Re: Collecting Salinger
WILL HOCHMAN (hochman@uscolo.edu)
Mon, 12 Apr 1999 09:02:54 -0600 (MDT)
Jason makes a nice distinction between "publishing" stories on the list
and trading and sharing privately...
Quickly, here's some response:
I don't know all of why Mr. Salinger doesn't collect and publish his early
work but he seems to not want to. I agree that one value of these early
stories is that they do show a writer growing and testing characters,
families, poets, and many of the elements that we understand in his
pbulished bookes. There are other values (Ambrose Beers recently
foregrounds RAy Ford from one of my favorites, "The INverted Forest) in
the stories that make me think they are of interest and worthy of many
more readers but I don't see why we can't respect Salinger's desire to let
them be where they are...in the public domain in a variety of magazines
still available in your libraries and micro film data banks...
In his l974 NYTimes phone interview with Lacey Fosburgh, Salinger
responded to an attempt to bootleg his uncollected stories by saying:
"I wrote [those stories} a long time ago and I never had any intention of
publishing them. I wanted them to die a perfectly natural death."
"I'm not trying to hide the gaucheries of my youth, I just don't think
they're worthy of publishing."
Now I don't know if there's more to Salinger's thinking, especially with
him seeming to publish _Hapworth_ and now hesitating, but I do respect the
author doing what he thinks best with the work he has written. At least
while he's alive and on this planet, I don't see why we can't respect what
has given us--hurting Salinger with our human desires seems to mean we
haven't read the published books well enough to learn something about
basic respect and honesty...
Do you think Holden would publish a bootleg version of _Out of Africa_ ?
will