Does Salinger’s biography matter?

I used to know more or less nothing about JD Salinger’s life. Now I wish I had stayed ignorant. This is not because, reading David Shields and Shane Salerno’s new book Salinger, along with a handful of older biographies, I discovered deal-breakingly off-putting details about one of my favourite authors. It is not even due to the feeling of having given in to the Salinger industry, which capitalises on his wish to be left alone. Rather, it is the realisation that looking to Salinger’s life for clues about his work is a waste of energy. Salinger’s traumatic wartime experiences, his unequal love affairs, his crankish caprices, are interesting in the abstract, but it is only by straining that they can be made to line up, usefully, with his fiction.

In The Anatomy Lesson, Philip Roth’s literary doppelganger, Nathan Zuckerman, has this to say about the relationship between a writer’s life and his art: “The burden isn’t that everything has to be a book. It’s that everything can be a book. And doesn’t count as life until it is.” This claim seems to have been taken up, in reverse, by Salinger’s chroniclers. For them, something doesn’t really count as a book until, so to speak, it is life. According to Shields and Salerno, Esmé, of “love and squalor” fame, has to be based on a real girl called Jean Miller that Salinger met at a Florida resort. Shields and Salerno also make Miller serve as the model for another fictional character, the little girl, Sybil, who plays on the beach with Seymour in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” At best, such readings simply confirm that Salinger, like most writers, sometimes drew from real-life experience. At worst, they rule out the importance of his imagination. More to the point, though, these readings have no purchase on their object. Salinger’s writing, like suede spritzed with waterproofing spray, is protected against this sort of biographical interpretation.

There is something hermetic about Salinger’s stories. They have an internal logic, a self-referentiality, which makes readers more than usually conscious of our dependency on the narrator. “Teddy,” the last in the volume Nine Stories, deals with a precocious, quasi-Buddhist ten-year-old on a cruise with his parents and little sister. The reader is drip-fed little details and led towards a sinister, indeterminate conclusion. The sudden gathering-together of meaning—in this case the scream of “a small, female child,” whose cause we don’t see but can guess at—is a speciality of Salinger. His stories are all about atmosphere until, when decisive moments come, we must suddenly put together, logically, what we thought he had only been asking us to feel.

Reading the testimonies of his daughter or his former girlfriends, Salinger comes across as controlling, paranoid, intermittent with his affection. This doesn’t tell us much about Salinger’s books but it does make us newly conscious of a certain cruelty in his attitude towards his readers. Salinger’s dislike of publication might, at first, have been a legitimate mistrust of the “slicks” which printed his stories, but it ended by being pretty comprehensive, a dislike of almost everyone that bordered on the pathological.

Some of Salinger’s biggest devotees have striven, especially in recent years, to foreground the work instead of the life. On the occasion of his death, Stephen Foskett, who runs the fansite Bananafish, urged readers to focus on the works Salinger left behind, “instead of gossip or garment rending.” Adam Gopnik, in a piece for the New Yorker, criticised readers for wanting Salinger’s “personal, talk-show presence” on top of his words. But the choice is not as stark as Gopnik, in particular, makes it. Wishing an author had continued to publish, when it turns out that he continued to write, is not the same as wishing he had been a tell-all, fame-loving, literary Kardashian. Look at Bob Dylan, who shares a feature or two with Salinger. Dylan is seldom interviewed; the details of his private life, past and present, are scarcely known; he even managed to write an autobiography from which he, as a character, is essentially absent. But he continues to produce work, concerts and albums of material old and new, engaging with the world on his terms rather than spurning it altogether.

The problem, then, was not Salinger’s personal reclusiveness, but the fact that he stopped publishing so early. He asked his readers for attention but gave us little in return. Maybe the extant work should be enough, but it hasn’t felt like it. Salinger’s best stories are delicate, balanced, anchored in reality and hovering observantly above it. But by withdrawing from publication, Salinger was retreating not from life into art, but away from both life and art. That is the only biographical detail that matters.