by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched the PBS premiere of the documentary Salinger, directed by Shane Salerno (a screenwriter of
growing repute who was at least an online contact of my former roommate/client
John!) and a portrayal of the long, successful but apparently not too happy
life of the writer J. D. Salinger. He was born in 1919 and died in 2010 at the
age of 91, and though he had a pretty normal background for an American writer
of his time and place — he was born in New York City, the son of a Jewish
cheese merchant and a Catholic mother; he realized from an early age that what
he wanted to do was write; he gradually worked his way up the ladder of
publications as a short-story writer and aimed at the most prestigious outlet
in the field, The New Yorker —
his life changed dramatically when he enlisted in the U.S. Army (the
documentary made it seem like he volunteered, though his Wikipedia page said he
was drafted). He began his service in 1942 but didn’t see combat until 1944; he
participated in the D-Day invasions and also was part of the company that
liberated Dachau. Apparently that experience sent him into a nervous breakdown
(what probably would be called post-traumatic stress disorder today), though
even before he went into the service he had started to explore teen alienation
and had created the character of Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of
Salinger’s most famous work (and only completed full-length novel!), The
Catcher in the Rye. After years of trying
to crack The New Yorker he had
actually got them to accept his first story about Holden Caulfield when the
Pearl Harbor attack occurred and the New Yorker editors decided a story about youthful alienation at
home no longer suited the national Zeitgeist. So Salinger’s words didn’t see the hallowed pages
of The New Yorker until, after
two years’ worth of revisions, they finally agreed to publish the grim story “A
Perfect Day for Bananafish,” in which a 30-year-old man named Seymour Glass
picks up an underage girl on a beach, walks with her, has a long philosophical
talk, then goes to his hotel room and, for motives only barely hinted at in the
story but described at length by Salinger in his later works about Seymour
Glass and his family, kills himself. The story was printed in 1948 and became a
sensation; Salinger followed it up with other stories in The New
Yorker, Collier’s, Cosmopolitan (back when
it was a serious literary publication and not a women’s sex rag) and elsewhere,
and built enough of a reputation that movie producer Sam Goldwyn bought the
screen rights to the story “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut” and turned it into a
big, blowsy, soap-opera movie called My Foolish Heart.
Salinger was so infuriated with the results that he
decided he would never again allow any of his stories to be filmed — a ban he
perpetuated beyond his lifetime by including it in his will — which didn’t stop
him from having a sensational literary success in 1951 with The
Catcher in the Rye, which not only
attracted attention among the literati but got named a Book-of-the-Month Club featured selection and
continued to sell for years — in 2004 it moved 250,000 copies, an astonishing
number for a 53-year-old novel about such a transitory topic as teen
alienation. (Teen alienation may repeat itself generation after generation, but
it’s hard to imagine the specific forms of it Salinger experienced in his own
teen years and put into his novel having much relevance to alienated teens in
2004.) One thing the Salinger
documentary did was dramatize that Salinger not only became famous from The
Catcher in the Rye, he became famous in a
particularly maddening way; apparently his book spoke to the deepest traumas of
so many of its readers that they got the impression that its author knew them
better than they knew themselves, and if they could just talk to him, he could
give them some sage words of advice that would enable them to solve all their
personal problems. There’s more than one story in this film of Salinger in the
last 59 years of his life being confronted again and again with people
approaching him with their deepest problems, and him responding, “I’m not a
therapist! I’m just a fiction writer!” The film also dealt with Salinger’s love
life — such as it was; he seems to have been the sort of person so wrapped up
in himself and his work that he wasn’t about to let anyone in — and the
documentary claims that the great love of Salinger’s life was Oona O’Neill,
whom he met in New York in 1941 when she was 16 and dated for two years. Then
she went out to Hollywood, auditioned for a movie called Shadow and
Substance, and while the film was never
made she attracted the attention of its 53-year-old writer-director, Charlie
Chaplin, and married him. Salinger realized that she had been drawn to Chaplin
because he was already not only a success but a legend, beloved by both the
mass audience and the intellectuals, and though Salerno’s film didn’t spell
this out I got the impression that in his later years, when Salinger himself
was in his 50’s and he was the
legendary intellectual with a mass audience, he used that same star attraction
to write to teenage girls and lure them to his home and, often, his bed.
Salinger
was married three times, the first to a German woman he met in
counterintelligence after World War II; the second to Claire Douglas, the
mother of his two children; and the third to a young woman who’s barely
mentioned in the film — just a brief picture of her and a title under it giving
her name and saying, “Salinger’s third wife,” but nothing about her beyond that. The film is more than half
over before Salinger writes and publishes Catcher, and the rest of the show describes his reclusive —
though not quite hermit-like — existence in the home he bought for himself in
Cornish, New Hampshire, where he obtained the isolation he wanted not only from
the star-fuckers but from anyone else he didn’t want to see — including a
growing enemies’ list since, as described here, he would break with long-time
friends at the slightest provocation and without giving them any chance to
apologize or explain. Salinger was so determined to maintain his anonymity he
ordered his photo taken off The Catcher in the Rye when the book went into its second edition — he
simply didn’t want anyone to know what he looked like so they could besiege him
with questions and demands that he say the magic words that would solve their
problems for them — and the pictures of Salinger that do exist show a man who, though dark-haired instead of
blond, otherwise bears a striking resemblance to bandleader Stan Kenton: tall,
thin, with a rather craggy face but still openly attractive and charismatic.
Salinger never published a full-length novel after Catcher and what little work he released to the public came
out in dribs and drabs: two more New Yorker stories in 1955, “Franny” and “Zooey” (these
are about two of Seymour Glass’s sisters — the entire Glass family consists of
seven intellectually brilliant kids and their parents, who exploited them by
getting them on a radio quiz show), plus “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters”
in 1957, “Seymour: An Introduction” (which is supposedly a work of spiritual
philosophy composed by Seymour Glass at age seven) in 1959, and his final publication
during his lifetime, “Hapworth 16, 1924” (an extended letter, also full of
philosophical and spiritual ideas usually considered beyond the ken of a boy
whose age is still in single digits, supposedly written by Seymour to his
parents from a summer camp) in 1965. All but “Hapworth” were eventually
reprinted as books — and the reviews got more derisory each time; one critic
commented that reading about the Glass family was like having dinner with seven
J. D. Salingers.
I must admit that I’ve never particularly been a J. D.
Salinger fan; in high school my most progressive English teacher read aloud to
our class “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and an excerpt from Catcher in which Holden Caulfield loses a set of foils he’s
supposed to be carrying for his school’s fencing class (like the real Salinger,
Holden went to military school after washing out of several civilian high
schools, and hated it). I was impressed but never read any more Salinger until
in 1981, at age 27 (probably a decade too old to appreciate it fully), and
after Mark David Chapman had told the world that anyone who wanted to know why
he had shot and killed John Lennon should read Catcher, I finally cracked it open. I couldn’t believe how
weak it seemed, how dull and clichéd (though to his credit it was Salinger who
probably created so many of these
now-clichéd descriptions of youthful alienation); as I was plowing through page
after page of mediocre prose by a writer obviously trying (and failing) to dumb
himself down to present his character, I couldn’t believe this work was still
considered an edgy literary masterpiece. “Is this the book that launched teen alienation as a literary
genre?” I kept asking myself. “Is
this the book that millions of
teenagers read and said to themselves, ‘That’s me!’” (I’ve sometimes had the interesting experience of
reading a book I had avoided getting “taught” in class — my lifelong
disinterest in Charles Dickens probably stems from having to plow through Great
Expectations as a high-school sophomore and
finding Dickens’ style, aside from a few exciting scenes, ponderous and dull —
and coming to it later in life. When I finally read Herman Melville’s Moby
Dick I had a quite different reaction to it
than I did to Catcher — it seemed
structurally messy and suffered from Melville’s attempt to write three books in
one, an adventure story, an explanation of how whaling worked and a spiritual
quest, but it was also legitimately powerful and moved me in ways I hadn’t
expected; “Yes,” I thought as I finished it, “this book is as great as everybody says it is.”) The show went
into some detail — not surprisingly, given that it was being directed by a
Hollywood screenwriter — on how many filmmakers, including Elia Kazan, Billy
Wilder, Jerry Lewis (!) and Steven Spielberg, sought the film rights to Catcher and were all turned down — indeed, according to this
program it’s in Salinger’s will that Catcher is never
to be filmed; though quite frankly, once director Nicholas Ray, writer Stewart
Stern and star James Dean came together to film Rebel Without a Cause, a movie of Catcher became totally superfluous. Rebel remains the ultimate movie about 1950’s teen
alienation and a work that succeeds where Catcher fails because its alienated protagonist at least admits his need for
love and affection from other people, both his parents and his age-peers — and
also, quite frankly, when James Dean died the world lost the one actor who
might have — not could have, but might have — made Holden Caulfield believable on screen (with one possible
exception: the young Sean Penn).
On one level watching Salinger the documentary makes me at least morbidly curious
about reading more of Salinger’s work (maybe now Catcher wouldn’t seem so disappointing and I might even be
able to appreciate the Glass family, though everything I’ve heard about those
later works makes me think Salinger is a prime example of an artist who, by
withdrawing from normal humanity, lost his connection with other people that
had made him popular and turned inward, creating material that made sense to him but had nothing to offer anyone else; I’ve cited the
Stanley Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut,
also the work of a brilliant artist who had lived in seclusion so long that
he’d literally forgotten how other people behaved and what they thought and
felt, as another example), though I can’t get behind my idea of Salinger as a
pathological case, a basket of bizarre experiences and obsessions whose work
I’ve lived my life just fine so far without feeling a need to delve into — at
times watching this movie seemed like watching a car wreck in slow motion, and
I couldn’t help thinking that what James Agee said of D. W. Griffith might also
have been true of Salinger: “He lived too long, and that is one of the few things
sadder than dying too soon.”
