Salinger, by David Shields – review

This biography has somewhat more news value than most literary biographies. Its subject worked hard to ensure that. After 1965, J.D. Salinger, having published one novel, a volume of short stories and two pairs of novellas, withdrew permanently from public life. His last publication, a long story entitled ‘Hapworth 16, 1924’, was never printed in hard covers.

Subsequently, he went to some effort to control what was known, and could be written, about him. He retired to Cornish, New Hampshire, living comfortably on the immense, ongoing sales of his single novel, The Catcher in the Rye. From there, information occasionally leaked out. A fan might extract a couple of rebarbative sentences from his idol. A mistress wrote her memoirs, years after her relationship with Salinger, and his daughter a volume designed to serve her own ends in therapy. A number of witnesses suggested that he had gone on writing until his death in 2010, storing the finished books in a safe.

This biography appears to contain something more than idle speculation. Its revelations about Salinger’s life are mixed in nature, and include some genuinely intrusive discoveries. The first is that Salinger had only one testicle, out of which David Shields and Shane Salerno conjure rich speculation about shame and emotional difficulties. They have also discovered Jean Miller — the girl Salinger started wooing when she was 14, finally seduced and then immediately abandoned — and persuaded her to talk. We are told in detail about Salinger’s horrific war experiences: he was one of the first American soldiers to enter Dachau. The authors have also tried to unearth the truth about a mysterious first marriage to a German woman at the end of the war, which lasted barely a year, and suggest that it may have foundered because she was discovered to be a Gestapo informant.