Damn People

David Shields and Shane Salerno’s Salinger is divided into four parts, the stages of life of Vedanta Hinduism: Apprenticeship, Householder Duties, Withdrawal from Society, and Renunciation of the World. It is imposing order on the extraordinary and complicated life of a writer who was largely self-taught; a father and husband who was only to be disturbed in his writing bunker if the house was on fire; a reclusive man whose fame made him irresistible to the young women with whom he corresponded and which attracted fans, seekers, journalists, photographers, and sycophants who were inclined to show little respect for his privacy; and a man who neither renounced his work nor the world, leaving behind a vault of fiction that continues the stories of the Caulfield and Glass families—his real children, so many interviewed for this oral biography claim (“How could his wife and children possibly compete with the Glasses, in all their doomed, fictional, idealized perfection?”)—a “manual” of Vedanta, and a WWII novel based on his marriage to his first wife Sylvie Welter. A half-Catholic, half-Jewish staff sergeant named Jerry marries a German woman who was an informant for the Gestapo reads like the fruits of karma worthy of a Salinger story.

The next to last chapter, “Jerome David Salinger: A Conclusion,” quotes from a letter: “I’m a condition, not a man,” and for the biographers the conditions were ten: from an undescended testicle to his relationship with Eugene O’Neill’s daughter Oona, for whom him he “carried a lifelong torch for a relationship that apparently was never consummated”; from his retreat to Cornish, New Hampshire, to his obsession “in his work, in his life, with girls on the cusp of their sexuality. … He wants to help them bloom, then he needs to blame them for blooming”; from the consolations of Vedanta “further away from the taint of the real” to his second marriage to Claire Douglas, a girl Salinger met at her boarding school when she was 16 and he was 31, and with whom Salinger “avoided sex except for procreation”; from his seclusion in his compound, a “recluse who liked to flirt with the public to remind him he was a recluse” and who “by being invisible to the public…could be everywhere in the public imagination” to his detachment from nearly everything but his work. “He is detached about your pain,” his daughter Margaret wrote, “but God knows he takes his own pain more seriously than cancer.”

It does not escape anyone’s notice his daughter sounds like her father and his most famous alter ego, who inspired five “assassins.” Shields and others make far too much of this. The most infamous assassin also had elaborate fantasies of hanging himself from the Golden Gate Bridge at rush hour, to maximize the spectacle, as unlike Holden Caulfield as shooting a musician. When Holden walks through Central Park to the Museum of Natural History, he remembers he “loved that damned museum,” because nothing—not the stuffed birds, the Eskimo fishing, or the deer drinking from a water hole—changes. “You could go there a hundred thousand times” and “the only thing that would be different would be you.” Assassinating a pubic figure is opposite of “Nobody’d be different.” Shields et al. acknowledge this at the same time they describe the assassins as being “under the influence” of Catcher in the Rye. And then Shields writes, “Maybe he [Salinger] felt found out. Maybe he thought Chapman and Hinckley had gotten the blood-soaked violence buried within the pages of his beautiful book…He never published another story…it’s difficult to believe Chapman and Hinckley weren’t forever standing guard at the gates of his imagination.” A near 700-page biography surrenders its entire structural motif in an instant: it wasn’t a religious obligation or duty, the withdrawal and renunciation of Vedanta Hinduism, “the most serious and long-lasting commitment of his life” that kept Salinger from publishing, but two “nitwit” sociopaths who had psychic x-ray superpowers to see into Holden Caulfield’s and Salinger’s murderous heart of darkness.

One can...