Salinger's Working Methods

Colin (colin@cpink.demon.co.uk)
Thu, 07 Oct 1999 09:44:35 +0100 

In Alexander's biography of JDS there is an interesting section where he
quotes some of the statements Salinger had to make during the legal
hearings over the Hamilton biography.  At one point the lawyer for
Random House attempts to get Salinger to talk about his current writing:

Q       "Could you describe for me what works of fiction you have
written which have not been published?"

A       "It would be very difficult to do."

Q       "Have you written any full-length works of fiction during the
past twenty years which have not been published?"

A       "Could you frame that a different way?"  he asked.  Callagy [the
lawyer] asked Salinger what genre he was working in.

A       "It's very difficult to answer," Salinger said.  "I don't work
that way.  I just start writing fiction and see what happens to it."

Q       "Would you tell me what your literary efforts have been in the
field of fiction within the last twenty years?"

A       "Just a work of fiction, that's all.  That's the only
description I can really give it . . . I work with characters, and as
they develop, I just go on from there."

Apart from the fact that JDS is clearly trying to avoid saying anything,
not surprising in the circumstances, it does result in one of the few
statements by JDS about his writing.  And what he does say strikes me as
honest because it fits in very well with the whole drift of his later
writing.

When asked if he is writing a full-length work JDS has difficulty
because he doesn't say to himself I'm going to write a novel but just
writes and sees where it leads him.  Without the necessity to fill a
framework his prose tends to naturally result in a novella type length,
but each novella doesn't only stand on its own but is more or less
closely related to the others in the sequence so that together they make
a much longer work without the whole being a 'novel'.

But the most interesting point in the exchange is the last one where JDS
talks about the way in which he works, and this fits in very well with
the development in the successive Glass novellas.  '... I work with
characters, and as they develop, I just go on from there.'

In his Glass family fictions Salinger moves away from plot driven
stories to stories which are essentially an exploration of character.
It is this trend in his work which alienates some readers from his later
fiction.  If one wanted to characterise this as a vice one would say it
is the opposite of a writer who has 'flat' characters, Salinger's later
characters are so three dimensional, so well rounded that they inflate
to a proportion which leaves room for little else, like story, for
instance.  Salinger wants to make his fictional characters fully alive
in a way in which most writers don't because as well as creating fully
rounded characters most writers also want to (or have to) get on with
other things like telling a story, developing the plot, creating tension
etc.  

I enjoy that aspect of his later work and think it is a very interesting
and innovative development in writing.  A development which for some
reason hasn't been treated as an interesting formal development like the
innovations of Joyce and Beckett and Burroughs, but should be.  Some
readers still seem to complain that the Glass stories don't make a
traditional narrative when that isn't what JDS is attempting to do,
whereas they are less inclined to expect it from Joyce, Beckett etc.


I think there are some very interesting parallels between the later work
of JDS and Beckett's fiction.  Both writer's became increasingly
hermetic and self-referential as they went on.  Reading both writers
gives me the feeling that I'm inhabiting the mind of the writer in a way
which is different to the experience of reading most writers.  The
'action' takes place in the writer's head, where they, and we
(temporarily), are trapped.  Both writers are, in an important way,
creating solipsistic worlds which we can step into by reading their
fiction.  The significance of their fiction ultimately rests on how much
illumination their solipsistic worlds casts on 'the real world'.
-- 
Colin