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Don’t tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

JA February 04

Obsession with posthumous publication has always been a lively pastime – case in point the recent release of The Originals of Laura, which Nabokov expressly asked to be destroyed upon his death, and the veritable bevy of books published by J.R.R Tolkien’s estate over the years, not to mention the huge following amassed by Roberto Bolaño and Stieg Larsson.

Of course, with the great J.D. Salinger passing away just last week, it was only a matter of time until the rumours began to rise about his secret cache of writings. The situation is made all the more frantic by the fact that Catcher in the Rye made such a huge impression on so many (something like 65 millions copies sold worldwide), and that Salinger was such a notable recluse, retiring to the small town of Cornish, New Hampshire after the release of his last novel Franny and Zooey in 1961. He told the New York Times years later that there was a ‘marvellous peace in not publishing’ and that he found the industry to be a ‘terrible invasion of my privacy’. In 1980, he similarly declared in the Boston Sunday Globe: ‘I love to write, and I assure you I write regularly. But I write for myself and I want to be left absolutely alone to do it.’

So far, the rumour tally stands thus.

  • Joyce Maynard, who dated Salinger in the seventies, claimed in her memoir that the author still wrote every morning and by 1972 had completed two novels

  • Jerry Burt, Salinger’s neighbour, stated that the author had at least 15 or 16 unpublished works kept in a safe in his home

  • Margaret, Salinger’s daughter, has also referred to a filing system that he had: ‘a red mark meant the book could be released “as is,” should the author die. A blue mark meant that the manuscript had to be edited.’

Information is scant when it comes to theories about what this supposed stash might entail. Gordon Lish, Raymond Carver’s famed author-editor, said that Salinger told him in the 1960s that he was still writing about the Glass family, while Jay McInerney speculated, somewhat bizarrely, that the works were about ‘health and nutrition’. Philip Hensher of the Independent has this to say:

We'll never know, so it doesn't really matter what we say. But we may, in due course, find out what Salinger's post-publication period was like. Was the weird and unreadable fantasy monologue of ‘Hapworth 16, 1924’ a one-off blip before he returned to the classical, heartbreaking lucidities of ‘Raise High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters’? Could there be a novel of the quality of The Catcher in The Rye waiting there? But I doubt it, somehow. Writers are forged in the exchanges between their minds and their audience, what people say about them, what readers thought of their last book – not a book they wrote 50 years ago. Writers may be independent-minded people, but few of them could turn inwards to that extent, for that length of time, and not run into the sands.

There is equal speculation about whether a film version of Catcher might be made, something that Salinger was staunchly opposed to. Walter Kirn, author of the novel Up in the Air which has now been adapted for the screen said that a movie version might work ‘with the proper casting of a great but unknown actor who would allow everyone to see him or herself in Holden’. He added however, that ‘the greatest challenge would be for the screenwriter and director to cast aside their reverence for the material and take a free hand with the adaptation, reinventing it for the screen instead of turning it into a pious monument to a work of literature that was about, above all else, impiety and irreverence.’

Some, like novelist Curtis Sittenfeld are eager awaiting the opening of the safe, if there is one: ‘I can't wait to find out... In our age of shameless self-promotion, it's extraordinary, and kind of great, to think of someone really and truly writing for writing's sake.’ Others, like Andrew Kaufman, prefer to take the mickey out of the whole situation with this tongue-in-cheek piece on a planned break-in to the Salinger home.

Catcher-in-the-rye-cover


 

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