This Australian edition of Slawenski’s biography was published
shortly after J.D. Salinger’s death in 2010. Slawenski claims he took seven years to write
the book and is best known for his website DEAD CAULFIELDS dedicated to the
life and work of Salinger http://deadcaulfields.com/
He fleshes out in considerable detail Salinger’s professional
publishing career which ended prematurely with his last story ‘Hapworth 16
1924’ which appeared in The New Yorker
in 1965. Two short chapters ‘The Poetry of Silence’ and ‘Coming Through The
Rye’ inadequately cover the remaining forty-five years of his life.
It was particularly fascinating to read accounts of Salinger’s
involvement during World War 2 which took him to D-Day, the Hurtgen Forest, the
Battle of the Bulge and the freeing of the death camp at Dachau. But because
Salinger never directly commented on his harrowing war experiences Slawenski
fills the reader in with details of his infantry division’s deployment and
combines it with a detailed discussion of short stories that Salinger was
writing at the time. I was reminded in a way of Bill Bryson’s 2007 biography of Shakespeare http://www.billbryson.co.uk/books_shakespeare.html.
Despite Bryson’s extensive research he isn’t able to nail the voice of the man
because of the paucity of primary
material.
Slawenski’s account of Salinger’s ambition to be a writer
and of his remarkable early professional life is probably the most intriguing
in the book. The strongest aspect of this is his dealings with The New
Yorker, and how in 1947, after much struggle and rejection, he is finally
given a retainer and annual salary by the prestigious magazine for the
privilege of being the first to review
his stories for possible publication.
Salinger’s life-long pursuit to protect his privacy,
especially after the publication of Catcher
in the Rye (1951), makes it difficult for biographers to reveal Salinger’s
perspective on any significant event in his life. He rarely granted interviews
and he avoided at all costs in disclosing personal facts regardless of how
harmless they were.
Salinger was deeply suspicious of and had a healthy contempt
for publishers which grew in venom throughout his life. According to Salinger
they mangled his work in pursuit of their gluttonous profits and he ‘was never
satisfied with the financial portion he received from his publications.’
Of particular interest to me were Salinger’s attempts to
control all aspects of his books’ publication, including cover design,
publicity and reprints. He appears to have been an extremely pedantic and
quarrelsome man. Slawenski’s view is that Salinger fought for contract clauses
that granted final say over the narrowest details in regard his work so he
could protect its integrity. He chose innocuous covers and spurned publicity
launches because he didn’t want to appear smug. Salinger hated being a
celebrity and he felt tremendously relieved when the season of success over Catcher in the Rye waned: ‘It’s a
goddamn embarrassment, publishing. The poor boob who lets himself in for it
might as well walk down Madison Avenue with his pants down.'
I enjoyed immensely the descriptions of Salinger’s life in
Cornish, a small rural town in upstate New York. He moved there in 1953 to
escape the gaze of people and to start a new life with his second wife Clare
Douglas. He built a 'bunker' away from the
main home so he was able to find the isolation conducive to evoking the
spiritual revelation characteristic of his best work. Yet the striving for
perfection in his writing alienated him from his family and he became a
prisoner to his life's work.
I was particularly interested in finding out more about
Salinger’s life after 1965 and the reasons why he ceased publishing. Slawenski’s
view is that ‘Salinger did not deliberately choose to withdraw from the world’
that it was the media who drove Salinger into seclusion. He needed seclusion
for his art and his writing became his method of prayer: ‘His work had become a
holy obligation and he accepted that loneliness and seclusion might well be the
price it demanded for fulfillment.’ In a rare interview with the New York Times
in 1974 Salinger tried to explain why he no longer published, ‘There is a
marvelous peace in not publishing…I like to write…I love to write..But I write
just for myself and my own pleasure.’ It is rumored that Salinger left behind
fifteen previously unpublished novels in a secret vault, but none unfortunately,
have emerged as yet.
Slawenski provides a highly readable but limited account of
Salinger’s life. Because of Salinger’s obsession with secrecy perhaps many of
the gaps may never be filled. Slawenski writes from the point of view of an
adorning fan and tends to apologise or quickly quash discussion of some of
Salinger’s more outrageous or eccentric behaviors. I enjoyed the descriptions
of his literary career and family life, but there is far too much recount of
stories without sufficient depth of analysis.
