Salinger
                         
Director: Shane Salerno
Year: 2013
Rating: 5.50
About five years ago, I finally got around to reading Catcher in the Rye - perhaps the most famous coming of age novel ever written that swept the literary world when it was published in 1951 and for years afterwards. Some 70 million copies of it have been sold and it still sells hundreds of thousands a year. Maybe I should have read it as a teenager. I wonder what I would have thought of it back then? But as an aging adult, I thought it was dreadful. The writing was common and I came away thinking Salinger had never talked to a teenager in his life. Well, as I was to find out, that was certainly not the case. But to me Holden Caufield's cynical alienation of the adult world felt tiresome. At 13 perhaps I would have understood. It may be just as well that the book didn't affect me since apparently it was the book of choice for Mark Chapman and John Hinkley. When asked why they did it, they said read the book.

 

He was a strange man - many writers are of course - the lonely challenge of taking a blank page and filling it with something worthy has driven many writers to insanity or drink. It is a fine documentary though at two hours it immerses itself too much into personal details which were of some interest but felt intrusive. But the thing is he didn't publish all that much in his lifetime - Catcher, Franny and Zooey, short stories and a couple other pieces - it was the mystique that surrounded him that fascinated people for decades after he stopped publishing in 1965. A few interesting details though come out - he was dating and madly in love with Oona O'Neill - then went off to WW2 and found out in a newspaper that she had married Charlie Chaplin, some 40-years older than she was. He also landed on Normandy on D-Day and was in the European campaign till the end of the war. And saw the concentration camps of stacked burnt bodies. He witnessed a lot of horror and death and near death. It led to a nervous breakdown, but he then stayed on to look for war criminals - and then ends up marrying a Nazi that he meets and brings her to the USA. He was Jewish by the way. During the war he began writing Catcher.

 

After the war and a quick separation from his Nazi wife he published a few short stories that gathered attention. And then Catcher which brought on mountains of adulation. He hated it and moved to a remote isolated house in New England and pretty much stayed there the rest of his life. Was rarely seen, refused interviews, built a small room in the back yard and would go there to write and not come out for weeks. He was married at the time which did not go over well with his wife and children. He never stopped writing, just stopped publishing - so there is a ton of material that his son is going thru in order to publish it. My guess is that much of it will be garbage. He became a zealot of Hinduism and Buddhism and apparently these writings are full of it.

 



The documentary does not paint a very positive picture of him as a human being - a perfectionist, very controlling of the women in his life, would cut off people he had known for years for the smallest thing, he would scream and rant and so on - and then the young girls. Creepy. On a vacation after the war in Florida he began spending a lot of time with a 14-year old and told her mother, someday I am going to marry her. He never does but when she was 18 he was in bed with her when she tells him she is a virgin and he stops and gets rid of her forever. There are a bunch of stories of him writing letters to very young women he did not know and trying to meet up with them.  The documentary gives a rounded full picture of him - all adoring his writing but also saying when he was younger - before the fame he was a very sociable funny fellow. And then he went into the dark deep woods. This came out after Salinger died in 2010, but people who love his writing hate this film apparently for delving so much into his personal life - but those are the times we live in.