The silence of the Rye

In her essay The Aesthetics of Silence, Susan Sontag claims silence “is the artist’s ultimate other-worldly gesture; by silence, he frees himself from servile bondage to the world, which appears as patron, client, audience, antagonist, arbiter and distorter of his work”.

Salinger’s silence is one of his most powerful artistic statements. “There is a marvellous peace in not publishing,” he once claimed. “I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.” He stopped publishing in 1965, retreating to an impenetrable New England compound.