the Salinger film
Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Wed, 24 Mar 1999 09:26:19 +0000
Well, the Salinger profile was broadcast on the BBC
last night & some of us saw it.
To start with, I must say the general effect was to leave me
a good deal more sympathetic to the man than I'm usually
am - especially after the steady diet of adulation that gets
doled out on the list.
A male cousin; a collection of ancient women who were
once girl friends; a middle aged chap who was befriended
by JDS as a little boy; some fellow writers like AE Hotchner
& Ved Mehta; neighbours from Cornish; Joyce in a couple
of brief appearances; & one or two others - all contributed
to a composite picture that came across persuasively enough.
One of the central themes was the transformation brought
about by the war.
Starting off as the dandyish, Upper East Side boy who could
take for granted all the priviledges of a moneyed background,
he seems to have related more closely to his mother (to whom
he dedicated the Catcher) than to his father (who was described
by others, nonetheless, as a warm, funny, highly educated man).
The latter thought that Valley Forge military academy would
give him the self-discipline that was so far missing. JDS later
described the Catcher to one of his girl friends as his story -
& certainly old class mates at Valley Forge said they recognised
perfectly the atmosphere & most of the characters from Pensey High.
On the other hand, the young Salinger does not seem to have
been quite as alienated as we think of Holden. On the contrary,
he was the wit, the 'star' who wrote the ironic school song
whom everyone recognised as 'special' & who emerged back
into his New York world with such sartorial elegance & so much
'style' that one of the girls commented: 'We'd never seen anything
like him...' The affair with Oona seems not have been quite
the distant infatuation that I'd assumed it to be.
I got the feeling of a rather spoilt boy whose good looks,
money & assurance had made for an easy life. He was not
noted for the gentleness of his tongue or his pen. In which
setting, people were surprised by his uncynical patriotism at
the start of the war. (He didn't wait to be drafted but applied
to the Principal of Valley Forge for the kind of commendation
that might lead to a commission.)
In counter intelligence, he experienced the horror - & futility
- of the Huertgen Forest & also witnessed something of the death
camps in Germany. He was certainly in hospital in Europe
at the end of the war (& is believed to have been married briefly
to a French woman.) He told someone he had an almost
uncontrollable urge to let civilians know what he had seen.
Though when he came home he appears to have made some
kind of resolution to tell no one. He had always wanted
to write but the drive appears to have become irresistable
around this time.
Hotchner remembered him from The New Yorker days
as a rather dour, highly successful poker player, who dismissed
the current Greats of Am. Lit. (Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner
- all then in full flood) as essentially 'second raters', leaving
only one great American writer since Melville - & that one was
JD Salinger.
But from then, the programme implied, he looked for respite
from what war had shown him about human beings in the comfort
& innocence of childhood. His favourite TV shows were
those that lingered on the carefree images of little houses
on praires & small town soap operas. The music he played
endlessly were the swing bands of the 1930s. And so on.
After the initial move to Cornish he was popular with
the local school children - until he gave an interview to
their school magazine which was exploited by the town paper
& then by the general press. The withdrawal became progressively
more extreme. (Although there is good evidence that around
this time, he also became one of the world's most industrious
letter writers. Many people have collections of letters from
'Jerry'. Could he be writing to the list under a pseudonym?
From indigo.ie?)
From then on, the 'facts' became more speculative. There was
the young wife with whom he had the two children & then
left after 13 years, Joyce (who has given her own version -
& whom I found much less repellant & much more credible
than others have presented her), followed by a fairly well
documented series of other youthful women (to whom he was
writing even as he lived with Ms. Maynard) - culminating in
his present partner Colleen who has survived the longest eating
her peas & nuts in this strange spartan life in the woods.
There were surprisingly leisurly film clips of the old boy
wandering round Cornish (where he seems to retain really
quite a high visibility), driving his station wagon, looking
very white-haired-distinguished but also rather anguished.
I mean anguished as a habitual facial expression - even when
he was evidently unaware of being filmed.
__________________
I'm writing this a few hours after the screening, knowing
how impatient you'd all be to hear the news from the front.
I don't doubt there may be a lot more stuff which chaps
might want to ask about; not to mention the bits I've
momentarily forgotten but which will come back when
I take another look at the tape (& before I send it to Tim.)
But in the meanwhile, please excuse the length & the bittiness.
As one always says: I didn't have time to write a short one.
Scottie B.