Holden Caulfield, peacenik
DAVID Shield’s and Shane Salerno’s voluminous Salinger is at once deeply arresting, edifying, fascinating, and frustrating. On the surface it fulfills all of the requirements of a great biography. Its subject was talented, interesting, unique and a figure of global importance. His life and times are excavated with archeological care, and considerable bulk is added to an already muscular body of work (there have been at least two previous biographies, and reams of academia and gossip).
But this book left me ambivalent. I read J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye for the second time just last year (part of a strategy to introduce my kids to the great books). It was every bit as powerful as I remembered — a searing description of alienation and the loneliness and anger of not fitting in. More than 65 million copies have been sold. Almost all readers presumably had the about the same interpretation as I did. And yet the authors tell me in the introduction that no, we are all wrong, it’s really an anti-war book. This is the just the sort of over-analysed meta-interpretation designed to make the rest of us feel stupid and unqualified. And so I started off irritated, notwithstanding that the authors make a bold attempt to justify this interpretation about halfway through.
Salinger is long: 575 pages before notes. While the exhaustiveness of the interviews and other foraged sources are impressive, I would have preferred more brevity. The authors use the device of assembling a breathtaking number of comments in every chapter from hundreds of interviewees, sometimes interleaving snippets of Salinger’s short stories from the New Yorker and other magazines for context and colour. All this is intended to build up a high-resolution picture of the man, the artist and the world around him. Unfortunately not everything these commentators have to say is interesting or new. A judicious edit would have vastly increased its readability.
The book is the companion to the extremely well-received documentary of the same name (also made by the authors). It seems as though they have carefully composed and re-assembled every single piece of interview footage that was shot or sourced, and spliced it all into the written shards that make up the text. It feels edited, rather than written.
According to Salinger experts, this biography has broken much new ground in having unearthed more letters, comments, old writings, photographs and other personal arcana than any other. We learn that The Catcher in the Rye was six chapters old when its author landed in the second wave at D-Day. His war experiences — particularly seeing a satellite concentration camp near Buchenwald (Salinger was halfJewish) — are harrowingly described, and led to what the biography calls a nervous breakdown after the war, which contributed substantively to his later withdrawal from public life.
He finished his masterpiece in 1951 and saw its wildfire success grow large enough to crush him. Then he discovered a religion called Vedanta which essentially ended his engagement with the world until he died.
Salinger’s complexity as a personality, his affairs with inappropriately young women — including his first great love, a possibly unconsummated relationship with Oonah O’Neill, the fêted 16-year-old daughter of the Nobel Laureate Eugene O’Neill — and his withdrawal from the world are indeed the stuff of near-prurient curiosity for most who have been affected by his short, great book.
Notwithstanding my objections to its structure, Salinger must come with a strong recommendation. The author and artist aside, the commentary brings to life the times in which Salinger lived and wrote. What remains is a great biography’s first reward, a multi-dimensional, fully coloured and long-lasting rendering of one of the most important authors of the last century. —