Forum / Salinger

James Lloyd Davis
Jan 27, 03:05am

In case you missed the PBS broadcast last week, you coul catch this on Netflix. A wonderful video portrait of an author whose writing transcends generations and nations.

You can see it here:

http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/70273611?strkid=1492933849_0_0&trkid=222336&movieid=70273611

whatwouldbukowskido
Jan 27, 01:57pm

I THOROUGHLY enjoyed it.

(for some reason it gets a lot of weak/bad reviews)

James Lloyd Davis
Jan 27, 03:08pm

I never trust reviews. They are so often riddled with bias I never understand. It was an artfully done and revealing piece that gives insight into the experiential forge that molded a complex and brilliant man.

Chris Okum
Jan 27, 07:01pm

I understand the why the reviews are bad. Some of the devices used in the film - the recreations, having him sit on stage and type - were totally hamfisted. Still, I found it informative. I had no idea how traumatized Salinger was by the war, and now his emotionally stunted behavior makes total sense. All the mentally disturbed men who have fetishized the book were really picking up on a particular wavelength that they shared with Salinger. The only difference between Salinger and the Hickleys and Chapmans and Bardos of the world is that Salinger had a creative outlet for his pyschic disturbances and they didn't. Score another one for the power of art. I used to think Salinger was a bit of poseur, that his recluse gig was part jive, but not anymore. He really was authetic.

whatwouldbukowskido
Jan 27, 08:55pm

"Some of the devices used in the film - the recreations, having him sit on stage and type - were totally hamfisted."

Well, there *was* that.

But the war stuff was an eye-opener into the man (and THE book).

Chris Okum
Jan 27, 09:09pm

Also didn't much care for the celeb talking heads like Cusack, Norton and Seymour Hoffman. Would have liked some more lit-heads to expound on Salinger. And Joyce Maynard is UGH. At 60 she's still the same gooey wide-eyed naif she was when Salinger made the booty call. I bet she believes that she's the one he loved the most, which is complete bullshit. See, falafel, that young pussy tastes like nothing but trouble. I should also add that the book that mattered most to me when I was a teenager was The Chocolate War. In my experience, the story told in that book hews closer to what it's like to be a teenager than any other book. Catcher didn't really mean anything to me. I didn't related to Holden at all. Seemed like a putz to me.

Sally Houtman
Jan 27, 09:22pm

Clicks on link.

"Sorry, Netflix hasn't come to this part of the world yet"

*sniff*

*sniff*

Ann Bogle
Jan 27, 10:14pm

I haven't seen a Salinger documentary, partly for the reason that he lived as a recluse. I read a letter by Joyce Maynard to the New York Times about Salinger's enlisting girls (not yet women) to live with him about a year. He enlisted Maynard after her first year in college, Barnard, I think or maybe another school. He talked her out of attending college. Perhaps he felt that 18 was too old for him. How to regard his life and his work? Separately or together? It may depend in part on how the author herself or himself views it or would view it, how the reader or life student responds. It is easy for me to admire Salinger's work that was published long ago. I wonder if those books were filed before he became a purveyor of live-in teenaged girls, one at a time. I wonder how his posthumously published volumes will compare to his earlier works of fiction. My fondness for his writing persists.

James Lloyd Davis
Jan 27, 10:35pm

It's not uncommon for a writer's character to overshadow his work, especially in Salinger's case, when people are so willing to capitalize on his reclusive nature and the Enquirer style hunger for anything Salinger. They got their fifteen minutes by appealing to the gossip-minded like barkers at a sideshow.

Chris, much of what I'd read about Salinger in the past either only hinted at his combat experience or glossed over it entirely. Yes, the trauma of his peculiar experience probably led to the reclusive nature that followed slowly but certainly, but how much more the negative influence that sudden acclaim brought to his life.

I never related to Holden personally because my background did not include upper strata life-style and schooling, (i.e. Valley Forge or other Eastern prep schools), but his message in Catcher in the Rye about the 'phonies' who clutter up the world with foolish concepts and lies about life... that did relate to me in a huge way, as it did so many people.

I think the personal voice in Catcher was the catalyst, the idea that Holden was talking to me, to us, as though he thought we could understand... this was the universal appeal. In truth, Holden probably wouldn't have liked me personally, but that was okay, because he was talking to me like some guy in the confessional, with a purple screen between us that filtered out things like that and I couldn't mess it up 'cause he could never hear me ask him questions. The beauty of the novel is that one-way screen, you can only listen and not get sloppy.

Like many and for many years, I always thought that if I could just talk to Salinger, he might fix whatever it was that I was lacking. Glad I never had the chance. I found it on my own. So many do not.

Ann Bogle
Jan 27, 10:57pm

Well, okay so Salinger's insistence on living with fifteen underaged girls one at a time as noted in print not in The Enquirer but in The New York Times letters column, so vetted for false reasoning and statements, has no impact on his male readers hot for new disclosures about his war-time traumas. Okay then! Does it pass muster in this forum topic thread that I like his portrayal of female characters and their dialogue or is that off-topic as well, where war-time trauma is an acceptable subject related to Salinger's life but his "love life" -- power life -- is not? I added a comment and got a war-time fanciers' rebuttal. It seems almost possible that two of the commenters are thinking of Salinger as a boys' and mens' author, whereas I had long thought of him as a rare author who could depict girls and women.

Chris Okum
Jan 27, 11:30pm

The only new revelation for me in the doc was his experience during WW2. I already knew about his penchant for jailbait and that always explained to me why he knew how to write about young girls so well, because he was obviously spending most of his time with them. What I did not know what that he survived D-Day and viewed first hand the Concentration Tramps and survived combat in that German forest. Having to experience those three things in succession over the course of nine months would drive anyone insane. Like I said in my first comment, I thought Salinger's pretenion to madness was just that. After watching the doc I realize it was no pretension.

whatwouldbukowskido
Jan 27, 11:44pm

Was this doc where I first heard the phrase "After 200 days of combat one is insane"?

As I recall from the doc he landed on D-Day with an early version of "Catcher" in his backpack.

And it IS funny, as much as I've read about Salinger, that his war experience is rarely if ever mentioned. Especially the grueling/gut-wrenching/liberating the concentration camp/viewing the piles of bodies part.

Ann Bogle
Jan 27, 11:45pm

I remember when people wondered whether Thomas Pynchon and J.D. Salinger were the same man. I knew someone who went to boarding school with Salinger's son. Perhaps it was known in certain (private wealth) circles that Salinger inducted teenaged girls in serial monogamy, yet to me that and almost anything else about his life were unknown until his death began to unfurl these and other facts. Willa Cather specified in her will that her letters, that she wrote many of and that she attempted to recall when she was in her seventies, not be published. A book of her letters appeared recently, and I have decided not to read it. I have not ruled out watching a Salinger documentary, but the author himself drew a chalk line that discourages it. Nevertheless, I read about its revelations.

whatwouldbukowskido
Jan 27, 11:59pm

The man liked certain young girls.

Certain young girls liked him.

James Lloyd Davis
Jan 28, 12:15am

I doubt that I've ever been "...hot for new disclosures about his war-time traumas." And I do believe Salinger's appeal has always been universal, transcending gender as few writers before or since. I'm not really interested in anyone's sex life, or rumors thereof, validated by the calibre of the vehicle or not. Bottom line either way? Let him who is without sin... etc.

I would personally take exception to the label 'war-time fancier' if it's aimed at me, but in response, would only wish to state that anyone who has ever experienced a war will never think of them a thing to be fancied. But I do personally relate to the effects on the psyche. The effects are often magnified for those who go into a war with less than the best state of mind.

Chris, I've always thought Salinger's war time experience better explained his reclusive behaviour than the idea of pretension. I also believe that his writing, continuing as it did beyond publication is probably what saved him from the self-destructive fate of someone like Hemingway.

Chris Okum
Jan 28, 12:19am

Yes, if I had really understood what he experienced I never would have thought him pretentious and now that I do know I regret thinking it.

Ann Bogle
Jan 28, 12:41am

If you re-read William S. Burroughs' very brief essay about Hemingway four times as I unwittingly did before I discovered his statement that Hemingway wrote his own death (as a man's murder) and if you read through to the end of James Mellows' biography of Hemingway, as I did, to its sophomore fiction-like last paragraph, bearing in mind Mellows' meticulous documentation of facts in Hemingway's life, you wonder on your own, as I began to, whether Hemingway did self-destruct. Burroughs also wrote his view that Hemingway suffered concussive depressions. And speaking of a man's private life, what of Burroughs' life? I read Burroughs' work so throaty with his voice and try to keep it separate. To try to separate life from art if it seems in keeping with the art and artist, and not to separate if not, is how I go.

whatwouldbukowskido
Jan 28, 01:05am

Ann--

Your last post has nothing to do with Salinger or the documentary in question.

People live what they live in the real world, experience what they experience in the real world, write what they write in the real world, fuck who they fuck in the real world, kiss who they kiss in the real world...above and beyond your Politicaly-Sexually-Academically-Correct judgement of them.

Thank God.

Chris Okum
Jan 28, 01:23am

I find Burroughs' entire corpus fascinating and have read it as a reaction to what he did to his wife. He created an entire cosmology that helped rationalize - to him at least - his own behavior. That sounds like a perfectly goof defense for his entire project. To not understand why one has done what one has done, especially when what one has done is snuff out the life of the person closest to them, is reason enough to set one scribbling ad infinitum, as Burroughs did. I'm repeating myself. But then again, so does everyone else.

Ann Bogle
Jan 28, 02:31am

falafel, my Hemingway note was in response to JLD's statement that Hemingway's fate was self-destructive; you seem partial to men's comments today. But you give me an insight about the denuded tenor of the web site despite many of our tireless attentions to it -- my background is more academic and you are perhaps an anti-academic, and that in writing is a good thing because preference is given to those without formal trainings in writing, ahem.

Deep comments, Chris. I feel your vibe here.

whatwouldbukowskido
Jan 28, 08:09pm

"preference is given to those without formal trainings in writing, ahem."

I won the national Sigma Tau Delta essay contest.

Judged by X.J. Kennedy.

Ahem.

whatwouldbukowskido
Jan 28, 09:05pm

Also studied with David Wevill during my graduate work at UT Austin, where I was a TA, conducting seminars with hundreds of students, grading papers, etc..

But I'm not a star-fucker.

Ann Bogle
Jan 29, 12:03am

Ha! today is a laugh, today was offline. AARP promises to get you offline and dating or your money back. What was your prize-winning essay about? and if not about Salinger, I'll take heat for beckoning the digression.

whatwouldbukowskido
Feb 01, 10:40pm

"my background is more academic"

In your dreams.

"and you are perhaps an anti-academic"

Having been there/done that, yes.

James Lloyd Davis
Feb 02, 08:52pm

Little about Salinger's work has any foundation in the academic world.

In one respect, you could say that general distrust of all institutions is a common thesis among his characters. This may be one reason for the appeal he has for so many and varied people, reliance upon something more human and visceral than reason as a means to an end, the discovery of 'truth' at any cost.

Sam Rasnake
Feb 02, 10:46pm

I'm looking forward to the new books.

Ann Bogle
Feb 07, 06:16pm

At U.W.-Madison where I went to college and majored in English literature, the department did not include on the syllabus authors whose books had appeared after 1950. Also, in general, it was difficult within that department to study American writers, though not impossible, and creative writing was a concentration for undergraduates (not mine, though I took a few workshops as electives) rather than a path to a graduate degree. Only in recent years has Madison had an M.F.A. program though there has been a writing faculty all along. W.H. Auden had been in residence there. Therefore, Salinger is a writer whose work I read outside class.
You must log in to reply to this thread.