J. D. Salinger tried to grapple with emotional trauma from World War II (above, in 1944), first through writing and later with religion, a new biography argues.  In the J. D. Salinger story âZooey,â the title characterâs mother says of him and his brother: âNeither you nor Buddy know how to talk to people you donât like,â adding: âYou canât live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes.â  This was true, too, of the famously reclusive Salinger, who retreated to Cornish, N.H., the small town where he lived in seclusion for more than a half-century. His alienation from the world and his mania for privacy became part of the Salinger myth â a myth that David Shields and Shane Salerno attempt to pierce in their revealing but often slapdash new book, âSalinger.â  Salinger stopped publishing decades ago (his last story to appear in print, âHapworth 16, 1924,â came out in the June 19, 1965, issue of The New Yorker), but, by some reports, he continued to write nearly every day.  In âSalinger,â Mr. Salerno and Mr. Shields assert that Salinger, who died in January 2010 at 91, left instructions âauthorizing a specific timetableâ (starting between 2015 and 2020) for the release of unpublished work, including five new Glass family stories; a novel based on his relationship with his first wife, Sylvia Welter, a German he married shortly after World War II; a novella in the form of a counterintelligence officerâs diary entries during the war; a story-filled âmanualâ about the Vedanta religious philosophy; and new or retooled stories fleshing out the story of Holden Caulfield, known to generations of readers from âThe Catcher in the Rye,â the novel that made its creator famous in 1951 as the voice of adolescent angst. The authors of âSalingerâ attribute details of these plans to two anonymous sources described as âindependent and separate.â  The sharp-edged portrait of Salinger that Mr. Shields and Mr. Salerno draw in this book is that of a writer whose âlife was a slow-motion suicide missionâ â a man who never recovered from the horrors of wartime combat and the soul-shaking sight of a Nazi death camp filled with burned and smoldering corpses. Salinger, they argue, tried to grapple with his post-traumatic stress disorder first with art and later with religion: âThe war broke him as a man and made him a great artist; religion offered him postwar spiritual solace and killed his art.â  This reductive diagnosis of Salingerâs âconditionâ is accompanied by pages and pages of testimony about how his youthful arrogance (one friend said he dismissed âDreiser through Hemingwayâ as âall inferiorâ writers) and disaffection with his parentsâ bourgeois world calcified, after the war, into a deep antipathy, even repugnance for most worldly things and ideas. Eventually, that contempt infected many of his closest relationships, and as depicted in these pages, an observant, Holden-like young man evolves over the years into a blinkered and condescending curmudgeon who is frequently guilty of the same sort of phoniness or hypocrisy his characters so deplored.  Salingerâs family, the authors say, had to compete for his attention with the fictional characters heâd created. One scholar quoted here says that when Salinger went off to his writing bunker, he gave âstrict orders that he was not to be disturbed for anything unless the house was burning down.â Whatâs more, as he retreated from the world, his writing grew increasingly solipsistic and hermetic, his mastery of the vernacular giving way to more and more abstract language.  âStory by story,â Mr. Salerno and Mr. Shields observe, âfrom âTeddyâ forward, Salingerâs work moves from religion as a factor or even a crutch in his charactersâ lives, to religion as the only thing in their lives that matters, to the workâs entire purpose being to cryptically convey religious dogma.â  âSalinger,â self-promotingly described on its cover as âThe Official Book of the Acclaimed Documentary Film,â is not a conventional biography but a kind of companion volume to Mr. Salernoâs documentary of the same name (to be released on Sept. 6). The book takes a montagelike form: Excerpts from interviews, snippets from books and newspaper articles, letters and photos (some new) and photocopies of documents have all been assembled along with the authorsâ own remarks into a sprawling, cut-and-paste collage.  This volume is indebted to earlier Salinger biographies by Paul Alexander (listed curiously as âan adviser to this bookâ) and Kenneth Slawenski, and it also draws heavily upon memoirs by Salingerâs daughter, Margaret, and his former lover Joyce Maynard, who was 18 when he began courting her. Among the other voices featured in this book are Salinger friends, paramours, colleagues, acquaintances and fans, as well as reporters, critics (including this one) and photographers.
A new biography of J. D. Salinger explores his private obsessions, relationships with young women, wartime experiences and the possibility of posthumous publications.