JD Salinger Film Will Solve Mystery

Catcher in the Rye author, JD Salinger, has long been a source of myth and mystery. But one of the big questions remaining about the reclusive author, who died in 2010 at the age of 91, is this: what’s taken Hollywood so long to get to the story of hiss life?

Whatever the reason, the silence has ended: with the upcoming release of an indie documentary called Salinger, the gates of privacy and silence are being lifted and it seems as though you can expect to be hearing a lot about Saligner from here on in, at least for a while. From The Guardian:

Called simply Salinger, the film is the brainchild of Shane Salerno, who has spent nine years writing, producing and directing the project, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money. The move is a major shift in career for Salerno, best known as a writer of mainstream blockbusters such as Alien vs Predator: Requiem and Armageddon.

But the promise of lifting the lid on the life of one of America's most revered writers has proven a massive lure to Hollywood. Salinger has been bought up by independent film mogul Harvey Weinstein after he reportedly saw a private screening of it at 7.30 on the morning of the Oscars. Even though the screening did not apparently include all of the film's most confidential revelations, he snapped it up immediately. 

In fact, so impressed have its backers been with what Salerno and his team have uncovered they are also releasing a TV show based on the documentary and have struck a deal with publisher Simon and Schuster to bring out a book called The Private War of JD Salinger.

Taking a page from his subject’s style, filmmaker Salerno is stoking the fires of public interest by not giving interviews and not giving air to rumors of previously unknown about affairs Salinger might have had and unpublished books he might have written. However, when the book was announced, , Salerno said that the “myth that people have read about and believed for 60 years about JD Salinger is one of someone too pure to publish, too sensitive to be touched. We replace the myth of Salinger with an extraordinarily complex, deeply contradictory human being.”

J.D. Salinger Dead at 91

Almost 60 years after the publication of his only novel, the seminal Catcher in the Rye, the mysterious and reclusive Jerome David Salinger is dead, just a few weeks after his 91st birthday. The New York Times obit is here:

Mr. Salinger’s literary reputation rests on a slender but enormously influential body of published work: the novel “The Catcher in the Rye,” the collection “Nine Stories” and two compilations, each with two long stories about the fictional Glass family: “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.”

“Catcher” was published in 1951, and its very first sentence, distantly echoing Mark Twain, struck a brash new note in American literature: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

Last year, Salinger's name came up on these pages quite often in relation to an unauthorized sequel to Catcher that generated comment around the world. We talked about it here, here and here.

Today, the world mourns Salinger, possibly as much for the novels we never saw as much as anything else: it's not as though we, as a culture, knew him as well as we would have liked.

Time magazine writes about Salinger here. The CBC is here. The National Post is here. The Guardian here. Expect many, many more still to come.

Holden Losing His Hold?

We have been keeping track on this page (see here, here, and here) of efforts to publish 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, a takeoff on J.D. Salinger’s best-selling novel, Catcher in the Rye. But as The New York Times observes, Salinger’s teenage protagonist, Holden Caulfield, “may have bigger problems than the insults of irreverent parodists and other ‘phonies,’ as Holden would put it.” Writes Jennifer Schuessler:

Even as Mr. Salinger, who is 90 and in ailing health, seeks to keep control of his most famous creation, there are signs that Holden may be losing his grip on the kids.

“The Catcher in the Rye,” published in 1951, is still a staple of the high school curriculum, beloved by many teachers who read and reread it in their own youth. The trouble is today’s teenagers. Teachers say young readers just don’t like Holden as much as they used to. What once seemed like courageous truth-telling now strikes many of them as “weird,” “whiny” and “immature.”

The alienated teenager has lost much of his novelty, said Ariel Levenson, an English teacher at the Dalton School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Holden’s home turf. She added that even the students who liked the book tend to find the language--“phony,” “her hands were lousy with rocks,” the relentless “goddams”--grating and dated.

“Holden Caulfield is supposed to be this paradigmatic teenager we can all relate to, but we don’t really speak this way or talk about these things,” Ms. Levenson said, summarizing a typical response. At the public charter school where she used to teach, she said, “I had a lot of students comment, ‘I can’t really feel bad for this rich kid with a weekend free in New York City.’ ”

The full Times article can be found here.

READ MORE: “Oh, Holden. Life Is Still So Hard for You,”
by John Green.

U.S. Publication of Holden Caulfield-ish Novel Delayed

It seems to me that, even if the American publication of 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye by “J.D. California” is delayed forever, the free publicity this book has gotten will sell a lot of copies around the world.

Today, another chapter was added to the ongoing saga. From The New York Times’ blog:

The judge, Deborah A. Batts, said a new book that contains a 76-year-old version of Caulfield cannot be published in the United States for 10 days while she weighs a copyright infringement case filed by lawyers for Mr. Salinger. The lawyers contend that the new book, published in Britain, was too derivative and that Mr. Salinger’s most well-known character was protected by copyright.

Clearly, the story is not over yet. But for one impossibly tiny Swedish publisher the outcome probably doesn’t matter very much: internationally, this windup bird is gonna have wings.

We’ve been covering this story for the last few months. See previous pieces here and here.

Maybe Salinger Didn’t Write the Sequel

Back in the middle of May, we posited that maybe J.D. Salinger himself had a hand in creating the ridiculous-sounding Catcher in the Rye sequel due out next month from an obscure European publisher. Turns out, we were wrong. Not only did the reclusive 90-year-old writer have nothing to do with Sixty Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, according to AP, on Monday he filed a lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan.

While Salinger says he owns the rights to the Holden Caulfield character, full stop, J.D. California, author of the new book in question, maintains his book has nothing to do with Salinger’s original work, despite the derivative title:

Despite the clear parallels, Mr California and his publishers said they were confident that the new book would not encounter legal problems.

“The stories are so different that I don’t think you can argue this is a sequel,” Mr California said. “This is such an American response. It’s just words. I have written about Mr C, a 76-year-old man. Salinger wrote a book about a a 16-year-boy named Holden Caulfield. It’s a story about growing old and old age and finding yourself in the world.”

Catcher in the Rye Sequel Probably a Hoax

Will this be what finally wrenches notoriously reclusive author J.D. Salinger from the comfy nest he’s been hiding out in for more than 50 years? Or was the book penned by Salinger in a lame disguise? Both are possible. Time will tell.

From the publisher’s description of Sixty Years Later: Coming Through the Rye:

A 76-year-old man wakes up in a nursing home in upstate New York. This seemingly normal day brings with it an unnerving compulsion to flee his present situation and embark on a curious journey through the streets of New York City. Powerless to resist these strange new urges, Holden Caulfield, like a decrepit marionette, finds himself in the midst of bizarre and occasionally depraved escapades. Is senility finally closing in or is some higher power controlling the chaos? 60 years after his debut as the great American anti-hero, Holden Caulfield is yanked back onto the page without a goddamn clue why.

The sequel will be published in September by a Swedish outfit called Nicotext. (“We make books. More specifically, we make books whose sole purpose it is to make you giggle. While thumbing our collective nose at the literati, we have found our niche amongst the useless, the trivial and the potentially offensive. The books in our catalogue may not reflect our capacity for intellectual athleticism, but they will put a smile on your face, which is our main objective.”)

It’s not by Salinger, but by (ahem) a freelance travel writer, “former gravedigger and Ironman triathlete” (what?) named John David California.

The world press and the blogosphere are abuzz. “The world needs a Catcher in the Rye sequel like it needs an asshole on its elbow,” Richard Lawson said for Gawker earlier today. The Guardian and the Quill and Quire blog offer up just-the-facts as they see them. However, considering author California’s bizarre biography and the fact that a sketchy Wikipedia entry lists his birthday as April 1st, I have a hunch we’ve not heard the last of this story. At all.

Writer in the Rye

Whatever happened to J.D. Salinger? According to Tom Leonard of The Spectator, he’s living in New Hampshire, eating sandwiches, attending the occasional church social and writing, writing, writing:

The recluse’s recluse, Salinger has lived in seclusion in the small rural community of Cornish, in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, for more than 50 years. After writing The Catcher in the Rye in 1951 -- his generation-shaping masterpiece about teenage angst and rebellion -- he published only a few collections of short stories. A short piece of fiction for the New Yorker in 1965 was his last published work. He hasn’t spoken to the media since the early 1950s, breaking his Trappist silence only once in 1974 for a brief phone conversation with a New York Times journalist in which he said there was ‘a marvellous peace in not publishing... I write just for myself and my own pleasure.’ He added: ‘I’m known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I’m doing is trying to protect myself and my work.’

Leonard’s piece is interesting, lengthy and here.