The girl in possession of the one identified audio recording of late creator J.D. Salinger says she plans to have it cremated alongside her when she dies, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.

Then a reporter for the Baton Rouge Advocate, Betty Eppes managed to trace down the notoriously non-public creator at his residence in Cornish, New Hampshire, in 1980. Salinger hadn’t printed any new work since Catcher within the Rye, which got here out in 1965; he hadn’t given any interviews in a few years (whereas Bloomberg cites the final prior interview as occurring in 1953, he spoke with the New York Times in 1974). Eppes advised Bloomberg that she had been trying to land one of the crucial tough interviews doable and settled on Salinger over two competing candidates, Thomas Pynchon and brutal Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.

As Bloomberg famous, it’s solely comparatively lately in historic phrases that the general public is aware of what authors sound like—earlier than 1950 or so, authors had been reasonably unlikely to be recorded speaking, and even much less possible for these recordings to outlive. In one of the crucial well-known examples, no known recordings of Nineteen Eighty-Four creator George Orwell survive, reasonably inexplicably as he was a regular fixture on BBC Radio. It’s little shock that the identical is true of Salinger as a result of, though he lived till 2010, he was deluged by followers and media requests after the publication of Catcher within the Rye and reacted by retreating from celeb life as totally as doable.

Eppes had an attention-grabbing means round this. She misled him. Eppes advised Bloomberg that she had poked round speaking to locals in Cornish to determine the creator’s hangouts, in addition to handed on a letter to him by way of the put up workplace wherein she launched herself not as a reporter “but a novelist—tall, with green eyes and red-gold hair—who had no intention of ‘usurping any of your privacy.’” (One purpose the request could have gotten Salinger’s consideration: What creator Joyce Maynard described as his predatory behavior of grooming a lot youthful ladies in the literary field.)

In the letter, Eppes advised Bloomberg, she talked about a doable assembly location at a neighborhood procuring middle the following morning. Lo and behold, Salinger appeared and started speaking, though Eppes by no means knowledgeable him she had a hidden voice recorder:

Lo and behold, the 61-year-old Salinger confirmed up the following morning sporting denims, sneakers, and a shirt jacket. Eppes turned on the recorder and requested him if Holden Caulfield, his most well-known character, was ever going to develop up. “It’s all in the book,” he stated. She additionally requested about Salinger’s expertise in World War II, whether or not he was nonetheless writing, why he refused to publish any longer, and whether or not he believed within the American dream. “My own version of it, yes,” he stated.

In all, Eppes recorded 27 minutes’ value of dialog with Salinger earlier than a few of the locals came visiting and tried to shake his hand. Angry, he stormed off again residence.

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A model of the interview was published in the Paris Review in 1981, however the audio has by no means been publicly launched. Approaching an interview on this trend could be a fairly severe violation of journalistic ethics with out extraordinary circumstances, and this case doesn’t match the invoice. To her credit score, Eppes advised Bloomberg she feels fairly badly about the entire thing.

Eppes advised Bloomberg she had turned down a $500,000 provide from a “wealthy, interested foreign party” shortly after the publication of the Paris Review piece, and didn’t present any audio to director Shane Salerno for his 2013 documentary, Salinger: “In the years after I did that, I came to regret it, terribly, terribly. I have spent many, many, many, many hours a day thinking about this. And, of course, it means an awful lot to me.”

“Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night and I think, ‘I stole that. I stole his voice,’” Eppes added. “You know that’s like stealing somebody’s soul, right? That tape is not mine to give or sell.”

Bloomberg reported that in a follow-up name, Eppes confirmed that she is going to alter her will to make sure that the audiotape is cremated in her coffin after her demise. The recording itself is at the moment in a secure deposit field.