The Vanishing Act: When J.D. Salinger Walked Away from the World

on 06/19/1965 a novella called hapworth sixteen nineteen twenty four inches appeared in the new yorker written by jd salinger and then for the next forty five years nothing nothing at all it's an absolute full stop yeah last week we talked about people walking away at their peak but salinger's story feels different he didn't just walk away from the stage he he dismantled the stage burned the blueprints and salted the earth where it stood it was a vanishing so what pushed him to that i mean the catcher in the rye comes out in 1951 it's a phenomenon it's not an instant number one but it

builds and builds into this cultural atom bomb most writers would kill for that i think that's exactly it he didn't wanna kill for it and he felt like it was killing him the letters started pouring in people felt like holden caulfield was theirs which meant salinger was theirs teenagers would show up at his home in cornish new hampshire just wanting to talk to him oh wow so his private space was already being invaded completely and he hated it he saw the fame the celebrity as this grotesque distortion of the work itself the work was supposed to be the thing the only thing and suddenly he was the thing and he couldn't stand the person they

were turning him into so where's the snap there must have been a moment a final straw where he just decided done i don't think it was one snap i think it was a slow quiet hardening he published a few more glass family stories in the years after catcher but with each one you can feel him pulling back he started demanding that his author photo be removed from book jackets he rejected every film offer most famously for catcher right he thought it would be a disaster on screen a complete disaster he once said he could only see himself playing holden and he was too old it was his way of saying it was impossible the final break it was half worth it got savaged by the critics and i've always been obsessed with this idea that maybe he just thought fine you don't want it you can't have it you can't have any of it ever again and he just turned the lock okay so he turns the lock in 1965 he lives until 2010 that's

forty five years what does a man like j d salinger do for forty five years in self imposed exile he writes wait really he kept writing oh yeah every single day that's the part that gets me he didn't stop creating he just stopped sharing his daughter margaret wrote in her memoir that he had a vault a fireproof safe filled with manuscripts he had a meticulous system a red mark meant it could be published as is after his death a blue mark meant it needed editing so this whole disappearing act it wasn't like howard hughes descending into madness it was more like a monk entering a monastery exactly that's the perfect analogy the monastery was his

writing room he was protecting the ritual his life in cornish became this legend he'd go to the town dinner he'd buy groceries but if a stranger approached him he'd just turn and walk away he built a six and a half foot fence around his property he sued his biographer he sued an author who wrote a sequel to catcher his silence wasn't passive it was an actively fiercely defended territory so he was curating his own absence he was performing the role of the recluse i don't know if it was a performance i think it was just real he wanted to be left alone so he could do the only thing that mattered to him which was

arranging words on a page the world's applause or its hatred was just noise interfering with the signal but the silence created its own noise didn't it the mystery made him bigger it did and that's the beautiful tragic irony of it in his desperate attempt to disappear j d salinger became more famous more mythical than he ever was when he was publishing he created a void and the world rushed in to fill it with speculation and obsession so what happens to the manuscripts in the vault it's been over a decade since he passed that's the question isn't it his estate has said they will be published eventually over time but we're still waiting he spent

half his life building a fortress of quiet writing only for himself mhmm but now he's gone and we're all still outside the walls waiting for him to let us in you have to wonder if that was his final perfect joke to make us want it more than anything just by withholding it he got his silence but what did we lose