Matt Salinger fancies himself the stalwart protector of his father’s legacy, which includes a tantalizing trove of unpublished manuscripts. But now that it’s clear that it may take 15 years or more before even one manuscript from J.D. Salinger’s safe gets published, Matt is looking less like a dutiful son and more like a paranoid miser.
J.D. Salinger’s four volumes were finally published in digital editions this month after Matt Salinger caved to market demand. “Things like e-books and audiobooks are tough, because he clearly didn’t want them,” the younger Salinger told the New York Times. Well, the Ten Commandments were originally published in stone format but adapting to newer technology did help the words get out. But Matt isn’t letting go of all those manuscripts he’s got under lock and key. He has confirmed the rumors that his father “kept writing for 50 years” (well, 45) after ceasing to publish with a New Yorker short story in 1965. There is a lot of material. He reckons it’ll take “five to seven” more until the manuscripts are fit to publish. In another interview, he says that he “hopes” the additional time needed will be less than 10 years.
So it will take 14 years, probably more, possibly a lot more to … edit J.D. Salinger’s remaining work? His entire book-publishing career lasted only 12 years, from the publication of The Catcher in the Rye in 1951 until he published his last book, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, in 1963. “We’re going as fast as we freaking can,” Matt reassured the Guardian.
I wonder what improvements Matt Salinger, who has dabbled in film and theatrical producing and starred in a little-seen 1990 film of Captain America, is making to J.D.’s work. Fixing punctuation? Giving things a brisk rewrite? More likely, Matt is being slowed by the fear and neurosis that gripped his father, who drank his own urine. What if the new material isn’t so well-received? A cascade effect might ensue. Louis Menand or Adam Gopnik might re-evaluate the previous work. They might even bring up Salinger’s peccadilloes, such as his fixations on very young women, which no longer earns the blithe dismissal it once did. The unpublished work “will definitely disappoint people that he wouldn’t care about,” Matt told the Guardian. I think he means the Gopniks and the Menands.
The unpublished trove contains more Glass family stories, and these are what excite the true devotee. Yet the last one we saw — “Hapworth 16, 1924” (1965), which was the author’s last New Yorker piece — broke the Salinger spell. It painted the 7-year-old zen master Seymour Glass with such a super-genius halo that the effect was ludicrous, and many said so. That reception seems to have stung Salinger into a moody silence that lasted 45 years. What if the subsequent works are equally shoddy?
You can see why Matt might consider reticence the better part of literary trusteeship, which he shares with Salinger’s third wife and widow, Colleen. As it is, Matt can bask in the glow of his father’s legend and live on comfy royalties. Why mess with a good thing? Why invite muddy-footed intruders into the parlor?
Yet a larger issue than Matt Salinger’s ease is at stake. Artists die over time. They get forgotten when one generation’s taste is not shared by the next. Salinger’s fans, heavily concentrated among Baby Boomers and Gen X, are old. Bringing out his unpublished material would be a way to renew interest, to keep the flame burning. It presents opportunity as well as risk.
Salinger was perhaps the single most beloved literary fiction writer of his era, but he is more vulnerable than most to erasure. Catcher is irretrievably dated. Its brand of adolescent angst and rebellion, which touched souls in two generations, falls flat today. It is an obvious candidate to be booted off high-school reading syllabi in favor of something more contemporary that is less hokey and more woke-y. Catcher’s destiny is the cultural landfill.
No reputation is imperishable. By keeping the drawbridge gates up, Matt Salinger thinks he is staving off attack by reappraisal. Instead he is inviting decay by neglect. By the time he releases his father’s work, the world may no longer care.
Kyle Smith is National Review’s critic-at-large.
