Ellopos Blog

Most writers seem to have accepted as natural and necessary some distinction between the wishes of their work and the everyday life: no matter how much Dickens loved David Copperfield, he did not expect to find him in every corner of London, on the contrary - but the contrary, no matter how painful, expressed also in the actual work, did not urge a complete denial of the direct daily life. The same must not be true about Salinger.

I understand Salinger’s retreat-in-the-world only or mainly as his excessive desire for the persons that he loved in his work, unable to tolerate even a little their absence from the nearby reality and the equally horrible, the dense ‘presence’ of an irrelevant life.

If this is true indeed, it must have had a decisive importance for Salinger’s creativity, minimizing its quantity. Therefore, I don’t expect us to find in his room the 1000 +1 masterpieces allegedly composed in secrecy all these years.

Salinger was not an artist. He used the relevant gifts that he had in order to think and realize as much as possible his experiences - but in his soul the life that he admired had a priority of absolute difference, not its artificial representations, which he was ready to stop any time, provided that he had that sublime life before him in flesh and blood, or because he could not have her, especially when his work went so far as to offer him the insights that he needed in order to keep with all of his forces within him what was missing from around him.

This does not mean that he had a hundred ideas for new novels, short stories and poems, bypassing them indifferently. The opposite is more likely, but what one would recklessly call ‘infertility’, as is said often for various authors that they ‘dried up’, already gave what they had to give, etc., can not be said in the case of Salinger, because he was not interested in writing 1000 + 1 masterpieces. He longed to meet with Holden Caulfield and the Glass family alive, not in the devises of an art that had exhausted its personal for himself importance and usefulness, so that even his retreat must have been a retreat in pain, not alleviated, even sickly, by his aversion for the life around him, but rather safeguarded because of that and intensified.

Precisely because his work had mainly the importance that exists when one talks with oneself, the importance of a monologue in hearing one’s thoughts and understanding them in a different manner, I would say that Salinger not only ignored a never-ending production, but that we can not exclude the possibility of his regretting even those few publications, just as one regrets the errors of an immature age. According to the quality of his consciousness, as I understand it, of course, reading his work amounted to a violation of his private life, and to a savage personal rape, when the reading was bad.

He left 91 years old, and if he lived as I believe that he lived, where the headlines see an eccentric famous writer, what really exists is a very slow torment.