Paul Alexander, Salinger, a Biography So there I am, walking out of the library (where I am employed) and there on the special bargain discount discard rack, Paul Alexander’s bio. of J. D. Salinger. It was only a quarter, but I felt sleazy about it. This is a pretty inept little book, but it was not a hatchet-job for the most part, and the writing of it did not involve stalking Salinger to make him squeal (which made me feel a little less guilty about picking it up), although there is a melodramatic bit at the beginning of Alexander gazing at Salinger’s house from his car. The book is not by any means a scholarly biography and it can be gulped down in fairly short order, and so, as a way to scoop up some biographical information on J. D. Salinger, it is not a bad way to go. Unfortunately, outside the bare recounting of facts, Alexander can be counted on to be banal: “Perhaps because he was trying to make a new life for himself, Salinger did things he had never done before” (p. 114). On page 186: “Serious and aloof, Salinger was so wrapped up in his life, he was usually unable to step back and laugh at himself, or at others.” Likewise, Alexander’s attempts at psychological analysis can be tiresome. He keeps worrying that ancient bone about Salinger’s penchant for younger-looking-than-they-really-are young women and the question as to whether he was a pedophile. Salinger wasn’t, so far as anybody can tell (and journalists tried like hell to find a “closet full of little girls” back in the 60s). Salinger’s peccadilloes and predilections are somewhat seedy and sometimes a little creepy, but nothing outright scandalous ever happened. When he first went into seclusion he did hang out a lot with the local high school kids around Windsor, VT – throwing parties, hanging out at the diner, etc. This is pretty weird, but soon after he married a young (but age of consent) woman who bore him two children. The marriage failed and she left him, suffering from neglect and isolation since as he got older, all Salinger wanted to do was write. The divorce was messy, as they tended to be back then, but by all accounts (including his children’s, mostly) Salinger seemed to be a devoted father. In later years he watched for pretty young actresses on TV and would write them fan letters, arrange meetings – this dating strategy landed him a relationship of a few years duration with an actress from “Mr. Merlin” (which struck me as being such a sad, funny fact). That this woman was 36 years old and apparently un-scarred or resentful after her relationship with Salinger makes things a whole lot less creepy. And there was that awful Joyce Maynard affair, but Maynard emerged unscathed (despite all her protests to the contrary) and went on to exact humiliating revenge on him. Perhaps not his most attractive trait, Salinger’s sporadic forays into the sexual jungle were at worst a literary version of rock stars trolling through the groupies. And Salinger hardly took full advantage of his fame. There are third-rate writer-professors who cut a far wider swath through their undergrads than anything Salinger ever did (see Sebastian Matthews’ memoir of his father, the poet William Matthews and his 1970s poetry workshop seraglios). Given his enormous literary status, Salinger could have been a real monster, possessing perhaps the biggest groupie base – male and female – in the world. But he didn’t and Alexander doesn’t give Salinger any credit for self-restraint. Again and again Alexander returns to a teenage incident in Vienna with a girl at an ice skating rink as if it were the key to Salinger’s obsessions with inappropriately young women (Fraulein Rosebud). Humbert Humbert references, I am sorry to say, slink out of the shadows. Sometimes Alexander indulges in outright prudery. Here is Alexander on the canonical Salinger short story, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”:“Just as disturbing, though, is an element in the story Salinger may not even have intended to be disturbing. This has to do with Seymour’s apparent fascination with Sybil (the little girl). Throughout the story, Seymour’s behavior toward Sybil comes dangerously close to being inappropriate; then Seymour actually crosses the line by saying that contemplating Sybil’s friend Sharon makes him mix “memory and desire.” (p. 126)Well, this is just dimwitted. To set the record straight, there is nothing remotely inappropriate going on here. In the context of the story, Seymour is teasing Sybil with the fact Sharon was hanging around him the night before (keep in mind, these little girls are about 5 or 6 years old). Seymour is gently correcting Sybil’s obnoxious, greedy insistence on having Seymour all to herself. Seymour’s quip about “memory and desire” is a riff on T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” and the whole thing is couched in such affectionate, good-natured irony that I find it hard to believe how anybody could consider it “inappropriate.” The fact that elsewhere in the story Seymour kisses the bottom of Sybil’s naked foot would probably land him in jail now, but even that incident is so innocent and free of sexual context that I only bring it up because, well, because you know how it goes these days. Pretty much by accident, what Alexander’s book does reveal that beyond being a writer, there doesn’t appear to be much about Salinger to report. He was an average student with average-to-bad grades. He loved his Mom, his Dad intimidated him. He liked girls. He kinda liked sports. Didn’t like office work. He was a little touchy, quick to feel slighted. He was for a while a snazzy dresser and a nightclub-goer. It wasn’t until he got turned on to writing that Salinger really lit up. This need for writing to basically fill out the suit may be why he became a recluse writing things he had no intention of publishing 15 hours a day. Most talented people become what they do and are not usually comfortable merely existing. Sometimes what they do becomes an all-consuming obsession. Back in the old days this used to be called genius…Well, if not a genius, the difference between Salinger and the rest of us was his formidable talent (which he worked like hell to develop). Say what you want, but Salinger is a freaking gorgeous writer. One of the things I most admire about Alexander’s book is that he does not go along with one of the biggest critical complaints about Salinger: that he failed to “develop” as a writer. This was, as Alexander notes, the same thing they said about Fitzgerald and once you’ve written “The Great Gatsby” just what in the hell are you supposed to “develop” into? I couldn’t agree more. As Oscar Wilde once said, only mediocrities “develop.” Unfortunately, as shrewd as he is on Salinger’s unique gifts as a writer, Alexander tries again and again to prove his theory that Salinger was working a con job on an unsuspecting public, that by staying a recluse, he was fuelling book sales and therefore his income, without having to publish any new material. This is poppycock. No author can sell as many books as Salinger did through “manipulating his image” and certainly not over the course of decades the way Salinger did. But Alexander can’t let this little conspiracy theory of his go and it pops up in angry little boluses throughout the book. Although Alexander does a competent job of recounting the publication history of Salinger’s works, with all the publishers’ squabbles and disappointments such things entail, when it comes to the actual work, he can be rather obtuse (see Seymour and Sybil above). There is a quite funny bit on page 224-225 where Alexander takes great umbrage at Salinger’s dedication/introduction to “Seymour: An Introduction and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenter.” Alexander sees it as being deceptive and presumptuous and insulting (“What exactly did (Salinger) mean by ‘mixed company’?”). As far as I can tell, these bits of late Salinger are nothing but the self-conscious and rather ponderously ironic wit of an increasingly withdrawn and cynical writer who had been thoroughly steeped in mid-20th century Manhattan literary culture. Much of the time it seems Alexander just simply fails to understand both the texts and their cultural contexts. Perhaps a minor point, but Salinger’s World War II experiences were rendered by Alexander with remarkable ineptitude. His background research was sketchy and the specific descriptions unintentionally hilarious to this reader. On page 95 we are told that on D-Day “Salinger’s regiment boarded an amphibian trooper mover that would take them across the English Channel.” “Amphibian” as an adjective is in the dictionary, but I have never heard it used in this context – it sounds as if the Allies’ launched a secret convoy of gargantuan troop-hauling frogs spawned to defeat the Nazi menace. The word I’m looking for is “amphibious” and it just proves my theory that there is no such thing in the world anymore as an editor. Even if you think “amphibian” is okay to use here, the rest of the passage is blundered, since in World War II, troops were loaded onto regular ships, taken close to the Normandy beaches, then loaded onto small landing craft (not called “troop movers,” amphibian or otherwise) for the short, harrowing journey to shore. On this very same page, Alexander tells us that during the crossing “In the sky overhead, anti-artillery shells were exploding.” First off, unless you are a cosmonaut, where else is the sky if not overhead? And what in the world is an “anti-artillery shell” and why were they exploding in the air where, as far as I know, no artillery can be deployed? Furthermore, Alexander tells us Salinger landed at Utah Beach about four hours into the invasion – I’m no expert, but I think most German coastal resistance of any description had been knocked out by then. Alexander, apparently basing his D-Day research on watching the movie “Saving Private Ryan,” tells us Salinger and his comrades “rushed out into the cold water, heading for the beach. On shore, they found cover. Digging in, they started to fire back at the enemy.” This describes the first wave at Omaha Beach, but not four hours later at Utah Beach. I imagine Salinger landed without encountering much by way of opposition and marched on up the beach without firing a shot. He was an army intelligence guy, sent to interrogate German prisoners and French civilians; he wasn’t there to knock out pillboxes. Later on, Salinger undoubtedly underwent terrifying combat experiences – Hurtgen Forest is perhaps one of the worst European engagement for US troops. These later experiences in Europe seem to be rendered without Alexander’s level of blunders on D-Day, but these sections would have been improved with a few choice quotes from first-hand accounts of Hurtgen and the Bulge rather than relying on Alexander’s sketchily generic descriptions of how awful it was. For instance, I’ve read (elsewhere) that one of the most terrifying aspects of Hurtgen Forest was the way pine trees were weaponized – I’m not kidding – German artillery shells were set to explode in the air. These explosions would splinter the trees, sending chunks of wood hurtling down on the Americans in their foxholes. This made it virtually impossible for the GI’s to take cover. Such details do make a difference, I think. Despite its considerable flaws, Alexander’s book is worth reading, if you want a quick fix for your Salinger curiosity without quite sinking to the tabloid level. Alexander’s complaints about Salinger’s character are clumsy but rarely vicious. He puts Salinger’s publishing history in perspective in a basic chronological way that I found useful, despite Alexander’s lack of cultural feel for mid-century A-list publishing milieu in New York City. I learned some things that I’m glad I did and a few I wish I hadn’t (that Salinger checked out the babes of “Mr. Merlin” on TV in the 1980s). This being said, when I consulted Wikipedia, I found Salinger’s biography there to be both more informative and better written. For instance, Wikipedia is much more specific about Salinger’s on-going searches for religious experiences; Alexander makes it sound as if he became a Zen Buddhist and food nut and that was that. Wikipedia quotes sources indicating that Salinger’s religious strivings were much more complex and wide-ranging. Plus, thanks to Wikipedia, I discovered that Salinger’s son Matt, an actor, made his big screen debut in the movie “Revenge of the Nerds,” and that, my friends, is priceless cultural knowledge. Until I encountered the quote in Alexander’s book, I’d never heard Norman Mailer’s remark that Salinger was “no more than the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school.” This idea that Salinger was basically an infantile man who appealed to the great infantile mass of “sensitive” Americans who don’t want to ever grow up sticks to Salinger’s works. Many of Salinger’s contemporary reviewers noticed it, and some of them attacked it with vigor (Mary McCarthy was especially shrill). The older I get, the more I tend to see their point – and some of Salinger’s appeal has indeed faded for me now. I was quite beguiled by Salinger in my youth: for a long time I desperately wanted to be one of the obscurer members of the Glass family (one of the twins, perhaps), or that one guy who really understood Franny. Recently rereading “Seymour: An Introduction” and the end of “Zooey” I found myself unable to return to these old states of bliss and yearning. However, looking over the ruins of the supposedly adult Norman Mailer or Mary McCarthy or John Updike and their literary legacies, I find it hard to fault Salinger too much for his preoccupations. Which is to say I’m still not resigned to trading in infantile Seymour Glass for echt-adult Rabbit Angstrom or that awful Man in the Brooks Brothers Suit or antique advertisements for myself.
The man who gifted the literary world "Holden Caulfield" also ensured that he remained obdurately inaccessible to the public throughout his life. While Holden Caulfield and "The Catcher In The Rye" do not seem to have any obstacles in gaining and regaining popularity, their creator seemingly seems to have gone out of his way to avoid being popular, unrelenting in his pursuit of shunning the arc lights of fame.In this searching portrait of J.D.Salinger, one of the most influential, albeit reclusive authors of our time, Paul Alexander seeks to unravel the mystery shrouding the escape from life attitude of one of America's most loved literary giants. The outcome of such a difficult and complex endeavor is a set of plausible and searing notions that astonish and stun the reader. Getting into Salinger's head can be an extremely daunting task. Many have attempted only to fall by the way side, accumulating scorn and contempt in the process.Alexander, displaying great subtlety and tact, proposes working around the hurdle rather than take it head on. Was Salinger's attempt at being reclusive an ulterior but genius master stroke at acquiring popularity? The means of getting at the very objective which Salinger outwardly seem to detest? Was his escaping to the quaint town of Cornish, a signaling act of building an insatiable curiosity surrounding his life amongst his fans? Or was Salinger plagued by a sexual tension as evidenced in his prepubescent as well as teen heroines ranging from Esme to Louis and from Franny to Phoebe Caulfield? Salinger's own romantic trysts with women significantly younger to him in age seems to edify this belief.Thomas Pynchon and Don Dellilio were also reclusive. But unlike Salinger, they were absolutely lost to the searching examination of the public, whereas J.D.Salinger chose to make isolated and rare appearances, many of which were those extensively covered by the media. Salinger's love-hate relationship with his publishers and his absolute revulsion for the publishing world (which he deemed 'devious') also set him apart from the rest of his contemporaries. The man is now physically lost to the world. Salinger died in the year 2010 choosing to leave a great part of his life swathed in mystery. However he will continue to live for ever and mesmerise us all through the thoughts, deeds and words of Holden Caulfield. J.D.Salinger - The real Catcher In The Rye.
What do You think about Salinger: A Biography (2000)?
Not as bad as Hamilton's book--but still pretty goddamn lame. Another guy who can't let the poor old recluse alone (or give him the right to be a recluse) but has to impart other motives to it. And the young-girl crap became as tiresome as the unconsciously-seeking-publicity stuff. The first part of it (through the war) was better than the rest...but his comments about the stories were often just buffoonish. Dismissing "The Laughing Man," and his sensitive-soul remarks about "Down In the Dinghy"--his bleak simplification of "Uncle Wiggily"--and excuse me, but wasn't the point of "Teddy" that he fell into the empty pool (not that he pushed his sister in)?! Like he presaged in conversation earlier in the story, and which would account for her "sustained" scream (hard to hold a note when you're hitting concrete). The main problem of course is--once again--I can't just read about the life, I've got to listen to some idiot blare his opinions at me. Also, looks like he might've had some trouble holding his pen--to judge from sentences like: "By inventing Holden Caulfield, Salinger had entered an arena where he would be able to produce significant fiction" or "She was attractive in a 'pretty' sort of way." (And no pictures!--a further lameness.)
—TrumanCoyote
Far be it for me to presume to be a worthy critic of biographies, but I really liked this one. I get that it may not have been very "academic," but it was interesting and entertaining. Alexander seems to imply that Salinger's reclusive nature is all just a well-crafted publicity stunt, but I tend to disagree. After learning what he went through in WWII, he kind of makes more sense to me now. Although the fascination with younger women is well documented, and pretty creepy.Anyway, the book definitely got me interested in reading Salinger's other books, which are really just short story collections. I'm even considering re-reading CATCHER to see if I can have a better opinion of it the second time around.
—Dustin
