Kenneth Slawenski

Considering the extent to which J.D. Salinger withdrew from the public eye and guarded his privacy for most of his life, much is known about him, as Kenneth Slawenski proves in his 2010 biography “J.D. Salinger: A Life.”
Salinger wasn't always so withdrawn. As a young man he was popular with women and someone who went out for a drink with the guys. Slawenski identifies several factors that eventually led to his isolation in Cornish, N.H., and his decision to continue writing but to cease publishing his work. His experiences in Europe during World War II affected him greatly. He wasn't the only veteran who pulled back within himself after the war ended. Even on the front lines, Salinger worked on his short stories, and many of his stories, including "For Esme — With Love and Squalor," were heavily influenced by the war.

Then there was the The New Yorker, which for several years exclusively published his stories. The magazine has long emphasized the importance of the story over its author, something Salinger took to heart. Removing his photograph from “The Catcher in the Rye” in later editions was just one way he attempted to make himself secondary to his work.

Eventually he carried this to the extreme by writing his stories but then hiding them away. This decision was fueled by his devotion to Zen Buddhism and meditation. Prayer, Slawenski writes, became his primary ambition. The popularity of his books provided him with enough income to live on and support his family, but as a virtual hermit, especially after his wife (the second of three and the mother of his children) left him, he didn't need much money.

Yet for someone who tried to put his work ahead of himself, Salinger couldn't stop putting himself and his beliefs front and center in that work. His characters, from Holden Caulfield to Buddy Glass, speak for him, thus giving a biographer plenty to work with. Slawenski discusses in detail every published story. Many of these stories Salinger refused to have reprinted and thus are difficult for fans to find.

The writer's life intersected with those of other famous people in surprising ways. Salinger's first love, the daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill, married Charlie Chaplin instead, During the war, Salinger would sometimes slip away to compare notes about writing with war correspondent Ernest Hemingway. His best friend in Cornish was the esteemed Judge Learned Hand. Jackie Kennedy once called him on the phone, trying to persuade him to come to the White House.

The irony of Salinger's withdrawal from the world is that it made him, not his fiction, the public's primary focus. Any Salinger sighting became news.

Salinger died just as Slawenski was wrapping up this biography. This was fortunate for the biographer in that it allowed him to tell a more complete story, but it also saved him, an obvious Salinger fan, from becoming another Salinger enemy, yet another person invading the privacy of someone who had had enough of fame and just wanted to be left alone.… (plus d'informations)

Who was J. D. Salinger? Few, if any, American writers have provoked the same manic level of curiosity about their personal lives as J. D. Salinger did, much to his perpetual dismay and despite his deliberate and often extreme efforts to withdraw from such curious scrutiny. In this riveting biography, Slawenski (a professed Salinger devotee) respectfully provides a balanced and unsensationalized account of Salinger's life and work. Even so, it's doubtful that Salinger would've approved of the book, given his unwavering belief that a writer's work alone should speak for the writer, and that the details of said writer's life are frankly no one else's business. Salinger has now passed on, though, and I think this book will go far in dispelling some of the myths surrounding the man. The arc of Salinger's published writing career and its abrupt end in the mid-1960s has always intrigued me, but I only had a surface understanding of why Salinger had acted the way that he did. Slawenski delves into Salinger's Army career, his work habits, his religious beliefs, his popularity and resulting gradual retreat from society, his relationship to both his characters and his fellow humans, and out of it all comes a sympathetic portrait of a gifted artist almost wrecked by his own fame. Here was a man who just wanted to write and be left alone to do it, who respected his readers but strove to maintain a professional distance from them, and who did not relate well to other people, yet in certain ways relied on them a lot. Salinger seemed to inherently trust people at first, and yet as they came to disappoint him he moved swiftly and viciously to excise them from his life. This happened over and over with editors, publishers, friends, and lovers. At the end of his life, there were few left. Perhaps Salinger's reactions to his sudden fame seem extreme, but it's really hard to say. Many people have been destroyed or nearly so by their own launches into the spotlight. It must be incredibly stressful to live under such a microscope. We live in a culture today where so many people expect to know, almost as a right, every last detail about the personal lives of public figures. And now the Web makes it even easier and faster for the floodgates of speculation and rumor to open and spill forth across the screens of eager fans (or birdwatchers, as Salinger called them). One can only guess that had the height of Salinger's fame occurred in current times, he would've been even more beside himself with rage at the world. In the end, however, it's Salinger's published works that now live on beyond the man himself. Given how enraptured he was by his own characters, how absorbed he was in the crafting of his fiction, it is in those printed words where we are likely to learn the most about Salinger. After all, those words are what he intended for us as readers to focus on all along.… (plus d'informations)