Coverage of JD Salinger's death implies it's more unusual to shun limelight than to be a literary genius, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE
WELL, THIS week it is JD Salinger. Despite appearances to the contrary I am not all that determined to revisit the collective adolescence of my generation. Last week’s column on the late Kate McGarrigle – and thanks for all the e-mails – was never meant to be the first in a long-running series. Nevertheless, this week it is JD Salinger.
But we will be concentrating more on JD Salinger the recluse, rather than JD Salinger the literary genius. The coverage of Salinger’s life and death seemed to imply that it is more unusual to be a recluse when you have the opportunity for publicity than it is to be a writer of genius. Even those of us currently reduced to reading the little booklets that accompany Ikea mattress insulators – Skydda Mjuk, impressive and delicately done – do not altogether believe this.
Salinger was a refusenik in the publicity wars. On Friday Jay McInerney said that Salinger had been the most influential American writer since Ernest Hemingway. He also said that Salinger, through his teenage narrator Holden Caulfield, had invented youth culture, years before Elvis or James Dean or the birth of rock’n’roll itself.
But the most interesting thing that McInerney said about the death of Salinger (91) was that he had been shocked by it because – and here I paraphrase – Salinger had been out of the public purview for so long that he had effectively died a long time ago. That Salinger had headed for New Hampshire in the 1950s and had never come back. That the extraordinary success of his first novel, The Catcher in the Rye, starring, as the young people would have it, Holden Caulfield, ruined his life in many ways.
Those of us with dim memories of normal life see things a bit differently. We see that The Catcher in the Ryecontinues to sell in its millions. And we believe that Salinger had a right to live
in privacy, in the days before Paris Hilton’s chihuahuas were born. Back when celebrity was not compulsory. Now privacy is called paranoia and the thought of some people enjoying it drives some people crazy, bringing forth both fury and contempt. But Salinger could not have known that when he started with the privacy thing.
Unfortunately for him, he went private just as the publicity industry was being born. As the decades rolled by a new attitude to fame grew around him in his seclusion, like the forest in Sleeping Beauty. Back in New York all talented and ambitious people acquired publicists to whom they would eagerly submit. In contrast Salinger became a sort of unicorn of celebrity; sightings of him were so rare as to be somehow magical.
Salinger had the money and the moxie to say no. The myth around him was such that both a former lover and an angry daughter published books detailing his private life. These works do not appear to have produced anything of lasting value, the most startling revelation being that Salinger ate frozen peas for breakfast, apparently. He had become obsessed with his health, they said. But, having died after a fall at the age of 91, and having been lucid until that time, JD Salinger seems to have had the last laugh on that one.
This is not to say that Salinger did not become a bit bonkers, or that he was a ray of sunshine for his friends and relatives. But the point is that his behaviour seems to have elicited a sort of resentment. And it wasn’t so much that he did not publish anything for 40 years as the fact that he failed to do any interviews that really annoyed people.
Journalists are strange about people doing interviews. Contrary to popular opinion and even to logic, we kind of despise people who are too eager for publicity. Groans go round the newsrooms of the world when certain celebrities hit the interview circuit.
At the same time there is a kind of grudging admiration for people who control the press’s access to them. Meryl Streep, for example, is universally praised for keeping her husband and kids out of the limelight. We regard that as classy.
Like any group of workers charged with servicing an insatiable machine we are somehow reassured by those who exist outside the system that absorbs us. The fact that Queen Elizabeth II never talks to the press is probably the reason that she, as opposed to the rest of her family, gets such good press in the UK.
So it wasn’t journalists who resented Salinger’s isolation. Rather – and this is understandable – it may have been other writers, who are lashed to the grindstone of publicity tours. Whatever, it was his rarity value as a celebrity who would not play ball that made him unusual, rather than the fact that he had written terrific books. Perhaps it is right after all to mourn the passing not just of a writer who outlived the affection and gratitude we owed him but of the last refusenik in the publicity wars. Now that’s sad.