The Sound of Silence

Today is an anniversary of sorts. Can you guess what it is?

Okay, I'll give you a hint. It's a date in literary history. Does that help?

No?

Okay, I'll give you another hint. It's a date in American literary history. How about that?

Still stumped?

All right, I'll spill it. If you insist.

Today marks the 42nd anniversary of the issue of The New Yorker magazine containing the very last (to date) piece of original fiction ever published by J.D. Salinger.

The story, "Hapworth 16, 1924" ran in the June 19, 1965 issue of The New Yorker. It took up pages 32-113. Don't look for this story in bound copies of The New Yorker in public libraries (those pages have long since been ripped out of the magazine by frenzied Salinger fans), and if you'd like to buy a used copy of the issue online be prepared to feel it financially -- it sells for $359.00. To give a gauge of comparison, it would be cheaper to buy the first 80 years worth of issues of The New Yorker in electronic form than it would be to buy that one back issue.

In the 42 years since the publication of that story, rumors have been rife about what if anything Salinger might have been writing since. He is said to have a safe in which he keeps at least one manuscript to be published posthumously (and posthumously might be any time now -- Salinger is 88 years old).

But Salinger's protracted silence leads to a lot of interesting questions about writers and what, if anything, they owe what used to be called "their public" back when people still read books instead of crap. Does an author have an obligation to write and to publish? Or can an author like J.D. Salinger, having published one novel and 13 stories in book form in slightly more than a dozen years, just ride out the rest of his life without feeling any obligation to provide his readers (the ones who have, amazingly, allowed him to live in comfort on the royalties from such a skimpy output) with anything new?

After all, in the years since Salinger stopped publishing, the equally reclusive Thomas Pynchon has published five novels, some of them of nearly Victorian amplitude -- in fact, some people asserted that Pynchon was really Salinger publishing new work under a different name.

In my opinion Salinger is a victim of what I like to call Radical Freedom -- where you are so rich and so famous that the rules that govern ordinary human conduct don't seem to apply to you. We've seen Radical Freedom destroy such famous people as Howard Hughes, Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando, Michael Jackson and, possibly, Lindsay Lohan. When you have so much money that you have no obligation to be anywhere or to do anything so that you can, in theory, sit around and smear yourself with Ding-Dongs if you want to, some people will get seriously weird without any external compulsion to get unweird -- like a boss who can fire you or a landlord who can evict you. When you are totally insulated from the normal world your inner demons can become your daily life.

Something like that happened, I believe, to J.D. Salinger. I think that he came home from World War II with a severe case of what we now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and that in the ensuing decades he became more and more unhinged until he was pretty much incapable of writing anything that anyone else would want to read. There is evidence of this in Salinger's own writings, as well as the writings of his daughter and his one-time lover Joyce Maynard. So I strongly doubt that we're missing anything amazing from the pen (or typewriter, or word processor) of J.D. Salinger in the past 42 years.

But you never know -- he could always prove me wrong posthumously. And I doubt I would mind if he did.

Tom Moran