The Salinger Affair

Julian Barnes

In Search of J.D. Salinger by Ian Hamilton
Heinemann, 222 pp, £12.95, September 1988, ISBN 0 434 31331 9

Listen to Jeffrey Robinson, American biographer of figures such as Sheikh Yamani, describing how he goes to work:

What I usually do is get two or three months’ research under my belt before I go to see the guy. He may say: ‘I don’t want this biography.’ I say to him: ‘That is not one of your options. This book is going to be written, I have a publisher and I’m getting near being able to write something. Your two options are you co-operate with me or you don’t.’ The next thing is to make him see it’s in his interest to co-operate.

Most of us will probably have no difficulty in finding this crude, pushy and – let’s use the word for a change – wrong.

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Vol. 10 No. 19 · 27 October 1988 » Julian Barnes » The Salinger Affair (print version)
pages 3-5 | 3180 words

Letters

From Tim McGuire

Julian Barnes’s review of In Search of J.D. Salinger is a very clear statement of the possible case to be made against the book – perhaps too clear to be fair (LRB, 27 October). Ian Hamilton’s book has helped to crystallise the debate about the morality of biography and it may well be that it is much easier now to encamp on the moral high ground than it would have been for Hamilton when he set out to write the book and got that letter from Salinger asking him to stop. In Search of J.D. Salinger shows very effectively the flirtatious way in which Salinger has used his reclusiveness in his fiction, and elsewhere. The dust-jacket for Franny and Zooey, for instance, said: ‘My wife has asked me to say, however, in a single burst of candour, that I live in Westport with my dog.’ Why write that easily-detectable lie unless to provoke biographical interest and speculation? There were good reasons for Hamilton to think, when he got the letter, that Salinger’s No might really mean ‘If you insist’.

Salinger isn’t the only American novelist not to want a biography written about him: Mark Harris’s book Drumlin Woodchuck is the account of a failed attempt to write a life of Saul Bellow. It could serve as a how-to manual for anyone wanting to thwart a biographer. Bellow obviously hated the idea of the book being written about him, but fended Harris off by local, tactical and undemanding means, rather than by going to live behind a crocodile-infested moat in New Hampshire. The published book even quotes Bellow’s letters, with Bellow’s permission, but at the same time it reveals virtually nothing about the novelist we didn’t already know: ‘What could you possibly reveal about me that I haven’t already revealed about myself?’ Comparing the Bellow non-biography with the Salinger one, it’s easy to see how obsessed with fame and publicity Salinger is, how his reclusiveness involves a complicity with the American fame which has destroyed so many writers. No doubt Seymour Glass would say that some kinds of rejection are merely another form of attachment.

Finally, it isn’t at all fair to blame Hamilton for the now-notorious picture of Salinger recoiling in horror (‘this is what Hamilton – unintentionally, perhaps even well-intentionedly – has done to Salinger: given him that hateful moment’). Photographers have been pursuing Salinger and attempting to take pictures of him for years.

Tim McGuire
Luton