Books: Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted IN SEARCH OF J.D. SALINGER

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There are hundreds of writers waiting in varying stages of despair for their phone to ring. They dream of giving interviews, being summoned to lionizing appearances and literary lunches. A reviewing assignment would be welcome; a request to blurb a fellow author's new book would not go unconsidered. But life is unfair. Those who have get, and those who could get sometimes choose not to. Like J.D. Salinger, who has spent most of his 69 years ducking the sort of publicity that most authors would kill for.

A consequence of Salinger's evasions is that he has become as famous for defending his privacy against nosy admirers and journalists as he is for writing The Catcher in the Rye (1951), the Huckleberry Finn of the Silent Generation. Salinger's last published story, Hapworth 16, 1924, appeared in The New Yorker in 1965, twelve years after he withdrew to 90 wooded acres in Cornish, N.H. He has been generally successful in protecting his solitude. But because he refuses to collaborate in the making of his own legend ("Because I might get to believe it," he told an inquirer years ago), Salinger has been less able to control what is written about him.

Or has he? Ask Ian Hamilton. Before being allowed to publish In Search of J.D. Salinger, the British critic, poet and biographer (Robert Lowell) was put through two rewrites and 1 1/2 years of legal proceedings, culminating in a landmark court ruling that many publishing insiders fear will hamper the future practice of biography. Hamilton's trouble started when he came across more than 100 unpublished letters, stored mainly in the libraries of Princeton and the University of Texas at Austin. The correspondence dates from 1939 to 1961, and provided him with a rich deposit of raw material and, at first, quotations. Salinger apparently did not know where his mail had ended up, although it is clear that he wished it had been burned.

Most of the letters were written to Whit Burnett, Salinger's teacher and the editor of Story magazine; Elizabeth Murray, a friend; Judge Learned Hand, a New England neighbor; and Hamish Hamilton and Roger Machell, the author's British publishers. The young Salinger was full of strong opinions and pithy wisecracks. His view of U.S. publishing: "Everybody over here who's ever taught Senior English for a couple of semesters, or worked for a good upholsterer, has considered himself qualified to collect and edit a short story anthology."

A book dealer provided Salinger with a galley of Hamilton's original work, then titled J.D. Salinger: A Writing Life. Salinger immediately objected and had the correspondence copyrighted, an act that paved the way for court action but allowed anyone to read his mail at the Library of Congress. Hamilton agreed to paraphrase most of the letters rather than quote from them and, thinking the matter settled, sent a revised manuscript to his publisher.