Apart from his publications that ceased decades ago, Salinger has been getting his share of recently ignited posthumous attention after living out the last nearly half century of is life as a media endorsed "recluse," before dying at 91 this week.
For the past five decades he was a resident of Cornish, New Hampshire, a town touted for harboring its share of "reclusive" artists. Salinger got out and about—church suppers, book stores-- and maybe stayed home just as often, like many folks do in towns where the population is 1700 or there about. While his widow thanked the town for affording her husband "a place of awayness from the world," is that what makes a recluse? Who doesn't want some "awayness?"
Are not writers solitary creatures? Try writing productively in a crowd. Or at least while engaging with the crowd. Do not writers, perhaps, create believable and memorable characters because they observe more than they engage? And might not writers decide that writing for public consumption isn't what matters to them? So they stop. And might they tire of endless public evaluation of their work? And shouldn't they be granted this gracefully… no questions asked, or speculative magnifying glasses aimed their way?
Recluse? Is that what we call someone who once gave us good tales, and then stopped providing them for whatever reason? What about the other residents of Cornish? The…regular people. Were they recluses because they lived in a small town that afforded them privacy? And what is privacy anyway? Can you not be as private camouflaged on a crowded sidewalk in a city of 500,000 other souls to whom you don’t even raise an eye?
John David Salinger was a man, just a man. He wrote, and was published, and we read his stories and liked them or not. But now he's gone… leaving some of his words behind, and maybe, hopefully, many more hidden. Recluse. Who knows? Who cares? And what's the big deal anyway?
Salinger was who he was, and now he will now be redefined, many times, post death. He was a man, just a man. But we'll pull him back into the limelight now, poor guy.
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I hope to hell that when I do die somebody has the sense to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody. ~J. D. Salinger
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Comments
First, a thank you for the lovely picture and poem below ... Winter Sings ...
And thank you also for your words of wisdom on the business of what is a recluse ...
I suppose Salinger picked up that tag because 50 years ago he was fairly fussy about having a private life. How refreshing that he was not bouncing on Oprah's couch!
I very much appreciate your inclusion of Salinger's thoughts on being dead. I have been to Westminster Abbey a number of times in my life and I have always looked for the tombs and markers and memorials of those people who have changed my life. I've not left flowers, but I've pressed my hand onto a name more than a few times. I've also been up to Bloomsbury to sit on Virginia Woolf's front steps. Does Virginia, in her Heaven, give a hoot? Probably not. But something in me likes to say "Thank You" ... Which can be easier in a noted place. Better, of course, to be thrilled by the writer's words and his or her life in the comfort of your front room. Touching the spine of a much-loved book, rather than looking for doors and windows used by the great, and taking flowers to their bones.
It has snowed again in Northumbria ... I thought we might be past that. But, everything has a song if one but listens.
Cheers!
Ross
"And what's the big deal anyway?"
Wonder if anyone can answer that without sounding like a pompous arse?
I laughed at the quote and then thought, oh I do hope my loved ones come to put flowers on my stomach on a Sunday, but I'd like if better if I could say thank you.
Pauline: I hear you on the flowers, but it's really not that at all, is it? It's being able to communicate still. A grave puts you in a pretty "reclusive" position.