Michael Greenberg in NYRB in 2010: ‘Salinger’s characters are like aspiring monks with no religion.’

And: ‘Attending a Broadway play starring the universally worshiped actors Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Holden remarks, “They were good, but they were too good.” The delivery of their lines was “supposed to be like people really talking and interrupting each other and all. The trouble was, it was too much like people talking and interrupting each other…. If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don’t watch it, you start showing off. And then you’re not as good any more.”’

And: ‘According to Salinger he continued to write about the Glass family during those years. He declined to publish these books (…) disgusted perhaps with the vagaries of “ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s,” as Franny put it.’

If you want to silence ego, disappear, disappear better.

(a sf 2168)