In his greatest works, a clash between self-expression and self-effacement. “Don't ever tell anybody anything," J.D. Salinger wrote in the closing lines of “The Catcher in the Rye." “If you do, you start missing everybody."
For more than two decades now, I've thought about that ending as a piece of code. Not that Salinger, who died Wednesday at age 91 in Cornish, N.H., was an oracle, despite what his most dedicated followers -- those who hung around his driveway, hoping for a glimpse of the reclusive author, or parsed his sentences on a million websites -- might believe.
But Salinger was a writer who refracted his perspective into language, producing work that was personal and profound. Between 1951 and 1965, he produced four uncommonly sensitive books of fiction -- “Catcher," “Nine Stories," “Franny and Zooey" and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" -- before retreating to his home in Cornish and refusing to publish any more.
As he once wrote to biographer Ian Hamilton (in the course of suing Hamilton for quoting from his unpublished letters), “I think I've borne all the exploitation and loss of privacy I can possibly bear in a single lifetime."
For the last 45 years, this was the encoded story, Salinger's self-imposed silence, as readers debated whether he was still writing or off in some twilit oblivion of his own. For his part, Salinger's interactions with the public were infrequent and largely litigious. As recently as July, he won an injunction preventing the release of an unauthorized sequel to “The Catcher in the Rye."
And yet, our collective fascination with his life rather than his writing suggests another bit of code, or at least a set of clues. Wasn't this, after all, what Salinger was rejecting, a culture of celebrity in which the most important thing was appearance and no one cared about the level of the soul?
“I just quit, that's all," Franny Glass tells her boyfriend early in “Franny and Zooey," explaining why she gave up acting. “ . . . I don't know. It seemed like such poor taste, sort of, to want to act in the first place. I mean all the ego. And I used to hate myself so, when I was in a play, to be backstage after the play was over. All those egos running around feeling terribly charitable and warm."
For all that “The Catcher in the Rye" made him famous, “Franny and Zooey" is Salinger's masterpiece, an evocation of loss and longing within the bonds of family. Composed of two novellas, it introduces the youngest members of the Glass family, about whom Salinger would devote more than half of his published work.
The Glasses are a New York creation, theatrical but also intellectual, middle class but bohemian at the same time. They talk and fight like immigrants, but they pursue esoteric pursuits, most notably Eastern philosophy and Buddhism, like members of the leisured elite.
