J.D. Salinger found the spiritual in his writings

THE great J.D. Salinger once flirted with the idea of moving to Tasmania. The famously reclusive author was attracted by its wild beauty and its “ultra-remoteness”.

But he soon reverted to type. Except for occasional trips abroad (he was especially fond of England and Scotland), he stayed put in Cornish, New Hampshire, where he’d moved after the success of The Catcher In The Rye and where last week, a month after his 91st birthday, he died.

Much of that time he spent at his desk. Writers have few disciplines, Salinger once remarked, but the ones they did have should be pretty near absolute. When I visited him in the late ’70s, he was still writing for long hours each day.

Writing was “what I’m cut out to do”, he said. As an army sergeant in Europe in 1944, he had carried a typewriter in his Jeep. But publishing no longer interested him.

Related Coverage Catcher in the Rye rights up for grabs The Australian, 7 Feb 2010 JD leaves a hole in TV talk-show schedules The Australian, 2 Feb 2010 A lifetime of celebrity from just one novel The Australian, 29 Jan 2010 Reclusive author’s death may be the open sesame to his secret hoard The Australian, 29 Jan 2010 It takes only one book to make an author a star The Australian, 29 Jan 2010

At the time I met him, Salinger was immersed in the teachings of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi (not to be confused, he pointed out, with the Maharishi of the Beatles). He would quote the yogi: “Effortless and choiceless awareness is our real nature.”

He also loved the poet-monks of Zen, especially the solitary Matsuo Basho: “The silence;/ The voice of the cicadas/ Penetrates the rocks.” I think writing had become for Salinger a spiritual practice, a fusion of yoga and Zen. The point was writing and only writing, not getting richer – and absolutely, categorically not getting any more famous.

Salinger’s reclusiveness seemed like a rejection of the world but it was only the fake and venal part of the world he abhorred – the calculating climbers and glib politicians, the clubby “joiners” and smug celebrities.

Salinger himself was neither an otherworldly wraith nor a po-faced zealot. He had long-term female companions (one of whom, Joyce Maynard, wrote a book about her affair with him). He chopped his own wood – it helped, he said, when he was searching for the right word.

He liked lemon pie, detective novels and a good joke. He introduced me to Celestial Seasonings teas, spiced “sticky buns” and the writings of Josephine Tey and his old friend Peter DeVries. Another close friend was S.J. Perelman, who wrote for the Marx Brothers; on my visit, Salinger screened A Night At The Opera and made us a huge bowl of popcorn.

He was a writer and a lover of words (and crosswords) but I think he saw his life as his most important work. He approached it as a goldsmith might approach a furnace, intent on shaping the metal of which he was made.

As to whether he succeeded, that is for God to know. But Salinger had a record of doing what he intended. His Holden Caulfield was a boy so repulsed by the fake and the phony that he resolved to go out west, “near the woods”, build “a little cabin somewhere with the dough I made”, and “pretend to be one of those deaf mutes. That way I wouldn’t have to have any goddam stupid useless conversations with anybody.”

Salinger, made rich and intolerably famous by his teenaged alter ego, moved to an undistinguished bungalow in the wooded back country of New Hampshire and spent a great deal of time in silence. When I met him, he was already going deaf.

The silence of death has made clear, though, how loud was his writerly voice.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/opinion/jd-salinger-found-the-spiritual -in-his-writings/story-e6frezz0-1225826069067