Ian Hamilton, 63; British Poet, Critic Wrote Unauthorized Biography of J.D. Salinger

Ian Hamilton, the respected British critic, editor, poet and biographer whose unauthorized book on J.D. Salinger was blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court because it quoted from the novelist’s unpublished letters without his permission, has died. He was 63.

Hamilton died Thursday in London of undisclosed causes, a former employer announced.

The multifaceted writer was well-established in England and known in the United States (where his highly praised first biography, “Robert Lowell” in 1982, was nominated for The Times’ annual biography prize) when he undertook his study of the reclusive Salinger.

Quietly ensconced in rural New Hampshire, the famed author of “Catcher in the Rye” and “Franny and Zooey,” among others, rejected Hamilton’s request to be interviewed or to cooperate for a biography. Salinger rejected most interviews over the decades and had long been on record as saying nobody should write his biography until he was dead.

Undaunted, Hamilton went to Salinger’s old neighborhoods, interviewed his school friends and--most notably--found some 70 private letters that Salinger wrote to publishers, editors and friends from 1939 to 1962. Although unpublished, the letters were housed in university libraries, including Princeton, Harvard Law and the University of Texas, and in the offices of Salinger’s former British publisher.

Hamilton produced the book “J.D. Salinger: A Writing Life,” which Random House hoped to release in 1986. Irate, Salinger sued to block publication.

The biographer and publisher won the first round when a New York federal judge ruled: “Hamilton’s book cannot be dismissed as an act of commercial voyeurism or snooping into a private being’s private life for commercial gain. It is a serious, well-researched history of a man who through his own literary accomplishments has become a figure of enormous public interest.

“Hamilton’s use of Salinger’s copyrighted material is minimal and insubstantial,” the judge continued in his 33-page decision, which was seen as a victory for the 1st Amendment, “[and] does not exploit or appropriate the literary value of Salinger’s letters.”

But in early 1987, a federal appellate court overturned that decision and banned publication of the letters. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the ban.

Biography Revised After Court Feud

Both writers, as it turned out, won some and lost some. Salinger won his goal to keep his letters out of the biography. But thanks to his civil suit, the letters became part of the public record, more accessible than ever.

Hamilton recouped, excising the letters, but revising the biography to include insights gleaned from the bitter court feud. He published “In Search of J.D. Salinger” in 1988.

The unexpected court brouhaha, which prompted New York Review of Books critic Richard Greene to call him “the most controversial biographer in recent times,” made Hamilton far better known in America than he had been earlier. And his resulting book won high praise.

William Gargan noted for Library Journal that Hamilton’s account of “Salinger’s conduct during the legal battles . . . actually reveals more of Salinger’s character than the snippets of letters that appeared in the original work.”

Hamilton also utilized the painful experience as the springboard for another book, “Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography” in 1992. Anecdotally, he related tales of famous authors’ widows and executors who changed facts or destroyed evidence either to sanitize a writer’s life or enhance their own importance in the author’s success.

Born in Norfolk, England, Hamilton served in the Royal Air Force and studied English at Keble College at Oxford.

Upon graduation in 1962, he became founding editor of a poetry magazine, Review, which lasted 10 years. He attracted other young poets and critics adept at minimalist verse with, as one described it, “the courage of its constrictions.” Writing his own poetry in that period, Hamilton also served from 1965 to 1973 as poetry and fiction editor for the London Times Literary Supplement.

Poems Contained in a Scant Few Volumes

Most critics view Hamilton’s small body of poetry as excellent and rue his decision to turn to the more lucrative writing of reviews and biography. His poems are contained in a scant few volumes, including “The Visit” in 1970, “Fifty Poems” in 1988 and “Sixty Poems” in 1999.

Reviewing the 1988 collection for the London Review of Books, Michael Hofmann praised Hamilton’s minimalist precision: “Each individual poem is pruned back to an austere and beautiful knot of pain. . . . They are physical, without losing themselves in materialist drift; scenic without being pretty; verbally effective but not finical or clever for the sake of it. Thought wrestles with feeling, word with thing and the poem balances. Stood alongside ‘Fifty Poems,’ most things just look impossibly trite, leisurely and overstuffed.”

After his Review folded, Hamilton became editor of the arts council-funded literary monthly New Review, which lasted from 1974 to 1979. A heavy drinker and smoker, he considered the next-door Pillars of Hercules pub part of his office and developed a tough-guy reputation that some new writers called “terrifying.” But he also earned respect in the literary community and encouraged, through publication and criticism, several new writers--among them Martin Amis, Jim Crace and Ian McEwan, and the current poet laureate of Britain, Andrew Motion.

The New Review was Hamilton’s last salaried job. No better with money than marriage (he divorced twice), he could not keep his magazines afloat financially and worried about how to make a living.

His intermittent answer was reviews, for which he earned universal acclaim, and from 1984 to 1987 hosting a BBC television program, “Bookmark.” Biography proved the long-term financial solution.

Hamilton’s first effort, which quickly established him as a careful and entertaining biographer, was the 1982 book about his friend, poet Robert Lowell, whose poetry Hamilton had published and championed. Lowell, a womanizer with frequent stays in mental institutions, was not an easy subject.

Yet, a Times reviewer noted: “Ian Hamilton’s book sets the poetry and the pain in wondrous balance. It is intensely alive. It is intimate, drawing upon a remarkable range of correspondence and interviews with those who found themselves in Lowell’s magnetic-storm field.”

Becomes Intrigued With Screenwriters

Hamilton never hesitated to delve into new areas. When he visited Hollywood to research F. Scott Fitzgerald for his television program, he became intrigued with screenwriters. So in 1990 he published “Writers in Hollywood 1915-51,” chronicling those who wrote for the silver screen from silent films until the end of the studio era.

An avid soccer fan, he surprised the literati by writing two books about Paul Gascoigne--”Gazza Agonistes” in 1993 and “Gazza Italia” in 1994.

Close on their heels came his radically different literary anthology, “The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry in English.”

Hamilton edited several anthologies, published collections of his reviews and wrote a well-received biography of Matthew Arnold titled “A Gift Imprisoned” in 1998.

He is survived by his partner, Patricia Whatley, and five children.

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Newscast

The Vietnam war drags on

In one corner of our living-room.

The conversation turns

To take it in.

Our smoking heads

Drift back to us

From the grey fires of South-east

Asia.

-- Ian Hamilton