A Biographer’s Quest for J. D. Salinger

When he was 17, a provincial, intensely literary young man discovered a blue hardback in a secondhand bookstore in a northern English town. The book was “The Catcher in the Rye.”

That novel, published in 1951, was by the hitherto barely known American writer, J. D. Salinger. By the time the young Englishman, Ian Hamilton, discovered it, the book had already achieved critical acclaim and become a best-seller. But unknown to Hamilton, it was becoming clear that the book was more than that. Gradually, it impinged on the general consciousness of the English-speaking world, attaining the status of an American classic and establishing Salinger as a household name. More than 250,000 copies of the book are still sold every year.

In his only published novel, Salinger had brought to life a voice that would increasingly be heard in the United States in the 1950s and ‘60s: that of the teen-ager awakening to the conflict between the desire to remain a child and the pressure to join the alien, enemy world of teachers and parents by growing up.

For Ian Hamilton, now 50, the encounter with “The Catcher in the Rye” would not be forgotten with the onset of maturity. Hamilton embarked on a literary life, attending Oxford University where he studied English. He eventually published two volumes of poetry, and, in 1982, a distinguished biography of American poet Robert Lowell.

But the experience of reading Salinger as an impressionable youth ultimately provided a powerful enough impetus to cause Hamilton to embark, five years ago, on a biography of the man who created Holden Caulfield.

A Virtual Recluse

For more than two decades J. D. Salinger has been a virtual recluse, granting no interviews and publishing not a word. In the course of researching the biography, Hamilton never met Salinger nor did he speak to him on the telephone. “If I had known then what I know now, I never would have started it,” Hamilton said.

Hamilton’s efforts to write about Salinger would result in court action by the author who had been the idol of Hamilton’s youth. As a result of Salinger’s legal action, Hamilton would be forced to rewrite his book twice. Initially called “J. D. Salinger, a Writing Life,” the book would eventually be recast as the saga of writing a biography of an author who does not want the story of his life written. Hamilton called the re-written version, “In Search of J. D. Salinger” and it was published in June by Random House ($17.95).

The repercussions of the case of J. D. Salinger vs. Ian Hamilton--which stopped just short of the U.S. Supreme Court--are only beginning to become apparent. According to Robert Callagy, the attorney for Random House, Hamilton’s draft of the Salinger biography was the first book to be enjoined by a U.S. court citing copyright law.

The legal controversy centered on the use of four groups of letters--each group covering a different decade of Salinger’s life--which Hamilton had uncovered during his research, and which Salinger had no idea still existed. Hamilton had found letters, freely available to the public on demand, in libraries at Princeton University and the University of Texas, in the possession of Hamish Hamilton Publishers in London, and in possession of the biographer of the late Judge Learned Hand, who was a longtime friend of Salinger’s. Quotations from and direct references to the letters comprised about a quarter of the first draft of the biography.

The initial court decision by Judge Pierre N. Leval of the U.S. District Court in Manhattan permitted publication of a re-written version of the biography that paraphrased, rather than quoted, Salinger’s letters. That verdict was overturned by an appeals court in a decision handed down by judges Jon O. Newman and Roger Miner. That decision rested heavily on an emphasis of faith in Salinger’s right to private ownership of the contents, “the expressive heart,” of his letters.

Finally, in October, 1987, the Supreme Court was petitioned by the Random House lawyers, but refused to hear the appeal, and the Newman-Miner decision stands.

Since the decision, two other biographies--of Igor Stravinsky by John Kobler, and of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard by British journalist Russell Miller--have been halted before publication citing the Salinger precedent. Salinger’s desire to remain in isolation has affected, in ways he might not have foreseen, the lives of other writers.

“I have mixed feelings about it now,” Hamilton said of his five-year project, two years of which have been consumed in legal battles. His voice has a tinge of disillusionment. “On the one hand he’s still this author I admire enormously. I feel upset that we’re now in this position of near enmity because of this book, and to that extent I sort of half regret having embarked on the whole thing.

“On the other hand, I’m capable of feeling irritated by him. I think there is something sort of excessive about the position he’s taken--and misguided in the sense that I think he has invited, unwittingly, a lot more publicity than he would ever have got if he had simply let the first book come out.”

From the outset, Hamilton knew that Salinger would be difficult to catch. All that was publicly known about Salinger was that he wanted to remain unbothered: Now 69, he has made it clear that his one desire is to be left alone on his 99-acre property in Cornish, N.H.

Hamilton was to wrestle with questions of conscience over the legitimacy of pursuing the truth about a man who apparently had nothing to hide, but simply wanted to remain, on principle, a private individual. He could see that by pursuing the truth about Salinger, however unsensational it was, the principle of freedom of information and the right to know would come into collision with the right to privacy.

“I had to ask myself: Is it possible to write a defensible literary biographical study of a writer who says, ‘Go away. I won’t tell you anything,’?” said Hamilton, who admits to being shy himself and protective of his own privacy. When Hamilton discovered, to his utter amazement, that letters of his own were in the archives of the University of Texas library, he confessed to being “horrified.”

But Hamilton insisted it is undeniable that Salinger, by writing a novel that captivated a massive audience, had himself laid the bait for a biographer to pursue. It is unreasonable, not to say unrealistic--human curiosity being what it is--not to suppose that someone, sometime, would want to get to the bottom of the man who wrote “The Catcher in the Rye” in a more thorough fashion than intermittent attempts by journalists over the years.

A Profound Silence

An introductory letter to Salinger from Hamilton, explaining his intentions, provoked nothing but a profound silence from the author. So as an effort at preliminary research, Hamilton sent off a series of letters to all the Salingers in the New York City phone book. As a result he got some replies, but, more important, he received a letter from J. D. Salinger himself asking Hamilton not to proceed with the project. “I think I have borne all the exploitation and loss of privacy I can possibly bear in a single lifetime,” Salinger said.

The letter gave Hamilton serious pause. But he decided that the author remained a legitimate subject for inquiry. Despite the tone of anguish in his letter, Salinger--who is in touch with a small circle of friends and relatives who meticulously guard his privacy--is known to be in good health. “I believe his life is fairly normal,” Hamilton says.

But as a result of that letter, Hamilton felt obliged to impose constraints on himself that he felt would distinguish him in the eyes of Salinger from being an utterly ruthless hack. He wrote Salinger back, telling him that he would not contact his sister, his children or his former wife. (In the course of his research Hamilton discovered that Salinger had been married twice, the first time briefly to a French woman after the war.) He would not make any attempt to research Salinger’s life since he ceased publishing in 1965. Hamilton believed he was being fair, and being a gentleman. He heard nothing more from Salinger until the legal action began two years ago.

It is one of the ironies of the Salinger case that, unusual for most biographies, Hamilton uncovered little about Salinger that wasn’t already known that could be deemed embarrassing. “The letters that were in contention were really completely innocuous, and not in the least damaging to him,” said Hamilton.

But when a proof of the finished biography got into Salinger’s hands through his longtime agent, Dorothy Olding, Salinger decided to fight the book.

Having refused interviews for more than 20 years, Salinger would end up having to give an eight-hour interview in the form of a deposition to Random House attorneys at their offices in New York City, as an unavoidable part of his legal action. But this sacrifice was less important to the author than allowing Hamilton to use his letters. “I didn’t like the biography because it was unauthorized and because it was an appropriation of my personal letters,” he said during the deposition taken by Callagy.

Unsatisfactory Outcome

The result of all the legal wrangling has been a rather unsatisfactory outcome--despite Salinger’s victory over the letters--for both sides. The book that has been published is not the one Ian Hamilton wanted to write; and several reviewers have been quick to point out it is not the book they wanted to read. New York magazine was one of several publications that thought it “thin and fragmented.”

Still, what some regard as Salinger’s unreasonable wish for total privacy after the achievement of a widely public identity through his books and others as an elderly author’s plea for peace and quiet has been thwarted in that at least a biography has been published. The J. D. Salinger who lives a reclusive life in New Hampshire seems almost to exist in a different incarnation from the picture in the Hamilton biography of the young J. D. Salinger who, as a struggling short story writer, had a burning desire to be published and known.

What may be the final irony in the case is that in his effort to protect his letters Salinger has had to place them on file in the copyright office in New York where any member of the public willing to pay $10--less than the price of the Hamilton book--may see them.

Hamilton says he is pleased--given the exigencies under which he worked--that his biography provides information for the first time on Salinger’s whereabouts during every month of his life up to 1965. It is the first document to give insight into Jerome David Salinger--son of a wealthy cheese importer--from his school friends during his days at the McBurney School in Manhattan and Valley Forge Military Academy. “This is the first time one has had a glimpse, however shadowy, of Salinger as seen by his school mates,” Hamilton said.

And Hamilton has established that Salinger himself, as a young man, was the model for Holden Caulfield.

Ambivalent Feelings

Like many authors before him, Salinger found he had ambivalent feelings about the actual achievement of fame. “Let’s say I’m getting good and sick of bumping into that blown-up photograph of my face on the back of the dust jacket,” Salinger wrote after “Catcher” was published. Later evidence emerges of Salinger’s growing interest in Eastern mysticism. According to Hamilton, it was this influence that would cause Salinger to withdraw increasingly into his rural retreat.

After the publication of his novel, Salinger began to write about the fictional Glass family--a subject from which his writing subsequently never strayed far despite rising protests from critics. A devastating review appeared in the British newspaper the Observer by Mary McCarthy, corresponding with the British publication of two Glass family stories, “Franny and Zooey,” in 1962. McCarthy was among several prominent reviewers, including John Updike, who felt Salinger’s obsession with the Glass family was unhealthy for the quality of his fiction.

In 1965, Salinger’s last published work, “Hapworth 16, 1924,” another Glass family story, appeared in The New Yorker, occupying virtually the whole issue. The story was widely regarded as Narcissistic, prolix, and ultimately obscure in its intent. Unpublished in any other form, it has nonetheless remained a collector’s item.

Salinger’s deposition established that he is still writing, and has actually produced two manuscripts of novels--thought to be about the Glass family--that are presumably safely stored in the self-made writing shed in which he works on his property in New Hampshire.

In all these matters, J. D. Salinger remains, out of his own choosing, unavailable for comment. All attempts to find out about him--except visits from zealous students which he dismisses good-naturedly--are viewed as hostile.

For many months after reading “The Catcher in the Rye,” “I went around being Holden Caulfield,” said Ian Hamilton in an opening chapter to his biography. The infatuation with Salinger and his novel is something that Hamilton said he is now over.

Despite the bitterness over the project, Hamilton still has the blue copy of the book that he bought when he was 17. It looks as though that book will forever remain unautographed by the author.