Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted IN SEARCH OF J.D. SALINGER by Ian Hamilton Random House; 224 pages; $17.95

By R.Z. Sheppard

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 Hamilton's trouble started when he came across more than 100 unpublished letters, stored mainly in the libraries of Princeton and the University of Texas at Austin.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.

Salinger sued. The lower court found that Hamilton had made "fair use" of the letters. But the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York reversed the ruling in a decision that not only reinforced existing copyright law but also limited the manner in which a writer could describe copyrighted material in his own words. Hamilton went reeling back to his writing table, and the publishing business went into a tizzy. "Biography is a legitimate literary pursuit," says Jason Epstein, Hamilton's editor at Random House. "Salinger's reluctance to be written about, if ceded, could threaten the whole genre."

Noting that 40% of the disputed manuscript's pages contained quoted and paraphrased materials, Copyright Lawyer Roger Zissu sees a more limited peril. "Most historians and biographers don't write books that are that dependent on the subject's correspondence," says Zissu, who was not involved in the case but who successfully represented Gerald Ford's publishers when they sued the Nation magazine for printing key excerpts from the former President's unpublished memoirs.

By paraphrasing Salinger's words, Hamilton believed he was within legal bounds. But the court signaled otherwise: "The biographer has no inherent right to copy the 'accuracy' or the 'vividness' of the letter writer's expression." For example, in 1941 Salinger dated Oona O'Neill, daughter of Playwright Eugene O'Neill and future wife of Charlie Chaplin. In one unpublished letter, Salinger imagined a scene from the couple's domestic life: "I can see them at home evenings. Chaplin squatting grey and nude, atop his chiffonier, swinging his thyroid around his head by his bamboo cane, like a dead rat. Oona in an aquamarine gown, applauding madly from the bathroom." The banned Hamilton version: "At one point in a letter to Burnett ((Salinger)) provides a pen portrait of the Happy Hour Chez Chaplin: the comedian, ancient and unclothed, is brandishing his walking stick -- attached to the stick, and horribly resembling a lifeless rodent, is one of Chaplin's vital organs. Oona claps her hands in appreciation . . ."

Citing an "enormous chilling effect" from the decision, Random House Lawyer Gerald Hollingsworth indicates that Scott Donaldson's forthcoming biography of John Cheever has been shorn of some of Cheever's illustrative and idiosyncratic phrases. Last year Macmillan shelved The Binghams of Louisville after a copyright challenge from Family Patriarch Barry Bingham Sr., former head of the Louisville Courier-Journal media empire.

Despite all the fuss, Hamilton's book emerges as a canny and engaging variation on that old journalistic ploy: how to write a lively story about not getting the story. In Search of J.D. Salinger is basically a tour de force, impressively written but a bit precious. The author invents an alter ego , character who prods the legally lamed Ian Hamilton to get on with his project despite the court's restrictions on paraphrasing. He also takes the liberty of imagining what Salinger might say to him: "It is you I hate. You are a snooper and a thief."

Hamilton provides no startling news about his reclusive quarry. Rumors emerge that Salinger has two finished manuscripts locked away, but there is no information about their contents. Instead Hamilton weaves colorful details into what was previously a ragged chronology about Salinger, the misfit son of a Scottish mother and a Jewish father who imported hams and cheeses from Europe. The Salingers were well off, and Sonny, as Jerome David was sometimes called, had New York City as his playground. There were the underachieving school years at Valley Forge Military Academy (the Pencey Prep of Catcher), the brief attendance at New York University and Ursinus College, and enrollment in Burnett's short-story course at Columbia, where Hamilton assembles a sketch of an "on-the-make young college drop-out plotting his first literary career moves."

As a member of a U.S. Army counterintelligence unit during World War II, Salinger searched for Nazis in newly liberated towns and wrote stories while huddled in foxholes. In Paris he met Ernest Hemingway, who supposedly made a bad impression by shooting the head off a chicken. A postwar Salinger cut a tall, dark and disconcerting figure in New York. An editor's wife recalls meeting "Jerry" at a party in 1952: "He came over to me and said that we ought to run away together. I said, 'But I'm pregnant.' And he said, 'That doesn't matter. We can still run away.' "

Among Hamilton's literary anecdotes is the story of the publishing house that missed landing The Catcher in the Rye when a vice president sent the manuscript to the textbook department because he had heard the story was about a preppie.

Hamilton's search for Salinger leads him into the author's fiction, where he finds autobiographical inspiration. The city and suburban settings of Nine Stories reflect Salinger's Manhattan youth and his adult stint among the commuters of Westport, Conn. The soldier in the magical For Esme -- with Love and Squalor suffers from a case of nerves not unlike the symptoms Salinger described in a letter to Hemingway. Models are identified for members of the Glass family, the precocious and haunting characters who ride the time loops of stories as early as A Perfect Day for Bananafish and as late as Seymour: An $ Introduction. The year the fiction stopped, 1965, is the point at which Hamilton ends his account.

Salinger has won his legal battle but with predictable results: he has lost the war against unwanted attention. He was forced to communicate with a world he had long since renounced. He was summoned to Manhattan to give a deposition to the defense. His tone in that document is terse and grudging:

Q. Have you written any full-length works of fiction during the past 20 years which have not been published?

A. Could you frame that a different way? What do you mean by a full-length work? You mean ready for publication?

Q. As opposed to a short story or a fictional piece or a magazine submission.

A. It's very difficult to answer. I don't write that way. I just start writing fiction and see what happens to it.

Q. Maybe an easier way to approach this is, would you tell me what your literary efforts have been in the field of fiction within the last 20 years?

A. Could I tell you or would I tell you?

Five years after undertaking the project, Hamilton is sadder and presumably wiser, although not necessarily richer. Random House footed the legal bills, but of his $100,000 advance, the biographer used up half for research and travel expenses. And there was the cost of ambivalence: "I proceeded with as much tact and decency as one could," says Hamilton. "Nonetheless there he is, wanting to be left alone, and he isn't being left alone, and this is partly because of me." If he had known the outcome, would Hamilton have written about Salinger? "No," he says emphatically. How does he feel about writing other biographies? "Extremely reluctant. The subject would have to be very, very dead."

With reporting by Helen Gibson/London and Raji Samghabadi/New York