The following is the original English version of an article I wrote on the passing of the American writer J. D. Salinger.  The official edited Chinese version was published on Feb. 4 and can be found here. 

I interviewed Roger Lathbury about his interaction with Mr. Salinger in the 1990's, the last time he came close to publishing.  Mr. Lathbury is a professor of English literature at George Mason University and the owner of Orchises Press, a literary publishing house. 

---

“Salinger left of his own free will”

Editor-in-chief of Orchises Press Roger Lathbury remembers Salinger and the premature end of his publishing contract with him

Tim Hathaway (魏一帆)

It is perhaps one of life’s ironies that English language media are heaping praise, affection and attention as they mourn the death of J.D. Salinger, the one American literary legend who seemed to despise it most. 

He is being hailed in America as a “cultural hero” and “a saint to his upscale readers.” He was a recluse who had “an influential voice even in silence”

British media also lavished praise on Mr. Salinger, calling him a “literary colossus” and the creator of “counter culture,” a peculiarly American type of cultural rebellion against the norms of society which existed in both his literature and his life.  But as the Guardian noted, his death presents a dilemma for those who want to remember the writer.  “We cannot celebrate his life, because he gave us no life to celebrate.”

He remained in the privacy of his rural home in New Hampshire nearly two thirds of his life, shunning all media and public attention.  He is said to have ordered his publisher to burn all fan mail.  His attorneys were not allowed to answer questions about him. 

According to a statement by his literary agent, he died of natural causes on January 27 at his home.  He is survived by a wife and two children.  He was 91. 

Jerome David Salinger was born in 1919, the son of a Jewish father and Irish mother who raised him in an affluent section of New York City.  He went to a private high school but flunked out at 16 and was then sent to a military academy, which became the basis of his one and only novel The Catcher in the Rye. It was first published in 1951 and quickly made the best sellers lists.  Today it is on nearly all American high school required reading lists and sells 250,000 copies a year. 

He served in the Army in Europe during World War II in a counter-intelligence unit and was assigned to interrogating Nazi defectors.  He is said to have suffered a break down after witnessing particularly horrendous violence.  He wrote about the breakdown of a soldier in one of his most celebrated short stories “For Esme –– with Love and Squalor” which was part of his second book, Nine Stories, published in 1953.  This collection, which received higher praise from critics than Catcher in the Rye when it first came out, also includes short stories based on the Glass family, his most well known creation after Holden Caulfield, the main character of The Catcher in the Rye.  He published several other short stories, some of which were about this family, almost exclusively in The New Yorker, the last of which appeared in 1965.  He never published again. 

It was perhaps the desire for privacy that stirred people’s curiosity and fueled the desire to interact with a literary legend.  Countless journalists and fans would travel throughout his life to his town to try to catch a glimpse of him in a kind of game of cat and mouse, in which the mouse always won.  Very few photos were taken. Obituaries and remembrances of Mr. Salinger use a picture from 1951, the only photo he made available.  He also won several lawsuits to bar people from publishing his letters or old stories.  Most recently in 2009 he won a suit against a Swedish author to prohibit a sequel to The Catcher in the Rye.  

His rejection of popular attention is part and parcel of a counter cultural lifestyle that was embodied by the teenage character of Holden Caulfield.  After flunking out of high school, he went to New York to experience life, shunning the “phonies” of the world along the way as he sought a new spirituality, a new authenticity of which he was never quite sure he could find. 

Prolific novelist Stephen King called Salinger “the last of the great post-World War II American writers, and in Holden Caulfield –– maybe the greatest American boy-narrator since Huck Finn –– he created an authentic Voice of the Age: funny, anxious, at odds with himself, and badly lost.” 

“Salinger’s great, obsessive theme,” said American novelist Joyce Carol Oates, “was the moral rootlessness of contemporary American materialism and its corrosive effect upon precocious, highly sensitive children and adolescents whose religious yearnings were both esoteric (eastern, mystic) and sentimental (narcissistic, naively self regarding).”

Both Holden Caulfield and the Glass family presaged the spiritual rootlessness and searching of Americans in the second half of the last century but according to John Updike, the author was guilty of the same excesses as his characters. 

“Salinger loves the Glasses more than God loves them.  He loves them too exclusively.  Their invention has become a hermitage for him.  He loves them to the detriment of artistic moderation,” he said in a 1998 article in the New York Times Book Review. “Salinger’s conviction that our inner lives greatly matter peculiarly qualifies him to sing of an America where, for most of us, there seems little to do but to feel.”

Salinger’s daughter published a memoir in 2009 stating her feelings about growing up with her father, who married three times.  According to the Washington Post, Margaret Salinger said he preferred the characters in his literature to the real human beings in his life and was unable or unwilling to sustain close personal relations with anyone. “His search… led him increasingly to relations in two dimensions: with his fictional Glass family, or with living ‘pen pals’ he met in letters, which lasted until meeting in person when the three-dimensional, flesh and blood presence of them would… invariably sow the seeds of the relationship’s undoing.” 

Mr. Salinger’s son contradicted his sister’s version of their father, saying in a letter to the New York Observer that his sister had a “troubled mind” and he did not recognize the man in her book. 

In respect of Mr. Salinger’s wishes, his family, literary representatives, and friends have not spoken publicly about his death.  But the American media and literary world have been vociferous in their musings about what writings he left behind and if they will be published.

The last time he was tempted to publish was in the mid 1990’s when he replied to a query in the late 1980’s from Roger Lathbury, a professor of English literature at George Mason University and owner of the small literary publishing house Orchises Press.  He met him to discuss details of the book in 1996 and the two maintained correspondence for some time.  Mr Salinger decided not to publish the book and dissolved the relationship after discovering Mr. Lathbury had granted an interview to a small, local newspaper, which quickly became national news, an incident he never anticipated and says he regrets.

Mr. Lathbury participated in an email interview with Southern Weekly on January 29. 

SW: Please tell me in detail about the contact you had with Mr. Salinger.

RL: I wrote J.D. Salinger in 1988 about the possibility of publishing his story “Hapworth 16, 1924.” He sent a note saying he would think about it. Eight years later he decided to make contact. We had a lunch at the cafeteria in the National Gallery of Art in Washington and talked the deal over. His agent drew up a contract. Salinger returned home. We exchanged letters about the book, but then I gave (imprudently) an interview to a local newspaper that I thought would not be seen, and it started a flood of inquiries and publicity –– just what neither he nor I nor his agent wanted.

SW: Why do you think he chose your press and what prompted him to do it at that particular time?

RL: I can't answer about the time –– don't know. I suspect he picked my press because it produces what I hope are beautiful books (he checked this out, and I gave him some books when I saw him) and because it is relatively obscure. He in this way could both publish and not publish at the same time –– be a public figure and a private one at once.

SW: What was he like as a person?  And what was he like in his correspondence?

RL: He was, for being a private man, very open personally. He had an irrepressible sense of humor and self mockery (this came through in his letters) and he was quite candid, apparently. He had a wonderful smile –– a smile that suggested that you and he understood just a little more than anyone else why something was funny. He seemed not to be much of an egotist, but this may also have partly been a pose.

SW: How did his health look when you met him?  What impression did you have of his appearance?

RL: He was 75, tall, in good trim, and alert. He was, as he explained with some embarrassment, rather deaf, so I had to lean toward him and speak loudly, without being too obtrusive.

SW: After he learned about the interview you gave, did he call you to cancel the book plan or did he do it through his agent?

RL: The contract was written with an expiration date. When that was reached, the contract lapsed. He could have renewed it but did not do so.

SW: Do you think he was really a recluse?  Outside of yourself, what other people in the literary world did he meet?

RL: I know he met Wilfrid Sheed by accident. At lunch he told me that he regretted not answering a letter from Edmund Wilson, the eminent literary critic and friend of Scott Fitzgerald. He asked me about Matthew J. Burccoli, the Fitzgerald scholar. Since Bruccoli was a friend, I could answer him there. He had lunch sometimes with S. J. Perelman, the humorist. Perelman died, however, in 1979.

SW: What is your take on his relationship with the 18-year-old Ms. Maynard?  How did other people in literary circles react?

RL: I have not met Joyce Maynard and know nothing about her. My sense is that she is quite a handful. I believe that people in literary circles reacted to Maynard with a mixture of tolerance and well bred, but not obvious, disdain. This, however, is only based on things I have read. I did not read Ms. Maynard's book. I'm interested in literature more than gossip.

SW: Why do you think his privacy was so important to him?

RL: Salinger was like Holden Caulfield in his famous novel. He rejected the commercial, predatory, exploitive, unfeeling, money-lusting world. Holden Caulfield rejects it and can't stand that he can't erase the swear words from the walls of the world –– so he is shut up in an institution. Salinger left it of his own free will.

He disliked celebrity-hood for the same reason Holden Caulfield dislikes "phonies" who use words like "grand." It's pretense and narcissistic glorification.

SW: Please describe his place in the canon of American literature or more simply his contribution.

RL: He wrote one book that meant as much to readers as a book can; they lived it, adopted it, felt it spoke to them and for them –– they adopted some its attitudes and even mannerisms.  The Catcher in the Rye caught perfectly the zeitgeist of the late 1940’s and the 1950’s. It did so in its iconic figure of Holden Caulfield, who is in line with many other heroes in American literature, such as the "isolato" (Melville's word) narrator of Moby Dick, Ishmael, and, more relevantly, because the book is so close in its exciting language to The Catcher in the Rye, Huckleberry Finn in Mark Twain's 1885 book Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huck too rejects civilization and "lights out for the territory ahead of the rest."

For a while in the 1950’s every writer sounded like Salinger: early Philip Roth and John Updike, for instance. Sylvia Plath's 1963 novel, The Bell Jar is cut from Salinger's cloth.

SW: When The Catcher in the Rye first came out in the '50s, it was both embraced and feared.  What do you think caused such disparate reactions?

RL: Embraced by the youth who saw themselves in it, and, well, I wouldn't say "feared" though; "disapproved" might be closer. Disapproved because it amounts to wholesale rejection, almost like Tolstoy's, of ordinary middle class life. The only people who come off well in the novel are a few dead writers, a few dead friends of the narrator's, and children. To be forced to live in the grown up world is to fall away from purity and become a hypocrite, to compromise one's values.

But we all have to grow up. It's inevitable.

To his credit, Salinger in his later, perhaps less read books, finds an affirmation in non-logical, transcendent, elusive Eastern philosophy –– something like Zen Buddhism. You can see this shift in what to my mind is his best book, Nine Stories.  The first story has Seymour Glass, a married man with a sensibility close to Holden Caulfield's killing himself rather than live in a world of "spiritual tramps." The last story approvingly recounts the history of an eight year old genius / savant / seer named Teddy whose ideas derive from Indian philosophy.

SW: It is rumored that his late writings on the Glass family might be published. How significant would that be and what does that mean about the ever reclusive Mr. Salinger?

RL: Depends on what the writings are. No one knows what manuscripts have been saved or completed, but anything that further displays the thinking and talents of this most original American writer would be precious to many different kinds of people.
 

RSS 2.0 订阅本文。 对本文进行评论 返回之前浏览的页 返回洋人看中国