how sad.
A. SCOTT BERG: Only Salinger and those who came and went in his house know whether he was still a writer. He will always be an important figure in midcentury America literature. I’m hard-pressed to name another writer with as big a reputation based on so small a published output.
It would now be very difficult for him to publish anything, just because there’s no way it could live up to the expectations. The morning line would be, “We’ve waited fifty years; is there fifty years’ worth of greatness in this novel or this short story?” It just seems impossible for anything to live up to that.
If his heirs discover there are manuscripts to be published, and they decide to publish them, it will be a huge publishing event, whether the material is good or bad. I think there will be nearly endless curiosity in seeing all of it, no matter what the quality. We are going to want to know, if nothing else, what it is we all fell in love with back in 1951. Was it just of a moment, or is there something that speaks to us for decades and maybe centuries thereafter?
A. E. HOTCHNER: Joe Gould was a character in [Greenwich Village] who allegedly was writing an oral history of the world. For years, he would go around and interview people. He’d move his cache of writing from one place to another. He’d put it in somebody’s barn or in somebody’s cellar. Then Joe Gould died. All these boxes. He hadn’t written anything.
It occurs to me: What if after all these years when Jerry’s been in his block house and allegedly writing all this stuff that’s too good for people to see because they’re going to distort it; what if when Jerry dies and they go into his vault and they open up his alleged treasure trove, what if there’s nothing there? What if Jerry’s written his last thing and maybe this was a defense against the fact that he’s been blocked and there’s nothing written? It’s a speculation that tickles my fancy. Maybe he hit a wall and didn’t want to have to face that. Who knows? It may be just one of the great hoaxes. Not that he perpetrated it for his advantage. He received nothing in this hoax. But it would be a divine ploy, wouldn’t it?
I’ve never known a more private person than Salinger. It’s as if he lived in a vault and all of his emotions were in that vault and he would dribble out a little bit of interest in somebody, a little bit of affection, but mostly it was in the vault.
SHANE SALERNO: A week after Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945, Salinger wrote to Elizabeth Murray, “Most of what I have written over here will not be published for several generations.” Salinger told Margaret that for him writing and enlightenment were synonymous; he was spending his life writing a single great work.
DAVID SHIELDS: Salinger’s best work isn’t good. It’s not very good. It’s not great. It’s perfect. “Perfect,” though, isn’t necessarily the highest praise. “Bananafish,” “Esmé,” Catcher, “Franny,” “Raise High”—they’re airless; they’re claustrophobic; they leave the reader no room to breathe. The work was perfect because it had to be: Salinger was in such agony that he needed to build an exquisitely beautiful place in which to bury himself.
MARGARET SALINGER: My father on many occasions told me the same thing, that the only people he really respects are all dead.
J. D. SALINGER (The Catcher in the Rye, 1951):
Boy, when you’re dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in the goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.
SHANE SALERNO: As quoted in the statement released by Harold Ober Associates, Salinger’s final words are an explicit fulfillment of the central idea of the fourth and final stage of his Vedantic beliefs: renunciation of the world.
J. D. SALINGER: I am in this world but not of it.
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JEROME DAVID SALINGER: A CONCLUSION
NEW YORK CITY, 1919–CORNISH, NEW HAMPSHIRE, 2010
DAVID SHIELDS and SHANE SALERNO: As death approached, Salinger looked forward to “meeting up with those he loves, whether they are religious or historical figures, personal friends or fictional characters.” He had long ago given up on the physical world, which had failed him. His first and second marriages had quickly collapsed. His third marriage was a caretaking operation. Even before he entered the war he was scarred, and after the war he was scarred more deeply and forever, so he sought to exit the world into a purely metaphysical realm. But this didn’t succeed, it can never succeed, because we are flesh-and-blood beings. Salinger didn’t understand or didn’t allow himself to understand this.
He was born with a congenital deformity. He lost Oona O’Neill to Charlie Chaplin and for the rest of his life mythologized this relationship; for the rest of his life he was obsessed with girls on the cusp of adulthood, both as a way to revisit this lost romance and as a way to revisit the moment before the dawn of adolescent self-consciousness about his own body. He served in five bloody battles of World War II and for a brief time transformed his accumulated pain into imperishable art. These body blows not only generated his art but made him an artist who demanded of himself perfection. But each time he tried to enter the adult world of conversation and commerce, he was viewed as (he always viewed himself as) broken. Then endlessly reliving and revisiting his wounds became far more important to him than the world that had caused the wounds, so he retreated to Cornish, retreated to the bunker, never to engage meaningfully again with the world. Through Vedanta the world vanished, and with it, his art.
The last known photograph of J. D. Salinger alive, 2008.
His life was a slow-motion suicide mission; the aim was to disappear. In one letter he wrote, “I’m a condition, not a man.” The conditions were many:
CONDITION 1: ANATOMY
Salinger was born with only one testicle. His mother babied him; Salinger joked that she walked him to school until he was twenty-six, as all mothers do. For no apparent reason, Holden pays the prostitute Sunny but refuses to have sex with her. In “Franny,” Lane finds Flaubert (one of Salinger’s favorite writers) wanting because he lacks “testicularity”—perhaps an inside joke to Claire, to whom the story was presented as a wedding gift. As Howard M. Harper, the author of Desperate Faith: A Study
of Bellow, Salinger, Mailer, Baldwin, and Updike, points out, in “Zooey” all of the ridiculed academics have double-entendre names: Manlius, Fallon, Tupper, Sheeter. Adult sexuality is inevitably associated, for Salinger, with stupidity and vulgarity. In story after story, men are fixated on girls’ feet: nongenital sexuality in which performance is beside the point.
Throughout Salinger’s life, he was drawn to very young, sexually inexperienced girls whom he knew he was unlikely to become intimate with, or if they did become sexual partners, they were unlikely to have enough experience with male anatomy to judge him. He almost always backed away from his lover immediately after the consummation of the relationship, thereby avoiding rejection. One of his lovers told us that he was “incredibly embarrassed and frustrated” by his undescended testicle. Surely one of the many reasons he stayed out of the media glare was to reduce the likelihood that this information about his anatomy would emerge. He embraced Eastern religions that endorsed chastity: “avoid woman and gold.” His second wife became a psychologist, and his third wife was a nurse.
The war was one wound, but his body was the other. It was the combination of these wounds that made Salinger; together they produced a man “in this world but not of it,” a man who needed to create flawless art.
CONDITION 2: OONA
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