Jerry Salinger

 Seeing the film, Salinger (2013), on Sky Arts last week immediately prompted a retrospective.

The book that the film is based on, by Paul Alexander, arrived today while I was reading Zooey, having read Franny this morning. When I first read The Catcher in the Rye, it was almost at one sitting and several years later the same applied to Ian Hamilton's In Search of J.D. Salinger. Franny and Zooey today similarly zipped by. There is something compulsive about all of it.

There is a 'compare and contrast' to be made with the recent look at that other American maker of cult art, Phil Spector. Each specimen of genius strangeness has its own causes, it seems. I don't think there are rules or truisms to be diagnosed. On the face of it, while Spector had an inferiority complex and terrible insecurities, Salinger had 'liberated' a part of Dachau as part of his army service and had been packed up by Oona O'Neill in favour of the much older Charlie Chaplin, too, so some reclusive, difficult types are born to it but others have it thrust upon them.

No writer can escape being themselves and perhaps the more they try to escape the discomfort of self, the deeper they find themselves in it. It will be hoped by many of Salinger's devoted admirers, who might be mostly 'of a certain age' by now, that we will see the complete histories of the Glass family and Holden Caulfield that he is understood to have continued to write but we must be wary of hoping for too much.

The further an artist goes into themselves the more they risk losing of that thing that made them great in the first place.  Franny and Zooey was already heavier on the nervy repartee between Franny and her boyfriend and Zooey and his mother than Holden's recalcitrant attitude and suspicion of phonies ever was and Salinger in 1962 was on his way to Zen, renouncing the world he had seen through and indulging himself with his reclusiveness.

I can see so much good in it, though, like Franny's reasons for not wanting to be an actress mapping accurately onto my own reluctance to be a poet,

'I just quit, that's all,' Franny said. 'It started embarrassing me. I began to feel like such a nasty little ego maniac.'

like Zooey's reasons for not graduating,

I didn't want any degrees if all the ill-read literates and radio announcers and pedagogical dummies I  knew had them by the peck.

and how,

Seymour had already begun to believe ... that education by any name would smell as sweet, and maybe much sweeter, if it didn't begin with a quest for knowledge at all but with a quest, as Zen would put it, for no-knowledge.   

There's much to be said for leaving the difficult world behind by means of literature but it immediately becomes for its own sake and diminishes rapidly if it disdains the world. Franny and Zooey was moving in that direction, examining itself, prolix and extending inwardly and one can only imagine that the still unpublished Salinger only becomes more so. I still want to see it, though. I would like to see Twenty Two Stories, the bootleg edition of those early New Yorker pieces that he disowned but at £350, I don't want them badly enough until all my horses win on the same day and multiply their odds into more money than I have sense. 

Not everybody is convinced by the Salinger thing, and maybe he's not quite George Eliot, but some things shone so brightly once that they will never dim. The sort of things he was talking about through Holden Caulfield have hardly receded in the years since. It's either that or, given enough rope, even a genius will hang themselves. I think he's still in my Top 10 most thrilling writers.