In Search of J. D. Salinger

A fascinating book. Says more about Hamilton than about Salinger but that's okay. A very interesting journey and, of course, the background to the court case which changed how scholars could use author's personal letters, documents, etc.

Felt like I was cheating reading this, but loved it all the same. I'll never grow tired of reading about one of my favourite authors.

In addition to writing one of the most popular and beloved novels of all time (The Catcher in the Rye) along with a few more high-profile books, J.D. Salinger had written stories for widely read pubs including the New Yorker and Esquire and The Saturday Evening Post.

Notice in all of that I did not say that J.D. Salinger wrote these things and then lock them away in a vault unseen, or allow them to be published only in the most obscure high school newspapers where they would be guaranteed to remain unread.

In other words, Salinger might have denied wanting fame and attention, but as Ian Hamilton shows in this biography time and again, his writing for high-profile publications was part of a conscious campaign by Salinger to have his work disseminated as far and wide as possible; to, in essence, be seen by as many as possible; to, in essence, become famous.

Salinger rather naively and unreasonably, in my opinion, wanted renown without the hassle of fame. And, for the most part, he negotiated that state of being very successfully. Time, the New York Post and hundreds of other fans, reporters and organizations tried over the decades to penetrate the elusive author's secretive world and score the scoop interview only to be decisively rebuffed at every turn. During his lifetime, Salinger was as much a master of deception, disinformation and secrecy as he was an author, so much so that his network of friends and acquaintances became a stone wall of silence whenever "outsiders" dared to ask anything about him. Knowing that reprisals would follow (Salinger would cut them off from what must have seemed the most exclusive friendship club in the world) the friends remained mum. This networked barrier was a masterstroke and a great example of psychological manipulation. Ironically, this was an author who withdrew from the world to get away from its "phonies"--to quote his partial alter ego and hero of ...Rye, Holden Caulfield--and yet he maintained relations with people who were not free to say what they wanted in order to remain one of his lapdog hangers-on. He obviously failed to see their phoniness, or the irony in his acceptance of that.

It is thus probably no surprise to learn that Salinger very likely had worked for the American intelligence corps in World War II, as Hamilton reveals persuasively from the evidence. We learn a lot, in fact, about the late Mr. S. from Ian Hamilton's dogged investigation into a life that, if not particularly earthshaking, was at least more than interesting enough to warrant a biography, and not just a life-story but one that authoritatively shows the links between the characters in Salinger's fiction and their likely real-life sources, inspirations and counterparts. Hamilton knows his Salinger inside and out, and his readings of the texts and speculations on the likely parallels between what's in the stories and how they related to Salinger's real life are provocative and insightful.

Given how little information existed in the public record about Salinger, it's quite remarkable just how much information Hamilton was able to glean from letters and other previously untapped sources. This is a good biography by any standard, and doubly remarkable in view of what a tough nut to crack was this subject.

I don't know what, if anything, has been rattled loose from the cobwebs or the zip-lipped compadres of Salinger since his death in January 2010 to give us any more insight about him apropos his decades of privacy and what was going on therein. Hamilton wrote and published this in the 1980s, well before Salinger's death but long after the author had disappeared from public view in the 1950s and after his last published work in 1965, and I know of nothing since that has as successfully managed to render corporeal someone as wispy and elusive as this phantom.

The effort reminded me a lot of a 1980s documentary about Marlene Dietrich called Marlene in which the actor-director Maximillian Schell attempted to interview the reclusive star on camera for the first time in decades but was rebuffed by her after an agreement to make the film, necessitating Schell's brilliant lemonade-from-lemons strategy of reconstructing her apartment from memory as the film's set, then superimposing tempestuous tape-recorded phone interviews with Dietrich over images of the reconstructed abode, thus giving the viewer as much or more insight into the combative star as would have been achieved in a conventional talking-head documentary.

Hamilton's book is not perfect. He adopts a somewhat disconcerting narrative framing device in which he debates with his alter-ego or "companion" or conscience about the significance of each fact or pseudo fact he encounters in the investigation. Instead of invoking conversations with this alter-ego character, Hamilton could just as easily have simply said, "I debated with myself about...(whatever)," which would have been just as effective and less gimmicky.

Nonetheless, given the dearth of information about Salinger, this is a spectacularly impressive job. Whenever Hamilton is forced to speculate--which is often--his speculations are well-informed and plausible and arrived at logically and in context.

Most of my rating is for Ian Hamilton's doggedness and reasonableness. Yes, reasonableness and fairness toward his subject. Hamilton laid down ground rules at the beginning of this quest that nobody else in the media would have granted Salinger, partly out of respect and partly out of a sense of responsibility to do a fair and balanced job. I think Hamilton succeeded.

Not surprisingly, Salinger and his lawyers did not agree, and they fought through several layers of courts to keep the book off the market. Unfortunately, this version of the book reflects some of the damaging influences of those censorious efforts. Although Hamilton was free to report the facts he gleaned from Salinger's previously unpublished letters (from various collections and archives), the courts ruled rather absurdly that he could not quote directly from them--despite the fact that Salinger did not even own the letters or would not likely realize any commercial gain from them; not to mention that anyone could walk off the street and read them themselves. Thus Hamilton was robbed of a legitimate tool of the biographer to show the style of his subject's letter writing in addition to the contents of the letters. The case shows the patent bullshit attendant to a good deal of copyright law and its inconsistent interpretation.

One is left satisfied by this book, partly because even by its end, Salinger remains enigmatic and mysterious. And, it's breezily written and easily read.

So, to those of you who say Salinger should have been left alone, I say, fuck that. He asked for every bit of this...if you want to know the truth.

(KevinR@Ky, slightly amended in 2016)

LOL Salinger is painfully crotchety.
Thank you, Ian Hamilton.

Fascinating if frustrating. Hamilton's book is the memoir of a thwarted biographer, with the reclusive Mr. Salinger lurking behind the castle walls pouring down boiling oil.... The reader leaves the book more tantalized, if possible, than at the start.

Intermittently interesting. Not sure about the alter ego format.

this is a very interesting, if slightly frustrating biograpy of JD Salinger. I had tried to read one before which was very trite and boring - while it described Salinger's reclusiveness, it did not explore it or try to solve the mystery. That mystery solving what I liked about this book, however there is no Da Vinci Code-like Holy Grail lying in wait at the end, only some disappointing legal wranglings.

Gonzo style Hamilton chases around the famously reclusive (so no doubt neurotic, paranoid and grumpy) Salinger. Hamilton is more thoughtful than HST, Plimpton or the hilarious nutter who stalked Graham Greene so this is an independent work of great writing skill as well as a companion piece to Salinger's great pieces