Today is J. D. Salinger’s 90th birthday. Who's he?--you may ask. Younger generations may not be aware that he’s the most famous reclusive writer in the world, a man who retired to a small town in New Hampshire over half a century ago after wowing the literary world of the 1950s and 1960s with just a handful of revolutionary works of fiction: “Franny and Zooey”, “The Catcher in the Rye”, “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters”, “Seymour: An Introduction”, “Hapworth 16, 1924” and “Nine Stories”.

What student from the Baby Boomer generation hasn’t read J. D. Salinger? What dedicated reader of the mid-20th century wasn’t familiar with the travails of the fictional characters Seymour Glass and Holden Caulfield? In a chilling illustration of the power of Salinger’s words, Mark David Chapman, the mentally disturbed killer of John Lennon, became obsessed with Holden Caulfield and was found by police calmly reading a passage from “The Catcher in the Rye” just after he shot Lennon.

What is Salinger up to these days? After “Hapworth”, a short story in the form of a letter that occupied almost the entirety of a 1965 issue of “The New Yorker”, Salinger became increasingly reclusive and essentially disappeared from public view. Nobody knows for sure if he’s stopped writing or he’s stockpiling manuscripts either for publication after his death, or for burning when he feels he’s close to death. His former girlfriend Joyce Maynard, whose memoir of her bizarre life with him I’ve read, claims he has a number of unpublished manuscripts stashed away.

What kind of a father was he? Salinger’s daughter Margaret wrote affectingly of her difficult life as his daughter in her book “Dream Catcher: A Memoir”. It seems that he was much better at creating and caring about a fictional family, the Glasses, than he was at nurturing his own.

Was J. D. Salinger a stylist or a seer? Or a combination of both? Why did he disappear at the height of his literary fame? Was it because as a mystic and idealist, he was disgusted with the materialism of the world he found himself in? Nobody really knows the answers, but this article in “The New York Times” attempts to understand what J. D. Salinger is all about, and how his works have stood the test of time:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/31/books/31sali.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=salinger&st=cse&scp=2

There aren’t a lot of J. D. Salingers in the world. Whether that’s good or bad is debatable. But clearly, writers come in all shapes and sizes, temperaments and talents. Most of us want to be published, to be recognized, to get our message out. Whether that message is in the form of nonfiction or fiction, or both, is a decision only the writer can make.

Speaking of the choices writers make, I watched the Jeffery Brown interview with Peter Matthiessen on PBS’s “The NewsHour” the other evening. Matthiessen, an environmentalist, zen practitioner, world adventurer, human rights advocate, even (briefly) a CIA operative, started out as a journalist and nonfiction writer but always believed his true calling was as a novelist. He wrote the award-winning “The Snow Leopard”, about the search for this elusive animal in the Himalayas in 1978 that becomes a naturalistic as well as a spiritual adventure. I have on my bookshelf “Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969-1982”, a vivid record of his personal spiritual quest.

His latest book, “Shadow Country”, in contrast, is a fictionalized account of the life and times of a charismatic sugar planter in the Florida Everglades who was eventually killed by his neighbors.

The interview, which is in an expanded version on line, is worth a listen:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2008/12/conversation-peter-matthiessen.html

Lastly, I plan to devote my vegblogs for the foreseeable future to an exploration of the nature of writing, and why so many of us are driven to put down in words the ideas and the stories that rattle around our brains. In my next blog I’ll include a list of books on the art and craft of writing that have inspired me not to give up.