Letters to J. D. Salinger

Part One: Writers and Readers

PART ONE Writers & Readers "If only you'd remember before ever you sit down to write that you've been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read ifhe had his heart's choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself." - J. D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction Dear Salinger: All these salutes! Raise high the roof beams! Shoot the fireworks! Hardly a reader among our generation to whom Holden Caulfield didn't speak, even those of us for whom a prep school was a place we had scarcely heard of, let alone attended. And after fifty years his story still has the power to lead us along, the power of his voice. The most famous literary adolescent since Huck Finn old Holden was. Is. And if when we first read the book we responded mainly to certain resonances, the slurs against the feeling of youth, the affronts against the world's decorum, the maddening solitude of the misunderstood soul, the horror of hypocrisy, and the putting on of airs, and now when we reread it, after decades and decades of deep reading and deep living, neither of which activities is entirely free of pain, we see the underlying patterns, the initiation tale at work, the obstacles confronting our young hero with his signature red hunting cap turned backward singling him out in the crowd, the various labors he must perform in order to achieve completion of his mission, and how vexed most of his labors become, the tortured trial of sex, the quest for whisky, carrying "Little Shirley Beans" into the dark wood of Central Park only to drop and shatter it. A good book is one that you can read more than once and a great book may be one that you can read once in youth and once in middle age and then perhaps again in old age and find that it holds together for you. A few more decades and we may try it again, and if you're still around we'll probably send the laurel wreath. But let's leave analysis to the critics. I have a few dark words. At Rutgers, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, a few of us would-be writers once staked out the university library stacks where the New,Yorker magazine was stored, waiting for your latest stories to appear. It never occurred to us to buy the magazine. And when the issue with a new story of yours would arrive, we would stealthily razor out the pages and keep them for our own. We felt such an empathy for your fiction we believed that your stories belonged to us! To think now how sweet and stupid we were, cutting out the pages and cutting your audience from you! But decades and decades later some symmetry shows through. All these years that we've been waiting for new work from you. And what have you done but cut off your audience from new work? Taken a razor to time. Some of us are angry, maestro, and you may not care. But I'm here to vent. Talk about bad stewardships! You've cut us off from only you know how many thousands of pages of new fiction, pages which, unless you burn them yourself or mandate a bonfire at your demise, will eventually find their way into print. You must either be the happiest writer on earth, or the craziest! And I'm voting for the former, since at least one of us should benefit from this long silence. Alan Cheuse ... Alan Cheuse is the author ofa number of novels and story collections including The Light Possessed and Lost and Old Rivers. He is also a regular commentator on National Public Radio. He lives in Washington, D.C. 4 ... Dear 1. D. Salinger: First things first. How best to address you? Dear Mr. Salinger seems wrong, Dear Salinger presumptuous; I wouldn't write Dear Dostoevski or Dear Mr. Sterne. Your initials establish our distance already, your nickname or nicknames pretend to a friendship I alas can't claim. It's a little like the way that poet named himself, the one with two capitalized first letters...