JD Salinger: A Life Raised High by Kenneth Slawenski
The Sunday Times review by Peter Kemp
Kenneth Slawenski’s choice of subtitle for his biography of JD Salinger — A Life Raised High — is a surprise. For his subject famously spent almost 60 years of his life lying low. Not long after publishing his first book, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), he quit New York for a remote village in New Hampshire where he secluded himself in a spartan cottage amid 90 acres of land. For the next half century or so, he lived there as if under siege, increasingly fortifying barriers between himself and the outside world. When the local newspaper printed an interview he’d supplied for a schoolgirl’s class project, he immediately erected a high fence around his property and withdrew behind it. Later, he built a subterranean tunnel to his garage. So thoroughgoing was his self-effacement that, when he died last month, just weeks after his 91st birthday, it was like the finale of a vanishing act.
Slawenski, a Salinger devotee who had just sent his biography of the celebrity recluse to his publisher, found himself urgently called upon to update it. Accelerated into print with swift additions, it has limitations. The writing can be awkward, and claims about Salinger’s work are often on the large side (“Today, Franny and Zooey is universally regarded as a masterpiece”). Slawenski’s industrious probings haven’t penetrated all of Fortress Salinger. The last 50 years of the writer’s life get just a handful of pages. Despite this, the book offers a welcome trove of information. Partly through exhaustive biographical research (especially into the early years) and partly through porings over almost unknown, uncollected stories, Slawenski enthrallingly illuminates what turned Salinger into an extraordinary literary phenomenon: an author who shunned not only publicity but publication.
His secrecy, it’s suggested, may have come from his “intensely private” parents. Their guardedness was reinforced by the anti-semitism of the period. A New York Jewish importer of cheeses and meat, Salinger’s father was sufficiently prosperous to install the family in a plush Park Avenue apartment. But when he wanted to enrol his son in Valley Forge Military Academy, he sent his Gentile wife along to the entrance interview, lest his own Jewish looks jeopardise the boy’s chances of acceptance.
As The Catcher in the Rye (where it features as Pencey Prep) derisively testifies, Valley Forge didn’t prove acceptable to Salinger. Nor did subsequent colleges. Former classmates regularly recall his sarcastic aloofness. How much this was a defence against anti-Jewish prejudice and how much part of his personality is hard to determine. But, either way, a taste for concealment persisted. Appropriately, when conscripted after Pearl Harbor, Salinger was steered towards counter-intelligence. Not that this meant he escaped combat. From Devon (where he set most of For Esmé — with Love and Squalor, his affecting story about war trauma), he took part in the D-Day landings. Carried with him through the bullets and bombardments of Utah beach was the manuscript of his work in progress, The Catcher in the Rye. It accompanied him during months of nightmarish fighting on the German border, and was with him when he witnessed the horrors of Dachau. After recuperating
from the nervous breakdown this brought on, he made a first, disastrous attempt to return to normal life. Marrying a German woman (for whom he obtained a forged French passport in order to evade military regulations), he took her back to New York where the marriage, which had lasted only eight months, collapsed.
Before the war, Salinger had frequented a Scott Fitzgerald-like milieu of nightclubs and glamorous socialites, about which he wrote Fitzgerald-like stories for the “slicks” (magazines such as Esquire and Collier’s Weekly). But his real goal was The New Yorker. His first piece to be accepted by it featured a mutinous adolescent, Holden Caulfield. Other stories about him followed, and eventually were worked together into The Catcher in the Rye, a triumphant tour de force because of Salinger’s inspired decision to combine a lively, vernacular voice (indebted to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn) with Fitzgerald-ish locations.
By the 1960s, the novel had achieved cult status as a classic of teenage alienation. Well before that, Salinger’s own alienation had removed him from the literary scene. Increasingly immersed in Zen Buddhism and Hindu mysticism (women he dated were surprised to be plied with volumes of oriental philosophy so he could “gauge their spirituality”), he began to withdraw from public gaze. Appalled publishers had already run into his intransigent resistance to promotion of his books. Editors encountered furious reactions to the slightest altering of his text (there was “hell to pay” over a comma inserted into one of his stories). Having come to regard writing as the equivalent of a religious exercise, he saw his works as almost literally holy writ (rave reviews of The Catcher in the Rye disgusted him because they responded to the book intellectually, not spiritually). A corresponding Zen notion that he should deploy his talent but not profit from it led to his resolve after 1965 to abstain from publication.
His stories revolving around Seymour Glass, a nudgingly named seer enjoying his third earthly incarnation in 20th-century America, had already given notice of this shift. But serene detachment proved hard to attain. Salinger’s second marriage, to a woman 15 years his junior, deteriorated into sour recrimination. Irked by her proximity, he constructed a bunker inside which he wrote, in the lotus position, for 16 or more hours a day. After their divorce, there were ill-fated affairs — most notoriously with the 35 years younger Joyce Maynard, who later belaboured him in an aggrieved memoir. Only a third marriage, to a woman 40 years his junior, seems to have brought him tranquillity.
Among rumours trickling out about Salinger (that he drank his urine and sat in an “orgone box” to boost his energies), the most attention-seizing is that he has left a cache of manuscripts in a safe or “a great vault”, or buried somewhere on his property. The race will now be on to unearth it. On the showing of this fascinated and fascinating biography, Slawenski should be to the forefront of the treasure hunt.
JD Salinger by Kenneth Slawenski
Pomona £20 pp480
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article7039540.ece
The Sunday Times review by Peter Kemp
Kenneth Slawenski’s choice of subtitle for his biography of JD Salinger — A Life Raised High — is a surprise. For his subject famously spent almost 60 years of his life lying low. Not long after publishing his first book, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), he quit New York for a remote village in New Hampshire where he secluded himself in a spartan cottage amid 90 acres of land. For the next half century or so, he lived there as if under siege, increasingly fortifying barriers between himself and the outside world. When the local newspaper printed an interview he’d supplied for a schoolgirl’s class project, he immediately erected a high fence around his property and withdrew behind it. Later, he built a subterranean tunnel to his garage. So thoroughgoing was his self-effacement that, when he died last month, just weeks after his 91st birthday, it was like the finale of a vanishing act.
Slawenski, a Salinger devotee who had just sent his biography of the celebrity recluse to his publisher, found himself urgently called upon to update it. Accelerated into print with swift additions, it has limitations. The writing can be awkward, and claims about Salinger’s work are often on the large side (“Today, Franny and Zooey is universally regarded as a masterpiece”). Slawenski’s industrious probings haven’t penetrated all of Fortress Salinger. The last 50 years of the writer’s life get just a handful of pages. Despite this, the book offers a welcome trove of information. Partly through exhaustive biographical research (especially into the early years) and partly through porings over almost unknown, uncollected stories, Slawenski enthrallingly illuminates what turned Salinger into an extraordinary literary phenomenon: an author who shunned not only publicity but publication.
His secrecy, it’s suggested, may have come from his “intensely private” parents. Their guardedness was reinforced by the anti-semitism of the period. A New York Jewish importer of cheeses and meat, Salinger’s father was sufficiently prosperous to install the family in a plush Park Avenue apartment. But when he wanted to enrol his son in Valley Forge Military Academy, he sent his Gentile wife along to the entrance interview, lest his own Jewish looks jeopardise the boy’s chances of acceptance.
As The Catcher in the Rye (where it features as Pencey Prep) derisively testifies, Valley Forge didn’t prove acceptable to Salinger. Nor did subsequent colleges. Former classmates regularly recall his sarcastic aloofness. How much this was a defence against anti-Jewish prejudice and how much part of his personality is hard to determine. But, either way, a taste for concealment persisted. Appropriately, when conscripted after Pearl Harbor, Salinger was steered towards counter-intelligence. Not that this meant he escaped combat. From Devon (where he set most of For Esmé — with Love and Squalor, his affecting story about war trauma), he took part in the D-Day landings. Carried with him through the bullets and bombardments of Utah beach was the manuscript of his work in progress, The Catcher in the Rye. It accompanied him during months of nightmarish fighting on the German border, and was with him when he witnessed the horrors of Dachau. After recuperating
from the nervous breakdown this brought on, he made a first, disastrous attempt to return to normal life. Marrying a German woman (for whom he obtained a forged French passport in order to evade military regulations), he took her back to New York where the marriage, which had lasted only eight months, collapsed.
Before the war, Salinger had frequented a Scott Fitzgerald-like milieu of nightclubs and glamorous socialites, about which he wrote Fitzgerald-like stories for the “slicks” (magazines such as Esquire and Collier’s Weekly). But his real goal was The New Yorker. His first piece to be accepted by it featured a mutinous adolescent, Holden Caulfield. Other stories about him followed, and eventually were worked together into The Catcher in the Rye, a triumphant tour de force because of Salinger’s inspired decision to combine a lively, vernacular voice (indebted to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn) with Fitzgerald-ish locations.
By the 1960s, the novel had achieved cult status as a classic of teenage alienation. Well before that, Salinger’s own alienation had removed him from the literary scene. Increasingly immersed in Zen Buddhism and Hindu mysticism (women he dated were surprised to be plied with volumes of oriental philosophy so he could “gauge their spirituality”), he began to withdraw from public gaze. Appalled publishers had already run into his intransigent resistance to promotion of his books. Editors encountered furious reactions to the slightest altering of his text (there was “hell to pay” over a comma inserted into one of his stories). Having come to regard writing as the equivalent of a religious exercise, he saw his works as almost literally holy writ (rave reviews of The Catcher in the Rye disgusted him because they responded to the book intellectually, not spiritually). A corresponding Zen notion that he should deploy his talent but not profit from it led to his resolve after 1965 to abstain from publication.
His stories revolving around Seymour Glass, a nudgingly named seer enjoying his third earthly incarnation in 20th-century America, had already given notice of this shift. But serene detachment proved hard to attain. Salinger’s second marriage, to a woman 15 years his junior, deteriorated into sour recrimination. Irked by her proximity, he constructed a bunker inside which he wrote, in the lotus position, for 16 or more hours a day. After their divorce, there were ill-fated affairs — most notoriously with the 35 years younger Joyce Maynard, who later belaboured him in an aggrieved memoir. Only a third marriage, to a woman 40 years his junior, seems to have brought him tranquillity.
Among rumours trickling out about Salinger (that he drank his urine and sat in an “orgone box” to boost his energies), the most attention-seizing is that he has left a cache of manuscripts in a safe or “a great vault”, or buried somewhere on his property. The race will now be on to unearth it. On the showing of this fascinated and fascinating biography, Slawenski should be to the forefront of the treasure hunt.
JD Salinger by Kenneth Slawenski
Pomona £20 pp480
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article7039540.ece
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