J.D. Salinger's Safe

I remember the first time I read J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye.

"I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all."

I'm glad that Salinger never sold the movie rights to the book.

J.D. Salinger was approached all his life by producers, screenwriters, and actors (including Elia Kazan, Billy Wilder, Jack Nicholson, Leonardo di Caprio, and Jerry Lewis, who identified deeply with the book despite being decades too old to play the part). But Salinger obstinately refused to relinquish the rights to the novel. He explains his reasons in this 1957 letter to one Mr. Herbert: "The Catcher in the Rye is a very novelistic novel. … The weight of the book is in the narrator's voice, the non-stop peculiarities of it. … He can't legitimately be separated from his own first-person technique."

Certainly, it's true that the first obstacle facing a director would be capturing Holden's rambling, idiosyncratic, unmistakable voice, but wouldn't that be the case for any adaptation of a first-person novel? If you read on, Salinger's resistance to filming Catcher seems to reside somewhere deeper: "Holden Caulfield himself, in my undoubtedly super-biassed [sic] opinion, is essentially unactable. A Sensitive, Intelligent, Talented Young Actor in a Reversible Coat wouldn't nearly be enough. It would take someone with X to bring it off, and no very young man even if he has X quite knows what to do with it." Joyce Maynard, a writer who lived with Salinger for a year at the age of 18 and later published a memoir about their time together, has said that the only person who could satisfactorily play Holden would be Salinger himself. Indeed, in a letter written shortly after the book's publication, Salinger imagined a stage adaptation that would star the author himself as Holden and the child actress Margaret O'Brien as his little sister Phoebe Caulfield.

Holden isn't "unactable," but Salinger elevated the character to that status.

He protected the characters of his novel by never allowing anyone else to shape them. There's a lot of Holden in that move.

I can understand Salinger's decision, but it's not like The Catcher in the Rye couldn't have been made into a movie. Salinger just didn't want an actor to portray Holden. He was untouchable. That was Salinger's choice, albeit a rather unusual one. Fair enough.

Question: What's in Salinger's safe?

The death this week of J.D. Salinger ends one of literature's most mysterious lives and intensifies one of its greatest mysteries: Was the author of "The Catcher in the Rye" keeping a stack of finished, unpublished manuscripts in a safe in his house in Cornish, N.H? Are they masterpieces, curiosities or random scribbles?

And if there are publishable works, will the author's estate release them?

The Salinger camp isn't talking.

No comment, says his literary representative, Phyllis Westberg, of Harold Ober Associates Inc.

No plans for any new Salinger books, reports his publisher, Little, Brown & Co.

Marcia B. Paul, an attorney for Salinger when the author sued last year to stop publication of a "Catcher" sequel, would not get on the phone Thursday.

His son, Matt Salinger, referred questions about the safe to Westberg.

Stories about a possible Salinger trove have been around for a long time. In 1999, New Hampshire neighbor Jerry Burt said the author had told him years earlier that he had written at least 15 unpublished books kept locked in a safe at his home. A year earlier, author and former Salinger girlfriend Joyce Maynard had written that Salinger used to write daily and had at least two novels stored away.

...Author-editor Gordon Lish, who in the 1970s wrote an anonymous story that convinced some readers it was a Salinger original, said he was "certain" that good work was locked up in Cornish. Novelist Curtis Sittenfeld, frequently compared to Salinger because of her novel "Prep," was simply enjoying the adventure.

"I can't wait to find out!" she said. "In our age of shameless self-promotion, it's extraordinary, and kind of great, to think of someone really and truly writing for writing's sake."

...Margaret Salinger, the author's daughter, wrote in a memoir published in 2000 that J.D. Salinger had a precise filing system for his papers: A red mark meant the book could be released "as is," should the author die. A blue mark meant that the manuscript had to be edited.

"There is a marvelous peace in not publishing," J.D. Salinger told The New York Times in 1974. "Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure."

"Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy."

That raises an interesting question: Does Salinger's quest for privacy end at death?

If Salinger found peace in not publishing and writing just for himself and his own pleasure, it would be odd for his legacy to include a pile of manuscripts to be published.

If he was being honest about his love of writing for himself alone and the peace he experienced, why would he permit anyone to have access to his work after his death?

Then he never really was writing for himself in the first place.