Amy Frykholm

In last week’s New Yorker, Lillian Ross writes a remembrance of J.D. Salinger, the infamously grumpy author of the classic The Catcher in the Rye. In the early 1960’s, Salinger holed up in Cornish, New Hampshire and started refusing both interviews and publishing. I’d always been struck by Salinger’s choice to walk away from the public door held wide open for him, his rejection of the authority granted to him by his success in writing the “great American novel” at a relatively young age. To be honest, the choice to refuse to be a public figure always seemed at least a little selfish to me.

Ross quotes Salinger twice in a way that offers a kind of explanation. “There are no writers anymore. Only book selling louts and big mouths,” she quotes him as saying. I admit this hits a little too close to home, as I have been thinking about how to “promote” my recently-finished biography of Julian of Norwich, but it gets at Salinger’s understanding of the nature of writing. Writing is essentially a private activity, one done by an internal impulse to express oneself, not as an act of self-promotion.

The other quotation is about reading. Salinger once encountered a Maytag salesman who quoted Ruskin to him. “God, how I love private readers,” Salinger reportedly wrote. “It’s what we all used to be.”

Salinger was nostalgic for reading and writing as primarily moments of private exchange. He imagined them emerging out of a solitude or an intimate community that he knew was essentially out of keeping with the contemporary world. Instead of writing for “himself and strangers” as Gertrude Stein famously put it, Salinger wrote for himself and friends. While Salinger no doubt found blogging appalling, is it, in an odd way, closer to his vision than traditional publishing?