Life of a recluse
Lead review
A Life,’ by Kenneth Slawenski, is earnest, vigorously researched and revealing, without resorting to voyeuristic speculation, writes Michiko Kakutani.
The well-known dedication of J D Salinger’s Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction reads: “If there is an amateur reader still left in the world — or anybody who just reads and runs — I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children.”
The reclusive Salinger, who died two years ago at 91, seems to have found that ideal reader in his latest biographer, Kenneth Slawenski, founder of the fan site DeadCaulfields and now author of a new life of Salinger that is earnest, sympathetic and perceptive. This volume, J D Salinger: A Life, which draws liberally from Salinger’s letters and a memoir by his daughter, Margaret, is flawed by a tendency to assume direct correspondences between the author’s life and work.
And it retraces a lot of ground covered in earlier books by Ian Hamilton and Paul Alexander. Still, it does so without the sort of condescending and at times voyeuristic speculation that hobbled those earlier biographies, and it does an evocative job of tracing the evolution of Salinger’s work and thinking.
The Salinger who emerges from this book is a close psychological relative of his most famous creation, the teenager Holden Caulfield, and the whiz-kid Glass
children who would star in his later books. He’s the perennial outsider and spiritual pilgrim who feels stranded in a vulgar, materialistic world filled with hypocrites and bores.
Doted upon by a mother who “believed in his talent completely,” Slawenski says, the young Salinger “came to expect the same reaction from others and had little patience or consideration for those who might doubt him or not share his point of view.” This sense of specialness would later calcify into an impatience with other people, an inability to grow past Holden’s adolescent either/or view of the world, which would eventually crimp Salinger’s later fiction, rendering it increasingly solipsistic and judgmental.
Salinger’s experiences during World War II further heightened his sense of alienation. Slawenski writes that the war left Salinger with deep psychological scars, branding “every aspect” of his personality and reverberating through his writings. According to this biography, Salinger was hospitalised in 1945 for what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder.
A letter he earlier wrote to a friend indicated that on the day the German Army surrendered, Salinger was sitting on his bed, staring, in Slawenski’s words, “at a .45-caliber pistol clutched in his hands,” wondering what it would feel like if he were “to fire the gun through his left palm” — a scene that eerily anticipates the shocking ending of A Perfect Day for Bananafish.
Upon returning to New York, Slawenski writes, Salinger tried to resume a downtown version of the sophisticated Manhattan life he’d known before the war. He joined a small group of poker players that met every Thursday night in SoHo, dated a succession of young women and regularly went out to restaurants and clubs. Still, he had difficulty finding what Slawenski calls “a ‘normal’ place to fit in.”
His isolation was gradual. First, Slawenski says, he moved to Connecticut, and then in 1953 purchased 90 acres of hillside property in Cornish, a village in New Hampshire. By the time he married young Claire Douglas a couple of years later, he was leading an austere existence that revolved around writing, meditation and yoga — a life, in Slawenski’s words, “void of the phoniness and materialism” that Salinger had “repudiated in his writings.”
What caused Salinger’s withdrawal? No doubt his wartime experiences played a role in his growing sense of estrangement, and so did his religious beliefs. By late 1946, Slawenski writes, “Salinger had begun to study both Zen Buddhism and mystical Catholicism” and by the 1950s had embraced the teachings of the Indian mystic Sri Ramakrishna. Slawenski argues that “from the time he completed The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger maintained the philosophy that his work was the equivalent of spiritual meditation,” and that fame and fans and publicity fed the ego, rather than the spirit, and also “served to fracture his meditation.”
Woven in with this account of the long, strange journey that was Salinger’s life is an analysis of his fiction. Slawenski is not particularly concerned with assessing Salinger’s gifts as a writer: his uncanny ear for dialogue; his love of colloquial, idiomatic language; his ability to domesticate the stream of consciousness innovations of the great modernists.
Instead, Slawenski focusses on mapping the connections between the author’s life and art, and the recurring themes in his fiction, most notably what Slawenski calls his “vision of the world as being divided between the genuine and the phony, the enlightened and the insensitive, the Tyger and the Lamb.”
Whereas Salinger’s earliest tales tended to focus on “the shortcomings of others,” Slawenski writes, Salinger aligned himself “so closely with Holden Caulfield” (in the stories that would eventually evolve into The Catcher in the Rye) that it was as though he’d “cast his own spirit within the main character.”
He sees the Glass stories too as explorations of Salinger’s own “struggle to accept others and to recognise the goodness in the world.” As for Slawenski’s narrative of Salinger’s odd life, it is peppered with holes and unanswered questions, perhaps not surprising, given his subject’s extreme reticence and mania for privacy and the biographer’s dependence on secondary sources.
“Salinger expressed his depression through his characters,” Slawenski writes, but he granted certain of his characters, like Holden and Sergeant X in Esme, some hope, salvation, often found through human connection.” But while “the author often shared the sorrow of his characters,” Slawenski adds, “he rarely possessed their cures” himself.
