Digging For Pearls In The New Salinger Biography

npr ^ | January 25, 2011

[JoeProBono]

.D. Salinger died a year ago this Thursday, and in time for that anniversary, there's a newly published biography called, simply, J.D. Salinger: A Life. Fresh Air's Book critic Maureen Corrigan says Salinger, no doubt, would have cringed at what Holden Caulfield calls "all that David Copperfield kind of crap" that biographies necessarily expose, but readers who revere Salinger will find a lot that's surprising in his early background. Here is her review.

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Here's Holden Caulfield at the beginning of The Catcher in the Rye uttering not only one of the most famous passages in that novel, but one of the most famous passages in all of world literature: "What really knocks me out" [says Holden] "is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."

Good thing, too, Holden! I would say because, chances are, if you did reach that beloved author, you'd be disappointed. Great writers pour their best selves into their books; in life, most are merely human. That truth was brought home to me yet again by Kenneth Slawenski's new biography of J.D. Salinger. As anecdote after anecdote in J.D. Salinger: A Life makes clear, it is a far, far better thing for readers to "meet" Holden Caulfield or Buddy Glass than it would have ever been for us to meet their strange, withdrawn creator.....

Buried within this sludge, however, are some genuine pearls. One revelation that is elaborated on throughout Slawenski's erratic biography is just how crucial Salinger's World War II experiences were to his later Zen Buddhism, as well as to his writing. Salinger served in an Army Counter Intelligence Corps. On D-Day, he landed on Utah Beach, then went on to fight in the Battle of the Bulge; toward the end of the war, he helped liberate a sub-camp of Dachau.

[JoeProBono]

[Bodleian_Girl]

I never got that book....

[muir_redwoods]

Salinger may not be the most over-rated writer in the English language but in the big list of over-rated writers, he’s way up on page one.

[boop]

Well I for one really liked it. I read it when I was about 13 after seeing it on “Lou Grant” as a banned book.

[Tainan]

I agree.
Ans, I think he knew that also. I have always viewed that his 'recluse-like' low profile life was his staying under the literary radar lest that be discovered and further explored.

[JoeProBono]

under the literary radar

[Mariner]

"I never got that book...."

I got about 1/3 of the way through it and after every paragraph I could hear a voice in my head saying: "Holden is a cry baby and a pu$$y".

very tedious and uninspiring.

[Tainan]

My point being that at during the time of his "fame" there were quite a number of other authors, Mailer, Vidal, Vonnegut, Baldwin, Bellows, Capote, Wolfe, Roth, etc. who were regulars on the "Cocktail/TV" circuit. Stories of their antics rivaled the literary contributions.
Salinger was not a participant in this public display. Personal insecurity is a possible reason for this. Possible I stress as I'm no student of Salinger, or the others beyond familiarity with their works. But I was a regular reader of Harpers, New Yorker magazine and NYTimes during the 60s, 70s and most of the 80s.
No real secret, even the issue you post is a story about his "life of recluse"...lol.

"salinger recluse" turns up 192,000 hits on google.

[SunkenCiv]

LOL!