Salinger By David Shields and Shane Salerno, Simon & Schuster, 695 pages, £23
When J.D. Salinger died, aged 91, in January 2010, he had been famous for not wanting to be famous for the best part of 50 years. “The Catcher in the Rye”, published in 1951, had quickly made him an uneasy object of public fascination, though he wasn’t considered properly elusive until the early Sixties, when a spate of bad reviews triggered by “Franny and Zooey” coincided with biographical investigations by reporters from Newsweek, Time and Life.
The figure they unearthed — a tall man in a boiler suit who didn’t want journalists near his property in Cornish, New Hampshire — became an emblem of American reclusion when he stopped publishing new work in 1965. By the measure of book sales and cultural mystique, this arrangement worked quite well for him. But his evident rage and terror during ambushes by the press seemed to tell a different story.
In spite of Salinger’s prohibitions, a fair amount of information leaked out over the decades. In the Eighties Ian Hamilton pieced together the outline of his pre-seclusion life (the result has been republished by Faber), and though Salinger’s lawyers managed to have the first two versions of Hamilton’s book pulped, the legal battle made a sheaf of his letters consultable.
Later, memoirs by Salinger’s daughter, Margaret, and a former lover, Joyce Maynard, served up reams of material on his emotional failings.
His religious passions — Zen Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, mostly — and obsessions with raw foods, homoeopathy and the like didn’t go undocumented either. So after his death the main questions were: had he really, as claimed, been writing for all that time? If so, would we get to see the results? And would further biographical details help to explain his apparent transformation from wisecracking genius to embittered crank?
David Shields and Shane Salerno think they have the answers, and with regard to the first two questions it will be good news if they are right. Their claim — “verified by two independent and separate sources”, they say — is that there is a mass of unseen Salinger writings set to be published “in irregular instalments starting between 2015 and 2020”.
Better still, these aren’t limited to “a ‘manual’ of Vedanta” and five new stories, “saturated in the teachings of the Vedantic religion”, about the Glass family. We are promised a novel and a novella drawing on Salinger’s experiences in the war, plus an expanded body of fiction concerning Holden Caulfield.
Salinger’s literary executors — his son, Matthew, and third wife, Colleen O’Neill — haven’t issued a denial, though they have been frosty towards Shields and Salerno and generally seem to have a Salingerian policy towards intruders. (Thomas Beller, the author of a forthcoming biography, also got the cold shoulder.)
Still, it has to be said that this book doesn’t inspire confidence in the Salinger estate’s ability to carry out a master plan. Energetically researched and containing some notable scoops, it is non-Salingerian in spirit to an almost comical degree: over-emphatic, lurid, Hollywood-inflected and altogether the kind of production that the executors would surely have done better to pre-empt or co-opt.
It is also not so much an oral biography as a multimedia event, being “the official book” of a big-screen documentary directed by Salerno, the screenwriter of “Armageddon” and “Aliens vs Predator: Requiem”. A well-heeled Salinger nut, he is said to have thrown $2 million (Dh7.34 million) of his own money into the project when not working on an “Avatar” sequel with James Cameron.
Shields, an admired novelist turned nonfiction writer, has been brought on board to add some highbrow credentials as well as literary knowhow — with mixed results. From the start, it is clear that the story they want to tell has been shaped as much by dramatic beats (as they are known in the film business) as by a feeling for Salinger’s life.
It begins with an account of the D-Day landings designed to leave the reader in no doubt that there was this thing called the Second World War and that it was a big deal. Salinger took part in the landings and the book repeatedly pictures him wading ashore with the first six chapters of “Catcher” in his kitbag. But since his only direct account of these events runs, “I landed on Utah Beach on D-Day with the Fourth Division”, we are clobbered with endless imaginative quotations from military historians (“The men felt their muscles tighten as the word was whispered back that the coast was just ahead”) and non-Salingeresque paeans to the fighting spirit.
“Saving Private Caulfield” seems to be the aimed-for effect. Salinger’s beginnings as a half-Jewish prep school child from a posh Manhattan neighbourhood get less coverage, partly, perhaps, because they are less impactful than the Battle of the Bulge and the liberation of the Kaufering IV concentration camp, both of which are dealt with in greater depth.
To be fair, the emphasis on the war is in line with one of the book’s main arguments: that Salinger’s psychic difficulties were partly caused by his experiences of combat and the Holocaust. This isn’t a crazy notion, and it even makes sense to speak — as Shields and Salerno often do — of “Catcher” as a disguised war novel. But they want the idea to do too much. Salinger was in counterintelligence: that’s why he was secretive!
The landscape around Cornish looks a bit like the Hurtgen Forest! It doesn’t help that they insist on translating “battle fatigue” into “post-traumatic stress disorder”, a way of thinking about war damage that emerged only after Vietnam. Women provide the book’s other main key to what it terms, a bit weirdly, Salinger’s “death-dealing soul”. (Shields, in his frequent imaginative reveries on Salinger’s psychology, often sounds like a profiler going to work on Hannibal Lecter.)
Again the basic argument — that his emotional life was arrested — is hard to disagree with: until late in the day he was mostly interested in Ivy League undergraduates with literary ambitions and alarming little-girlish looks. The book is impressively nonjudgmental about all this but puts too much weight on a theory that Oona O’Neill, a socialite he dated before the war, “formatted him forever”.
Shields and Salerno have pulled off several coups, such as tracking down a former teenage lover previously known only as “J” and persuading her to go on the record. They have hoovered up startling gossip from earlier biographers — a story, for instance, that Salinger became infatuated with the actress who played Amanda Carrington in “Dynasty” — and supply an interesting perspective on the cult-like world of William Shawn’s New Yorker.
Against that, Shields’s musings often seem a little unhinged (he is big on the present tense and gnomic assurance, as in: “He’s learning to aim the gun at himself”) and there are some surprising critical voices in the mix: John Cusack, Ed Norton, Jake Gyllenhaal. The book relentlessly hypes its own claims. The “torrid love affair with a Gestapo agent” turns out to mean that Salinger might have suspected his Franco-German first wife of having been an informer, though there is no evidence that she was. He also spoke of being in telepathic contact with her.
The best parts of the book deal with Salinger only tangentially. These are the testimonies of the snappers, wily hacks and obsessed fans who, over the years, got a few words or images out of him. As well as introducing a range of vivid chancers, these inter-chapter episodes serve as a reminder that the Salinger myth was largely driven by the fame industry’s enjoyment of watching itself go to town on a refusenik.
Treat him as a riddle to be solved and you end up with a pretty commonplace figure: he probably wasn’t the only American man of his generation with bad memories of the war, a thing about co-eds, a selfish way with wives and children, grumpy spiritual yearnings and a dislike of being quizzed by strangers. The trick would be to explain the way such a guy once developed the ear for dialogue and control of tone that got us interested in the first place, but that is hard to do and affords limited opportunities for a killer montage.
–The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2013
