Inheritances come in many forms, from the stately to the symbolic, along with every shape of heirloom that accumulates over a lifetime –I’m thinking of a relative’s vast collection of ceramic frogs. Then one day we are tasked to parse through these treasures with some semblance of decorum.
Among the least cumbersome, at least in appearance, are those legacies that come in writing. It’s not uncommon for an elderly member of the clan to leave behind an account of a significant event they lived through, or a narration of the family tree. Some people even get left a manuscript or two.
It’s a conundrum I’ve been faced with in the mildest degree: not enough to overflow a large bag. Yet anything left unpublished by a loved one presents its own possibilities and challenges. It may rekindle their voice when talking is no longer possible, but it can also represent a posthumous burden, weighed down by pangs of guilt for not knowing what to do with it.
That’s for normal circumstances. Now imagine the most extravagant of cases: you’ve been entrusted not with a tidy folder or two but half a century’s worth of unpublished materials, written by one of the most famous writers in the world; by someone, say, whose first novel is nearing 90 million copies sold. And in fulfilling that task, you’re standing in the way of decades-long anticipation. All the while, it’s very much your loved one you’re reading and trying to do right by.
That’s the task Matt Salinger has taken on since the passing of his father, writer J.D. Salinger, in 2010.
I spoke to Matt Salinger last year in Mexico, at the Guadalajara Book Fair, where he took part in a “Conversation with Youths,” during which he subtly suggested they read his father’s work beyond The Catcher in the Rye (he’s partial to Franny and Zooey). Few people will have a better grasp of the weight that befalls the child, no matter how old, who finds that filial duty, and in his case, the trappings of literary posterity, are added to the usual loss and strife. We discussed the expectations that have been with him for the decade and a half he’s spent immersed in all that his father continued to write.
As he admits, repeating a phrase he’s used before to stem the impatience, “My father wrote for 50 years, and didn’t publish, so there’s a lot of handwritten pages, a lot of typewritten pages.” So far, he said, he’s only been transcribing. “They’re on old manual typewriters that can’t be digitally scanned; they just don’t have the technology yet.”
What is left of a life made of words? An intimidating amount of work for the son he entrusted to take care of his papers.
“It’s been grueling,” he said, and he’s not referring only to his father. Claire Douglas, Matt’s mother, died in 2023, leaving her own intellectual legacy. “She was a Jungian analyst and wrote three books, a lot of papers, and book reviews. She left behind quite a number of filing cabinets of material,” which scholars are now eager to parse. “I needed it like a hole in the head,” he adds, recounting all that he is expected to bring to light. “Because I’m not finished with my father’s yet. And all of a sudden, I have these Jungian scholars calling me, asking about my mother’s archive and what I’m doing with it. And I said, well, hold on, you know, I’m not ready to tackle that.”
I’d known Matt’s work since childhood, years before I read his father, having seen him star in Captain America, the 1990 film where he portrays the comic book hero. Matt is an actor and producer of theater and film, and his passion for it is clearest when he mentions The Syringa Tree, the play written and performed by Pamela Gien, which tells the story of the love between two families, one black and one white, in apartheid South Africa.
“I produced it and worked on it for about four years,” he said. “We traveled all around the world with it. It’s beautiful. It’s heartbreaking. It’s true. It’s just an exceptional, epic story of love.” Yet along with this love of stories comes the knowledge of the difficulties of bringing them to light. “I love acting, I hate the business of it. I love the craft: acting is enormously challenging, fun, and interesting. I can’t compare myself to my father in many ways at all, but a little bit like me, he loved writing and he hated the business.” It’s a business Matt’s very much been plunged into.
As Janet Malcom wrote of the duties that writers leave in their wake, to their literary executors, there is the “effort from disentangling life…from legend, while tending its flame.” That is, being committed to the material left behind, wishing it to be well received, while not wanting to feed the narratives and grappling with all the wild theories that surround it. As Malcom added on Salinger senior himself, he had long become “a sort of public monument about which there was a lot of curiosity.” His decision to stop publishing in the mid-1960s was further grist for the mill of speculation about what he’d written since. His death spurred varied myths of treasures ripe for publication.
“What will be published is not what some biographers have promised,” Matt said. “There is this ridiculous biography which chest-thumpingly announced he wrote these five or six novels and that they’re going to come out, and even gave a date for when they were going to come out. Great! And then Harvey Weinstein made a movie of it…My father didn’t write any of those five or six novels. I mean, I’m not even sure he wrote one novel.”
That’s added to the well-known trappings of the public fascination with J.D. Salinger, as perceived by a family member.
“He was a great father and a lot of fun and very present, and, um, you know, I gradually became aware of his fame, and then sort of his cultural impact, and the way he was being mythologized in a kind of freaky way by the press, and the public, and even his ‘fans’ who just projected onto him all kinds of things that weren’t necessarily him” Matt said. He also remembers “reporters who would come by the house occasionally and knock on the door and I knew that was a little odd, and I knew that it would upset him when it happened so it became a sort of game of dodging them.”
But there’s also another side to spending time with all this material. It’s a chance to get reacquainted with that person amidst the landslide of everything else: “I do have a dialogue with him, and I’m really grateful for that, because he was a tremendously funny and intelligent man.”
And when he’s asked where his own vocation and love for stories come from, he has no doubts. “Both my mother and father were rabid readers,” he said. “It’s probably not a surprise that my father was, but my mother was, too. And they read to me when I was very little. My father would come up to the house after he had worked early in the morning. He had a little detached studio where he would write, and he’d come up and he’d tell me stories.
“There were three distinct storylines that he would tell me about, each involved different characters, and they were ongoing, they were serialized, and I begged for one of them. I think my love for stories originated there, with him telling them to me, and what could be better than a storyteller of the caliber of my father, having him all to myself when I was a little boy and his fertile imagination just riffing…”
Beyond all the pressure, the time alone with the manuscripts is time spent with his storytelling father: “I would say it’s been close to joyful, despite it being grueling, because it’s kept him alive for me. And I’m able to…I miss his voice tremendously. I miss his sort of contrarian, rock-solid views of the world. I could always depend on him to have a really frank, interesting, and usually wise take on things, and I miss that. But I’m finding it everywhere I look in the material that he left behind, unpublished.
“There are hundreds and hundreds of pages of beautiful writing, profound writing, hysterically funny writing, great dialogue, all the sort of raw nuggets that he mined from this vein that he was mining his whole life of the Glass family [the subject of two of his novels and various short stories]. So all that will be available to readers who loved his writing, and I think they will rejoice. But to those who were given false expectations of other jewel-like, perfectly polished finished works, they’re going to be sorely disappointed, and shame on those biographers who gave them false expectations. But I don’t want to say much about what it is, because I don’t want to affect the reader’s expectations myself. I want them to discover it.”
Photo: Wikimedia Commons, dust jacket of The Catcher in the Rye
 | A guest post by
|
This is absolutely amazing. Wow.