Return to sender

A collection of letters to J.D. Salinger, many from well-known writers, shows how the author of "Catcher in the Rye" went from man to myth.

By Jonathon Keats

Apr 17, 2002 | Virtually everybody has a story to tell about J.D. Salinger. Some can claim once to have seen him on the street while passing through the New Hampshire town where he lives, not stalking him quite, yet drawn, undeniably, to press some unspoken boundary. Others are content to repeat familiar rumors, recalling failed attempts to lure him into a liaison or interview, or speculating about the vault in which he allegedly has confined everything he's written since he stopped publishing in the mid-'60s. But, for the vast majority of readers, the crucial story about Salinger only incidentally involves the author. What most people want to talk about when they discuss the famously reclusive writer is themselves.

As might be expected, there are almost as many variations on the theme "the first time I read 'The Catcher in the Rye'" as there are copies of the book in print. And in that respect it isn't so dissimilar from how earlier generations must have remembered their initial encounters with the "Iliad" or "Hamlet" or "The Howdy-Doody Show." The difference is that, in the case of Salinger, we seem to have the insatiable urge to share with him our experience of his work.

So perhaps we shouldn't be surprised to find a Web site dedicated to correspondence with the man who gave us Holden Caulfield and the Glass family and who followed them with more than 30 years of silence. Nor should we be disappointed if it offers little new in the way of biography: That site and the book that comes out of it this month are, ironically enough, the truest portrait we'll likely ever have of Salinger.

He'll never write back, not to the name-brand authors who have contributed to "Letters to J.D. Salinger" -- Barry Gifford and Jim Harrison and George Plimpton -- nor to the dozens of anonymous others. That doesn't matter. Since he published his last book, Salinger has been alive, really, only in our imagination. By now, he can't tell us anything we don't already fundamentally know. If we honestly want to understand him, we need to read ourselves.

Of the few actual encounters with Salinger recalled in the book, the one thing all have in common is that they're utterly, wonderfully, mundane. The novelist Herbert Gold recounts in his letter to J.D. an actual exchange by mail they had back in the '60s, the closest we come to epistolary intimacy:

"Dear Mr. Salinger,
Some forty years ago, along with David Lloyd Stevenson, I was preparing an anthology that was published under the title, 'Stories of Modern America.' We requested permission from you to reprint one of your stories. You wrote a short note to deny us the privilege. Alas, your note seems to have disappeared ... But the mysterious last sentence ... is fixed in my memory. It read: 'I have my reasons.'"

Gold goes on, with his typically insightful wit, to ponder what reasons Salinger might have had, reasons the stoic author so obviously intended to persuade nobody but himself. ("Did your rejection of our offer mean," Gold asks, "that you wanted your story to be the only one in our anthology?") Yet the greater significance to this tale isn't what Salinger said, but rather that "the mysterious last sentence" hasn't after all these years been forgotten by Gold.

"I have my reasons" is memorable because, without telling us anything about Salinger, it expresses our image of him as succinctly as the perfect epigram -- or, better, epitaph. (After all, we've heard his last words. In every meaningful sense, Salinger is already gone.) "I have searched for clues to your disappearance," writes Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson, another "Letters" contributor. "When I first read 'The Catcher in the Rye' and 'Franny and Zooey' as a teenager, you had already stopped publishing more than three decades before. I figured you were dead." If over time she's modified her initial postmortem, it's but slightly: "I can't help but wondering why, for so many years, you've decided to play your music in the closet of your own making, leaving the rest of the world increasingly deaf."

I figured you were dead: The truth is that, when we speak of J.D. in the present tense, it's in the sense that we'd say "Ovid is the author of 'The Metamorphoses,'" or even, maybe, "Narcissus is the author of his own fate." It's the present tense of timelessness, not the immediacy of now. The character we call J.D. Salinger is literary, and our interpretation of it is our legacy.

Next Page: "Are you J.D. Salinger?"

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