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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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Anyway, I wrote the story as a tribute to the power of Salinger's emblematic resistance to the publicity-industrial complex (my coinage!). I called his silence, this repudiation of celebrity culture, "his most powerful, his most eloquent, perhaps his most lasting work of art." But a few dolts misread it in a simple-minded Mark David Chapman way because it did not fit their preconceived image of a celebrity profile. It was an anti-celebrity profile! The misreading made me understand Salinger's anger: Why put up with idiots when he could write as he pleased and let the misguided hacks hack away at him when he was dead? He had a vision and he had a right to pursue it his way.

But every time I wrote about Salinger I used to get into nervous discussions with my old friend Jonathan Schwartz, a writer and radio man, who was convinced Salinger was writing but worried that he might decide to destroy it all out of pique. We both fantasized about someone breaking in and saving the manuscripts. And in fact I just learned that a Kindle book has just been published called J.D.: The Plot To Steal J.D. Salinger's Manuscripts. I want to make clear I don't approve, but clearly the cult is getting antsy.

How is Salinger's silence different from Nabokov's burn notice? For one thing Nabokov is dead but his wish was unequivocal. Salinger is alive and equivocal. Or if not equivocal, certainly withholding, uncommunicative. But at least we have a chance to communicate with him.

There is also a critical difference between the two finicky writers: Nabokov was a finisher. Look how many dozens of books he wrote in two languages in his life. True, he tried to burn Lolita. (It was saved only by his wife.) True, he was a perfectionist, but, I'd argue, one who came to recognize that there was a time finally to publish. That a work was, at a certain point, as perfect—as perfectly Nabokovian—as it would ever get. Salinger seems—in his parentheses-choked later works, at least—to believe he could never get as Salingerian as he wanted. And that his work had to be not as good as he could make it but as good as God could make it. Which suggests nothing can ever be truly finished. Maybe that's his problem.

You might ask why it will be important to read whatever Salinger leaves behind. I think it will certainly be more important to our understanding of Salinger than Laura's note cards will be to our understanding of Nabokov.

Forty-odd years of work in silence! It feels like a tragedy or, at least, a mystery: Was he inscribing more and more on less and less like biblical angels-on-pinhead types? Or did he take off and grow and soar in some way beyond our expectations?

I don't think Salinger was anywhere near what novelist Nabokov was at his best, but he published only one novel. Who knows what he was capable of?

So here's my plea: Mr. Salinger, forgive me my genuinely earnest and well-meaning if intrusive-sounding request, but could you reassure us that—if you have been writing all this time—we'll get to see some of it before … we die?

Must I drive up to New Hampshire and put another letter in his mailbox? Anyway, I started reading Catcher again. It's still good. If you don't misread it.

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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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