SALINGER

SALINGER

J D Salinger never had a chance. Born of a Jewish father and Catholic mother it was a gilt edged invitation to guilt edged rebellion. With Papa a purveyor of Cheeses and Mama a disciple of Jesus, young Jerry spurned both, becoming a tearaway and a truant, triggering expulsion after expulsion from school after school. When people asked him what the JD stood for in his name he would answer “juvenile delinquent”.

Eschewing the cheddar and chevre career that his big cheese chose for his son, Jerry opted to churn words rather than curds and set his sights on getting published by New Yorker magazine, the pinnacle of penmanship.

He endured rejection upon rejection from New Yorker till the end of 1941when they finally accepted a story, a success scuttled by the bombing of Pearl Harbour. It was also around this time that he was squiring Oona O’Neil, a sweet sixteen six years his junior, a pre-pubescent proclivity that would remain a penchant for life. Leaving his love to fight the Japs, Jerry is jilted for The Little Tramp. The final zap on Jerry’s soul is fighting the Jerry on D DAY and liberating the concentration camps. As one commentator says, anyone who is subjected to combat stress for over 300 days becomes insane.

Like so many of his contemporaries – Heller, Mailer, Jones – WWII marked the man and the writer who delivered The Catcher in The Rye. The popular press would have it that JD was a recluse. As the film, SALINGER, succinctly points out, he was not the Howard Hughes of Letters. Reluctant to get on the Merry go Round of publicity junkets, writers festivals, book signings, he merely wanted to write, unalloyed and unambiguously anonymous. His workplace may have been a hermitage but he travels into town and abroad, so the label hermit does not justly apply.

His one brush with Hollywood was horrendous, a short story bought by Sam Goldwyn and turned into My Foolish Heart. This fueled his hatred for the “phony” and put a caveat on Catcher ever being made into a film.

Directed by Shane Salerno, SALINGER is a compelling study of a phantom phenomenon where the spectre of celebrity made a cultural ghost of a great writer. Peppered with interviews of people who lived with him, worked with him, fought with him, and were inspired by him, this film is a powerful testament to a fascinating life and the myth and cult that developed around it.

Catcher in the Rye was famously successful for touching people’s lives, as Martin Sheen and John Cusak and Philip Seymour Hoffman among others enthuse. The same book acquired some infamy when it was reported as the touch paper to a powder keg of deranged individuals responsible for assassinations, most notably the malevolent murderer of John Lennon. Playwright John Guare worries over the three killers citing the book as influencing their actions, but a trio of lunatics is nothing when you consider the violence and slaughter under the influence of the Bible or the Koran.

According to the documentary, a number of posthumous  works are  to be published between 2015 and 2020, including  A Counterintelligence Agent’s Diary, about his time interrogating prisoners of war; A World War II Love Story, based on his brief marriage to Sylvia, a suspected Nazi, after the war; A Religious Manual, detailing his adherence to Advaita Vedanta Hinduism later in his life; and The Complete Chronicle of the Glass Family, featuring five stories about Seymour Glass, a recurring character in other works. Makes one shiver with anticipation…