In Search of J D. Salinger
Hamilton, Ian
BOOK REVIEWS Pascal complained that the whole problem with man is that he cannot sit quietly by himself in a room. There is a modern corollary: the newspaper-reading public cannot tolerate a...
...But Catcher is one of those books, like This Side of Paradise, which you think you are going to outgrow but never do...
...Salinger had the courage to keep writing and publishing near-trash until he found his voice...
...He put Cornish off bounds and approached Salinger through a few polite letters...
...It's not anywhere so entertaining as the fictional letters which go back and forth in the Glass family...
...so he reworked his material along the lines of Symons's The Quest for Corvo, splitting himself into two, the "biographer" and private Mr...
...There is a modern corollary: the newspaper-reading public cannot tolerate a celebrity doing just that...
...Dept W-101 Indianapolis, IN 46250 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988 39...
...But by hiding behind his eight-foot fence up there in Cornish, Salinger has guaranteed that any number of journalists and literary groupies would try to jump over it...
...776 pages Liberty Fund edition, 1988 Individual Volumes: Hardcover $15.00 Paperback $ 7.50 Three Volume Set: Hardcover $45.00 Paperback $22.50 ON Please send me: Selected Writings of Lord Acton Quantity Price Per Thtal Ordered Title Edition Copy Price The Complete Set Hardcover $45.00 Paperback 22.50 Essays in the Hardcover $15.00 History of Liberty Paperback 7.50 Essays in the Study Hardcover ikl5.00 and Writing of History Paperback 7.50 Essays in Religion, Hardcover $15.00 Politics, and Morality Paperback 7.50 Subtotal If 'e pay book postage rate...
...Hamilton, so that he could fill out the volume with self-exchanges...
...In Salinger, there is the inner circle of the sensitive and the suffering, while everyone else is pretty much beyond the pale...
...The reader will flip ahead to the sketchy biographical bits which are interesting in a low-grade way...
...1 major resource for academic readers — a collection like thts...
...IN SEARCH OF J. D. SALINGER Ian Hamilton/Random House/$17.95 George Sim Johnston 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988 Like E. M. Forster, Salinger loomed larger in the public mind with every book he did not publish...
...Almost all his fictional characters seem more real, more plausible than he...
...Not content with doing his mail box from every angle, they ambush him in downtown Cornish or snap pictures through the chinks in his fence...
...I was able to get my hands on one of these galleys, and my reaction was twofold...
...I'm told, on very good authority, that he hasn't stopped writing at all...
...In attempting to write a biography of Salinger, Ian Hamilton at least set some honorable ground rules for himself...
...One wonders, though...
...And that all of them are very strange and all about Zen Buddhism...
...And, second, the correspondence, while containing some amusing bits, is not worth all the fuss...
...Since then, through a crack in his door, Salinger has said that he's found "a peace in not publishing...
...Waugh wrote that he "regarded his books as objects which he had made, things quite external to himself to be used and judged by others...
...There is no way an editor can make the difference between a slickpiece of sentimentality like "This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise," which appeared in Esquire in the mid-forties, and the disturbing, endlessly re-readable stories which followed...
...He wanted to be a good writer and he wrote all the time," is how someone who was with Salinger in the army put it to Hamilton...
...Those stories, along with The Catcher in the Rye, have no rivals in postwar American fiction for their impact both on the reading public and on other writers...
...Salinger's success was a matter of a minor talent nurtured by, hard work...
...The courts ruled in favor of Salinger, and bound galleys of D. Salinger: A Writing Life immediately became a collector's item, fetching over a hundred dollars from New York dealers...
...Over the years, periodicals ranging from Life to the Village Voice to the Paris Review have sent interviewers up to New Hampshire to try to pry from Salinger a few Zen thoughts...
...The photographers are the worst, for some reason...
...The observation would apply better to a novel like Bellow's Herzog, which is like a three-card monte game rigged so that a critic can't win...
...When Holden Caulfield describes his sister Phoebe as "roller-skate skinny...
...He is the impresario of classic "New Yorkese...
...Please allow 4 to 6 weeks for delivery...
...o Enclosed is my check or money order made payable to Liberty Fund, Inc...
...Edward Norman, Cambridge University Essays in the History of Liberty The unifying theme of Volume I is Lord Acton's famous work on the history of freedom...
...dollars...
...With the exception of the deaf-mute dwarf in "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters," not a single adult in Salinger's fiction (outside of the Glasses) escapes the author's implicit damnation...
...The stories he published between 1948 and 1957, from "A Perfect Day for Banana-fish" through "Zooey," were a watershed in the history of that magazine...
...Hamilton speculates that Salinger's amazing transformation as a writer in the late forties was the result of superior New Yorker editing...
...It made Selena prefer to watch the indicator dial over the elevator"—we see a gifted minor talent making genuine discoveries about the use of language...
...Mary McCarthy dismissed The Catcher in the Rye as a stunt, a feat similar to a one-armed man playing the violin...
...That he's written at least five or six short novels and that all of them have been turned down by the New Yorker and that he won't publish anywhere except in the New Yorker...
...The other problem which became evident in the Glass family saga—and probably made it unsustainable—is Salinger's preoccupation with Eastern mysticism...
...But none of Salinger's literary heirs, which include people as diverse as John Irving and Ann Beattie, are capable of the effects which Salinger brings off again and again...
...has been needed for very many years — but also a work that will be useful for general readers concerned with some of the seminal ideals of modern western culture...
...Miss McCarthy's problem may be that she did not grow up in New York...
...The Acton Legacy" is composed of excerpts from his remarkable letters and unpublished notes...
...Please send me a copy of your latest catalogue...
...If he had saved the remark for "Hapworth," he would have been right...
...The small book he wrote provoked Salinger's litigious wrath, anyway...
...7440 N. Shadeland Avenue...
...According to Ian Hamilton, author of In Search of J. D. Salinger, when Salinger started publishing in the early forties, he was determined to be a "professional...
...If he wants privacy that badly, he should follow Thomas Pynchon's strategy, which is to disappear entirely—presumably into one of the other six dimensions predicated by moder__ string theory...
...Modern literary biography then was not impoverished by the permanent restraining order from the U.S...
...Name Address City/State/Z ip Mail to: Liberty Fund...
...Salinger's best stories represent a special moment in postwar fiction, and that is all that should concern us...
...The subtle narcissism of Eastern detachment, moreover, creates a bad odor in the Glass family...
...By the period of the Glass family stories, Salinger had no such detachment...
...But don't be a God-damned sneak about it") seems a morbid projection of the author's own...
...This is surely unfair...
...There is a lack of charity in these stories which you would never find in a story by Tolstoy, even when Tolstoy is portraying characters of whom he totally disapproves...
...But Salinger was never a professional in the way that, say, Trollope or Evelyn Waugh were professionals...
...That his personal life seems not to have worked out so well may have been part of the bargain...
...Half the action in a Salinger story involves the manipulation of cigarettes...
...Hamilton is far less enamored of his subject the second time around...
...Salinger's last published story was "Hapworth 16, 1924," which took up an entire issue of the New Yorker in June 1965...
...And his criticism of Salinger's work is no more than pleasant chat—which is all it should be, perhaps...
...607 pages Liberty Fund edition, 1986 NEW Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality Acton focuses on moral and political issues as they relate to religion and to liberal Catholicism...
...But that city has sunk beneath the pavement like a lost Atlantis...
...A typical New Yorker story before Salinger—say by John O'Hara—was like a television picture which is a little distant and somewhat fuzzy—the kind that doesn't really make you feel that you are there...
...Salinger understandably did not wish to see his private correspondence used, as the affidavit put it, to "flesh out an otherwise lifeless and uninteresting biography...
...Salinger is the finest fiction writer the New Yorker ever produced...
...adjectives like "venom-ous" have slipped into the portrait...
...The impression of spiritual snobbery only increases when members of the Glass family criticize each other for looking down on the rest of humanity...
...They provide the same sort of ballast as George Sim Johnston is a writer living in New York...
...Shortly before his death, Truman Capote was asked by an interviewer why he supposed Salinger had stopped writing...
...Salinger, after all, is not Thomas Mann...
...He created a literary alter-ego, Buddy Glass, gave him his own year of birth (1919) and publishing history, and then let him go on (and on and on) about an older dead brother, Seymour, an artist-saint type whose hypersensitivity ("If you want to look at my feet, say so...
...Here the pale man usually sits," ran the famous 1961 cover story in Time, "sometimes writing quickly, other times throwing logs onto the fire and making long lists of words until he finds the right ones...
...588 pages Liberty Fund edition, 1985 Essays in the Study and Writing of History Volume II covers Acton's distinguished study of history and his belief that it had to be impartial and based on moral judgment...
...Hamilton had found a number of early letters and quoted from them liberally...
...Anyone old enough to remember the city before 1965 (when, it has been said, the "sixties" really began) experiences the same sense of loss reading Salinger...
...A man is entitled to his hobbies, but if a fiction writer, of all people, goes about trying to "unlearn differences" in the Oriental manner and has his ear cocked for the sound of one hand clapping instead of fresh dialogue, he is in trouble...
...All three volumes NOW available libertyPtess/Libertyassics SELECTED WRITINGS OF LORD AC in Three Volumes By John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton Edited by J. Rufus Fears, Boston University ord Acton was among the most significant figures and illustrious historians in the intellectual life of nineteenth century England...
...Few escape the iron law of Yeats's observation, "The intellect of man is forced to choose/ Perfection of the life or of the work...
...Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit...
...all orders must be prepaid in U.S...
...In the case of J. D. Salinger, there is a small bunker with a skylight on the outskirts of Cornish, New Hampshire...
...E. B. White wrote ten years ago that "the last time I visited New York, it seemed to have suffered a personality change, asthough it had a brain tumor as yet undetected...
...Like Fitzgerald, Salinger is a master of the adjective...
...What went wrong...
...Cardinal Newman discovered this when he retired to his Littlemore cottage for prayer and meditation...
...Norman Mailer called Salinger's previous effort, "Seymour—An Introduction," the "most slovenly portion of prose ever put out by an important American writer...
...Forster granted an interview now and then, and so was left alone...
...you could almost hear the author breathing beside you—or, in the case of Salinger, chain-smoking cigarettes...
...Along with the late E. B. White, Salinger is the prose laureate of New York in the forties and fifties—of New York, that is, when it was really New York...
...First, I was surprised that the author of a quite decent biography of Robert Lowell had produced such slipshod work...
...the nautical minutiae in Moby Dick...
...But Salinger's stories had an extraordinary immediacy...
...Without the letters, Hamilton barely had a pamphlet...
...or when the two girls in "Just Before the War with the Eskimos" enter a New York apartment lobby— "At fifteen, Ginnie was about five feet nine in her 9-B tennis shoes, and as she entered the lobby, her self-conscious rubber-soled awkwardness lent her a dangerous amateur quality...
...T n the late fifties, Salinger dropped 1 the spare, laconic style of his early stories, and his fiction became insufferably prolix and self-absorbed...
...He alsohas the most acute ear for the vernacular since Ring Lardner and Sinclair Lewis...
Vol. 21 • October 1988 • No. 10
