Buddy Joins Seymour at Last

Today came down what just might be the most important news of the decade: J.D. Salinger is dead.

I do not mourn, though I loved the man. J.D. had no love for this world.

Yet as for the rest of us, we may now get to see what he has been writing for the last 60 years.

Given his talent, and the influence his first novel and a few collections of short stories generated, a sudden release of essentially his life corpus might change world culture. Catcher in the Rye did: along with Kerouac's On the Road, it kicked off the cultural revolution those of us who are still lucid remember as the Sixties.

Was he really writing, though not publishing, all those years? He always said he was; and those who were closest to him, though they never saw what he wrote, believed he was. He went to work every day at his desk. And I believe he must have been. Writers do not write for money, or for publication, or for fame. Writers write because they are compelled to write, as Jonah was compelled to prophesy. And what else would Salinger have been doing, all those years in isolation with, deliberately, nothing else to occupy his time? Of course he was writing; it's mad to imagine otherwise.

Will it be any good? His last published piece, for the New Yorker, is widely considered to be drek; by me as well. Many writers burn out, and never write anything especially good again. But I am minded of something WB Yeats once said: that every aspiring writer has a stark choice. They can either live the life of a writer, or they can actually write.

Salinger, surely, is the perfect example of someone who refused the life of a writer, who backed away from all that, in order to keep writing. If Yeats's views are correct, this probably preserved his relationship with his muse. Those writers who do burn out, I suspect, are either crowded in and loaded down with the necessities of making a good living and supporting a range of dependents—something Salinger was freed from—or are struck with writer's block from fear they can never again live up to their early reviews--something Salinger avoided by not publishing--or are too busy celebrating their fame or drinking themselves to death to concentrate on their craft--Salinger was a health fiend.

By not publishing, Salinger is more likely to have preserved the authenticity of his voice; as Gerard Manley Hopkins did. He may have been freed to say what he most needed to say, without needing to worry about the consequences, whether it would sell, or damage his reputation, or embarrass him, or be panned by the critics, or alienate friends, or unintentionally reveal something he did not intend. It was an interesting experiment, and it will be very interesting to see what it has produced.

Assuming his will allows for it all to be published after his death, my guess is that we are about to see something fantastic.