I have been a student of JD Salinger for a long time. I love his commitment to perfection. His word-squeezing. His ruthless refusal to bend his art to appease critics. His unrepentant belief in the existence of the precocious child; the reincarnated old soul.

Admittedly, some hero worship can be taken too far. Mohandas Gandhi took an enema every night. Good for him. I’ll be pro-peace with dirty pipes, thank you very much.

The Cult of Salinger is a topic all its own. Salinger knew a thing or two about cults. He joined almost every major cult movement you can name. Moonies. Scientology. Every frickin’ Yogi who ever opened a compound of over-hemped field workers dressed in organza. Jerry was there.

Sooner or later Jerry would buy his way into meeting the Grand Poobah of the cult and… that was that. Once he saw the cult leader as a fallible human being, Jerry lost interest and moved on.

And what do we learn from this? That Jerry was a nutjob? Maybe. More likely: Jerry was figuring out how cults work. Rule One: “Limit access to The Master.” He definitely learned that lesson. Contrary to popular belief, Jerry was not a recluse. He wasn’t a hermit. He had friends all over the world and traveled frequently. He puttered around Cornish, New Hampshire in an old WWII era Jeep. He loved to talk to people… Just not fans. Not unless you were a cute sixteen year old girl who radiated innocence and intelligence, but that’s another blog topic.

Nope.  He just did his thing, making sure to keep a safe buffer between his adoring worshipers and the reality of his fallibility.  Even after he went dark in 1965… for a host of reasons, many of which are laden with my own speculation regarding that sixteen-year-old girl thing mentioned in the previous paragraph and a documented “issue” with some local kids who were hanging out at his house.

In his daughter’s memoir, Dream Catcher, Margaret claimed that her father never stopped writing. He kept tomes of work stacked in a fireproof safe, color coded to let his estate know which ones to publish first upon his passing. Ostensibly, the rest of the Glass Family stories. Letters he wrote to his friends confirmed this wishful thinking.

Jerry being Jerry, this put me in the uncomfortable position of waiting for the Old Man to die so I could finally read his hoarded stuff. Die he did, January 27, 2010 at the age of 91. An ironic birthday present to me. Sigh. I was sad to hear he passed, but delighted at the prospect of FINALLY READING FIFTY YEARS WORTH OF LITERARY GENIUS.

That was three and a half years ago. Hey, Harold Ober and Associates, where are the fucking books?

Answer: Fucking Jerry fucked that up too, even posthumously. He left instructions to his estate (wife and son) to withhold publishing anything until after a cleansing period of time “so his fans wouldn’t dance on his grave.” Yeah. That’d be me he was talking about.  Bastard.  How long, I ask rhetorically? How long is this cleansing period?

One day after I stop caring, I guess. That would delight Jerry’s reincarnated ghost to no end.

Big PBS documentary scheduled to air this January.  Even the flippin’ documentary has been sitting on a shelf for four years, and it is being held for a cleansing period. Sheesh. WTF?

Jerry Salinger; the most famous guy you’ll never know about.

But hey. At least Plants Vs. Zombies 2 finally released today.  So I’ve got that goin’ for me.