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From
Tehelka Magazine, Vol 9, Issue 18, Dated 05 May 2012 |
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Catch him if you can
The slippery, sly and secretive JD Salinger isn’t boxed in by this biography, but you can find him within its pages, says Indrajit Hazra.
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The recluse JD Salinger
Photo: Getty Images |
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THE THING to listen for, every time, with a public confessor, is what he’s not confessing to,” wrote JD Salinger in his 1959 story Seymour: An Introduction. Jerome ‘Jerry’ Douglas Salinger, American icon, recluse par excellence, creator of Holden Caulfield, was not much given to confession.
What Kenneth Slawenski does in JD Salinger: A Life Raised High is examine what the writer confessed through his work, what he obscured of his life with artistic distortion, and what he sometimes unsuccessfully tried to reveal through his stories.
At a basic level, Slawenski’s intensely researched biography is about the life, the works and the legacy of the notoriously elusive Salinger. But it is also an investigation that, with a biographer’s hindsight, becomes a case study of that old Cartesian divide between ‘saleable’ writing and writing as ‘literature’.
Salinger’s professional trajectory was forked, since early on in his writing life, he “made a conscious decision to separate his writings between those containing introspection and nuance and those more marketable works that could earn him a quick, easy buck”. Much of the early half of this book deals with this duality, a negotiation most authors are familiar with.
The New Yorker was a holy grail for him That esteemed magazine would ultimately turn down pre-publication excerpts from The Catcher In The Rye as editors found the story “not quite tenable” and displaying “writer-consciousness” (a New Yorker way to say ‘smart-assed’).
The reader may get bogged with the litany of acceptances and rejections Slawenski provides. But they foreground this biography’s fundamental contention about Salinger; that his writing was informed by the way he handled challenges and disappointments. Whether it was yet another rejection of his stories, or not being made commissioned officer during World War II, or getting dumped by Oona O'Neill for Charlie Chaplin, Salinger “developed the ability to counter misfortune by redirecting his energies”.
For this reason, writes Slawenski, “Salinger’s words, whether spoken or written, often denied, or at least evaded, many of the feelings engendered by events”. That claim is backed by juxtaposing Salinger’s writings with his life. This sort of close reading is a revealing exercise — what seems a fictional divergence shows itself as a parallel rendering of reality. In Death of a Dogface, Salinger writes about a sergeant taking a new recruit to see Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. “‘What’s the matter, Mr Burke? Don’t you like Charlie Chaplin none?....’ Burke says, ‘He’s alright. Only I don’t like no funny looking little guys always getting chased by big guys. Never getting no girl, like. For keeps like.’” The irony is stark since the ‘little guy’ stole his girlfriend and got to ‘keep her’ through marriage. A little reality revision as defense mechanism.
Slawenski also reveals Salinger’s other great antipodal self: a man craving attention and company, and one who genuinely fears social (and romantic) contact as a distraction to devoted writing. It is here that Holden Caulfield’s hatred for the ‘phoney’ and his love for the ‘swell’ takes on reflective and reflexive dimensions as the reader realises that Caulfield/Salinger is the kind of phoney he despises. Caulfield’s desire to protect innocence from adulthood ‘phoneyness’, even to a reader unfamiliar or unconcerned about Salinger’s own anxieties of becoming ‘one of them’, has a shallow source in the Jerry Salinger Show.
Salinger’s discovery of Zen Buddhism as well as his serious study of Ramakrishna Paramhansa’s teachings of the Advaita failed in fictional format. As a propagandist of religious philosophy, the writer didn’t work. As a purveyor of self, he requires no defense.
Two years after the author’s death, JD Salinger: A Life Raised High, is an important book about a man who, through his works, railed against a world which moulded him. Like Huckleberry Finn rafting against the current, Holden Caulfield negotiated the world in his own way to ultimately find equilibrium. Jerry Salinger, Slawenski shows, didn’t have the same luck in beating phoneyness.
Hazra is a novelist and Deputy Executive Editor, Hindustan Times
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