So, we must presume, the typescripts are still there piled up in the bunker in the woods, more likely to be novellas than full-scale novels — ‘I’m a dash man, not a miler,’ he said. The unpublished material may well be wonderful, for it is hard to see much falling off in his last published work. I agree with Slawenski that ‘his ability to draw the reader into his work, a manoeuvre whose gentleness seems to have been refined with each previous story, reached its summit in Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters’, a story which is as touching as anything by Chekhov and as funny as anything by Wodehouse. If ever Salinger’s children fall on hard times and choose to publish whatever is there, millions of fans will fall on every scrap. But it is also nice to think of that withheld treasure glowing quietly in the dark woods. Or of course there may be nothing there at all, which would be a good joke too.
The Catcher in the Rye remains the great American novel of the 20th century, just as Huckleberry Finn was the great American novel of the 19th. A recent poll of literary professionals voted Catcher the most influential book of its time, together with Camus’s The Outsider. Superficially, the two books might appear to share a common theme of alienation — the rebellion against phony bourgeois values etc — but Catcher has a lot more love in it and less estrangement.
Yet it is Salinger’s picaresque account of a couple of days in the life of an upper-class college drop-out which has had the greater fall-out. Catcher became the most banned book in the US. School boards tried to have it removed from classroom and library as fast as academics recommended it to their students. It was nearly 30 years after its publication that Mark David Chapman followed every step that Holden Caulfield takes in the novel before emptying five bullets into John Lennon in the old Dakota building. He claimed that he killed Lennon to prevent him from descending into phoniness, for his own good, as it were. Only a few months later, John Hinckley Jr took his copy of Catcher when he went to Washington to shoot President Reagan. How curious that this book should make some readers like me bark with laughter and feel marvellously carefree and happy, while it inspires others to go out and shoot people.
Slawenski tells us nothing about Salinger’s funeral, if there was one. He ends instead by describing how, when news of Salinger’s death broke, thousands of people, mostly young, took to YouTube to read out their favourite bits of his work, their voices alternately soaring and breaking as they read. I logged on to a couple of these jerky, smudgy little films. They are, to use the driest word I can think of, affecting. I rather felt like making one myself.
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