Jesse-Justin Cuevas, Staff Writer
Ideology: Liberal | Writing from: Brooklyn, NY

J.D. Salinger is my second favorite author, a man whose unpretentious bouquet of blooming parenthesis permanently graces the flesh of my forearm. When I heard the news of his death, I called a former coworker who shares my reverence of the American author.

“J.D.!” I cried into the phone as soon as she answered.

“I know,” she cooed, “But at least there will be lots of new stuff to read soon.”

Spoken like a true fan.

Though the prospect of reading, freshly, that iconic italicized conversation elates me beyond comprehension, I can’t help but doubt my entitlement to his meticulously stowed away manuscripts. Many recently published articles on the late author report that he kept and filed his writing to be published upon his death, but no official statement has been made about his yet unpublished works and their alleged publication.

After Franz Kafka’s death in 1924, Max Brod famously published his friend’s work despite the stipulations set forth in Kafka’s will. Brod consistently told Kafka that he would not burn the manuscripts, and he defends his decision in Kafka’s The Trial. “Franz should have appointed another executor if he had been absolutely and finally determined that his instructions should stand,” Brod wrote.

But Kafka’s reluctance to publish came from a very different place than Salinger’s, and Brod often reported that Kafka must have made him the literary executor deliberately, knowing that Brod would override Kafka’s will. Kafka wrote often about his tormented compulsion to write; he simultaneously hated and needed to write, and he usually hated the outcome. Salinger, on the other hand, wrote for his own private enjoyment. It was fame and celebrity that turned Salinger off to publication.

If, indeed, as Dave Eggers fantasizes, Salinger “continued to write for fifty years, finishing hundreds of stories and a handful of novels, all of which are polished and up to his standards and ready to go, and all of which he imagined would be found and published after his death,” then the Glass family devotees like myself will happily wait for the anthology to hit the bookshelves.

However, if Salinger, like Kafka, stipulated in his will the desire for his work to remain hidden, I may have a hard time wrapping my head around the breaching posthumous publication of his work. I would be lying if I said I wouldn’t read the stories, but certainly I would struggle with their publication.

To what extent can a man’s privacy expect to be honored after he is gone? How much control ought we have over his treasures?

When Leona Helmsley, an infamously tyrannical hotel operator and real estate investor, passed away in 2007, she scattered her fortune between a slew of mammals: family members and dogs. The bulk of her estate, now valued to be between five and eight billion dollars, went to the Helmsley Charitable Trust with specific instructions that the foundation be used to support the care and welfare of canines. Additionally, twelve million dollars was left to her Maltese, Trouble.

Less than a year after the reading of Helmsley’s will, a judge reduced Trouble’s outrageous inheritance to two million dollars. While I find her last wishes ostentatiously offensive, my reason tells me, respectfully, to keep my mouth shut. It was her money and her will (pun intended) to allocate her wealth as she pleased. Why should Helmsley’s already endowed family be any more entitled to twelve million more dollars than her dog? Both recipients ring ridiculous in my mind. Despite her nick name, New York City’s “Queen of Mean” should have been able to die in peace. Instead, Helmsley’s family has made a raucous over her net worth.

The same raucous could be made, and quite likely will be made depending on Salinger’s last will and testament, over Salinger’s theoretical unpublished works. If it was celebrity that Salinger avoided, then the case potentially could be made that publishing his written work would affect neither he nor his family’s publicity now that he’s gone.

Eggers alluded to the irrationality in Salinger’s resistance to publish, as he declares, a severe contradiction in authorship and non-publication. Eggers claimed that writing is inherently a social act because language, ultimately, was created to facilitate communication. “Writing books upon books without the intention of sharing them with people is a proposition full of contradictory impulses and goals. It’s like a gifted chef cooking incredible meals for forty years and never inviting anyone over to share them.”

I disagree. I was a dancer for the better half of my life, and I studied and performed with some of the world’s most renowned directors and choreographers. Now I refuse to dance in front of so much as a mirror, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy giving myself a Barre class in the privacy of my own home. I understand partaking in a passion for one’s private enjoyment despite the public nature of the activity. I think the things we truly love are as sanct to us as our religion, and as far as I’m concerned, the relationship between man and his god is a private one.

The consequential question to stay true to art or to its maker is inherently selfish on both sides. Although I was taught early on always to separate an author’s biography from his literature, I believe that sometimes the two must go hand in hand. The creative process is delicate and, arguably, infinite, and if Salinger wanted to take his with him to his grave, then so be it.