A Fresh Look at J.D. Salinger’s Life

In 1949, still reeling from his heroic service in world War II, already deep in the throes of writing The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger took a vacation at the Sheraton Plaza Hotel in Daytona Beach, Fla., where he met a girl named Jean. She was 14. Salinger was 30. “He was the first adult who seemed to be genuinely interested in what I had to say,” she would recall 60 years later.

When he got home, Salinger began writing Jean letters, and the two stayed in touch. Salinger told her, not implausibly, that she inspired his story “For Esmé–With Love and Squalor.” After five years, things went further: he took her to Montreal for the weekend, and they slept together. She was a virgin. The next day his manner was chilly. Apart from one wordless glimpse, she never saw Salinger again.

Disconcerting anecdotes of this kind are thick on the ground in Salinger, a new biography by David Shields and Shane Salerno. How could a man like Salinger, who saw into the hearts of millions of readers, not see what was going on in Jean’s? Or not care? If biographies are supposed to elucidate the contradictions within their subjects, they don’t come much starker than that.

Salinger is billed both as “the official book of the acclaimed documentary film”–meaning Salerno’s movie of the same name, which was released on Sept. 2–and as an “oral biography.” In fact, it’s somewhat more than the first and less than the second. It presents a decade’s worth of genuinely valuable research, but in an oddly half-baked form, choppily edited into 700 pages of brief, bloggy chunks with minimal context and attribution. It’s as if Salinger’s life were a YouTube video and we were reading the comments. (And while I’m complaining: there’s no index.)

But scroll through it, because there are riches here. I knew, for example, that Salinger fought in WW II, but the book presents a shocking, vivid account of a smart-alecky wannabe writer who went from the bosom of a well-heeled Park Avenue family to the D-Day landings–he hit Utah Beach with the first six chapters of Catcher in his pocket–and who witnessed some of the most horrific scenes in the European theater: the Norman hedgerows, Hürtgen Forest, the Battle of the Bulge and, finally, the liberation of the concentration camp Kaufering IV.

It’s a miracle Salinger survived; in fact, not all of him did. “You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live,” he once remarked to his daughter. An irony Salinger returns to repeatedly is that the war both made him as a writer and destroyed him as a person. It stripped away the slick glibness of his prewar fiction, giving him the voice he needed to write Catcher and the Glass-family stories, but it also left him with a crippling case of posttraumatic stress disorder.

What follows is well known: Salinger fled fame and celebrity for rural New Hampshire, where he embraced an ascetic form of Hinduism. His emotional life revolved around a personal mythology in which a series of younger women (like Jean) appeared first as idealized goddesses to be wooed, then as imperfect humans to be spurned. If there’s a bombshell in Salinger, it’s that although he published his last story in 1965, Salinger apparently left behind five new books that will appear over the next few years.

Salinger doesn’t excuse its subject’s personal failings, but it helps explain them: in his fiction, Salinger had a chance to be the good, untraumatized man he couldn’t be in real life. “All of us are broken,” Shields and Salerno write, “everyone, at some point, especially in adolescence, feels irreparably damaged, and we all need healing.” Most of us find it; some of us even find it in Salinger’s fiction. But while he sometimes granted his characters grace and closure, they were, apparently, gifts he could never give himself.