The death of J.D. Salinger yesterday at the age of 91 has reignited a cultural conversation that hasn’t really stopped since the famously reclusive author’s last published story appeared in the New Yorker more than 40 years ago. Who was Salinger and why did he stop publishing his work? Why has every generation of post-WWII readers responded so strongly and consistently to his most famous creation, the smartass drop-out Holden Caulfield? And what has Salinger been working on behind the walls of his secluded New Hampshire compound for all these years? Will the unpublished works, should they ever be released, be any good?
One very loud strand of that conversation suggests that the reclusive author’s fame grew in direct proportion to his withdrawal from public – and publishing – life. There’s some truth to this assertion – nothing stimulates the information-addicted public’s imagination like absence, and the stories and novels his millions of fans have imagined Salinger writing dwarf, in number and accomplishment, anything he could have created in a dozen lifetimes. What these speculations tend to ignore is the ultimate cause of Salinger’s fame: the writing, which, especially in the early stories and novellas and Catcher in the Rye, was utterly original. Salinger’s work may not have expanded or challenged the novel or story form, per se, but he brought a particularly modern and very American voice to English-language literature that no one had heard before and has never really heard since (though countless authors have based their careers imitating that voice). But as Chris Wilson writes in the National Post, if Salinger’s last published works, especially Seymour: An Introduction, are any indication, that voice was beginning to strain under the tremendous pressures, both internal and external, of topping his early success. The later published works are at times solipsistic and obsessive to the point of unreadability. Hopefully Salinger wrote his away through those low points, and hopefully he left behind those writings to his devoted public.
There are a ton of touching obituaries out there, including tributes by Rick Moody, Stephen King, Robert Fulford, Charles McGrath and Books@Torontoist favourite Steven Beattie. For a very inclusive list go to Arts & Letters Daily and for more remembrances in the New Yorker go here.
People always love Catcher because it influences them when they were young, but I think that Franny and Zooey was the much better work. The extended scene of Zooey reading the letter in the bath as the mother comes in and out with the pockets of her robe bulging with junk–the ability to imprint an image so simply is perfect.