What sort of person would you expect to be bringing out a life of J. D. Salinger two months after his death, bearing in mind that Salinger was more obsessive about his privacy than any other writer in human history and fought the publication of the last biography all the way to the US Supreme Court? You might not expect the answer to be Kenneth Slawenski. Who, you may ask, is he? Well, he is a pretty private person too. I pummelled the web and the only meagre intelligence I could extract is that he was born and raised in New Jersey and has worked in computers. This may be his first book, for he mentions no other on the dustjacket, and tells us only that he runs the ‘definitive Salinger website’, deadcaulfields.com. So he is not by trade a biographer or a critic. He is a fan, one of those ‘amateur readers’ to whom Salinger dedicated Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters ‘with untellable affection and gratitude’.
Like the rest of us, amateur readers have their faults. Slawenski spells Adolph Hitler like that. He has an eccentric way with the apostrophe. Sometimes he plods and sometimes he gushes. And it doesn’t help that his publishers seem a bit amateurish too. Pomona Books of Hebden Bridge, Yorks, do not give us any pictures, or an index, let alone a Salinger bibliography. One imagines them cranking an inky old press in between turning out tapestry kits of Wensleydale scenes and Toby jugs of Geoffrey Boycott and Sir Bernard Ingham.
And this biography is no more authorised than Ian Hamilton’s was 20 years ago. So Slawenski cannot quote chunks from letters or diaries or even from the books. This is rather tantalising when he tells us about the ‘misleading’ and ‘deceptive’ letters Salinger wrote when he was in the army, but cannot tell us what was in them. More tantalising still when he mentions the passionate letters Salinger wrote to Oona O’Neill, here identified as the love of his life before she was snatched away by the ancient Charlie Chaplin. Oona’s best friend, Carol Marcus, later to become famous as the original of Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, copied some of the more elegant passages in Salinger’s letters to Oona into her own letters to William Saroyan, so he wouldn’t think she was an airhead, thus using Salinger as an involuntary Cyrano de Bergerac. Alas, Saroyan was contemptuous of those ‘lousy glib letters’, but he forgave her when she owned up and he married her none the less. Nor do we get a glimpse of the letters Salinger wrote to his agent or to the editor of the New Yorker, the almost equally reclusive William Shawn, who did so much to help shape Salinger’s finest work, because he made them both destroy the lot.
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