.J. D. Salinger’s Love and Squalor

By Jay McInerney
New York Times, February 10, 2011

J. D. Salinger spent the first third of his life trying to get noticed and the rest of it trying to disappear. He would have hated
“J. D. Salinger: A Life,” (Random House) Kenneth Slawenski’s reverent new biography, which comes to us just a year after the writer’s death and creditably unearths and aggregates the facts and reads them into the fiction — reanimating the corpse without quite making it sing.

If you really want to hear about it, what’s missing — and this is not necessarily Slawenski’s fault — is Salinger’s voice. I was tempted to say his inimitable voice, but of course it’s been imitated more often than that of any American writer, except possibly Salinger’s pal Hemingway, infiltrating the language of our literature and refertilizing the American vernacular from which it sprang.

Slawenski is handicapped in part by the legacy of Ian Hamilton, author of “In Search of J. D. Sal­inger” (1988). As Slawenski recounts, after being
stonewalled by Salinger and his small, tight circle of friends, Hamilton tracked down a great deal of unpublished correspondence and quoted extensively from Salinger’s letters and books. When a galley of the book reached Salinger, he called in the lawyers and demanded that Random House remove quotations of unpublished letters from the text. The initial district court ruling in favor of Random House and Hamilton was overturned on appeal — with major repercussions for American copyright law and with the immediate result that Hamilton was forced to paraphrase the letters he’d relied so heavily on. Slawenski is muzzled by that 1987 ruling and also by his fastidious interpretation of fair-use copyright law in regard to quoting from the fiction, limiting himself pretty much to short phrases. The bulk of the book was written when the litigious Salinger was still alive, but I can’t help wondering if his heirs might have proved a little more relaxed about quotation. Margaret Salinger’s memoir, “Dream Catcher” (2000), to which Sla­wenski is heavily indebted, quotes great swatches of the prose, but she may have presumed that even J. D. Salinger was loath to sue his own daughter.

The most comprehensive biography to date has been Paul Alexander’s “Salinger” (1999), which was sympathetic but far from hagiographic. Slawenski is a fan, not to say a fanatic. For seven years he’s run a Web site called Dead Caulfields, and in a maudlin introduction he reports on his anguish upon learning of his subject’s death. “The news stared me down from my in-box through the starkest, most ugly of headers. It read: Rest in Peace J. D. Salinger. . . . Impossibly, I fumbled for a sentiment that would match the man.” Readers looking for a balanced assessment may be inclined to stop here, where the page is virtually damp. Thankfully, the tone of the book itself is generally more measured.

Full review.