The maestro, playing piano in a closet
Salinger seemed to be the perfect subject. He was, in any real-life sense, invisible, as good as dead, and yet for many he still held an active mythic force. He was famous for not wanting to be famous. He claimed to loathe any kind of public scrutiny and yet he made it his practice to scatter just a few misleading clues. It seemed to me that his books had one essential element in common: Their author was anxious, some would say overanxious, to be loved.
— Ian Hamilton, In Search of J.D. Salinger
Next week I’m going to see Salinger, the new documentary about the writer (who died in 2010) by Shane Salerno, a Memphis boy who heretofore was best known as the screenwriter of Armageddon. There was a surprise screening of Salinger at the Telluride Film Festival (Aug. 29-Sept. 2). It opened in some markets Friday (it is scheduled to open in Arkansas Sept. 13), and there’s been quite a bit of buzz about it. “Cultural event of the season,” Karen deadpanned at me over coffee the other morning.
Salerno reportedly spent nearly a decade researching his subject, and apparently there’s a twist in the film that reviewers have been asked not to reveal. I suspect the big secret is nothing more alarming than the revelation that Salinger wrote several more novels after he retired from publishing his work in 1965. It’s been reported his estate will start publishing them in the next couple of years.
The “unpublished novels” story has been part of the Salinger mystique for decades; in the ’90s one of Salinger’s neighbors claimed the writer told him in 1978 that he’d completed 15 or 16 book-length manuscripts which he was storing in a walk-in bank safe installed in his home. The neighbor claimed to have seen the safe, but said it was too dark inside for him to see any books.
This story was seconded by Joyce Maynard, the novelist who as an 18-year-old moved in with and conducted a nine-month affair with Salinger beginning in 1972. In her 1998 memoir At Home in the World, Maynard recalled how Salinger wrote every day and kept his manuscripts locked in a safe. She said she knew of at least two complete, unpublished Salinger manuscripts.
Maynard is featured in both the new documentary and an accompanying book. She said at the Telluride festival that while “the film was an extraordinary accomplishment … there will not be a complete portrait of Salinger until it is fully acknowledged that he engaged in serial repeated emotional damage to dozens of young girls.”
Salinger confirmed that he continued to write fiction in a deposition given in October 1986 after he sued would-be biographer Ian Hamilton to prevent him from using even paraphrased excerpts of Salinger’s unpublished letters in what would become the literary biography In Search of J.D. Salinger. In a six-hour session with Random House lawyers, Salinger described a current project as “just a work of fiction” and added that he worked “with characters, and as they develop I go from there.” Salinger eventually won his suit, forcing Hamilton to remove the objectionable passages.
“I have outgrown the idea of being beguiled and bewitched by the author of The Catcher in the Rye,” Hamilton told People magazine after his book was published. “He has been spoiled for me by my own activities. There was something sort of marvelous about Salinger’s mysteriousness, inaccessibility and his refusal to do all the low stuff that writers are excessively in pursuit of. There was a purity about him. There still is, but for me it is muddled in with the fact that he doesn’t like me and that he would say I have caused him terrific inconvenience.”
On the evidence of what we know of his life and work, I imagine Salinger would not like most of us very much either. And the more we learn about him, maybe the less we’d like him as well. In a way, I wish we could all follow the advice of the great Iris DeMent and simply “let the mystery be,” but I cannot lie. If there are more Salinger books to come, I will read them. For professional reasons and because I am one of Jerry Salinger’s fans.
I have read all the the author’s work that is easily available. That means the 13 stories collected in three books— Nine Stories (1953), Franny and Zooey (1961) and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), as well as his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye. I have read a couple of odd pieces collected in various anthologies and a few of what the faithful referred to as his “under-published” (never anthologized) stories. It’s been suggested that at least some of the “new” Salinger delves deeper into the teacup mythology of the Glass family, the characters Salinger picked up after he put down Holden Caulfield.
Salinger’s stories about Seymour, Buddy, Franny and Zooey Glass are miniature and involuted. Their worlds are delimited by the family home and various universities and restaurants; their inner lives are restricted. However much they want to love all humanity—Seymour, who kills himself in “A Perfect Day For Bananafish,” insists that his siblings be ever vigilant for the presence of the Fat Lady, the Christ-like essence that resides in every human being no matter how wretched or lowbrow—no one approaches their standards, not even their parents, the ex-vaudevillians Les and Bessie.
I love these stories. I prefer them to The Catcher in the Rye, even as I recognize in them a certain oppressiveness. These Glasses are a depressing, joyless lot, with their hermetic little lives and feelings of superiority (which they recognize as uncharitable and mean but still can’t stifle). It’s not unfair to wonder if the contempt with which they view the world— the world of the Fat Lady—isn’t something shared by their creator. As Leslie Fiedler, reviewing Franny and Zooey in Partisan Review, put it: “The crises of Salinger’s fiction are the crises of people who are better than people like you.”
Seymour Glass is “a ring-ding enlightened man, a God-knower,” capable of writing the most beautiful, life-affirming poetry ever written, moments before putting a bullet through his brain. Salinger’s retreat can be read as a kind of suicide, an extinction at least of the public man. Like Seymour, he had an artist’s need for self-expression; he simply couldn’t bear the self-interested reactions of cynical adults, the “phonies” who would use his words for their own purposes.
In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield goes to a nightclub to hear Ernie, a piano player. Ernie is a genius, but his audience doesn’t listen, they chat and laugh and get drunk. They don’t know (or care) if he’s good or bad; to them it’s just notes. And Holden thinks that if he played piano as well as Ernie, he’d play in a closet, where nobody could hear him.
It seems Salinger’s symphonies will soon be coming out of the closet. You might want to listen.