Jerome David Salinger, the famously reclusive author, died in 2010. (“For J.D. Salinger – With Love And Squalor” TFT 1/29/10) Three years later, the documentary, Salinger, directed by Shane Salerno, parts the clouds around his life – and leaves a cloud on his reputation.
Not intentionally, the film is unfailingly positive, but it’s two hours long, so among the hero-worshipping, sensationalism and unanswered questions are a great many facts. Being the stubborn things they are, these facts lead to an inescapable conclusion: J.D. Salinger felt sorry for himself his entire life. Occasionally, he was distracted and, ultimately he replaced his pain with religion, but in addition to his literary contribution - indeed, encompassing it - Jerry Salinger built a house, nay, a palace of self-pity and lived in it to the end.
J.D. Salinger was the sensitive, intelligent, talented son of a wealthy, Park Avenue family. A man about town, he dated beautiful women, notably Oona O’Neil (daughter of Eugene and future wife of Charlie Chaplin.) As a soldier, he took part in the Invasion of Normandy, The Battle of The Bulge and the Liberation of Paris, where he met and made friends with Ernest Hemingway. Salinger’s first and only novel, The Catcher In The Rye, made him famous at the age of thirty-two. That’s a lot of good fortune to overcome, but J.D. was nothing if not determined. Having nursed his adolescent angst into a major work of fiction, he turned a raging case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder into Nine Stories, a literary reputation and, arguably, a lifestyle. He came by his PTSD honestly, however. As the documentary makes clear (in a manner more akin to hammer throwing than character sketching) Salinger was among the first American soldiers to enter the Dachau concentration camp in 1945 and was very affected by it.
Salinger’s precarious mental and emotional state is reflected in three of his best short stories. “A Perfect Day For Bananafish” about a brilliant, but disturbed man who commits suicide. “Teddy” about a brilliant, but disturbed ten-year-old boy who commits homicide and “For Esme – With Love and Squalor” about a brilliant, but disturbed soldier and his relationship with a thirteen-year-old English girl. Although the last one has no body count, it may be the most unsettling because the girl in question owes more to Ava Gardner as Lady Brett Ashley than, say, Judy Garland as Dorothy.
What distinguishes these stories, apart from their style – economical and concrete like Hemingway, but more flowing and deeply personal in tone – is the overwhelming, almost palpable sympathy he has for his characters. It’s what makes these stories instantly engaging and fondly remembered. Their strength, however, is also their weakness. As no less an author than John Updike said, “Salinger loves his characters more than God loves them.” When you consider that every character in every story, every sensitive loner and highly intelligent, but tormented, individual is J.D. Salinger himself, then, even for a writer, that’s an epic amount of self-regard.
Nine Stories cemented Salinger’s literary reputation because The Catcher In The Rye, for all it’s acclaim - and the director has no trouble finding people, often famous, to acclaim it – is a qualified success. Teenagers will identify completely with Holden Caulfield and think it’s the best book they’ve ever read because it perfectly mimics their intense, shifting emotions in a voice exactly - not close, but dead on - like their own. Adults are more likely to admire the technique, but yearn for a character beside the author’s persona and anything resembling a plot.
That brings us up to 1953. J.D. Salinger is thirty-four and he lives to be ninety-one. What does he do for the next fifty-seven years? He writes – and publishes - a short story and three novellas: “Franny” (1955) Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters” (1955) "Zooey" (1957) and “Seymour:
An Introduction" (1959). That’s all. “Seymour: An Introduction” was his farewell. At the ripe, old age of forty, Salinger leaves O. Henry’s “Baghdad On The Subway” for “Shangri-La” in the mountains of northern New Hampshire. Not exactly a hardship. The idea of leaving the city for some beautiful, remote location occurs to every Manhattanite around 3.5 times a day. The reality, for J.D., was more humble. Salinger, shows us how dull and ordinary, how utterly unromantic, his house and separate writing studio in Cornish, New Hampshire were. If you were dust you might want to settle there, but they lack what real estate agents call, “everything.” Not that his life there was dull. Mr. Salerno takes great pains (ours, not his) to prove that his subject is not as reclusive as we think.
J.D. Salinger never lacked for female companionship. He didn’t know any women, I don’t think he could, but he sure knew a lot of girls. (His only relationship with a woman his age, his first marriage, lasted eight months and she may have worked for the Gestapo. Except for her knowledge of torture methods and a taste for decorating with swastikas, that could happen to anyone. Okay, maybe not. Plus, his Jewish parents weren’t thrilled.) Then, while still pining for Oona O’Neill (whom he knew while she was in high school) he meets Jean Miller, who is fourteen (although, she states in the film, they didn’t have sex until she eighteen) Claire Douglas (Radcliffe student and his second wife) and Joyce Maynard, whom he noticed reclining like an eighteen-year-old odalisque on the cover of the New York Times Magazine. (In all fairness, she was hard to miss.) Maynard, in turn, was replaced by Colleen O’Neill, an au pair girl, whom he married and widowed.
That’s all the light that Salinger sheds on the author’s romantic life. If you want heat, go somewhere else. About the only mildly kinky thing in the movie is how, during her interview, Joyce Maynard is wearing the same watch, too large for her wrist, that she wore on her magazine cover and which reminded Salinger of the watch that Esme wore in his story, “For Esme - With Love and Squalor.” That dizzy feeling is Vertigo (1958).
So much for hero worship, unanswered questions and torrents of facts.What about the sensationalism I promised? It doesn’t amount to much. When the film ends, the director tries to tease us with all the writing Salinger supposedly did and never showed anyone. He claims that Salinger’s personal foundation has copies and will start publishing them, per his instructions, in 2015. There are a lot of reasons not to hold our breath.
J.D. Salinger spent most of his life, easily the second two-thirds or about sixty years, practicing Vedantic Hinduism. Here I must plead ignorance. Everything I know about Hinduism is from the movie, Gunga Din (1939). Assuming that Salinger did not worship the goddess, Kali, he probably took a more austere path. One involving a lot of renunciation. So, he takes the beautiful palace of self-pity that is his life and starts emptying it. No more publishers wanting things or, worse, depending on him. No more crappy editors at The New Yorker, who insist on having standards that aren’t his own. No more constant distraction by wives, girlfriends and, oh yeah, those two children he had with his second wife. Harsh and unsparing, I’ll grant you, but there are two obvious benefits. One is that, like all writers, he loves the sound of his own voice and what echoes better than an empty house? The other is serenity and who needs more goddamned serenity than Jerome David Salinger?
It doesn’t guarantee good literature, though. I’ll give you The Razor’s Edge (1944) by W. Somerset Maugham, but after that the pickings get kind of slim. What’s more, Maugham was working with editors, publishers and reviewers. He wasn’t sitting around talking to himself, laughing and kissing his hand. So, when Shane Salerno rises to his full, sensationalist crouch and beats the drum for more stories about the brilliant, but disturbed Glass family, a WWII novella about a soldier exactly like J.D. Salinger and a “manual” of stories about Vedanta, forgive me if I don’t throw my hands in the air and shout, “Hallelujah.” Instead, I’ll cover my ears and chant, “Om my god.”
