“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 cemetary. 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 has died. Have a favorite Salinger quote or passage? Leave it in the comments below.
6 responses
I personally have felt like Salinger just outdid every other writer ever since I read Franny & Zooey, Raise High the Roofbeams Carpenter & Seymour: An Introduction, and Hapworth 16 1924 (text is posted on my blog).
I feel like he could be the greatest American writer.
And of course, most importantly, he’s said that he’s been writing every day w/o publishing. That means 45 years of unpublished work. His daughter’s memoir described him having a shelf with a row of Glass family stories, all unpublished.
Who cares about The Original of Laura or the Pale King. Those are fragmentary novels. We are talking about potentially thousands of pages of completed, perfected Salinger, ready to descend on the literary world.
Unless he said to burn it all in his will.
From Salinger’s A Girl I Knew, “Probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. How well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn’t necessarily affect the transformation. She was there, and she was the whole city, and that’s that.”
As much as I want to read every last Glass story, I don’t think it’d honor his lifelong fight for privacy if those stories were released.
I like to think the Library of Alexandria still exists somewhere, too. That’s where the manuscripts should find their way, shelved right next to the lost Sophocles plays.
“Sleep tight, ya morons!” has always been my favorite Salinger line, and seems to say it all.
I take it that Salinger hoarded his work because he didn’t want to deal with the critical response and attentions of fame that come by publishing, especially for a figure such as him. Now that he’s dead, of course he needn’t be troubled by that anymore.
If he wanted his unpublished stories to never find an audience, I don’t see why he bothered to keep the manuscripts, polish his work, and even organize the volumes on a shelf. I hope to God that he didn’t instruct his heirs to burn it all. I think it would be a real crime against his legacy if the public never got to read the bulk of his life’s work.
“Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.â€
I think this really sums up everything I got from Catcher in the Rye. It is true, though. With the passage of time, you do miss everyone and everything – the good and the bad.
I think that if Salinger wanted all his manuscripts destroyed, I hope his estate follows through. That was his art that he made for himself. We have no right to it.
Salinger looked down on the world. They weren’t as clever or as smart as he was. They were beneath him. He wanted the recognition for his great talent so he published for a while, but then hated the fame that came along with it. So he retreated.
But I still love his writing and would love to read more. My sense is that if any new work comes out, Salinger will have instructed his estate to wait until the last moment before copyrights or whatever run out- be that in 50 or 75 years or whatever. That way he can be a dick to all the people that he despised- for one last time.
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