
By Albert Stern / BJV Editor
Perhaps the most shopworn advice a creative writer receives is “write about what you know.” That saw came to mind as I read Salinger’s Soul: His Personal & Religious Odyssey, Stephen B. Shepard’s insightful biography of the enigmatic author of The Catcher in the Rye. As Shepard shows in his concise and fast-moving overview of J.D. Salinger’s life and career (and subsequent lack of career), the author’s experiences provided him with an abundance of compelling material – witnessing pivotal battles of World War II in Europe, being present at the liberation of a concentration camp, relationships with famous friends and lovers, rising to star status at The New Yorker under the editorships of both Harold Ross and William Shawn, and struggling with success and celebrity – none of which he wrote about.
As Shepard relates, these experiences may have informed his fiction, but his failure to take on these meaty subjects head on led him to be dismissed by Norman Mailer (as a literary figure, Salinger’s polar opposite) as “no more than the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school.”
Moreover, as Shepard points out, there are “scant references to anything Jewish in a lifetime of writing.” Jerome David Salinger’s father was Jewish, but he didn’t find out that his mother was only pretending to be Jewish until after his bar mitzvah, after which, writes Shepard, “he was quick to abandon his own Jewishness.” During a year abroad in Austria, he lived with a Jewish family in Vienna; after the war, he learned that they had all been murdered. He fictionalized that experience in the short story “A Girl I Knew” and alluded to antisemitism in another, “Down at the Dinghy.” The fictional Glass family, around which so many of his stories revolved were, like him, half-Jewish, although Shepard points out that they are “even less Jewish” than were the Salingers.
Even if Salinger avoided Jewish themes because of what his daughter called his “touchiness” about his heritage or as a method of suppressing the trauma of his wartime experiences, one can’t help but wonder, as did the literary critic Ihab Hassan (quoted by Shepard) as early as 1957: “Is this all that so gifted an author can do with the deep-down complexity of a Jew’s fate in our culture?”
As Shepard’s book about Salinger’s career shows, that question can be redacted to: “Is this all that so gifted an author can do?” Salinger famously stopped publishing in 1965, choosing to live outside the limelight in rural New Hampshire, although he kept on writing until his death in 2010 – he produced works that his son asserts will all someday be published, though the timetable is still uncertain. Shepard is harsh (although not uniquely or unfairly so) in his assessment that after Catcher, the collection 9 Stories, and the long story “Franny,” the quality of Salinger’s writing dropped precipitously. More and more, the “religiously obsessed” Salinger wove in ideas relating to his own odyssey through Eastern religious thought, particularly the Vedanta branch of Hinduism, and his storytelling and character development suffered. Shepard himself finds it “improbable” that any of the unpublished work from Salinger’s later output will possess the merit of his early work.
I enjoyed Shepard’s clearheaded overview of Salinger’s life and career – the book’s brevity was, for me, a real virtue. I would have stopped reading a longer biography in the middle because Salinger proves to be someone I did not want to spend any more time with. Even if Salinger’s personality was warped by the staggering trauma of his wartime experiences, his unpleasant traits seemed less rooted in those experiences then exacerbated by them. Shepard also points out that Salinger’s fiction is marked by both an absence of humor and mature sexuality – “there is love, but it’s usually in a relationship in which sex is ruled out,” he writes. These insights made me consciousness of an aridity I always felt in Salinger’s work, but never put my finger on.
The question I found myself asking as I finished Salinger’s Soul was whether I wanted to re-read the Salinger works I remembered as having loved. I read Catcher twice – I loved it as a teenager because it moved me and then again when I was thirty, when its craft blew me away. And I remember the experience of being transported by reading “Franny” hunkered down in a lounge chair in my college library during finals week, when it distracted me from the studying I should have been doing.
But my answer is no – I don’t want to read them again. Stephen Shepard’s biography conveyed something about J.D. Salinger and the outlook of his fiction that I find off-putting as I enter my dotage. Would labeling that something a “phoniness” be too glib? Maybe. All I know is that I loved the books when I read them, and would not want to remember them any other way.