Death of Salinger may unlock one of literature's great mysteries

In 1999, a neighbour made the sensational claim that Salinger was harbouring a treasure-trove of manuscripts to 15 unpublished novels.

FILE - In this 1951 file photo, J.D. Salinger, author of "The Catcher in the Rye", "Nine Stories", and "Franny and Zooey" is shown.  (AP Photo, file) *** Local Caption ***  NYET525_People_J.D._Salinger.jpg
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Ever since JD Salinger made his famous exit from the public eye in the mid-1960s, rumours have persisted that the author of The Catcher in the Rye was continuing to write. In 1999, a neighbour made the sensational claim that Salinger was harbouring a treasure-trove of manuscripts to 15 unpublished novels. Now, with the death of Salinger at 91, the attention of the world has turned again to the question of what exactly is in the locked vault at his New Hampshire home - and what will happen to it next.

Both Salinger's agent, Harold Ober, and his publisher, Little, Brown, have declined all comment. Their silence has only given fuel to speculation in the blogosphere and among literary journalists. After 45 years of silence, for Salinger to start publishing again would be a literary event of extraordinary proportions. What has he been doing, after all, for all these years? According to all the evidence we have, he has been writing.

"There is a marvellous peace in not publishing," Salinger told The New York Times in 1980. "I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure." Salinger's ex-lover Joyce Maynard - who after an exchange of letters had a year-long relationship with the writer in 1972, when she was 18 - recalled in a memoir of her time with him that every morning he wrote for two or three hours.

She said that by the time of their affair he had already completed two new novels. A decade ago, it was claimed that Salinger had an archive of something like 15 unpublished novels. In her 2000 memoir, Dream Catcher, his daughter, Margaret, claimed - this is especially intriguing in light of Salinger's claims to write only for himself - that Salinger had marked the manuscripts with colour-coded tags: "A red mark meant, if I die before I finish my work, publish this 'as is', blue meant publish but edit first, and so on."

Where is that archive now? Did those novels really exist? And if they did, do they still exist? To call this "the million dollar question" is the obvious figure of speech - but it substantially underestimates the value of a putative archive of unpublished Salinger. As literary discoveries go, it would make Nabokov's The Original of Laura look like small beer. But such an archive would carry another price. Salinger's reputation rests on a slim but very highly regarded body of work - The Catcher in the Rye, above all other things, but also the novella Franny and Zooey, and the short stories about Seymour Glass and his eccentric family.

To add 15 or more full novels to the canon would completely change the landscape of how he is understood as a writer. The process will take a long time - indeed, the process will have a direct effect on the way he is understood as a writer. Posthumous publication would become half the Salinger story. Would the estate rush to publish? Not if it wanted to maximise the quality of publication and of public attention and understanding - and, for that matter, its profitability.

The law of supply and demand applies - Salinger's stock has been bulled by scarcity. One a year might do nicely. The fascinating thing to see would be how or if he accommodated the modern age in his writing. Salinger's fictional world, for his readers, ranges between the 1940s and the 1960s. We know what the Philip Roth and Norman Mailers of the 2000s were like - what would a Salinger of the Noughties be like? This could be as disconcerting as bumping into a boyhood friend in an old folks' home.

We can't know what their quality will be like. We know that Salinger, in the days when he did publish, was intensely sensitive to criticism. The poor reception accorded his last published work, an 80-page novella published in The New Yorker in 1965, is regarded as having contributed to his decision to leave literary life. But criticism, or at least the reaction of readers real or imagined, can be an important part of the process.

Writers in isolation can produce something rich and unique. Emily Dickinson published only a couple of poems in her lifetime and, horrified by the feeling of exposure, never did so again. Yet the body of work discovered after her death is without peer. But it doesn't always work like that. The writer in isolation from a public - the writer with no reader in mind - risks retreating into mannerism, or worrying, like a dog with a bone, on a manuscript he never lets go.

We can only wait and see - praying, meanwhile, that no final Salingerian perversity, no deathbed bonfire, no binding stipulation in the will - deprives the public of the answer to one of the great literary riddles of the age. * The National