Rare Hamilton *First* JDS Bio
citycabn (citycabn@gateway.net)
Thu, 28 Oct 1999 09:52:15 -0700
Since I never expect to own (and hence be able to read) the original,
intended Ian Hamilton bio of JDS, titled, "JDS: A Writing Life," I was more
than interested to see a review of it, borne by the gentle zephyrs of
research, land on my desk (which I will spare you a description of). The
editors of The New Criterion in their Sept. '86 issue clearly state that the
reviewer is reviewing JDS: A Writing Life and that it had been scheduled
for August publication and has now been postponed due to an injunction, and
"at this writing, no new publication date has been announced."
So far so good and then one runs into the title: "Salinger's arrested
development" by one Bruce Bawer.
I'm not going to dissect this 14-page, double-columned opus, but just
practice my typing. Excerpts follow:
***
As in the case of Garbo, though, Salinger's insistence upon being left alone
served only to increase the public's curiosity about him, thus preserving
his celebrity status throughout a long period of professional
inactivity;indeed, it might reasonably be argued that his love of privacy
in the years since his departure from the active literary scene, made him a
"legend"in a way that his work alone could never have done....Herein lies
the ultimate irony in this most bizarre set of circumstances--it is
precisely his fanatically enforced privacy that, more than anything else,
has helped to place JDS's life and not his writing at the focus of public
scrutiny.
Given the state of affairs, it seems likely that Ian Hamilton's forthcoming
para-biography JDS: A writing Life, will generate an enormous amount of
interest. I call it a "para-biography" because to use the word "biography"
in this instance would be egregiously misleading... Hamilton has simply been
unable to gather enough material to produce a full-fledged biography of S.
This is not to say that the book lacks detail. Indeed, it is altogether too
plentifully stocked with gratuitous trivia--with, for example, quotations
from the movie revies S. contributed t his college newspaper and bits and
pieces of every letter(apparently) that Hamilton could get his hands on.
What the book is short on, however, is detail that is illuminating and
appropriate.Though Hamilton usefully summarizes S.'s literary career--giving
us synopses, reviews, contract arrangements--he does not even come close to
providing a vivid, coherent rendering of S.'s life.
The scraps of personal materialthat H. *has* been able to collect--most of
which concern S.'s life in military school, college and the army(the three
periods when he was forced,day and night, into the company of others)....
Hamilton writes: JDS has often said that he 'started writing at the age of
fifteen' as if this was when to him real life began. That , to my mind, is
a most peculiar 'as if'; certainly most of Salinger's fiction suggests that,
much to the contrary, real life *ended* for him at age fifteen..... [then
scolds H. for not giving us JDS' childhood] ... the childhood of a writer
whose fiction is enigmatically obsessed with the theme of childhood--whose
entire oeuvre cries out for a biographer able to shed some light on the
reasons for its strange fixation.
Having thus established that the young S. was simultaneously sycophantic and
insubordinate, H. proceeds to draw a parallel between this apparent
two-faced quality of the writer to be and the combination of non-conformity
and submissiveness that characterizes Holden Caulfield...
Like Holden, too, S was (to use a word that is nearly ubiquitous in his
fiction) something of a "phony."...
Clearly S's phoniness, his spercilis air, was a sign of insecurity. But why
was he insecure? Born into a family hat lived on a modest block of upper
Broadway, did he feel out of place in the Park Avenue apartment that his
family had moved inot when he was 13? ...Did he, indeed,play the part of the
sophisticated New Yorker at Ursinus precisely because, when he *was*in New
york, he felt relatively *un*sophisticated?
Holden speaks of his classmates at Pencey Prep as having "this goddam secret
fraternity that I was too yellow not to join." To S., the Park Avenue set,
Eugene O'Neill's daughter , and Harold Ross's magazine wre, taken together,
exactly this--a "secret fraternity" that he saw through but was too yellow,
too insecure, not to strive to be (or, atleast, to pretend to be) a part of.
It should hardly be surprising that a man who found it so hard to relate
maturely to his peers should have created a body of work that is
distinguished primarily by its nostalgia for childhood and its hostility
toward the conventions and responsibilities of adult life.
...A line from a letter--quoted by Hamilton--that S. wrote his friend, Judge
Learned Hand, upon the birth in 1956 of S's daughter: by summer, he boasts,
the baby will be able to explain some of the more obscure aspects of Vedanta
to both of them.
So fascinated did S. become with the idea of Seymour that he lost all
interest in plot, pace, characterization, conflict and other such
irrelevancies; far from being recognizable works of contemporary American
fiction directed at a literary audience, his last two published prose pieces
are rather letters to himself--gospels, as it were, about the Glass family,
that private pantheon of eternally puerile Olympians.
[and he ends the essay with:]
For all his supposed spiritual enlightenment, then, S. manifestly remained,
throughout his public writing career as snobbish as he had been at military
school and college. It is dismaying, but should not be surprising, that so
contemptuous a man, however considerable his talent, was unable to produce a
more consequential body of work than that which he has bequeathed us. Nor,
alas--given the current literary climate, in which cultish devotions and
sentimental attachments often count as strongly as sensible critical
evaluation in the making of a literary reputation--is it surprising that the
immense esteem in which Salinger isheld by literate Americans should
continue to stand in such remarkable disproportion to the actual level of
his literary achievement.
***
regards to all.