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Save the Salinger Archives! Even if we have to save them from Salinger himself.

By Ron RosenbaumPosted Friday, June 5, 2009, at 6:01 PM ET

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What if, like Nabokov, he decides that it's not finished? What if Salinger—perhaps prompted by Dmitri's decision to contravene his father's wishes posthumously—decides to take action before he dies? And by "action" I mean consigning years of work to the flames so no opportunistic estate can decide to enrich itself at his expense by publishing it. It comes down to the question of how much control a writer should have over the fate of his work, particularly his unfinished work, after he dies.

While I've come to disagree with Dmitri Nabokov's decision about Laura—I think a writer's greatness should not, paradoxically, deprive him of a right we accord to ordinary humans, the right to have their deathbed wishes observed—Salinger is still alive and, who knows, might be open to persuasion, which is what I'd like to try.

Before getting into my proposal about the Salinger manuscript mystery, a few more words about Holden and the so-called "copy-cat" book Salinger opposes. I can see arguments on both sides. Some might say Holden Caulfield has escaped the novel to become an independent cultural entity like Huck Finn, available for other novelists to use as they see fit. But I'm sympathetic to Mark Helprin's recent argument in Digital Barbarism that our default position should be in favor of writers, which means being in favor of copyright enforcement.

Writing is hard; memorable writing like Salinger's, even harder. His writing made him sweat blood. You can feel it in the later work, not always to its advantage, admittedly, but it's there, the blood, sweat, and tears.

It's pretty remarkable—amazing, isn't it, when you think about it—that he stopped publishing when he was only 46, half a lifetime ago. He stopped publishing but may not have stopped writing. For all we know, he may be withholding what will turn out to be the eighth wonder of American letters. Or not.

And why would someone as publicity-intolerant as Salinger go to the trouble (ultimately, if the case goes far enough, he might even have to testify in public) of suing the author of the Holden sequel? Perhaps because he still cares about the character and the way it's been read and he doesn't want any more naive misreadings—by pro- or anti-Salingerites—to distort the nature of his work.

Indeed, these misreadings may be the problem that caused Salinger to retreat from the world in the first place. The cult that reads The Catcher in the Rye as an endorsement of Holden Caulfield's callow, purist point of view and obsessively badgered Salinger as a kind of guru could have driven him into hiding. In fact, I once wrote a piece in which I essentially blamed the assassination of John Lennon on the misreading of Catcher by assassin Mark David Chapman, who carried around a copy of the book and proclaimed that he had killed Lennon because he'd become a "phony," just like the ones Holden hated. Of course, anyone who brings to Catcher a somewhat more sophisticated sensibility than Mark David Chapman, an awareness that novelists often use unreliable narrators and, you know, ironic distancing, can see that it's a novel about the conflict between Holden's naive and narcissistic juvenile romanticism (the world is full of "phonies"—duh!) and the kind of accommodations he needs to make to its corruption to survive.

Is Salinger a recluse because of his misguided cult? Or because of his own oversensitivity? That was a question I addressed back when it was first announced, about a dozen years ago, that he was going to allow "Hapworth" to be published in hardcover. (Copies of the New Yorker version circulated like sacred relics; I called it "the Dead Sea Scrolls of the Salinger cult.") It would have been a small step, since it had already been published in a magazine and wasn't a new work, but I hoped maybe he was testing the waters for new material.

But then a heavyweight critic published a pre-emptive attack on "Hapworth." An attack that seemed to be as much an attack on the Salinger mystique as it was an attack on the work. (Late Salinger is like late James: Sure, it's mannered, but it is what it is. Should he have started writing like Cormac McCarthy?) And after that, plans for publication of "Hapworth"—or anything else—evaporated. The sad episode ended with nothing old or new forthcoming in the succeeding dozen years and nothing likely to come out while he's alive.

Shortly after the Hapworth incident, I wrote a story about Salinger's silence, about driving up to New Hampshire to seek out Salinger's house, a kind of iconic American literary pilgrimage. It was a story about finding the house on the hill, and then just standing outside the verge of his driveway unable to cross and transgress his privacy. And, finally, being unable to resist writing a letter to Salinger in a nearby Denny's, calling attention to my explication of "the sound of one hand clapping" as adumbrated in the opening paragraph of his short story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish." (You might recall the story opens with the soon-to-be-suicide Seymour Glass' wife waving her hand back and forth to dry her nails. One hand clapping! That's allegedly the answer to the Zen koan: Make that one-hand-waving gesture and you get … silence.)

I know: This is the kind of obsessiveness that probably scares him. But I did offer one amusing factoid about Salinger in the story that I still think holds up in a way. A woman I know stood in line behind him at a grocery store and discovered he was buying … doughnut holes! Those round balls of sugary fried dough. Doughnut holes: the junk-food equivalent of the sound of one hand clapping.

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Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler.

Photograph of J.D. Salinger from book jacket of Margaret Salinger's memoir Dream Catcher.

COMMENTS

With all the hand-wringing over the possibility that Salinger might not allow his (possibly non-existent) works die with him, I'm surprised there was no mention of Kafka. Kafka, after all, famously instructed his friend Max Brod to destroy all his works upon his death. When the time came, Brod agonized over the promise he'd made, and ultimately decided not to honor that promise. Later, Brod was able to use the unpublished manuscripts as a bargaining chip to get sponsorship as an American emigrant, and thus escape the holocaust. It was a deal brokered partly by Thomas Mann and the American PEN club.

This "after story" is almost another Kafka plot, and it's because of Brod's broken promise that we can still read much of Kafka's work.

-- EbenCooke
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Rosenbaum explains why an unequivocally important work appears to be a shallow, adolescent novel: it uses an unreliable narrator, a troubled teen in the late 40's. Likely it is somewhat autobiographical. There are a startling number of hilarious, touching, sad and poignant moments to be found for such a short novel. His use of teen vernacular of the time is evocative and timeless. To identify with it, it is probably best to be a troubled young person or an empathetic older person who has been through it. There are many untroubled people who could never identify with such a character.

In context, it addresses mental illness in a unique way for the time period; as the rebellion of a sensitive, creative mind against the necessary shallowness of the real world. Much of Nine Stories addresses the same issue, while Franny and Zooey actually seems to offer a solution. I think Salinger's last few published works demonstrate a relapse and his own personal lack of ability to come to terms with the real world. I suspect modern research and identification of Asperger's Syndrome might have something relevant to say about Holden Caulfield, and perhaps J.D. Salinger, that was unavailable to people in the 50's.

-- bsharporflat
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