Salinger's Long Goodbye
How do you mourn a writer who departed years ago?
By ADAM KIRSCH
Ordinarily, when a great writer dies, it is easy to know what to feel. We are grateful for everything he has given us, and we grieve that he will not be giving us anything more; in time, we start asking the questions, about the nature and quality of his books, that constitute a writer's real afterlife and the best tribute we can pay him. That is more or less what happened when John Updike died last year, and when Saul Bellow died in 2005.
But when the news came this week of the death of J.D. Salinger, possibly the most beloved and certainly the oddest writer of that postwar generation, it was hard to know how to react. How can you grieve for a writer who has been, for all practical purposes, dead for half a century—one defined by his refusal to publish or even to appear in public? As for gratitude, no writer has earned it more or wanted it less. Since "The Catcher in the Rye" was published, in 1951, millions of teenagers have felt about Salinger the way Holden Caulfield feels about his favorite authors: "What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author . . . was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it."
No wonder that, from time to time over the past 60 years, readers took Salinger up on the implied invitation, making the pilgrimage to Cornish, N.H., to meet their imaginary best friend. To the most persistent fans, the very ostentatiousness of Salinger's privacy—has any writer ever been so well known for refusing to be well known?—must have seemed a kind of flirtation. Surely if you ignored the famous fence and went right up to the hermit's door, you would prove by your very persistence that you were the reader Salinger was looking for, the one genuine soul in a million "phoneys." How great the disappointment must have been when it turned out that Salinger really meant his refusals, that he would make no exceptions—not even for Ian Hamilton, the English man of letters whose attempt to write Salinger's biography embroiled him in a lawsuit that led all the way to the Supreme Court.
Salinger's death is unusual in another way, too. For most writers, dying means the end of their work; for Salinger, it may well mean a new beginning. He did not publish a book after "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" in 1963, but he made very clear that he had not stopped writing. In an exceedingly rare interview, in the mid-1970s, he said: "I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure." It was enough to hold out the possibility that some day—if Salinger changed his mind, or when he died—a secret hoard of stories and novels would be revealed. If that turns out to be true—if we now, finally, get to see what Salinger was working on all these years—then his death will, paradoxically, convert his long absence into a new presence.
The great question, of course, is what those books might look like. And here the evidence is not encouraging. Before he stopped publishing, Salinger seemed to be growing more and more entranced with the Glass family, the intellectually and spiritually precocious clan that populates his later work. As critics like Updike noted long ago, there is something unwholesome about the way Salinger treats the Glasses: They seem to become not a way of exploring reality, but a substitute for it.
The obsessive inventory of the family's apartment in "Franny and Zooey"—there are page-long lists, one of which includes "three radios (a 1927 Freshman, a 1932 Stromberg-Carlson, and a 1941 R.C.A.)"—is not the kind of detail novelists use to capture social or psychological truth. It is more like the gratuitous, self-delighting detail children use when inventing fantasy worlds. The Brontës spent their childhoods making up stories about the land of Angria—but that was before inventing "Jane Eyre" and "Wuthering Heights." Salinger, uniquely among major writers, seemed to go in the opposite direction, from public storytelling to private, until he reached the point where it was unnecessary to admit any readers into his fictional universe.
The purpose of "Franny and Zooey," with all its Zen exhortations, was partly to predict and justify this development. When Salinger declared that he was writing for himself, not for the world, he was echoing the words of the Bhagavad Gita that Seymour and Buddy Glass posted on their wall: "Work done with anxiety about results is far inferior to work done without such anxiety, in the calm of self-surrender." Yet this philosophy seems incompatible with the writing of fiction, which is nothing if not an engagement with the world and the self. It seems highly unlikely that the books Salinger wrote for his own pleasure—if they exist—could be as lovable as the books he wrote for the pleasure of his readers.
And while "The Catcher in the Rye" is not a book that grows with us, no book gives as much pleasure if you read it at the right age—say, at 16, Holden's age when he can't stop wondering what happens to the ducks in Central Park in the winter. He hasn't yet learned that they, like us, have to keep moving if they don't want to end up frozen in the past.
How do you mourn a writer who departed years ago?
By ADAM KIRSCH
Ordinarily, when a great writer dies, it is easy to know what to feel. We are grateful for everything he has given us, and we grieve that he will not be giving us anything more; in time, we start asking the questions, about the nature and quality of his books, that constitute a writer's real afterlife and the best tribute we can pay him. That is more or less what happened when John Updike died last year, and when Saul Bellow died in 2005.
But when the news came this week of the death of J.D. Salinger, possibly the most beloved and certainly the oddest writer of that postwar generation, it was hard to know how to react. How can you grieve for a writer who has been, for all practical purposes, dead for half a century—one defined by his refusal to publish or even to appear in public? As for gratitude, no writer has earned it more or wanted it less. Since "The Catcher in the Rye" was published, in 1951, millions of teenagers have felt about Salinger the way Holden Caulfield feels about his favorite authors: "What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author . . . was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it."
No wonder that, from time to time over the past 60 years, readers took Salinger up on the implied invitation, making the pilgrimage to Cornish, N.H., to meet their imaginary best friend. To the most persistent fans, the very ostentatiousness of Salinger's privacy—has any writer ever been so well known for refusing to be well known?—must have seemed a kind of flirtation. Surely if you ignored the famous fence and went right up to the hermit's door, you would prove by your very persistence that you were the reader Salinger was looking for, the one genuine soul in a million "phoneys." How great the disappointment must have been when it turned out that Salinger really meant his refusals, that he would make no exceptions—not even for Ian Hamilton, the English man of letters whose attempt to write Salinger's biography embroiled him in a lawsuit that led all the way to the Supreme Court.
Salinger's death is unusual in another way, too. For most writers, dying means the end of their work; for Salinger, it may well mean a new beginning. He did not publish a book after "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" in 1963, but he made very clear that he had not stopped writing. In an exceedingly rare interview, in the mid-1970s, he said: "I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure." It was enough to hold out the possibility that some day—if Salinger changed his mind, or when he died—a secret hoard of stories and novels would be revealed. If that turns out to be true—if we now, finally, get to see what Salinger was working on all these years—then his death will, paradoxically, convert his long absence into a new presence.
The great question, of course, is what those books might look like. And here the evidence is not encouraging. Before he stopped publishing, Salinger seemed to be growing more and more entranced with the Glass family, the intellectually and spiritually precocious clan that populates his later work. As critics like Updike noted long ago, there is something unwholesome about the way Salinger treats the Glasses: They seem to become not a way of exploring reality, but a substitute for it.
The obsessive inventory of the family's apartment in "Franny and Zooey"—there are page-long lists, one of which includes "three radios (a 1927 Freshman, a 1932 Stromberg-Carlson, and a 1941 R.C.A.)"—is not the kind of detail novelists use to capture social or psychological truth. It is more like the gratuitous, self-delighting detail children use when inventing fantasy worlds. The Brontës spent their childhoods making up stories about the land of Angria—but that was before inventing "Jane Eyre" and "Wuthering Heights." Salinger, uniquely among major writers, seemed to go in the opposite direction, from public storytelling to private, until he reached the point where it was unnecessary to admit any readers into his fictional universe.
The purpose of "Franny and Zooey," with all its Zen exhortations, was partly to predict and justify this development. When Salinger declared that he was writing for himself, not for the world, he was echoing the words of the Bhagavad Gita that Seymour and Buddy Glass posted on their wall: "Work done with anxiety about results is far inferior to work done without such anxiety, in the calm of self-surrender." Yet this philosophy seems incompatible with the writing of fiction, which is nothing if not an engagement with the world and the self. It seems highly unlikely that the books Salinger wrote for his own pleasure—if they exist—could be as lovable as the books he wrote for the pleasure of his readers.
And while "The Catcher in the Rye" is not a book that grows with us, no book gives as much pleasure if you read it at the right age—say, at 16, Holden's age when he can't stop wondering what happens to the ducks in Central Park in the winter. He hasn't yet learned that they, like us, have to keep moving if they don't want to end up frozen in the past.
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