Salinger: a burger-lover in the rye | Kathryn Hughes
As JD Salinger would have recognised, his letters show that Great Writers are not great all the time
If you wanted to dream up a scenario to tickle a biographer's fancy, you couldn't do better than this week's announcement that a bundle of letters from JD Salinger has been deposited at the University of East Anglia. The American novelist, who died last year at the age of 91, was regularly described as "reclusive". This didn't mean that he lived in a log cabin, shot squirrels for lunch and shouted at anyone who came too close. "Reclusive" here means that he avoided literary parties, didn't give interviews and never popped up on television or in lecture halls rattling on about himself. Salinger was, then, what writers were once supposed to be: self-effacing, a bit mysterious, insistent that it was his work rather than his personality that mattered.
All of which explains why this batch of 50 letters, written to a British correspondent called Donald Hartog over a period of 20 years, is so tantalising. Salinger and Hartog had met before the war in Vienna. Some time in the 1950s they lost contact, as young men do, until 1986 when Hartog wrote to Salinger out of the blue, triggering a renewed correspondence that lasted until 2002.
There's one final piquant detail that rounds out what might be described as this biographical primal scene: these precious relics were left in a drawer until Hartog's children decided something Ought To Be Done with them. It's that "snatched from oblivion" tag that really gets professional literary snoops going.
So given the buildup it would be nice to report that concealed within these 50 typed letters and four hand-written postcards are the hidden wellsprings of Salinger's artistic genius, which included the 1951 classic The Catcher in the Rye. But in! fact, w hat emerges from this little archive is the bathetic realisation that Great Writers are not really all that Great most of the time. Salinger's letters to "Don", signed "Jerry", are full of the kinds of things that you, I or anyone might write to an old friend: the vegetable garden, who's going to win Wimbledon, and which high street chain does the best hamburgers. Capping it all is the revelation that during a 1989 visit to Britain "Jerry" was especially keen to visit Whipsnade Zoo. Whether it was the prospect of seeing the penguins or sampling a Cornetto that got him in such a delicious tizz remains unclear.
I'm not suggesting for a moment that JD Salinger was a disappointingly dull or silly man. Far from it. The fault, if it can be called that, lies in our pervasive cultural myth that letters are somehow a "deep" form of communication, bulletins from the most profound reaches of the soul. It's a myth that started, appropriately enough, in the Romantic age at the end of the 18th century and has lasted through to the age of email.
What is so peculiar is that we simultaneously know perfectly well from our own experience that, far from representing the last word on what we are feeling and thinking, letters are a kind of first draft report of wherever we happen to find ourselves in the moment. Moreover, each letter is a kind of performance, designed to achieve a particular effect. In our letters to the gas board we are terse; to a lover sweet; and to a child kind. And when it comes to writing to an old friend with whom we have nothing in common save a few months half a century ago, we either hark back to shared happiness (Jerry was fond of remembering an ice rink in Vienna where he and Don had slipped and skidded as young men) or search for subjects that will bind us together in the present: tennis, veg, the physical taxes of old age.
It is quite possible the evidence is ! not yet gathered in, nor will it ever be entirely that at the same as he was writing to Don about domestic trivia Jerry was also writing completely different kinds of letters to other correspondents. Salinger was famously fierce in his opinions on matters including his privacy, religion, the general rottenness of the literary establishment, cinema and, indeed, the fact that letters belonged in perpetuity to the person who wrote them no matter where they physically came to rest.
On this last point Salinger famously went to court in 1986 to block the writer Ian Hamilton from quoting from his letters in Hamilton's proposed biography, JD Salinger: A Writing Life. Salinger knew, in a way that the rest of us have not yet quite absorbed, that far from being the full picture of someone's personality, letters provide an angled glance, as distorting as those funhouse mirrors that you used to find at the end of piers.
In the circumstances, then, we should not be surprised or disappointed by the quotidian ordinariness of the JD Salinger letters deposited at UEA. Nor should we assume that this cheery companionable "Jerry" must now replace the grouchy, reclusive "Salinger" in our cultural imagination. The point is and Salinger would surely have been the first to recognise this that a person's letters can only ever tell a fraction of a story.
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