Throwing light on J.D. Salinger

WE PUBLISH this article for all those who were introduced to J.D. Salinger in high school or college through The Catcher in the Rye, and wondered why so little more.

The review appeared in Canada’s National Post, and was forwarded to Newsroom by an Australian reader.

IN LIFE he published famously little. But J.D. Salinger will become considerably more prolific in death, according to a documentary about the reclusive author.
It discloses the titles of five works by the writer of The Catcher in the Rye, which it says will be released in the years ahead. Holden Caulfied, the protagonist of his defining novel, will appear in a short story sequel entitled The Last and Best of the Peter Pans, written in 1962.
The disclosure is part of an exhaustive documentary on the writer, entitled simply Salinger, that was screened for the first time at the Telluride film festival in Colorado on Monday night (September 16).
According to the documentary, the four other titles to be published between 2015 and 2020 are: 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.
The documentary traces Salinger’s childhood and throws fresh light on his romantic history, including a relationship with Oona O’Neill, daughter of playwright Eugene. She dumped Salinger for Charlie Chaplin after he went away to the Second World War.
Rejection appeared to drive his writing as he started The Catcher in the Rye and, according to some reports, carried six chapters of the unfinished book during the D-Day operations. The book would make his name and endear him to generations of readers.
But the war also apparently left him with what would now be diagnosed as post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
“I dig my foxholes down to a cowardly depth,” he wrote in a letter to a friend.
Salerno, a Hollywood scriptwriter who spent a decade and $2-million of his own money on the project, interviewed hundreds of people and amassed piles of documents, letters and photographs.
A fellow soldier provided a wartime snapshot of a mustachioed Salinger looking up from a notebook or journal (that photo can be seen at the top of this post). It is the only known photo of him working on The Catcher in the Rye, said Salerno, who has been working on a sequel to Avatar in his “day job.” Speaking after the screening, he said: “Having people speak for the first time was a huge challenge … doors just slammed in your face for the first couple of years, but I was very grateful to finally have people come forward and share their stories.”
He also spoke about Salinger’s PTSD. “World War II really was the transformative trauma of J.D. Salinger’s life,” he said. “It made him as an artist, but it broke him as a man. He was living with PTSD throughout his life.”
In keeping with the author’s obsessive desire for secrecy, Salinger’s family and publishers have made no statement on the contents of the documentary, which is accompanied by a 700-page book.