Salinger's Final Project
I originally broke this story in the comments section of Jon Sealy’s litblog, but now that the cat is out of the bag, it would be remiss of me not to share it with my own readers. This is just a summary of a larger report, the product of years of meticulous research and often difficult interviews with those close to the author. Here’s the scoop:
When he died, Salinger was working on a single 100,000-line epic poem about the assassination of Tupac Shakur, from the point of view of the ghost of the Notorious B.I.G., looking back after his own assassination the following year. The language is a dream-tongue of halfwords and fictional dialects. It is both beautiful and insane, and has permanently damaged everyone who has read it. Shortly after starting composition in 1998, Salinger began experiencing what he described as “fits of violent deja vu” in which the characters and situations he was writing about in the poem would suddenly appear as people and events in his own memory, tattoos and bullet scars suddenly appearing across his body where they had not previously been. It was as if he was remembering the story of his own life as a rough-and-tumble crack dealer from the heart of Brooklyn whose lyrical fire both propelled him to fame and sped him towards a grim, early death. It is Salinger, in fact, who can be heard rapping on Biggie’s posthumous “Born Again,” a secret that Sean Combs has guarded with a combination of legal threats and a private security force hired through the now-defunct Blackwater Consulting, which was formed in 1999 for the express purpose of obscuring Salinger’s involvement in the recording process. On completion of the poem, his “mad rhymes,” as he called them, Salinger has stated, “The ghost of Biggie descended on me through the ceiling like a plump meteorite, and I was suddenly aware of the perfect phatness of the universe.” It was then that Salinger, emotionally and physically spent from the act of creation, threw his arms into the air, palms up, and gesticulating wildly, raised high the roofbeams one last time. Now he was finished. Now he was ready to die.
Sat., Jan. 30, 2010
Reader Comments (5)
If only a copy of the poem could be released so that we all might be enlightened and driven insane.
So it's true, then; Pynchon really was Sallinger. That would explain the screaming.
Rumor is his estate has created a legal web more complex than Jarndyce and Jarndyce, so that we'll be bickering for generations about who has rights to what, and by the time the lawsuits are settled we'll all be dispassionate cyborgs more concerned with dismantling planets for new energy sources than in the works of some long-dead writer.
What if Salinger knew that, and wrote his final works FOR dispassionate cyborgs?
I heard Wes Anderson is writing a movie about Salinger composing this poem.