Bookslut pointed me toward the Economist blog “More Intelligent Life,” where in a post titled “Salinger’s Spoiled Children” Bradley Freedman describes a friend’s pilgrimage to see JD Salinger and present him with a manifesto demanding more fiction. Freedman, as you can infer from the title of this post, disagrees with his friend’s impulse:
But instead of accepting Salinger’s published works as gifts, they sought his unpublished writings as their due, like ungrateful children. Surely art is not an obligation. It must always be a choice.
I don’t think their expectations are that far off the mark. And characterizing them as “ungrateful children” surely goes too far.
I think his friends believed, as I do, that art kept only for oneself is selfish. As human beings, we don’t exist in a vacuum, we exist in communities and societies that rightfully demand dues. It’s not an option to give those dues, it’s a duty.
Obligation to society comes in many forms. The most obvious one would be voting, at least in a democracy. Or caring for your children, or participating in the safety of your neighborhood. And for an artist, you need not only to write, but to share that writing. To do otherwise, such as hoarding manuscripts for five decades, is to be derelict in the artist’s duty.
Unfortunately, in American (Western?) society, “choice” has been elevated to the highest moral platform. As long as you have options, as long as your will or agency is primary, then that is above all the moral good. This is not only self-centered, it’s plain wrong. So when Freedman says that “[Art] must always be a choice,” he is essentially saying that the choice belonged to Salinger, that he had the right to choose or not to choose. But even as high as we’ve enthroned the Individual in Western thought, this is a false choice. We do not get the right to choose whether or not we contribute to society. We just have an obligation to contribute.
It must be said: Salinger failed in his responsibility to society. He most certainly did not have the “right” to withhold his writings from his devoted fans and from a free society that enable him to publish in the first place. Because of his solipsistic attitude, Salinger is the spoiled one, not those of us who requested more work from a master of fiction.
