Reading Update

Just lately I've been reading another biography of a writer: J.D. Salinger: A Life, by Kenneth Slawenski. It's good, especially at linking the life and the work. Slawenski does a particularly good job of showing the significance of Salinger's military service during World War II. He was in the thick of preparations for D-Day, was among the first to land on Utah beach, and experienced months of hard fighting and the loss of many comrades in arms. It also seems significant that Salinger was in the Counter Intelligence Corps and was called on to keep an eye out for collaborators and to use his knowledge of German to interrogate German prisoners. As the war drew to an end, his unit was involved with the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. Despite his often expressed desire to return home, he stayed on in Germany an additional year after the war working with occupation forces and tracking down Nazis. Although Salinger never revealed much about his own war experiences, several of his early stories deal directly with the wartime experiences of young soldiers. His famous short story, "For Esmé with Love and Squalor" was clearly based on personal reactions to combat and its aftermath.

Like many who came of age in the late 1950s and 1960s, I was very much under the influence of J.D. Salinger. He was one of several authors who became models for my own writing. And although I was certainly a fan of The Catcher in the Rye, I was even more under the spell of the stories and the later saga of the Glass family in Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour--an Introduction, a first edition of which I gave as a birthday gift to my future wife! Reading this biography, I realize that to some extent I continue to be susceptible to the Salinger mystique, and all the contradictions contained therein. Nevertheless, I do now recognize that Salinger himself was in many ways a very damaged individual whose writing often reveals the terrible extent of that damage as well as his efforts to find a means to heal himself. When I was younger Salinger's mysticism appealed to me more than it does now. While I sometimes wish I were a more spiritual person, I have come to accept that I am not, and no amount of effort or study is likely to change that. Still, I am drawn to Salinger's take on human nature and his quest for understanding, perhaps because it is in so many ways very contradictory. And so I have decided to return to some of those books to see if I can find any traces of the young man who fell under their spell so many years ago. I'm curious to see if there is actually anything there.