Joel Murphy |
“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
– Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye
When J.D. Salinger’s private safe is opened, I hope it turns out to be as empty as Al Capone’s vault on that infamous Geraldo special.
As you’ve no doubt heard by now, Jerome David Salinger, author of one of the great American novels, The Catcher in the Rye, died last week at the age of 91. His last published work was a short story printed in the New Yorker in 1965 entitled “Hapworth 16, 1924.” For over 50 years, he lived a quiet life in Cornish, New Hampshire (home of the longest covered bridge in the U.S.).
To say that he shied away from the spotlight would be a vast understatement. He famously demanded that his photo be taken off the dust jacket of The Catcher in the Rye. He reportedly ordered his agent burn all of his fan mail. Salinger’s reclusiveness was so iconic that it became the inspiration for two Hollywood characters – Sean Connery’s William Forrester in Finding Forrester and James Earl Jones’ Terence Mann in Field of Dreams (who delivered one of my favorite movie lines: “I don’t give interviews, and I’m no longer a public figure. I just want to be left alone, so piss off”).
Fans of Salinger and journalists looking for a scoop would occasionally take trips to Cornish hoping to track down the author. The other residents of the town, respecting the author’s privacy, would lead these poor souls on wild goose chases.
Mike Ackerman, owner of the Cornish General Store, clearly using a metaphor designed to get my attention, said Salinger “was like the Batman icon. Everyone knew Batman existed, and everyone knows there’s a Batcave, but no one will tell you where it is.” Ackerman admitted that when giving directions to curious outsiders, how complex and misleading the directions were “depended on how arrogant they were.”
The only times Salinger made headlines later in his life was when he was attempting to protect his legacy. Most recently, he blocked the release of Sixty Years On: Coming Through The Rye, an unauthorized sequel to his iconic novel. In the 1980s, he sued British literary critic Ian Hamilton to prevent the writer from using quotes and paraphrases from unpublished letters in a biography Hamilton was writing about Salinger. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, but Salinger eventually prevailed.
Joyce Maynard, who had a relationship with Salinger when she was a freshman at Yale, and Salinger’s daughter Margaret both wrote biographies that purportedly revealed intimate details about the reclusive writer. Both books added a Howard Hughes-ish quality to his reclusiveness.
Now that he has passed away though, I can only imagine that we will begin to find out more about Salinger than we ever wanted to know. Since he is no longer alive to file lawsuits, I’m sure we will start to see salacious biographies revealing even more of his eccentric behavior. While the residents of Cornish seem content to protect his privacy, chances are that other people who had connections to Salinger won’t be so kind.
Then, of course, there is the safe I mentioned in the beginning of this column. Reports vary on what exactly this safe contains, but it’s believed that it holds novels, short stories and possibly even haiku. Maynard claimed that Salinger wrote daily and had at least two completed novels tucked away. Salinger’s neighbor, Jerry Burt, said the author had at least 15 unpublished books in his safe.
Salinger himself hinted at the possibility of unpublished works in an interview in 1974.
“There is a marvelous peace in not publishing,” J.D. Salinger told The New York Times. “Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”
Now that he’s dead, people will undoubtedly begin to believe that he has lost the right to that privacy. I’ve already heard those in the literary field compare the situation to the publishing of Franza Kafka’s novels The Trial and The Castle, which were printed after Kafka’s death, even though he had asked they be destroyed. The claim will be that Salinger’s every outline and doodle is too important not to be published and scrutinized.
It seems a shame, really. In this column and on the podcast, I go on and on about celebrities who overstay their welcome. Lars and I even coined a term for when a public figure loses his edge – we call it “the Eddie Murphys.” When George Lucas tries to destroy his legacy by releasing terrible new Star Wars and Indiana Jones films, I’m the first one to jump up and shout. When Sylvester Stallone feels the need to play an over-the-hill, plastic surgery-ridden Rocky, I berate him as much as possible. When Hulk Hogan is on a mission to replace every fond childhood memory I have of him with a horrible paparazzi story about his train wreck life, I die a little inside, but I still mock him.
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Someone like J.D. Salinger is such a rare breed. He could have easily Bret Favre’d his career, making comeback after comeback, releasing terrible novel after terrible novel as the fat paychecks kept rolling in. Instead, he simply dropped the mic and walked away, riding off into the sunset while still in his prime. (Please forgive my somewhat confusing, but still pretty awesome, mixed metaphor of Salinger holding a mic while riding a horse.) You have to respect his decision to do that.
Now, I’m not saying that the writing locked away in that safe is terrible. Obviously, I have no way of knowing that. For all I know, it’s brilliant. (Although, I’m secretly hoping the safe is filled with nothing but penis sketches like the ones Johan Hill’s character drew in Superbad.) I’m simply saying that if Salinger had wanted us to read it, he would have published it. Since he didn’t, I think we should respect his privacy and allow those works to remain a mystery. Why risk tainting his legacy by publishing works he didn’t deem fit to print?
You don’t need to know the intimate details of the man’s life. We don’t need any new tell-all biographies filled with odd details that Salinger isn’t alive to refute. Just enjoy the work he already published without rifling through his private papers greedily looking for more. He’s no longer a public figure. He just want to be left alone … so piss off.
Joel Murphy is the creator of HoboTrashcan, which is probably why he has his own column. He loves pugs, hates Jimmy Fallon and has an irrational fear of robots. You can contact him at murphyslaw@hobotrashcan.com.
Nicely said. I hope he had some confidant burn all that shit when he knew the end was near. And I hope that the use of “favre” as a verb continues to grow.
In the words of a Heroin Cartel in Vietnam, “Quitting while you’re ahead is not the same as quitting.” Too bad Denzel’s Frank Lucas didn’t listen. But it seems like Salinger was keen on this privy.
I am as equally intrigued by the contents of that safe. I think there is an interesting psychological dynamic to writers who choose anonymity and seclusion, for the very act of writing is an engagement in communication; externalizing an internally propelled creativity (and I’ll leave it at that, though I am tempted to bust into Derrida and Hiedegger philosophies detailing the role of the artist and specifically writers).
Another brilliant writer that actively evades any sort of publicity and encounter with fans and the like is Thomas Pynchon. He wrote my favorite book: The Crying of Lot 49. I guess a man who writes creatively about entropy and the second law of thermodynamics as it pertains to human existence and our struggle to find meaning within the chaos would be somewhat hard to follow in general conversation anyway.
I think Salinger’s Box, (which I intend to call it forever) will be filled with works of a faded genius. For although it is taught in high school curriculum and commonly carried by assasins, Catcher in the Rye just isn’t that great of a story. Teenager angst and sexual repression? Jesus, we’re the Columbine generation – hookers and profanity ain’t got nuthin on gothic cloaked angst fed by prep boy cruelty resulting in mass murder and booby trapped suicide. Someone should write a story about that, and they should call it: “Salinger’s Box”.
Amanda: If he indicated in his will that he didn’t want any of his unpbulished materials to ever be published, then the question is moot, from a legal standpoint. As an archivist, I do hope whoever receives the material in a bequest (if there is such a thing) would donate it to a repository of some sort. If he didn’t want anyone to read it, then the repository would be obliged to keep the documents restricted as a part of the donor agreement. If he didn’t want anyone to ever see the materials, then he would have probably made arrangements to have it destroyed. And that would put an end to any sort of discussion on what to do with materials that no longer exist. But I am curious. I can’t help it.
Amanda: I immediately thought of this in terms of Schrodinger’s Cat, and I think Salinger’s Box is a perfect phrase to use in this case. We don’t know what’s there until we observe it. Also, you hint at something quite interesting re Derrida and Hiedegger: if Salinger’s work was only for his personal amusement, then (as he concieved it) it no longer has any purpose given that his potential for being amused by things is no longer a variable in this equation. Therefore, according to that assessment, it can and should be destroyed. But we as a potential audience might feel entitled to read what he wrote after his death, given how we perceive the function of the artist and his work. What, then, is the function of the artist and his work after the demise of the artist? How does it function in society? Do we have any claim on it as something outside of what the artist himself intended? All very interesting to mull over, even if I do agree with Joel’s argument that the materials shouldn’t get published if that’s what the author wanted.
Also, I didn’t really enjoy Catcher in the Rye. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t agree that it was an important work of 20th Century literature. It certainly was influential. I do think that Frank Portman in King Dork did a fantastic job summarizing the “Catcher Cult” (as he put it). The protagonist, Tom, has quite a lot in common with Holden Caulfield, despite his contempt of those (teachers and parents, mostly) who think Holden Caulfield is the bees knees.
Dammit, that first paragraph was a general comment, not specifically directed at Amanda. Oops.
Joelle: I love that you know about Derrida and Heidegger. Those questions you bring up are good ones, also to be paired with the question of whether the work created by the artist even belongs to him once it is outside of himself.
Derrida’s theory on Logocentrism and my recollection of Post-Modern Philosophy have me thinking about this in terms of the “metaphysics of presence”. If speech is the orginal signifer (and this is true, with no other evidence necessary than the fact that we THINK in terms of speech) and writing is an externalization of speech, then writing is the originally concieved thought Once Removed. Then the writing is experienced by a reader outside of the writer’s presence and not spoken by him (making books on tape read by the author a unique experience in connecting with this original source of creative intent to create meaning) – making it even further removed from its original state of purpose; its left to be interpreted in another mind, formulating thoughts often expressed through speech and writing, giving way to, while simultaneously being stimulated by the dilluted original thought-speech-writing attempt to create meaning, a cyclical process amongst academics and intellectuals. It’s almost like a cycle which continually dillutes the original inception, but still posseses some of that original energy; a line of thought ancestory (and again this brings me back to the second law of thermodynamics).
And if it is in fact so far removed from Salinger’s original speech-thought-writing externalization process now that he is dead, then would it even make a difference whether someone else reads it? For no one will ever know its true intent, no one will ever think the original speech-thoughts that Salinger did while creating his meaning. This being the case, I am now seriously contending that perhaps we do have claim on it: for it will never be what he meant it to be. It will only exist in our subjective interpretation, and since he physically externalized what could have been kept pure in simple speech-thought expression, he in essence gave that energy up to the ever evolving field of thought.
I think we should be able to read it. His original work will always be preserved for he is dead and its meaning died with him, but he can still contribute to the intellectual growth and the raising of consciousness through his delivery of post mortem thought provoking writing.
But then I think of diaries and journals and my own writing that I don’t necessarily want anyone to read, yet I feel the need to externalize my thoughts. Once on paper though they are no longer mine alone -they exist outside of me-, and if read by a snooping mother – then they become something even less mine, for they are now stimulating her thoughts and interpretations without her knowing the depth and meaning of my original thoughts.
Amanda: I admit to being a bit rusty on my Post Modern philosophy (not having studied it in at least 7 years), but I do see your point. There does exist a kind of ownership on the part of the consumer of art that is certainly independent of the intentions of the artist, which is why someone can view the same painting or read the same book at multiple points in their life and find a different layer of meaning. Every subsequent interaction with a piece of art creates a different level of meaning, which are different from the meaning intended by the artist.
I agree that we have some sort of claim on Salinger’s work, even if it’s only emotional/intellectual and not in the legal sense. It is ours in that we have thoughts/experiences independent from the original piece of art in question. In the case of whether or not to grant a deceased author his post-mortem privacy, it’s not really straightforward. It doesn’t so much matter to him now that he is dead, as you say. But it still seems unfair in a way to read what an author did not want us to read. How much weight do we put on the author’s purpose now that the work is out of his head and on paper? Once he wrote something on paper, it does exist as something outside of himself, and is therefore able to be consumed by another. Should his intention of privacy be the driving force behind what is done with the materials, presuming there are materials at all, and presuming the legal will doesn’t address the issue? While the thoughts have been externalized from the author’s head and are now separate from him (especially since he’s no longer alive to have those thoughts), they still exist as his property. or at least the property of his estate. Our interactions with the work in question (should we ever be allowed to have any) will be our own, as they are with any piece of art, but any claim we might have on the work is solely dependent upon the execution of the author’s will.
The hell with Salinger, can we make sure that Dan Brown doesn’t get anything else published?
Speaking of Salinger’s archives:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/nyregion/05nyc.html?scp=4&sq=salinger&st=cse