Personal quests to know Salinger

Second Take

JD Salinger: The Escape Artist begins promisingly: its author, Thomas Beller, has located someone who has the original, unexpurgated manuscript of Ian Hamilton’s biography of J D Salinger.

Many will probably remember how Salinger took Hamilton to court because the biography included excerpts from Salinger’s letters. In Search of JD Salinger was the first biography that drew Salinger out of his silence and forced him, over and over again, to get combative as more new biographies began hitting bookshops. After his meeting with this unnamed manuscript holder who actually gifts(!) it to Beller for safekeeping, he promptly loses it; rather, it is misplaced in his apartment.

This precious cargo with letters by Salinger never seen by the public is gone even before Beller has had a chance to look at them. By the time he eventually finds the Hamilton manuscript, the book has lost all steam. I recalled that quite a while ago Beller had co-edited an anthology of essays on Salinger called With Love and Squalor. I got out the book from my shelf and began looking through it again.

The young contemporary writers who contributed here call themselves Salinger’s literary children, but stepchildren, I thought, would be closer to it. All but two of them sounded like disillusioned, ex-disciples of a guru they were once mesmerised by and about whom they now can’t wait to spill the beans. Most of the essays here have what Salinger once called, “the precise informality of underwear.”

The anthology’s aim was to “express their deep affection and deep frustration with Salinger.” The title is a nod, of course, to Esme and the book cover cleverly even looks like a Salinger novel you’ve never read!

To Salinger and his fans, nothing would be more desirable and appropriate than for writers to maintain that “enviable, golden silence” that Buddy Glass spoke of. But if there has to be a response to his work, it should now only be one of admiration. And though the writers in Love and Squalor claim they are concerned only with Salinger, the writer, and not the man (his sustained reclusiveness, the kind of father he was, etc), it is obvious, in the way most of them are eager to renounce him, how deeply they have been influenced by those memoirs. Which is why this sneaky tribute to him, shot through with ambiguity for its subject, seems really more like cashing in on a juicy book idea on the Salinger mystique than taking a fresh look at his work.

But the book is not without its charms. (No book on him, however grudging, can be without it). In The Trouble with Franny, Lucinda Rosenfeld adroitly mimes Salinger’s voice: “Of all the leading ladies of American literature who end up supine on sofas, nursing advanced cases of ennui, it is tortured young sophisticate, college sophomore, and former Whiz Kid, Franny Glass, curled up under an Afghan in her dippy vaudeville parents’ messy East Side Manhattan apartment, who made the most vivid impression on me growing up.”

Franny and Amy by Amy Sohn is not an essay but a neat, full-blown short story written in Salinger’s style about a girl called Amy who always carries Franny and Zooey in her little handbag.

The story asks: what happens to her when she meets another young man who claims to have read the book? Lovers of Franny and Zooey will read the opening with a wide grin: “Though pouring down rain, Thursday evening was parka weather, not slicker weather as it had been all week. 0f the seven wet hipsters waiting on the platform of the Lorimer Street Station for the Manhattan-bound train at 9.05 pm, not more than few were without woollen hats. Amy, in a long black coat, was one of these people. She sat down and pulled a small paperback book out of her handbag.”

In The Salinger Weather, Beller points out that “JD Salinger’s writing is like a certain kind of weather. The Salinger Weather is one in which there is a coat. You are either wearing it, or carrying it, or wishing you hadn’t brought it, or wondering if you should have. It requires pockets, secrets, privacy, a place where your hands can hide, touching a letter or some bit of memorabilia like a photo. It is heavy with the romance of absence.”

With the exception of Amy Sohn and Benjamin Anastas (and his terrific essay here, An Unexamined Life) most of the writers in this anthology have the cheek to pronounce Salinger’s prose variously as “failed poetry”, “brilliant writing steam rolling everything”, “original without being good”, “workmanlike”, “relentlessly middleclass and middlebrow” — while their own prose feels ungenerous and artless in comparison.


Beller escapes writing in any new way about Salinger by turning the narrative on himself: with no Hamilton manuscript at hand — which was to have been his rousing starting point — he falls back, for a starting point, on writing about his childhood in New York. Of the handful of new work on Salinger, The Escape Artist turns out to be that most unexpected of things: a boring book on J D Salinger.