J. D. Salingers Love and SqualorBy JAY McINERNEYPublished: 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, Kenneth Slawenskis reverent new biography, which comes to us just a year after the writers death and creditably unearths and aggregates the facts and reads them into the fiction reanimating the corpse without quite making it sing.Enlarge This Image

Illustration by Paul Sahre; photographs by Antony di Gesu/San Diego Historical Society Hulton Archive Collection/Getty ImagesJ. D. SALINGERA LifeBy Kenneth SlawenskiIllustrated. 450 pp. Random House. $27.Enlarge This Image

Illustration by Paul Sahre and Erik Carter; photographs by Antony di Gesu, via San Diego Historical Society Hulton Archive Collection/Getty ImagesEnlarge This Image

Illustration by Paul Sahre and Erik Carter; photographs by Antony di Gesu, via San Diego Historical Society Hulton Archive Collection/Getty ImagesIf you really want to hear about it, whats missing and this is not necessarily Slawenskis fault is Salingers voice. I was tempted to say his inimitable voice, but of course its been imitated more often than that of any American writer, except possibly Salingers 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after beingstonewalled by Salinger and his small, tight circle of friends, Hamilton tracked down a great deal of unpublished correspondence and quoted extensively from Salingers letters and books.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a galley of the book reached Salinger, he called in the lawyers and demanded that Random House remove quotations of unpublished letters from the text.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 hed 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 cant help wondering if his heirs might have proved a little more relaxed about quotation. Margaret Salingers 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 Alexanders Salinger (1999), which was sympathetic but far from hagiographic. Slawenski is a fan, not to say a fanatic. For seven years hes run a Web site called Dead Caulfields, and in a maudlin introduction he reports on his anguish upon learning of his subjects 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.Slawenski seems to have uncovered the facts of Salingers lineage, about which the writer and his sister were in doubt. His mother, Miriam, ne Marie Jillich, was born in a small town in Iowa of German and Irish stock. Her fair skin and red hair seem to have given credence to the widely circulated idea that she was an Irish immigrant, which is what Salinger told his daughter. Marie changed her name to Miriam, after the sister of Moses, not long after she married Solomon Salinger, who managed a theater in Chicago before moving to New York to work as an importer of European meats and cheeses.Jerome David Salinger was born in New York City in 1919 and grew up in increasing prosperity in a nonsecular household that celebrated both Christmas and Passover. (Although, according to Margarets memoir, he celebrated his bar mitzvah shortly before learning he was only half Jewish.) In 1932, the family moved from the Upper West Side to the decidedly gentile Park Avenue, to the rambling apartment that would become the Glass family home in Franny and Zooey. Young Sonny, as he was known, went to camp, attended the McBurney School on the West Side before being expelled for poor grades, and eventually went to Valley Forge Military Academy, which years later transmogrified into Pencey Prep, the unhappy backdrop of Holden Caulfields adolescence. Slawenski judges that Salinger himself, after a rocky start, seems to have thrived at Valley Forge. Though not insensitive to the ubiquitous anti-Semitism in the period in which Salinger grew up an era when most Ivy League colleges had strict quotas limiting the number of Jews the author reveals no overt instances of it in the young Salingers life, although his sister, Doris, told her niece, I think he suffered terribly from anti-Semitism when he went away to military school.Salingers education after that was desultory: a semester at New York University and yet another at Ursinus, a small college in Pennsylvania. It was only when he enrolled in a short-story writing class at Columbia in 1939 that he found his calling under the tutelage of Whit Burnett, founder and editor of Story magazine. Salingers first published story, The Young Folks, appeared in Story shortly after his 21st birthday. Set at a young adult party in Manhattan, its a sketch more than a story, but Salingers deft use of dialogue and mastery of idiomatic speech are already on display.Jerry, as he was now called, decided to embark on a literary career instead of re-enrolling at Columbia, but his early triumph was followed by a string of rejections. Still, he found representation with Harold Ober Associates, the literary agency that also represented his idol, F. Scott Fitzgerald. (While Hemingway, whom he would later meet and correspond with, was an obvious influence, Salinger always held the author of Gatsby in higher regard. I was crazy about The Great Gatsby, Holden says. Old Gatsby. Old sport. That killed me.)Even as he struggled to find his voice, Salinger enjoyed social success with a fashionable group of debutantes that included Eugene ONeills daughter, Oona, who was 16 when she met the 22-year-old Salinger. Apparently, it wasnt her mind that captivated him. She was a blank, the daughter of a friend of Salingers said, but she was stunning in her beauty. Unfortunately, Slawenski, lacking the specifics, reaches for clichs: Catering to Oonas flamboyant tastes, he paraded down Fifth Avenue with her, dined at fine restaurants he could barely afford and spent evenings sipping cocktails at the glamorous Stork Club, where they socialized with movie stars and high-society celebrities in an atmosphere that must have made Salinger cringe. Which restaurants? Did they really socialize with movie stars, or just share the room with them? What was said? The speculative, conditional mode of the last phrase indicates just how little we know. Slawenskis brief sketch of Salingers postwar adventures in Greenwich Village is similarly hackneyed; his associates are labeled trendy artist types and in-vogue intellectuals.In October 1941, Salinger got the news that The New Yorker, which hed been deluging with submissions, had accepted his story Slight Rebellion Off Madison. The story marked the debut of Holden Caulfield, although its told in the third person rather than in the intimate first person of The Catcher in the Rye.Before The New Yorker published the story, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, after which the editors judged Holden and his whining about the Madison Avenue bus to be out of tune with the new public mood and suspended publication of Slight Rebellion indefinitely.For this reader, the great achievement of Slawenskis biography is its evocation of the horror of Salingers wartime experience. Despite Salingers reticence, Slawenski admirably retraces his movements and recreates the savage battles, the grueling marches and frozen bivouacs of Salingers war. Its hard to think of an American writer who had more combat experience. He landed on Utah Beach on D-Day. Slawenski reports that of the 3,080 members of Salingers regiment who landed with him on June 6, 1944, only 1,130 survived three weeks later. Then, when the 12th Infantry Regiment tried to take the swampy, labyrinthine Hrtgen Forest, in what proved to be a huge military blunder, the statistics were even more horrific. After reinforcement, of the original 3,080 regimental soldiers who went into Hrtgen, only 563 were left. Salinger escaped the deadly quagmire of Hrtgen just in time to fight in the Battle of the Bulge, and shortly thereafter, in 1945, participated in the liberation of Dachau. You could live a lifetime, he later told his daughter, and never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose.That July he checked himself into a hospital for treatment of what we would now recognize as post-traumatic stress disorder. In a letter to Hemingway, whom hed met at the Ritz bar shortly after the liberation of Paris, he wrote that hed been in an almost constant state of despondency. He would later allude to that experience in For Esm With Love and Squalor. Readers are left to imagine the horrors between the time that Sergeant X, stationed in Devon, England, meets Esm and her brother, Charles, two war orphans, and the time that Esms letter reaches him in Bavaria a year later, after he has suffered a nervous breakdown.It seems remarkable that this deeply ambitious writer, who continued to send stories to Ober from foxholes, chose not to write about his combat experience when he clearly had the material for a European-campaign version of The Naked and the Dead. From another angle Slawenski sees it this way his avoidance of the most dramatic material of his life suggests post-traumatic stress disorder.Salinger did write several stories about the war years, at least two of which could stand alongside those he eventually collected in Nine Stories. But with one exception, they took place on the home front, as is the case with Last Day of the Last Furlough and The Stranger, with its haunting echoes of Fitzgerald. Listen to Babe Gladwaller, home from the war, examining a pile of records:His mind began to hear the old Bakewell Howards rough, fine horn playing. Then he began to hear the music of the unrecoverable years . . . when all the dead boys in the 12th Regiment had been living and cutting in on other dead boys on lost dance floors: the years when no one who could dance worth a damn had ever heard of Cherbourg or St.-L, or Hrtgen Forest or Luxembourg.Only A Boy in France, a meditative story about a soldiers attempt to find a dry foxhole in which to sleep, takes place on the front lines, and Salinger chose not to reprint it. Slawenski claims that through his writings, he sought answers to the questions that his service experiences had exposed, questions of life and death, of God, of what we are to each other. Perhaps, though this list of concerns applies to any number of writers who never fired a shot in anger.The war hovers in the background of A Perfect Day for Bananafish, published in The New Yorker in January 1948, after Salinger spent a year revising it with the help of William Maxwell. After passing a day on the beach at a Florida hotel chatting with a bratty young girl and avoiding his wife, Seymour Glass blows his brains out with a pistol. The story opens with a conversation between Seymours wife, Muriel, and her mother, during which it is suggested that Seymours behavior has become erratic since he returned from the war. The precision of observation and the ear for dialogue are masterly; the ending is as abrupt as a car crash. Readers who arent baffled tend to attribute Seymours suicide to his wartime trauma although theres also a school of thought that blames his horrible wife.On the basis of that story Salinger was offered a first look contract with The New Yorker, although his relationship with the magazines editors under Harold Ross was difficult. They rejected several of his stories before publishing For Esm, the most hopeful and affirmative of his early stories, which elicited a raft of fan mail from readers. Also rejected was The Catcher in the Rye, which Salinger had completed in the fall of 1950, some nine years after Holden Caulfield was born in Slight Rebellion. In his letter, Gus Lobrano, Salingers editor, complained of writer-consciousness. The intimate, idiomatic, self-conscious first-person narrative of Catcher, many degrees warmer than the cool Flaubertian mode of his early New Yorker short stories, didnt fit the magazines standards of literary decorum.When The Catcher in the Rye was published by Little, Brown in 1951, the critical and popular reception was more favorable, although the reviews were much more mixed than Slawenski would have us believe. It was praised as unusually brilliant in The New York Times and soon appeared on the Times best-seller list, where it would remain for seven months. William Faulkner was a big fan. Despite its immediate success, its enormous impact on the culture was gradual and inexorable. Several years before Elvis or James Dean came along let alone the Beats or the Beatles Salinger practically invented teenage angst. Like Mark Twain, whom he mimicked in the opening line of The Catcher in the Rye, he injected a new slangy, colloquial tone into our literature. Like Huck, Holden would become an adolescent American icon.In 1974, John Updike remarked, J. D. Salinger wrote a masterpiece, The Catcher in the Rye, recommending that readers who enjoy a book call up the author; then he spent his next 20 years avoiding the telephone. But even before publication, Salinger was showing signs of the mania for privacy that would make him still more famous. He demanded his photograph be removed from the back jacket and decamped for England to avoid the hubbub of publication. There is ample testimony here that he was fiercely private, not to say paranoid, long before celebrity engulfed him. Though Slawenski never quite pronounces the diagnosis, it seems clear he suffered from clinical depression. Slawenski also offers a theoretical justification for his desire for privacy: his devotion to the Buddhist principle of transcending the ego. Shortly after his return to New York from the war, Salinger became absorbed in the study of Zen Buddhism and Catholic mysticism; later his interest would shift to Vedanta, a form of Eastern philosophy centered on the Hindu Vedas. His religious interests would profoundly color his life and his fiction after Catcher. (While Slawenski tends to see his religious pursuits evolving systematically, Margaret portrays him as a fickle cultist flitting from one spiritual fad to the next.)After The Catcher in the Rye, Slawenski proposes, the aim of Salingers ambition shifted and he devoted himself to crafting fiction embedded with religion, stories that exposed the spiritual emptiness inherent in American society. Slawenski gives sympathetic readings of Franny and Zooey, Salingers inaugural Glass family chronicles, with their curious amalgam of Christian and Eastern religious notes, in light of Salingers evolving beliefs.Whereas Holden had railed against phonies, Zooey Glass tells his sister Franny, who has suffered some sort of mental collapse, that even the terrible Professor Tupper is Christ himself. Everyone is Christ and, as in Buddhism, all is one. Maybe, although many of us believe that fiction is properly concerned with manyness, the particularities of identity, which Salinger once told his daughter are all Maya, or illusion. Despite its mysticism, Franny and Zooey was hugely popular when it was published in 1961, although critics, including Joan Didion and Updike, generally felt that Salinger, besotted with his self-contained, self-satisfied Glass family, was disappearing up his own omphalos. This was an impression that the final book-length installment of the Glass family chronicles, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour an Introduction, did nothing to dispel. Even the deeply sympathetic Slawenski seems disappointed by Hapworth 16, 1924, the interminable story that filled most of the June 19, 1965, New Yorker. Taking the form of an impossibly precocious letter from summer camp by 7-year-old Seymour Glass, it was Salingers last published work.Slawenski devotes a few short chapters to the last half of Salingers life, his self-imposed silent exile in Cornish, N.H. A girlfriend of mine who met him in the Dartmouth library in the mid-70s and subsequently had lunch with him told me that he talked mainly about his macrobiotic diet, holistic medicine and his garden. After he divorced Claire Douglas, his second wife, who was just 16 when they started dating, he conducted several affairs with young women, notably 18-year-old Joyce Maynard, whose memoir about her months in Cornish enraged the faithful and tended to confirm the suspicion that one would rather read Salinger than meet him. Salinger always told friends he was still writing, and its possible theres a trove of unpublished stories and novels, although readers of Hapworth, in which he seems to be talking to himself rather than to fans of The Catcher in the Rye, may wonder whether they wish to see it. J. D. Salinger: A Life leaves this and many other questions hanging. Though Slawenski adds to the record, Paul Alexanders biography is, to my mind, more dramatically vivid and psychologically astute.There will probably never be a definitive biography of Salinger, but our understanding will be modified by the actions of his executors and the release of unpublished material in the coming years. For the moment, at least, Holdens creator might take some satisfaction in knowing the extent to which his efforts to erase his own story have succeeded.Jay McInerney is the author of seven novels. His most recent book is How It Ended: New and Collected Stories.