So Much I Want to Tell You, Nowhere to Begin

I find I keep wanting to say things about the death of J.D. Salinger, his great writing, his enigmatic public/private life, his specter. Of course it’s sad, the way it’s sad anytime Buddy mentions Seymour. But it’s hard to get sentimental (or maybe it’s hard to be anything more than sentimental) about the passing of someone who kind of died 45 years ago; more than any other artist in this privacy-forsaken world, Salinger was the one for whom it truly was about the work—the work he showed you and the work he didn’t.

You can hope he found what he was looking for in his committed reclusion. You can speculate on his legacy, whether that one book will continue to overshadow the other three. You can feel reverence for the unvanquishable fascination of the Glass family. You can be grateful. You can even pretend to believe you know anything about his private life. But more than anything, you can begin to hope that Salinger’s death at 91 might mean that his vaults will finally be opened, and we’ll find out whether there really are reams and reams of unpublished works written in a decades-long stupor of anti-egoism, or whether he was really hiding from himself. Are there stories? Are there novels? Scribbles, sketches, notes? Or is there just a lot of half-cooked stuff that doesn’t live up to Franny and Zooey and he knew it and that’s why it never came out?

It has seemed for a long time that we’d never know. But now Jerome David Salinger is dead, so there’s at least a fighting chance that he’ll get to live a lot longer.