Living in a Glass house

J.D. SALINGER: A LIFEBy Kenneth Slawenski , 414 pages Available at  National Book Store

Oh, how Jerome David Salinger might have loathed Facebook and Twitter. It’s perhaps fitting that the author died last year at age 91, around the same time Facebook and Twitter mania was hitting its peak. If any modern invention stood at polar opposition to Salinger’s worldview, it was online social networking, which allows humans to peep and gawk at one another at their frivolous leisure.

Then again, he might have found something beautiful in the random, un-self-conscious moments found in Facebook posts. Something unexpected, revealing the face of God, perhaps, in haiku-like tweets.

We’ll never know. But biographer Kenneth Slawenski sees the glass as half full, ending his account of Salinger’s life with the spectacle of thousands of Catcher in the Rye fans reading passages from that book and Franny and Zooey in online videos posted shortly after the reclusive author’s death. As though enlightenment had somehow been attained with Salinger’s passing.

What’s really enlightening about Slawenski’s biography (though it may be old hat to die-hard Salinger fanatics) is the wealth of back story, the scaffolding that provides insights into how Salinger’s voice developed, rose to a fever pitch of poplarity, then retreated forever into a bunker in Cornish, New Hampshire. 

Film directors and writers sometimes use the term “scaffolding” to describe the character details and back story that are sometimes shot or laid out in a script, then later removed during editing to make the story tighter and give it more impact. In the case of Jerome David Salinger, who flirted with Hollywood but ultimately rejected it, and whose life seems like a screenplay that will probably never get filmed, there is a lot more scaffolding than his slim output of literature might suggest.

We tend to think of Holden Caulfield, for instance, as springing to life fully formed on the pages of The Catcher in the Rye, but true Salinger fanatics and archivists have had personal, intimate experience with the half-dozen or so Holden stories that Salinger wrote before that novel finally came out in 1951. Even more tantalizing, we learn that Salinger kept handwritten pages of the forthcoming novel under his uniform, tight to his breast like some kind of anting-anting, while landing on D-Day. Yes: Catcher in the Rye helped storm the beaches of Normandy.

Private life: This army photo of Jerome David Salinger is one of a handful included in the book.

Imagine uncovering a hidden trove of long-buried Beatles recordings. Or a cache of Picassos found in someone’s garage. The pupils dilate, the mouth salivates. The background for The Catcher in the Rye and the template for the Glass Family stories actually lie hidden in dozens of short pieces Salinger churned out as a young writer for The New Yorker, Story, Saturday Evening Post and others.

Even more scintillating, many of his early stories exist now only as titles, with no known copies in existence. Titles like “This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise,” “A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All” and “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls” are intriguing, eccentric, and what you’d expect of the man who wrote “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” — a seemingly jocular title concealing a deeply sad meditation on mortality.

We learn from Slawenski’s book that Holden had enough scaffolding to fill another book about the Caulfield clan, just as the Glass family would eventually occupy two story collections (Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour — An Introduction).

Even more remarkable, Salinger was crafting many of these stories while fighting on the front lines during World War II, trapped in the Hürtgen Forest on the border of Germany and Belgium. It was this hellish environment that seemed to open up a crisis in Salinger’s soul, Slawenski writes — whether God existed, whether He cared about us, and whether there was any point to our own existence.

The stories that came after the war ended (and after Salinger’s 12th Infantry Regiment had helped liberate Nazi concentration camps near Dachau) directly addressed this spiritual crisis — most notably “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” and others that made up the Nine Stories collection.

But Salinger’s spiritual journey went further. Along with the fame and fortune that arose after the war, when The New Yorker adopted Salinger and made itself a regular home to his stories, and with the worldwide acceptance of The Catcher in the Rye in 1951, Salinger apparently felt torn between the demands of ego and art. Along with his interest in Zen Buddhism, the writer embraced what he called “the book of the century,” The Gospels of Sri Ramakrishna, which cemented his belief in Vedantic reincarnation and a fixation on seeing “the face of God” in every person and thing we encounter. This factual detail will be familiar, no doubt, to readers of Franny and Zooey.

The upshot is, just as his fame reached fever pitch, Salinger retreated to his 90-acre Cornish property with his young wife, Claire, and continued to send missives about the Glass family and their quest for spiritual satori to The New Yorker until 1965. Reactions were mixed. Critics savaged the Glass stories (one, novelist Mary McCarthy, deplored: “Who are these seven wonder kids but Salinger himself?… To be confronted with the seven faces of Salinger, all wise and simple and loveable, is to gaze into a terrifying narcissus pool…”), but the public lined up in droves to buy the books. 

Some say mailing off “Hapworth 16, 1924” — an 80-page, almost unreadable letter purportedly penned by seven-year-old Seymour Glass from summer camp — to The New Yorker in ’65 was a form of professional suicide, the author’s method of stopping demand for Glass stories and further output forever. It did stop Salinger from publishing. But it didn’t stop the world’s demand.

Off to the side of Salinger’s property in Cornish, the writer built a private writing cabin in the mid-‘60s which Slawenski calls “the bunker.” Salinger would retreat there from his family daily at 6 a.m. and only return for dinner, and sometimes not even then.

What was he writing all that time, up until his death in January 2010? Slawenski believes his mind became fully occupied by the Glass family characters, but even that fictional road must have hit a cul de sac at some point. Was he seeking some other way to spread a spiritual message to Americans, where it was “profoundly difficult to talk about spirituality”? Was he writing every day merely for his “own pleasure,” as he let slip to a journalist in 1980, with no intention of publishing his later works? Or would it all amount to — shudder! — a huge immoveable block of letters sent home from summer camp by Seymour? Perhaps the terms of Salinger’s final will — which he managed to complete before a hip ailment hastened his death — can eventually shed light on what else the author had to say.

Not surprisingly, the bulk of Slawenski’s earnest biography documents the years of Salinger’s youth up to his public retreat in ’65. It spends only 30-plus pages on what has happened since then, which is no doubt because Salinger succeeded so well in sealing shut the bunker, through legal action and profound silence.

But you just can’t silence the world. After Salinger’s death, it was not unusual to see home videos posted on YouTube, sightings of the man on the streets of Cornish, grainy footage taken by a few quick yahoos with cell phones. The badly shot videos of the white-haired Salinger, slowly lumbering along the streets, unaware of the camera as he attends to his daily errands, remind one of the grainy footage just as mythical, supposedly taken of “Bigfoot” so long ago. Just as apocryphal, shedding very little truth or light on its subject.