Seamus Heaney - an appreciation

Seamus Heaney – an appreciation
In Seamus Heaney's poetry, ordinary objects and places – a sofa, a satchel, the sound of rain – are sanctified. But it has edge and politics, too. Blake Morrison recognises an astonishing poetic achievement

Blake Morrison
The Guardian

Friday 6 September 2013

People kept calling him the greatest Irish poet since WB Yeats. Now he has gone, perhaps it is time to put it another way, and say that Yeats was the greatest Irish poet till Heaney. Seamus would have demurred; poetry's not a contest. But they do belong to the same stratosphere. And in a week when the favourite adjective used about Heaney in the media has been "earthy", it's something that needs to be said. "Earthy" may be no more than shorthand for "farmer's son" or for distinguishing him from the more cerebral Joyce and Beckett. But if it suggests unsophisticated, hearty or coarse, it's wildly misleading. Steadfast, certainly. Grounded, some of the time. But earthy, no, the word's not right.

Whatever he owed to Yeats, Heaney more than gave back. For instance, Yeats had dreamed of writing a poem "maybe as cold/ And passionate as the dawn" about an imaginary fisherman ("The freckled man who goes/ To a gray place on a hill/ In gray Connemara clothes"). Heaney got on and wrote that poem, about a real fisherman, Louis O'Neill, a regular at his father-in‑law's pub in Ardboe, who was killed in a bomb attack after defying the curfew imposed in the wake of Bloody Sunday, when British troops shot dead 13 Catholics. The poem is less an elegy than the exploration of a moral conundrum: "How culpable was he/ That last night when he broke/ Our tribe's complicity?" "Casualty" ends with a memory of the two of them out fishing in a boat one morning. "I tasted freedom with him," Heaney says, and asserts the importance of being yourself, and going your own way, in poetry as in life:

To get out early, haul
Steadily off the bottom,
Dispraise the catch, and smile
As you find a rhythm
Working you, slow mile by mile,
Into your proper haunt,
Somewhere, well out, beyond.

Heaney admired writers (Ovid, Joyce, Mandelstam) who refused to compromise their artistic independence. But he also felt the counter-pull of duty – loyalty to family, tribe, home, nation, religion. You could say it was the central struggle of his life: how to find the time and space to nurture his art, when everyone wanted a piece of him – to give a reading here, go on a lecture tour there, review that book, attend this dinner, judge that prize. The pressure was on long before the award of the Nobel prize in 1995. I had a glimpse of it in Belfast, at the end of the 1970s, when he was still in his 30s. He was living in the south by then but had come up for the day to do a broadcast for Paul Muldoon (then a BBC radio producer). Afterwards, outside in the street, the three of us had barely walked 10 yards before a car screeched to a halt and a man rushed over: "Mr Heaney, Mr Heaney, can I have your autograph?" Ever obliging, Seamus signed his name. So it went on. Ireland accords its poets a special place, as we saw at Monday's funeral, but the demands on him were global. After readings, there were always hour-long queues.

The poems that made his name recall a rural childhood: poems about potato-digging, milk-churning, thatching, blackberrying, water-divining; poems strong on euphony, alliteration and other classroom-friendly devices; poems (as one reviewer put it) "loud with the slap of the spade and sour with the stink of turned earth". There was a lot more to them than this, though, including self‑consciousness ("I rhyme to see myself/to set the darkness echoing") and a need to guiltily measure himself against his father and forefathers, from whose path (pen rather than spade in hand) he had deviated. He took the praise from English reviewers but felt suspicious of it. To be labelled as a poet with PQ – "peasant quality" – had more than a hint of condescension. And though his instinct was to load every rift with ore, he didn't want to be known as an Irish wordsmith. As his friend Seamus Deane put it, "a reputation for linguistic extravagance is dangerous, especially when given to small nations by a bigger one … By means of it Celts can stay quaint and stay put."

By the time the political climate of Northern Ireland changed at the end of the 1960s – with civil rights campaigns, riots, and the calling-in of British troops – Heaney's poetry was changing, too. His verse-forms became sharper, like drills. Even his poems about local place-names were edgy, as in "Broagh", with "that last gh the strangers found difficult to manage". It was a tricky path to tread, between being responsive to the moment and independent of party lines; between using poetry as a slingstone to help the desperate and respecting the "diamond absolutes" of art; between labouring over poems and allowing them to come unexpectedly, "like a ball kicked in from nowhere". But the times, or his conscience, demanded it.

Sorry for his nation's Troubles, he published North, a collection intended to explain and console. The first half covers 2,000 years of northern European history, from earth-sacrifices through Viking raids to Elizabethan colonisation; the second half offers reportage on the present – shootings, bombs, neighbourly murders. In "Punishment", these two strands come together brilliantly as he connects the hanging of a young woman for adultery (her body preserved in a Danish bog for two millennia) with the tarring and feathering by Republican hardliners of Catholic girls guilty of consorting with British soldiers. The loving attention to the female victims doesn't preclude an understanding of their persecutors. "At one minute," Heaney wrote in a piece of journalism at the time, "you are drawn towards the old vortex of racial and religious instinct, at another time you seek the mean of humane love and reason." The ending of the poem is poised between the two:

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings
who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.

Heaney's poetry is full of accusations – often self-accusations, voiced by others: the ghost of his second cousin, Colum, a victim of sectarian murder, who tells him "[you] saccharined my death with morning dew"; the unnamed Sinn Féin hierarch (Danny Morrison, in fact) who sits down opposite him on a train to Belfast and demands: "When, for fuck's sake, are you going to write/Something for us?"; his wife, Marie, who asks "Why could you not have, oftener, in our years/Unclenched, and come down laughing from your room/And walked the twilight with me and your children?" He has answers for all of them – for Marie, the answer is two of the most surprising and beautiful love poems in the language, "The Otter" and "The Skunk". But worries about whether he is doing the right thing are integral to Heaney's poetry, and that vulnerability is part of their strength. "Incertus" was an early pseudonym he used, and even after becoming Famous Seamus a shyness and tentativeness remained. No poet was ever less pompous.

Much of his poetry was written from a cottage in Glanmore, to where he would retreat from the house in Dublin or between teaching spells in the US. At the end of North, and in his next, equally magnificent collection,Field Work, he presents himself as a wood-kerne escaped from the massacre, a man who has left the urban battlefront for Wordsworthian seclusion or Ovidian exile. It was a necessary strategy: a way to clear some space for himself. But as Andrew Motion and I discovered, it didn't betoken quietism or the surrender of a public voice. We had given him pride of place among the 20 writers included in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry in 1982. It wasn't the first time he had featured in an anthology with the word "British" in the title. But he decided it would be the last. People were killing and being killed over the issue of Britishness and Irishness, and his identity was on the line. "Be advised/My passport's green," he told us in "An Open Letter". "No glass of ours was ever raised/ To toast The Queen." The rebuff couldn't have been more gracious but thereafter he was Irish, no messing.

I had got to know Heaney after publishing a book about him that same year – only a short book, soon superseded by others, but he was grateful for the advocacy (and for the fact I hadn't pestered him while writing it), and declined to play lordly creator to his grubbing scholar. He was quick with jokes, puns and anecdotes, and liked a good gossip, but there was no malice. With his warmth and (later) that shock of white hair, he lit up a room. Audiences were spellbound when he read. He had a gift for being himself, or for seeming to be. The easy onstage charm was deceptive: to combat nerves, and choose the right poems for the occasion, he sometimes spent two or three hours preparing.

Like Yeats, he had a talent for reinventing himself. "Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten," he announced in the 1990s, with Seeing Things, berating his past poetry for being heavy, sluggish, in the doldrums, and of having to wait "until I was nearly fifty/to credit marvels". He was being too hard on himself, as always. The luminous and the numinous had long been a feature of his work: "here is love/like a tinsmith's scoop/sunk past its gleam/in the meal-bin" – nothing sluggish about that. But it is true he lightened up. "For years I was bowed over the desk like some monk bowed over his prie-dieu," he said in his Nobel lecture. Now was time for the marvellous as well as the murderous – to walk on air against one's better judgment. Trust, agility, give-and-take, "a less binary and altogether less binding vocabulary": the qualities he espoused, as a poet, would also, he thought, help bring peace in Northern Ireland.

His later poems make room for everyday miracles and otherworldly wisdom. There is a lovely one about a ship that appears in the air while the monks of Clonmacnoise are at prayer. According to legend, the ship's anchor gets hooked on the altar rail:

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
And struggled to release it. But in vain.
'This man can't bear our life here and will drown,'
The abbot said, 'unless we help him.' So
They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back
Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

For Heaney, there were marvels enough in this world, and never mind the next. Ordinary objects and places – a sofa, a wireless, a satchel, a gust of wind, the sound of rain – were sanctified. His Catholicism ran deep: in his teens he made pilgrimages to Lough Derg and Lourdes, and he thought of writing as a sacred act: "When I sit opposite the desk, it's like being an altar boy in the sacristy getting ready to go out on to the main altar." Religion taught him reverence but the gods of the hearth were what he revered – the den-life he had known as a child. He kept coming back to it and finding new things, or seeing the same things in a new light. In "Digging", his pen rests "snug as a gun". In a late poem, "The Conway Stewart", the pen is named and given a "snottery" life of its own, "The nib uncapped,/Treating it to its first deep snorkel/In a newly opened ink-bottle."

Has any poet since Wordsworth written so lovingly of his childhood – its textures, sounds and furniture, and all the relations (parents, siblings, aunts, neighbours and cousins) who populated its domain? There was no need for Heaney to publish a memoir, because the poems do the remembering (and the remembrances) with a resonance no prose could equal. Still, he did collude in a biography of sorts, a 500‑page book of interviews with Dennis O'Driscoll (another poet who died recently and all too young), which looks back on the life, and the work, in illuminating detail. The poems must always come first, then Beowulf, then the essays. But Stepping Stones shouldn't be missed.

Seamus himself will be missed, hugely: for his critical intelligence, his old-fashioned courtesy and his deep learning (no one who read his 2010 collection Human Chain would have been surprised that his last words were texted in Latin). Above all, though, because he showed what poetry was capable of, and how many people it could reach without ingratiation or dumbing down. To record "the music of what happens" was his mission. It's hard to believe that music has stopped.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/06/seamus-heaney-poet-blake-morrison

Salinger (2013) Book Reviews

Hunting Again for Salinger Within the Silences and Secrets
A Biography From David Shields and Shane Salerno

SALINGER
By David Shields and Shane Salerno
Illustrated. 698 pages. Simon & Schuster. $37.50.

By Michiko Kakutani
25 August 2013

In the J. D. Salinger story “Zooey,” the title character’s mother says of him and his brother: “Neither you nor Buddy know how to talk to people you don’t like,” adding: “You can’t live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes.”

This was true, too, of the famously reclusive Salinger, who retreated to Cornish, N.H., the small town where he lived in seclusion for more than a half-century. His alienation from the world and his mania for privacy became part of the Salinger myth — a myth that David Shields and Shane Salerno attempt to pierce in their revealing but often slapdash new book, “Salinger.”

Salinger stopped publishing decades ago (his last story to appear in print, “Hapworth 16, 1924,” came out in the June 19, 1965, issue of The New Yorker), but, by some reports, he continued to write nearly every day.

In “Salinger,” Mr. Salerno and Mr. Shields assert that Salinger, who died in January 2010 at 91, left instructions “authorizing a specific timetable” (starting between 2015 and 2020) for the release of unpublished work, including five new Glass family stories; a novel based on his relationship with his first wife, Sylvia Welter, a German he married shortly after World War II; a novella in the form of a counterintelligence officer’s diary entries during the war; a story-filled “manual” about the Vedanta religious philosophy; and new or retooled stories fleshing out the story of Holden Caulfield, known to generations of readers from “The Catcher in the Rye,” the novel that made its creator famous in 1951 as the voice of adolescent angst. The authors of “Salinger” attribute details of these plans to two anonymous sources described as “independent and separate.”

The sharp-edged portrait of Salinger that Mr. Shields and Mr. Salerno draw in this book is that of a writer whose “life was a slow-motion suicide mission” — a man who never recovered from the horrors of wartime combat and the soul-shaking sight of a Nazi death camp filled with burned and smoldering corpses. Salinger, they argue, tried to grapple with his post-traumatic stress disorder first with art and later with religion: “The war broke him as a man and made him a great artist; religion offered him postwar spiritual solace and killed his art.”

This reductive diagnosis of Salinger’s “condition” is accompanied by pages and pages of testimony about how his youthful arrogance (one friend said he dismissed “Dreiser through Hemingway” as “all inferior” writers) and disaffection with his parents’ bourgeois world calcified, after the war, into a deep antipathy, even repugnance for most worldly things and ideas. Eventually, that contempt infected many of his closest relationships, and as depicted in these pages, an observant, Holden-like young man evolves over the years into a blinkered and condescending curmudgeon who is frequently guilty of the same sort of phoniness or hypocrisy his characters so deplored.

Salinger’s family, the authors say, had to compete for his attention with the fictional characters he’d created. One scholar quoted here says that when Salinger went off to his writing bunker, he gave “strict orders that he was not to be disturbed for anything unless the house was burning down.” What’s more, as he retreated from the world, his writing grew increasingly solipsistic and hermetic, his mastery of the vernacular giving way to more and more abstract language.

“Story by story,” Mr. Salerno and Mr. Shields observe, “from ‘Teddy’ forward, Salinger’s work moves from religion as a factor or even a crutch in his characters’ lives, to religion as the only thing in their lives that matters, to the work’s entire purpose being to cryptically convey religious dogma.”

“Salinger,” self-promotingly described on its cover as “The Official Book of the Acclaimed Documentary Film,” is not a conventional biography but a kind of companion volume to Mr. Salerno’s documentary of the same name (to be released on Sept. 6). The book takes a montagelike form: Excerpts from interviews, snippets from books and newspaper articles, letters and photos (some new) and photocopies of documents have all been assembled along with the authors’ own remarks into a sprawling, cut-and-paste collage.

This volume is indebted to earlier Salinger biographies by Paul Alexander (listed curiously as “an adviser to this book”) and Kenneth Slawenski, and it also draws heavily upon memoirs by Salinger’s daughter, Margaret, and his former lover Joyce Maynard, who was 18 when he began courting her. Among the other voices featured in this book are Salinger friends, paramours, colleagues, acquaintances and fans, as well as reporters, critics (including this one) and photographers.

Although Mr. Salerno has done an energetic job of finding sources and persuading them to talk — he says he interviewed more than 200 people over nine years — numerous entries in this volume have been taken not from new interviews but from earlier books and articles, sometimes with and sometimes without real context. Mr. Shields offered a defense of this sort of approach in his 2010 book, “Reality Hunger,” which embraced the validity of “recombinant,” or appropriation, art.

This methodology gives the reader a choral, “Rashomon”-like portrait of Salinger, but it also makes for a loosey-goosey, Internet-age narrative with diminished authorial responsibility. Instead of assiduously sifting fact from conjecture and trying to sort out discrepancies, Mr. Salerno and Mr. Shields are often content to lay back and simply let sources speak for themselves.

This can make for sloppy scholarship with a lot of hedges like “probably thought,” “would have understood” and “might have been,” as well as outright speculation — sometimes by the authors themselves. Mr. Shields and Mr. Salerno even suggest that “Catcher” in some way played a role in the killings of John Lennon and the young actress Rebecca Schaeffer, and the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. These terrible acts, the authors write, “are not a coincidence; they constitute frighteningly clairvoyant readings of ‘Catcher’ — the assassins intuiting the underlying postwar anger and violence in the book.”

The authors contend that Salinger “was born with only one testicle” and they argue that this caused him enormous embarrassment — that it was “surely one of the many reasons he stayed out of the media glare” so as “to reduce the likelihood that this information would emerge,” and that it amplified his psychological need “to create flawless art.” This assertion, however, is based on anonymous sources: two unnamed women who the authors say “independently confirmed” hearsay that Salinger suffered from this anomaly.

In another chapter, Mr. Shields and Mr. Salerno discuss outsourcing their research. They write that they “hired the literary scholar, Salinger expert, and German native Eberhard Alsen to travel to Germany to conduct an extensive investigation into Salinger’s year in the European Theater and postwar experience in Germany.” Mr. Alsen then proceeds to say that “utilizing his counterintelligence skills, Salinger forged French identification papers for Sylvia in order to circumvent the nonfraternization law,” and suggests, without hard evidence, that Sylvia “might have been a Gestapo informant.”

Attempting to identify patterns in Salinger’s life and art, Mr. Salerno and Mr. Shields quote sources who note his compulsion to try to control the lives of those closest to him and his appreciation of fiction as a way to orchestrate his fantasies. Innocence and nostalgia, they remind us, were recurring themes in his work, and they suggest that these preoccupations — not unlike his fondness for old-fashioned television like “The Lawrence Welk Show” — represented a desire to turn back the clock, to retreat to the past (before the war, before his hospitalization for “battle fatigue,” before his psyche was horribly scarred).

They also contend that this yearning for innocence — coupled with his devastation at being dumped as a young man by the teenage Oona O’Neill for Charlie Chaplin in 1943 — had something to do with his need to seek out young women: his need to idolize them, seduce them and then abandon them. With Jean Miller — a 14-year-old he met at a Florida beach resort in 1949 and who seems to have inspired the heroine of “For Esmé — With Love and Squalor” — he nurtured a five-year relationship, only to freeze her out the day after they had sex for the first time.

There is something creepy in Salinger’s use of his distinctive Holden-esque voice to try to charm his potential conquests — in a 1972 letter to Ms. Maynard the 53-year-old author describes himself as “perhaps the last active Mousketeer east of the White House” — and his judgmental, Glass-ian impulse to divide the world into us and them, inviting these worshipful young love interests to join his elite little club, only to expel them later with a curt dismissal that they’re merely ordinary or conventional, not special enough for him.

“The problem with you, Joyce,” Ms. Maynard recalls him saying, “is you love the world.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/26/books/a-biography-from-david-shields-and-shane-salerno.html?ref=movies

Salinger, by David Shields and Shane Salerno, review
An explosive new biography of JD Salinger argues that 'The Catcher in the Rye’ was really a disguised wartime novel. Up to a point, says Christopher Tayler.

By Christopher Tayler
07 Sep 2013

When JD Salinger died, aged 91, in January 2010, he had been famous for not wanting to be famous for the best part of 50 years. The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951, had quickly made him an uneasy object of public fascination, though he wasn’t considered properly elusive until the early Sixties, when a spate of bad reviews triggered by Franny and Zooey coincided with biographical investigations by reporters from Newsweek, Time and Life. The figure they unearthed – a tall man in a boiler suit who didn’t want journalists near his property in Cornish, New Hampshire – became an emblem of American reclusion when he stopped publishing new work in 1965. By the measure of book sales and cultural mystique, this arrangement worked quite well for him. But his evident rage and terror during ambushes by the press seemed to tell a different story.

In spite of Salinger’s prohibitions, a fair amount of information leaked out over the decades. In the Eighties Ian Hamilton pieced together the outline of his pre-seclusion life (the result has been republished by Faber), and though Salinger’s lawyers managed to have the first two versions of Hamilton’s book pulped, the legal battle made a sheaf of his letters consultable. Later, memoirs by Salinger’s daughter, Margaret, and a former lover, Joyce Maynard, served up reams of material on his emotional and sexual failings. His religious passions – Zen Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, mostly – and obsessions with raw foods, homoeopathy and the like didn’t go undocumented either. So after his death the main questions were: had he really, as claimed, been writing for all that time? If so, would we get to see the results? And would further biographical details help to explain his apparent transformation from wisecracking genius to embittered crank?

David Shields and Shane Salerno think they have the answers, and with regard to the first two questions it’ll be good news if they’re right. Their claim – “verified by two independent and separate sources,” they say – is that there’s a mass of unseen Salinger writings set to be published “in irregular instalments starting between 2015 and 2020”. Better still, these aren’t limited to “a 'manual’ of Vedanta” and five new stories, “saturated in the teachings of the Vedantic religion”, about the Glass family. We’re promised a novel and a novella drawing on Salinger’s experiences in the war, plus an expanded body of fiction concerning Holden Caulfield. Salinger’s literary executors – his son, Matthew, and third wife, Colleen O’Neill – haven’t issued a denial, though they’ve been frosty towards Shields and Salerno and generally seem to have a Salingerian policy towards intruders. (Thomas Beller, the author of a forthcoming biography, also got the cold shoulder.)

Still, it has to be said that this book doesn’t inspire confidence in the Salinger estate’s ability to carry out a master plan. Energetically researched and containing some notable scoops, it’s non-Salingerian in spirit to an almost comical degree: over-emphatic, lurid, Hollywood-inflected and altogether the kind of production that the executors would surely have done better to pre-empt or co-opt. It’s also not so much an oral biography as a multimedia event, being “the official book” of a big screen documentary directed by Salerno, the screenwriter of Armageddon and Aliens vs Predator: Requiem. A well-heeled Salinger nut, he’s said to have thrown $2 million of his own money into the project when not working on an Avatar sequel with James Cameron. Shields, an admired novelist turned non-fiction writer, has been brought on board to add some highbrow credentials as well as literary know-how – with mixed results.

From the start, it’s clear that the story they want to tell has been shaped as much by dramatic beats (as they’re known in the movie business) as it has by a feeling for Salinger’s life. It begins with an account of the D-Day landings designed to leave the reader in no doubt that there was this thing called the Second World War and that it was a big deal. Salinger took part in the landings and the book repeatedly pictures him wading ashore with the first six chapters of Catcher in his kitbag. But since his only direct account of these events runs, “I landed on Utah Beach on D-Day with the Fourth Division”, we’re clobbered with endless imaginative quotations from military historians (“The men felt their muscles tighten as the word was whispered back that the coast was just ahead”) and non-Salingeresque paeans to the fighting spirit. “Saving Private Caulfield” seems to be the aimed-for effect.

Salinger’s beginnings as a half-Jewish prep school kid from a posh Manhattan neighbourhood get less coverage, partly, perhaps, because they’re less impactful than the Battle of the Bulge and the liberation of the Kaufering IV concentration camp, both of which are dealt with in greater depth. To be fair, the emphasis on the war is in line with one of the book’s main arguments: that Salinger’s psychic difficulties were partly caused by his experiences of combat and the Holocaust. This isn’t a crazy notion, and it even makes sense to speak – as Shields and Salerno often do – of Catcher as a disguised war novel. But they want the idea to do too much. Salinger was in counterintelligence: that’s why he was secretive! The landscape around Cornish looks a bit like the Hürtgen Forest! It doesn’t help that they insist on translating “battle fatigue” into “post-traumatic stress disorder”, a way of thinking about war damage that emerged only after Vietnam.

Women provide the book’s other main key to what it terms, a bit weirdly, Salinger’s “death-dealing soul”. (Shields, in his frequent imaginative reveries on Salinger’s psychology, often sounds like a profiler going to work on Hannibal Lecter.) Again the basic argument – that his emotional life was arrested – is hard to disagree with: until late in the day he was mostly interested in Ivy League undergraduates with literary ambitions and alarming little-girlish looks. Sex, though, wasn’t high on his agenda and often seems to have persuaded him, when it happened, that women were phoneys.

The book is impressively non-judgmental about all this but puts too much weight on a theory that Oona O’Neill, a socialite he dated before the war, “formatted him forever”. It puts a similar weight on a theory that Salinger’s cardinal tragic wound was an undescended testicle, a theory based on what one witness said he remembered hearing Salinger tell Hemingway in 1944.

Shields and Salerno have pulled off several coups, such as tracking down a former teenage lover previously known only as “J” and persuading her to go on the record. They’ve hoovered up startling gossip from earlier biographers – a story, for instance, that Salinger became infatuated with the actress who played Amanda Carrington in Dynasty – and supply an interesting perspective on the cult-like world of William Shawn’s New Yorker. Against that, Shields’s musings often seem a little unhinged (he’s big on the present tense and gnomic assurance, as in: “He’s learning to aim the gun at himself”) and there are some surprising critical voices in the mix: John Cusack, Ed Norton, Jake Gyllenhaal. The book relentlessly hypes its own claims. The “torrid love affair with a Gestapo agent” turns out to mean that Salinger might have suspected his Franco-German first wife of having been an informer, though there’s no evidence that she was. He also spoke of being in telepathic contact with her.

The best parts of the book deal with Salinger only tangentially. These are the testimonies of the snappers, wily hacks and obsessed fans who, over the years, got a few words or images out of him. As well as introducing a range of vivid chancers, these inter-chapter episodes serve as a reminder that the Salinger myth was largely driven by the fame industry’s enjoyment of watching itself go to town on a refusenik. Treat him as a riddle to be solved and you end up with a pretty commonplace figure: he probably wasn’t the only American man of his generation with bad memories of the war, a thing about co-eds, a selfish way with wives and children, grumpy spiritual yearnings and a dislike of being quizzed by strangers. The trick would be to explain the way such a guy once developed the ear for dialogue and control of tone that got us interested in the first place, but that’s hard to do and affords limited opportunities for a killer montage.

695pp, Simon & Schuster, Telegraph offer price: £23 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) 0844 871 1515 (RRP £25, ebook £12.49)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/biographyandmemoirreviews/10289384/Salinger-by-David-Shields-and-Shane-Salerno-review.html

Five new JD Salinger books on the way
Titles expected between 2015 and 2020, according to new biography and documentary film

Liz Bury
The Guardian

Tuesday 3 September 2013

An unseen story told from the perspective of JD Salinger's Holden Caulfield and more tales of the recurring character Seymour Glass could start appearing as early as 2015, film-makers revealed at the world premiere of documentary Salinger, at Colorado's Telluride film festival.

Five new Salinger books are expected between 2015 and 2020, the Daily Beast reports. They include The Last and Best of the Peter Pans, a 1962 short story featuring the Catcher in the Rye protagonist Caulfield, and A World War II Love Story, which is based on Salinger's brief marriage to Sylvia, a Nazi collaborator.

The other highly anticipated new works include A Counterintelligence Agent's Diary, based on the writer's experience interrogating prisoners during the final months of the second world war, and A Religious Manual, about Salinger's relationship with Advaita Vendanta Hinduism.

An unseen collection of short stories, The Complete Chronicle of the Glass Family, tells more of Salinger's recurring character, Seymour Glass, who is often said to be a self-portrait and who appears in A Perfect Day for Bananafish and in several novellas.Salinger, a documentary by Shane Salerno and David Shields, took 10 years to complete.

The documentary film on Salinger and a related book suggest the late author instructed his estate to publish at least five posthumous books, authorising a specific publishing timetable that would run from 2015 to 2020.

The book's co-authors Shane Salerno (who is also the film's director) and David Shields write in its introduction that they had three goals: "we wanted to know why Salinger stopped publishing; why he disappeared; and what he had been writing the last 45 years of his life".

After Salinger withdrew from public life in 1951, following the publication of Catcher in the Rye, rumours have swirled about what he was working on, but no one would break the secret. So far, no agent or publisher for the new works has been confirmed and Salinger's closest family have not formally contributed to the latest retelling of his life.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/03/new-jd-salinger-fiction-documentary

Charlie Rose interviews Shane Salerno about Salinger:

Loudon Wainwright III - Surviving Twin

Loudon Wainwright III delves into family history and musical theater at Chapel Hill

Isaac Weeks
1 September 2013

In hindsight it seems obvious that Loudon Wainwright III was destined for the stage. The Grammy Award-winning folk singer has always had a propensity to frame life’s truths as stories that resonate with anyone who has four minutes to spare.

Like many singer-songwriters to emerge in the late ’60s, he found himself labeled as “the next Dylan.” While perhaps falling short of those lofty expectations, Wainwright has gone on to release 22 studio albums to critical acclaim, as well as becoming a celebrated actor.

Now Wainwright, who was born in Durham, returns to North Carolina to open the 2013-14 season at PRC², the second stage series at PlayMakers Repertory Company, with his latest project, “Surviving Twin.” The professional theater company at UNC-Chapel Hill will host the program for a limited engagement Wednesday through Sept. 8.

“Surviving Twin” has been composed by Wainwright as a posthumous collaboration with his father, the celebrated Life magazine editor and columnist Loudon Wainwright Jr., who attended UNC-CH. Wainwright Jr.’s writing was a staple of Life from 1964 to 1985, when the magazine could still be found on every coffee table in America.

Wainwright the musician combines his father’s writings with his own music, and the finished product focuses on fathers, the experience of having one and being one. During the performance, the entertainer broaches such subjects as birth, identity, loss and mortality.

Wainwright has never shied away from dealing with parental issues in song. Much of the musical basis for “Surviving Twin” is taken from his 2012 release, “Older Than My Old Man Now.” That album was a family album of sorts, as it featured all four of his musically gifted children, an ex-wife as well as his current wife, along with spoken word recordings of his father’s voice. On the album, he uses his trademark wit to spar with the disapproval he felt under his father’s gaze, as well as current struggles with his own kids.

Due to a last minute trip to New York City, Wainwright wasn’t available for a pre-show interview. But Joseph Haj, the producing artistic director at PlayMakers Repertory Company, explained that Wainwright had been working on building a show around “Older Than My Old Man Now” for two years, when they were introduced eight months ago by a mutual friend.

Since Wainwright was looking for a modestly sized venue to open “Surviving Twin,” and with his ties to the area, the match between “Surviving Twin” and the PlayMakers’ stage seemed the perfect fit.

“We bring several things to the mix: PlayMakers’ video projection designer, scenery design, costume design, etc.,” said Haj.

The transition from a musical performance to theater staging created “a bit of a different animal,” the veteran director continued.

“It’s been a fantastic collaboration. There has been a difference in language. He has been a musician who has been making music for 40-plus years, and I am a theater artist. We’ve had to learn each other’s vocabulary.”

As with all PRC² performances, the event will include a discussion with the creative artists after each show.

“I think all of the post-show conversations will be really great,” Haj said. “First, Loudon is so articulate about the work that he does. Plus this will bring very important information back to Loudon about how audiences are receiving the show.”

While many stage directors would love to participate in building a touring production from the beginning, Haj is trying to keep his focus on the upcoming debut at PRC2. Discussion of what happens next is being postponed for now.

“I try not to get out ahead of it,” Haj said.

“I feel as if I was putting much of my attention on that, I wouldn’t be able to work well enough with Loudon on the play here, to make it as strong of a production as we know how to make. If it’s real strong, we’ll all know that, and it may indeed have a future life.”

Haj said he has been impressed with the deep vein of talent that runs throughout Wainwright’s family.

“It’s very clear that Loudon is in a trajectory, an ancestry, of extraordinarily talented people who all work in different disciplines,” Haj said. “In the case of Loudon, his daughter Martha and his son Rufus, they make different kinds of music and approach their work differently.”

But as an experienced director, he also appreciates the hard work and discipline that goes into creating and staging a new work.

“It doesn’t matter what native talent you’re born with, it takes a lot of years and a lot of work to become very good at anything, and that includes the work of an artist,” Haj said.

http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/09/01/3150632/loudon-wainright-iii-delves-into.html

One-man play explores performer’s memories of father

By Rebecca Pollack
The Daily Tar Heel
9 September 2103

“surviving twin”
Time and Dates: Sept. 4 – 8, 7:30 p.m.; Sept. 8, 2 p.m.
Location: Kenan Theatre
Info: www.playmakersrep.org

Loudon Wainwright III’s song “Surviving Twin,” which he wrote about his complex and emotional relationship with his late father, is the inspiration behind his new show of the same name.

The one-man show opens PlayMakers Repertory Company’s second PRC2 season tonight.

“My father was a wonderful writer, and he wrote for Life magazine, and my idea for this show would connect and take live songs with selections of his writing because I think they do connect,” Wainwright said.

PlayMakers has two series of plays every year — six main stage plays and three plays that are part of the secondary season.

“We pick plays that we think will inspire conversation, and every performance has a post-show conversation,” said Jeffrey Meanza, coordinator for PRC2.

This year, the PRC2 season opens with the Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter and actor’s one-man show.

The song deals with Wainwright’s looking and being like his father — something that caused him to want to be better than his father through fame and fortune — and it asks if a man could be his father’s twin.

“I’m performing (his) columns, (and) … there are 11 songs in the show, 10 songs in the show of mine and one of his,” Wainwright said.

The themes of the show — birth, self-identity, loss, fashion, pet ownership and mortality — are all matters that Wainwright and his father were interested in.

Joseph Haj, the director of “Surviving Twin,” said Wainwright will talk about multiple generations of his family through different media.

“In addition to it being the text and the music, there’s a lot of photograph and video projections,” he said.

Wainwright’s singing will be coupled with a slideshow of pictures featuring not only his father and himself, but also other father-and-son pictures of historical figures — such as Abraham Lincoln and his son.

Wainwright’s father, Loudon Wainwright Jr., attended UNC and went on to write a column about his life and current events for Life magazine from 1964-1985 before his death in 1988.

“He wrote personal things and political things and current events,” Wainwright said.

“He was known for writing about the original Project Mercury astronauts — the first men that went into space in the ’60s — but he also wrote about very mundane things like visiting his mother in a nursing home or buying a London tailored suit in London in 1965 or Mickey Mantle, the famous baseball player.”

Wainwright’s father wrote for the magazine in a style similar to the way Wainwright writes his songs.

“Songwriters write about what they want to write about, and I’ve been doing that for 40 years,” he said. “I’ve been writing about my personal life, also topical songs, novelty songs — all kinds of songs.”

Following every show, there will be a post-show discussion featuring Wainwright and Haj, and possibly a crew member.

“Since ‘Surviving Twin’ is such a personal story, it’ll be more about the artist involved,” Meanza said.

Haj said that because Wainwright’s show describes a particularly complicated father-and-son relationship, it also describes many other such emotional links.

“Every relationship with every parent is neither good nor bad, like any number of things, and that was our relationship, too,” he said.

One of the songs Wainwright performs talks about fighting with and hating or loving someone.

“With the whole father-and-son story, there’s a real sort of pain that’s beautiful and moving,” Meanza said.

“And of course, Loudon Wainwright (III) is an incredible performer, really an artist as both a musician and a performer.”

http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2013/09/one-man-play-explores-performers-memories-of-father

Salinger (2013) - film reviews

The Punishment for Being Publicity-Shy

‘Salinger,’ a Documentary by Shane Salerno

A. O. Scott
5 September 2013

“Salinger,” the doorstop-thick new biography by David Shields and Shane Salerno, announces itself on the dust jacket as “the official book of the acclaimed documentary film” of the same title. (The film itself credits Paul Alexander’s biography of Salinger as its source.) “Acclaimed” is perhaps wishful thinking, but the most dubious words in that puffy phrase are “documentary film.” There are plenty of archival images and talking-head interviews, but “Salinger,” directed by Mr. Salerno, is less a work of cinema than the byproduct of its own publicity campaign. It does not so much explore the life and times of J. D. Salinger as run his memory and legacy through a spin cycle of hype. Salinger moved to the woods of New Hampshire partly to escape the intrusions and indignities of American celebrity culture. “Salinger” is that culture’s revenge.

Mr. Salerno, a dogged researcher and tireless interviewer, assembles his documentary material (supplemented by re-enactments and propelled by a throbbing, action-movie score) into a breathless story full of hyperbole and speculation. The resulting blend of reverence and character assassination is an almost perfect distillation of the modern pathology of fame. Salinger, a talented, hard-working and very popular writer, who died in 2010, is built up into a world-historical literary genius. Though a few negative reviews are mentioned — by Mary McCarthy and John Updike, most notably — they are drowned out by a chorus of extravagant praise. High school students and movie stars testify that “The Catcher in the Rye” changed their lives and changed the world.

But Salinger’s work is built up in this way so that his life can be torn open, and the fortress of privacy he erected around it torn down. A run-of-the-mill eccentric author of short stories might be left alone in the hills above the Connecticut River, but a genius of this caliber, whose books have been declared the common property of all humanity, is clearly asking to be exposed. And several of his stalkers — journalists and fans who staked out Salinger’s local post office or roosted at the bottom of his driveway — choose to interpret his supposed reclusiveness as a covert demand for attention.

This is an interesting and not altogether implausible idea, one of many that flicker into view during “Salinger,” only to be dissolved in the acid of sensationalism. Some of the film’s most intriguing information has to do with Salinger’s experiences in World War II, where he endured almost 300 days in combat and took part in the liberation of Dachau. He stayed in Europe after V-E Day to work with the Army Counterintelligence Corps and was briefly married to a German woman who may have been a Nazi. All the while, he was writing chapters of “The Catcher in the Rye.”

Mr. Salerno overplays his hand by making the war the key to nearly everything about Salinger, the primal wound that festers beneath the surface of his stories about young, rich, disaffected Americans. The idea that “Catcher” is a closet combat novel is provocative and not necessarily dismissible, but it needs to be argued with a sense of literary nuance, a sense of literature as something other than a message-delivery system, that is utterly missing here. Juxtaposing cover art from an early paperback edition of “Catcher” with photographs of death camp corpses does not do the trick.

The other main theme of “Salinger” is his personal life, in particular the relationships he had, platonic and not, with younger women and teenage girls. Interviews with two of them — Jean Miller, who met Salinger in the late 1940s in Florida and who is thought to have inspired his story “For Esmé — With Love and Squalor,” and Joyce Maynard, who lived with Salinger in the early ’70s and later wrote a book about the experience — are genuinely illuminating and disturbing. His behavior with them sheds a queasy light on his fiction, which often dwells on the precocity and half-innocence of characters perched on the brink of ruinous disillusionment.

“Salinger” offers up the bombshell revelation — anonymously sourced and blasted onto the screen with the kind of music that usually accompanies the destruction of a planet — that more novels are in store. Those will be acclaimed (or not) in due course, but in the meantime, Salinger fans will have to contend with this garish and confusing portrait. There are insights that can be plucked from it, but to do so requires strenuous resistance to the spirit of the project (both book and film), which is not just leering and gossipy, but aggressively anti-literary.

It is not entirely Mr. Salerno’s fault that he barely quotes any of Salinger’s words, apart from a few snippets of letters in the possession of their recipients. The film is dealing with an author notoriously protective of his copyright. (One of the few times he initiated contact with a journalist was to expose, and try to suppress, the circulation of pirated editions of early stories). But it is curious that a movie about such a notorious perfectionist should be so sloppy in matters of judgment and craft. The re-enactments — in which a dark-haired figure in a suit paces a darkened stage and pounds away at a typewriter, or else (dressed in a blue jumpsuit) lumbers through the forest with an ax — are embarrassingly literal. And the conversation about the place of “The Catcher in the Rye” in the imaginations of a few notorious killers would be a parody of hyperventilating tabloidism if it were not so obviously the real thing.

One of the experts dragged into that discussion notes that the word “phony” appears in “Catcher” more than 30 times. The last time I read the book, I thought Holden Caulfield overused that word, but, in this case, it is surely le mot juste.

http://movies.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/movies/salinger-a-documentary-by-shane-salerno.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Salinger - Movie Review

Odie Henderson

6 September 2013

J.D. Salinger wanted to be left alone. This is why he moved to the mountains of New Hampshire, built himself a writing bunker, and disappeared from mainstream society. The notion of him being a "recluse" was dismantled every time people in the town of Cornish saw him eating at a restaurant, or going to the post office, or doing the things we private citizens do every day. His desire for solitude was not unusual for a writer; unlike singers or actors, writers do not need a captive audience to create. He wanted his work to speak for itself, without his intervention. It wasn't as if he, like most celebrities, screamed for privacy while appearing in public dressed in an outfit made of live puppies and Brylcreem. He drew no attention to himself in public. It's safe to say Salinger meant it when he said "leave me alone."

And yet he was stalked by his fans, people who thought "The Catcher in the Rye" gave them license to harass and aggravate a man who just wanted to be left alone. Making matters worse, his most famous work was used as justification by more than one person with murder on his mind. One would think that even the hardest-hearted person might feel some guilt over that, and burrow himself deeper into self-appointed celebrity exile. But even if that were not the case, perhaps Salinger was tired of the public's constant need to discuss his only novel, and their clamoring for more of the same. After all, his philosophy was not to publish everything he wrote.

A talking head in the new documentary, "Salinger," implies that J.D. Salinger played the Howard Hughes game because it made him even more famous. It's a very cynical idea, and one of the many things in this film that made my skin crawl. Full disclosure demands that I state I was not a fan of "The Catcher in the Rye" when I read it 30 years ago, so I fail to grasp why so many people wanted to talk to its author or identified with Holden Caulfield. But I do understand and identify with Salinger's refusal to betray his solitary desires. I'm a programmer and a writer; you can't get more hermetic than that. The public thinks it is owed every personal request by those who entertain them, as evidenced by the recent Dave Chappelle flap in Connecticut. I admire Salinger for thumbing his nose at this notion.

This is why I think "Salinger" is the ultimate invasion of its subject's privacy.

The stalkerish vibe starts with its opening sequence of a photographer scoping out a post office in the hopes of getting a picture of J.D. Salinger. It then alternates between being an intolerable document of fawning fandom and a creepy parade of people who were willing to hunt Salinger down in the hopes of getting answers to their psychological issues. Their identification with Holden Caulfield is so deep that they assume his creator is omnipotent. Director Shane Salerno shows his hand early, so you immediately know what to expect during the interminable 129 minute running time. Intercut with the story of the photographer on stakeout is another talking head who proclaims that Salinger's writing was "ordained by God." Is this woman for real?

A story told late in "Salinger" highlights what bothers me so much about this film. One of the interviewed subjects tells a story of his meeting with Salinger. He waited at a crossroads outside of the author's house, and when the author appeared, engaged him in conversation. Salinger first asks "are you getting psychiatric treatment?" then in exasperation says "I'm a fiction writer. I don't have the answers to your problems. Go away!" The guy responds to this by writing Salinger a letter he intends to post on a tree outside the property. The letter explains in detail how "disappointed" the guy is: "I drove all this way and you treated me like this?" Salinger, to his credit, takes the letter.

This movie is like that guy. It's a relentless assault on a man who wished to be left alone.

Now, every documentary is in love with, or has hatred for, its subject. The good ones know how to be objective, or at least fake a sense of objectivity. Even if you love Salinger and accept him as your Personal Savior, you'll be aggravated by how Salerno clubs you over the head with this material. The music in "Salinger" is so bombastic it makes Hans Zimmer's "Inception" chords sound as dainty as "Minuet in G." The score playing over the film's big "revelations" about Salinger's upcoming released work is hilariously loud and self-important, as if these revelations hadn't been leaked on the Internet months ago. There is actual Holocaust and World War II imagery in "Salinger." It is used to give an idea of the atrocities Salinger saw during WWII, but there is so much of it that it becomes exploitative.

"Salinger" does manage to drum up a little interest during the section on Mark Chapman and the others who used "The Catcher in the Rye" as an excuse for murder. Chapman shot John Lennon on December 8, 1980. Three and a half months later, John Hinckley attempted to assassinate President Reagan. And in 1989, Robert John Bardo murdered actress Rebecca Schaeffer on her doorstep. All three cited "The Catcher in the Rye" as some form of personal philosophy. Playwright John Guare states that "if three people used something I wrote in this fashion, I'd be very troubled by it." This is an interesting point, but like the others that dilute the awe with which "Salinger" holds its subject, it is quickly forgotten.

"Salinger" tells us almost nothing we don't already know. What little that is new or revelatory is quickly dispatched in favor of playing up the subject's "mystery," and the responses of fan after fan. I doubt Salinger would have been amused by this, especially considering his own feelings about celebrity and fame, given life by his most famous character. Yet these fans all sit there glassy-eyed, talking about how much "The Catcher in the Rye" meant to them. If only Holden Caulfield could see them. I'm sure you know what he would have called them, and this movie.

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/salinger-2013

Movie review: 'Salinger' is a treasure-trove of details about writer
Shane Salerno's energetic and at times over-dramatized documentary is a revealing look at the author of 'The Catcher in the Rye.'

Kenneth Turan

Los Angeles Times
5 September 2013

If further proof is needed of Oscar Wilde's contention that "When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers," one need look no further than the life of author J.D. Salinger.

As delineated in Shane Salerno's energetic, informative and at times over-dramatized documentary, "Salinger," the celebrated writer spent the first part of his life lusting after literary success and the rest of it recoiling in horror at the consequences of his passion, refusing to publish anything and retreating to self-imposed, semi-reclusive exile in out-of-the-way Cornish, N.H.

But because he was J.D. Salinger, the author of "The Catcher in the Rye," which has sold some 60 million copies and been called "the great subversive anti-establishment book of all time," no one would leave him alone. Complete strangers would stalk him until, as one recounts in the film, Salinger would end up snapping, "I am not a teacher or a seer. I'm a fiction writer."

Though he never camped out in front of the great man's door, filmmaker Salerno is one of those obsessive fans. Best known for writing decidedly non-literary movies such as "Savages" and "Armageddon," Salerno has spent nine years and an estimated $2 million of his own money investigating Salinger's life.

The photographs and information Salerno unearthed over all that time are impressive and, despite a disingenuous publicity-seeking plea by the Weinstein Co. to keep things secret, it has all been made public by journalists who had access to the information well before the film was screened for critics.

Among Salerno's finds are a snapshot of Salinger working on "Catcher in the Rye" during a mesmerizing moment of World War II downtime, as well as brief home movie footage of him interacting with French civilians after the country's liberation.

We also learn about his brief postwar marriage to a German who may have worked for the Gestapo, and, in what is big news in literary circles, about the five books that Salinger, who died in 2010 at the age of 91, had written and arranged to be published starting in 2015.

It does zero harm to reveal these secrets because the lure of "Salinger" in no way depends on keeping them quiet. What compels us is the energetic — at times too energetic — pulse of Salerno's investigations, the sheer amount of work he's done and the almost 80 people he's convinced to open up on camera about their relationship to the man friends called Jerry.

Though neither of Salinger's children nor his widow sat for interviews (daughter Margaret is shown in old "Today" show clips), we do hear from people who were important in the writer's life. They help us understand how Salinger, in ways both sensible and strange, dealt with the enormous celebrity that came his way when "Catcher" was published in 1951.

The young writer had his first short story in print in 1940 when he was 21 but his great dream of being published by the New Yorker was derailed by World War II. He took part in the D-Day invasion, saw almost a year of fierce combat and was one of the first soldiers to enter a sub camp of Dachau, experiences that led to a post traumatic stress disorder breakdown and continued to have a powerful impact on him. "You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nostrils," he once said. "No matter how long you live."

A perfectionist about his writing who could get melancholy about a misplaced comma, Salinger had yearned for success without realizing that it would mean intrusions into his personal life as well as ungovernable demands on time when he wanted to be writing. Seen in that light, the writer's move to New Hampshire and his decision to keep working but stop publishing make a certain kind of sense.

That's especially true when you realize that Salinger was never as much of a hermit as the media made him out to be. "He's not a recluse," Gore Vidal huffs. "He appears when he wants to." And that is exactly the case. Salinger also found time for the companionship, platonic and otherwise, of very young women.

The film has tracked down Jean Miller, whom Salinger first met on a Florida beach when she was 14 and inspired one of his most famous stories, and talks extensively with writer Joyce Maynard, who famously moved in with Salinger when she was 18 and he was 53.

All of this is compelling. But Salerno, as if he's unsure of what he's got, goes to great lengths to heighten the drama with crisp editing, a strong score, frequent sound effects and snappy visuals.

Less successful are the film's frequent dramatic re-creations of events in Salinger's life and, even worse, what it assumes is going on in his mind. Using the inside of downtown Los Angeles' Bradbury Building — one of the most instantly recognizable interior spaces in America — to substitute for a Manhattan publishing house is especially egregious, and one suspects that Salinger, an avowed enemy of phoniness, would hate the whole business.

More than that, as a compulsive protector of his own privacy, the man would of course be horrified by the tell-all nature of "Salinger." While it's impossible not to be drawn into the drama of the story, on a deeper level our fascination with the painful details of his life is disturbing. J.D. Salinger sacrificed a great deal for his privacy, and there's something inescapably sad about seeing it stripped away.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-salinger-review-20130906,0,6130480.story

Salinger (2013) - Film and Book Reviews

Salinger – first look review
This documentary portrait of the reclusive Catcher in the Rye author manages to come up with some interesting new titbits, but doesn't radically change our view of the author

Tom Shone
theguardian.com

Thursday 5 September 2013

"If there's one thing I hate, it's the movies," declared Holden Caulfield. Not so his creator who nursed youthful dreams of being an actor and liked nothing better, later in life, than to curl up in front of John Huston's The Maltese Falcon, Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, or his personal favourite Frank Capra's Lost Horizon, in which Ronald Colman crash-lands in the Himalayas and stumbles across the secret of eternal youth. The perfect Salinger combination: enlightenment plus milkshake.

That the famously retiring author was engaged in a lifelong pursuit of the same, whether in his work or with women, is the contention of a new documentary, produced by Harvey Weinstein, and directed by Shane Salerno, the screenwriter who gave us Michael Bay's Armageddon, Oliver Stone's Savages, and other such sylphine tributes to innocence lost. You don't know what would offend Salinger more: the invasion of his privacy, or the fact that he was so intruded upon by the man who authored the line, "The United States government just asked us to save the world — anyone wanna say no?"

This film packs something of the same irresistibility. Salinger fans will see it through a frown of disdain, emitting occasional whimpers of protest, but see it they will for its revelations, dropped at cunningly dispersed intervals throughout an otherwise wearying two-hour-and-15-minute running time. This is very much Salinger in the eyes of Hollywood, with lots of ambition, demons, plushly exaggerated love interest, a portentous score that never quite dispels the suspicion that Bruce Willis will soon arrive and start blasting asteroids, plus an array of talking heads plucked from Harvey's Rolodex: Martin Sheen, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ed Norton, even – God bless him – Judd Apatow, prompting the unbidden thought that Holden Caulfield could easily have slipped into the cast-list of Freaks and Geeks, no question.

Of Salinger himself we see very little, of course, save for some re-enactments from a dynamic and swarthy young actor. See Salinger pounding away at his typewriter! Hefting logs up a mountainside! Running down a wrought-iron staircase (the same wrought-iron staircase, I believe, prowled by Jack Nicholson in Mike Nichols's Wolf) upon being rejected by Farrar-Strauss! And then just as you're about to pelt the screen with peanuts for sheer phoniness, we get the real thing: the only known film footage of the actual Salinger, shot during the war, when he was at his most tall, dark and Clive Owenish, doffing his hat to Parisian women offering him flowers. He takes a single flower and tucks it into his hat brim — a piece of gallantry he nonetheless performs with ineffable and beguiling shyness.

Salinger's war years have already been comprehensively detailed in Kenneth Slawenski's 2010 biography, but here come fleshed out with some riveting archival footage. He had the kind of war that would make even Spielberg blush: storming the beaches of Normandy with 60 pages of Catcher in the Rye tucked under his uniform, surviving the Battle of the Bulge and "meat-grinder" of Hürtgen forest – they don't say so here, but Salinger's unit had a survival rate of one in four – before stumbling across the ashen horror of Dachau. Afterwards, Salinger promptly hospitalised himself for what the film-makers call a "nervous breakdown", from which proceeds their Big Idea — that, "the second world war made Salinger", in the words of one of their countless talking heads. "It's the ghost in the machine of all the stories."

It's certainly true that he saw enough combat – an astonishing 299 hours – to deprive a man of his wits, or that the voice that Salinger crafted for Holden Caulfield – marvellously intelligent, supple, quicksilver, only ever inches from a crack-up – can only have gained its fractured depth from his wartime experiences. It may even have something to do with the kamikaze arc of his work, which for all its pellucid brilliance and uncanny inner-ear, remains American literature's most heartbreaking case of arrested development. Salinger was a genius of immaturity, stuck in "a fantasy of innocence" in the words of Jean Miller, the 14-year-old he picked in Florida with the words "How's Heathcliff?" when he saw what she was reading. "Troubled," she replies. What follows is the film at its most winsomely naïve: seaside strolls, violin swells and lines like "he remained haunted by the love affair that never was". Yeah, right. Until he has sex with them, at which point the girls turn into women and Salinger runs for the hills.

The resulting portrait, for all Salinger's peculiarity, seems horribly familiar. You don't need the war to explain his relentless deforestation of friends and family. The technical term for this is "literary genius" – in Salinger's case, a lightning strike of such force as to blacken anyone standing in the immediate vicinity – even, in the end, his readers, although Salinger's famous retreat from the raucous din of publishing to pursue the zen-like purity of writing for it's own sake turned out to be something of a feint. In the doc's biggest coup, we find out that the fabled Salinger safe contains five unpublished works: two novels, one about his counter-intelligence work, and one a "love story" based on his first marriage to a German woman, a book about Salinger's beloved Vedanta Hinduism (yawn), a reworked Holden Caulfield story Last and Best of the Peter Pans, and some new stories about Seymour Glass.

Most revealingly of all, each came with little green or red dot indicating which manuscripts required further work and which were ready for publication, and on what date. Shock, horror. He needed us after all.

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/sep/05/salinger-documentary-review

Who was J. D. Salinger?

Adam Gopnik

5 September 2013

Sometime in late 1968, Charles Manson was listening to “The Beatles,” to use the proper name of what’s most often called the White Album, and decided that “Helter Skelter,” an upbeat rocker about a roller coaster at an English amusement park, was a call to black insurrection in America, to be set off by the brutal murders of an actress, a hairdresser, a coffee heiress, and several other innocents. The question that this horrible incident has always provoked was not just: How could anyone have thought anything so murderously insane? It was also: Why was Charles Manson listening with such hallucinative intensity to an album whose other highlights were John Lennon’s delicate bossa-nova ballad to his mother Julia, Paul McCartney’s lyrical invocation of Noël Coward, and George Harrison’s mystical celebration of the varieties in a box of English chocolates—not to mention a nine-minute-long tribute to concrete music? Why did he pay such close attention to something so inherently unsympathetic to his, ahem, sensibility?

The simple, sad answer is: because everyone did. There are certain artists, and some art, that become so popular that everyone peers into them, finding whatever they will, however they will. All the usual tests of sympathy, natural feeling, and do-I-really-respond-to-this? are lost in the gravitational pull of ubiquity. Not surprisingly, the artists who are, briefly, the beneficiaries and thereafter the victims of this kind of attention get totally freaked out by the intensity of it all: not too long after, Bob Dylan, another of the tribe, recorded his notorious “Self Portrait,” just back out in a new version, trying to demonstrate to his admirers the simple truth that he was an American singer, with a broad taste for American songs, not some kind of guru or mystic or oracle, please go away. It didn’t help.

These questions come to mind in reading David Shields and Shane Salerno’s heavily hyped biography “Salinger” (Simon & Schuster), not least because, in one of the most bizarre sections of a bizarre book, they themselves raise the issue of murder-by-bad-reading, in connection with the murder (fearful symmetry!) of the Beatles’ John Lennon by Mark Chapman, who happened to have hallucinated a motive within “The Catcher in the Rye.” Shields and Salerno’s own peculiar view of Salinger forces them to insist that Chapman was not just a crazy hallucinant, but in his own misguided way an insightful reader, responding to the “huge amount of psychic violence in the book.” Now, there is a section in “Catcher” in which Holden fantasizes about shooting the pimp who has set him up with a prostitute, but it is exactly a bit of extended irony about the movies and their effect on everyone’s imagination: a defusing of vengeance fantasies. In Salerno’s “acclaimed documentary film” (as the book’s jacket calls it), meanwhile, a witness points out that the word “kills” occurs with ominous regularity in the text—failing to acknowledge that this is Holden’s slang for the best things that happen to him. “She kills me” is what Holden says about his beloved little sister Phoebe. There’s no more “violence” implicit in the usage than there is sublimated religiosity in Holden’s New York cabbies saying “Jesus Christ!” It’s just an American idiom, lovingly preserved by a master of them.

That Chapman’s reading strikes the authors as logical, if unfortunate, is just one demonstration, in a strange chop-shop biography, that they are no more interested in Salinger the writer or artist than the people who go through Dylan’s garbage cans are really interested in Dylan. In both book and bad movie, a simple theory is flogged: that Salinger was a victim of P.T.S.D., screwed up by a brutal combat experience in the Second World War. It’s a truth that, as far as it goes, Salinger himself dramatized at beautiful length in his story “For Esmé—with Love And Squalor,” and then left behind. (Holden is far too young to be a veteran, and Seymour Glass, so far as a close reader can tell, was in the armed forces, like most of his generation, but never in combat: the proximate cause of his suicide is a bad marriage, not a bad war.)

In any case, Salinger’s work emphatically editorializes its moral point, which is about as far from celebrating or even sublimating violence as any writing can be. No writer could ever have had his moral pluses and minuses so neatly, so columnarly, arranged and segregated off from each other. Phoebe, the Fat Lady, Esmé, innocence, and small domestic epiphanies are good. Violence, the military, cruelty are all bad. To make this view somehow its opposite is to refuse to read what’s there on the page, in search of something that might sit better on Page Six. That Salinger was wounded, like many of a generation, by combat is obvious; that it “explains” everything he wrote after is the kind of five-cent psychiatry that gives a bad name to nickels. (In any case, as the authors admit, Salinger already had six or so chapters of the book finished before he set foot in France, while the Holdenish sensibility—if not Holden’s sweetness and essential helplessness—was shared by hundreds of artists of the period, most of whom had never held a rifle.)

But then Salinger as writer, or craftsman, or just listener—with a perfect ear for the sound of American mid-century speech—is invisible throughout. The subject of the book and documentary is not Salinger the writer but Salinger the star: exactly the identity he spent the last fifty years of his life trying to shed. Cast entirely in terms of celebrity culture and its discontents, every act of Salinger’s is weighed as though its primary purpose was to push or somehow extend his “reputation”—careerism is simply assumed as the only motive a writer might have. If he withdraws from the world, well, what could be more of a come on? If it turns out that hehasn’t entirely withdrawn from the world but has actually participated in it happily enough on his own terms: well, didn’t we tell you the whole recluse thing was an act? This kind of scrutiny might possibly say something about a writer like Mailer, whose loudest energies (if not his best ones) were spent playing in the public square, not to mention Macy’s windows. But it couldn’t be worse suited to a writer like Salinger, the spell of whose work is cast, after all, entirely by the micro-structure of each sentence—on choosing to italicize this word, rather than that; on describing a widower’s left rather than right hand; on the ear for dialogue and the feeling for detail; above all, on the jokes. (Salinger, as Wilfrid Sheed long ago pointed out in the best thing ever written about his style, was first of all a humorist, trained on other humorists. The two writers who meant the most to Salinger, Ring Lardner and Scott Fitzgerald, seem left largely, if not completely, out of the book’s discussion—though Hemingway, the celebrity writer whom he briefly courted but never imitated, is made much of. A book about J. D. Salinger with no Ring Lardner in it, one can say with certainty, is a book about something other than J. D. Salinger.)

The “documentary” method that the book employs is what was once quaintly called a “clip-job”—the kind of celebrity bio where, in the guise of research, previously published work is passed off, with varying degrees of honesty, as original discovery. Journalists who never met Salinger, old “friends” who saw him last in 1948, are quoted fragmentarily, in the manner of the kind of oral history that Jean Stein and George Plimpton used to honorably assemble, while large chunks of quotations are lifted out of other people’s published work and plunked right down alongside the rest, as though these writers, too, had stopped by for a chat. These unwilling contributors see their work chopped up and recycled without any indication on the page of its source. (You can, with diligent effort, figure out what’s from where by consulting the notes in the back, but surely the ordinary reader can’t be expected to show such diligence, and will understandably assume that everything is, so to speak, on the same level.) Gossip is offered interchangeably with fact, bald speculation is sold as though double-checked, salacious rumor (Salinger had one testicle!) is accepted with a shrug: well, somebody said it. To take one example among a hundred, John Updike’s intricately wrought review of “Franny and Zooey”—indicating both his debt to Salinger, which he admits is enormous, and his qualms about “Zooey,” which are real, and his conviction that, in any case, Salinger was a brave artist making a journey on behalf of us all—is reduced to a “merciless” dismissal, one writer from the grave breezily zinging another. (A significant bit of praise from that review appears in another place, pages from the put-down.)

Shields, of course, has written an entire testament, the manifesto-like book called “Reality Hunger,” in defense of the chop-shop approach to prose, with a high-minded po-mo appeal to the constant recycling of other people’s words as itself a kind of originality. Like many other capitalist ventures, though, this involves taking intricate handiwork done by other people, breaking it up, and selling it off again without permission, not to mention payment. If you have persuaded yourself that invention and recycling are the same thing, then you can’t begin to make sense of someone who would spend seven or eight hours a day laboring over a single line. This puts you in terrible shape with a writer like Salinger, who feels his entire life at stake over a semi-colon. What can he be doing all day in his “bunker” except stewing over his obsessions?

Throughout book and film both, the focus is leeringly on Salinger’s presumed oddities, the authors of this book seeming never to have met any others. That the writer who can be contagiously charming on the page might be actually rather ornery and difficult to live with is a revelation only to one who has never spoken to a writer’s spouse. And an urge to escape from the world, far from being an aberrant impulse driven by neurosis, or shame at an anatomical oddity, is just part of what American writers have always been up to. E. B. White, as Sheed points out, beat Salinger to the north country by a decade, for similar reasons, while Thomas Merton became a major literary figure in those same fifties by going into a honest-to-God monastery and publishing his stuff from there.

What is true is that Salinger, through no fault or even an act of his own, save publishing a book whose reception no one could have anticipated, became the victim/beneficiary of the kind of hyper-fame that usually gets reserved for singers and actors. Seen that way, there is little that’s peculiar or pathological about Salinger’s retreat, though much in it that’s sad. A book about a week in the life of a sensitive, observant kid—affectionately viewed by the author, as one might a teen-age son or a younger brother, but hardly idolized—became a bible to a whole generation. (The ironies could not have eluded the author, since the one thing that a loner like Holden doesn’t want to be is the voice of a generation—his contemporaries being the very thing he has most contempt for.)

That the book gave Salinger the real, mind-bending, freak-out kind of fame early on was a blessing in certain respects—one important reason that he didn’t publish was because he didn’t have to. It was a curse in most others, however, since it created the circumstance in which a parade of random stalkers felt free to come up to his driveway and ask him to tell them how to run their lives. His trouble was that the writing was him, or seemed to be, in the sense that the stories gave an impression, however misleading, of being personal sources of wisdom, judgment, or good advice. Most people who get this treatment retreat to a Graceland or Neverland. Salinger retreated to New Hampshire. (Philip Roth got the treatment for a period after “Portnoy,” and it was so disconcerting—success on such a scale being “as baffling as misfortune”—that he wrote a couple of novels just about what it felt like.) For what it’s worth, the movie suggests that Salinger responded to most of the stalkers with surprising generosity, trying to explain to them that he was a fiction writer, not a guru. It didn’t help him, either.

For the rest—aside from the genuine news that Salinger made a strange, short marriage to a German girl he met during the occupation—there are no real revelations here, with the New Hampshire years mostly sketched from already familiar memoirs by family members and ex-lovers. There is a lot of prurient gossip about Salinger and his courtship of teen-age (not, to be sure, prepubescent) girls, although it does seem that if you had been imprinted on, and then rejected by, the exquisite seventeen-year-old Oona O’Neill, there would be no mystery in spending your life searching for her duplicate. (Of their claim of new books to come from Salinger, tacked on in the movie in titles with pointlessly ominous music playing, about all one can say is, Hope so! And add that it seems unlikely that someone with so good an ear would call anything “The Family Glass,” and that one of the few forthcoming stories specified, about a party in the nineteen-twenties, was already explicitly promised by Salinger himself, in the introduction to his story “Hapworth 16, 1924.”)

We have decided, legally and mostly morally, that our interest in telling truths about human life is always greater than our need to protect people’s privacy, at least after the people are dead, and so be it. But if you want to grasp why silence is so appealing to artists whose audience has grown too loud—John Lennon himself withdrew for many years, then tried peeking out again, with the tragic results we know—here it is. Indeed, the great advantage of the whole new episode is this: from now on, if you want to understand why the young J. D. Salinger fled New York publishing, fanatic readers, eager biographers, disingenuous interpreters, character assassination in the guise of “scholarship,” and the literary world generally, you need only open this book.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/09/who-was-jd-salinger.html

New Paddy McAloon Interview 2013

Paddy McAloon: 'I'll do without an audience to make the music I want'
Prefab Sprout sold millions of records in the 80s, but singer Paddy McAloon always made music for himself rather than the masses. Now he's back breaking silence with a new album

Paul Lester
The Guardian
Thursday 5 September 2013

Paddy McAloon wants to set the record straight. The driving force behind Prefab Sprout once did an interview in which he declared that he was too "reasonable", too un-extraordinary, to be classified alongside his favourites: the Brian Wilsons and Michael Jacksons, those visionary dreamers from the US with a glint of the divine and a hint of the insane. He decided he belonged to a rather more modest and sensible British songwriter tradition that included Elvis Costello and Morrissey.

Well, it's 2013 and McAloon has revised his opinion. For one thing, Costello and Morrissey aren't so sensible. And he, McAloon, is not so modest. "That statement was a lie," he starts, in the genteel surrounds of a hotel lounge in his home city of Durham. "It was a lie because I'm more unreasonable than you might guess. I'm well-disguised. I don't come from any modest tradition, and I don't think Morrissey does either. His lyrics are some sort of monument to disgruntlement at the universe. Maybe it was a lack of self-knowledge on my part back then that made me say what I did. I clearly didn't realise what a megalomaniac I am."

There was a time when McAloon was as feted as Morrissey and he did threaten to take over, if not the world, then at least the music press. "For a while it's seemed as though the entire future of civilised songwriting hinged on his pen nib," wrote Barney Hoskyns in NME in March 1984, around the time of the release of Prefab Sprout's debut album, Swoon. Over the past two decades, he may have withdrawn somewhat from the fray, with health issues – he has tinnitus and a detached retina – ruling out touring. But he still talks about "lyrical gorgeousness" and "sonic excellence" in a way that befits someone who, with Prefab and producer Thomas Dolby, created some of the most beautiful and intelligent records of their era, from Steve McQueen (1985) to Jordan: the Comeback (1990), via From Langley Park to Memphis (1988).

They were, arguably, rivalled in the sophisticated pop stakes only by the output of Scritti Politti and the Blue Nile, although McAloon had more vaulting ambitions than that: "We thought that for all the intricate twists and turns of the music, even a record like Swoon would be as big as Thriller," he says, toying with his beard and smiling. "The '80s, right?"

He still makes music with a vague intention of reaching as wide an audience as possible, despite an insistence on doing what suits him, which invariably means staying in the north-east of England. "It's vulgar to talk about," he says, in the same breathy, lilting Durham register that he sings in, "but we sold a lot of records – not as many as Madonna or Dire Straits, but millions. But I won't move towards the listener first, not before I please myself. And I'm prepared to be bloody-minded about it, even to do without an audience to make the music I want. I'm not interested in the Laters … He's a nice man, Jools Holland, but it's not for me. My manager says: 'Oh, but you'll reach so many more people and sell more records.' But I'd rather not, frankly."

He laughs, loud enough to draw the attention of the hotel guests. "It is a very radical step because it can lead to penury. But that's my take. I will withdraw if I don't think I'll be able to do something to my satisfaction."

There is a line on The Best Jewel Thief in the World, the fabulous lead single from Prefab's new album, Crimson/Red, that goes: "Watch the legend grow." It's about the titular larcenist, but there is a temptation to see it as McAloon revelling in his latter-day reputation as the quasi-mythic recluse.

These days McAloon looks every inch the eccentric hermit. Dressed in a white linen suit and white shirt, and with a head of silver hair and matching long, flowing beard, he resembles psychedelic casualty Roky Erickson more than he does the purveyor of elaborate, literate 80s pop. But then, in his mind, Prefab Sprout were always more of a 70s band. Swoon was considered by some critics to be a throwback to the tuneful, jangling indie of the Postcard label, but to McAloon and his bassist brother Martin, with its songs about chess grandmasters and difficult time signatures, it had the lush sweep of George Gershwin and complex musicality of Stephen Sondheim, only played with the awkward angularity of Captain Beefheart's Magic Band.

"We called it Sprout Mask Replica," he laughs again, marvelling at his own youthful audacity. "Swoon was a strange record, and why would I do that? I'll tell you exactly why: I thought if I've only got the chance to do one record, I'd like it to be something unusual. I was big on unusual then. Maybe too much so."

Although Prefab were seen as peers of the Smiths, McAloon had the idea for the band back in the early 70s when he was in thrall to Syd Barrett, David Bowie and T Rex and he and his pals would bash about in his parents' garage. "Not to diss anybody [from the 80s lineup], but my version of Prefab Sprout as the Platonic ideal would be the incarnation from about 1975," he says.

McAloon is renowned among Sprout enthusiasts for having a trove of unfinished albums at his house in the village of Consett, including Earth: the Story So Far, Zorro the Fox and Zero Attention Span. The holy grail for collectors, however, are his earliest recordings. He came across a Tupperware box full of quarter-inch tapes recently. He also found a letter that he had written to Brian Eno in 1976.

"I'd read that he was forming a label," he recalls, "so I've got this rejection slip from Obscure Records. It was written by Eno: 'Dear Patrick, I've listened to your tape, it's not really what I've been looking for, but thanks anyway. Sorry I've taken so long in getting back to you, but I've been very busy.' I didn't know it then, of course, but he must have been working on [Bowie's] Low. So fair dos, really." In 2001, McAloon got Tony Visconti to produce the Prefab's album The Gunman and Other Stories. "So when I say we were a 70s band, I'm not kidding."

Even Steve McQueen featured songs that he had written in 1977-78. But with its modern, spacious production and McAloon the post-feminist songwriter – he documented love and lust on tracks such as Appetite without resorting to the decade's leering sexism – it belonged to a newer age. That and the follow-up also brought Prefab a degree of commercial success with hits such as When Love Breaks Down, Cars and Girls and The King of Rock'n'Roll.

"I remember going through Rome airport and the guys were supposed to be frisking me but they were too busy asking for my autograph," he says, "and I've seen the Top of the Pops 2 re-runs where they write [straplines] like 'all the girls loved Paddy McAloon's hair', but I must have missed that. I feel as if I moved like a ghost through it all. I was always thinking about something else. There was no thrill in it for me – it was too angsty a process to rest on my laurels."

Instead, he recorded a double album of songs about Abba, Elvis and death – Jordan: the Comeback – and promptly disappeared for seven years, issuing only one further record in the 90s: Andromeda Heights, in 1997.

After The Gunman, he recorded a solo album, 2003's I Trawl the Megahertz. Its title track comprised 22 minutes of cinematic strings and a female voiceover reciting heartbreaking extracts from a phone-in to a radio show by a divorced 49-year-old father. It was torn from McAloon's soul and it was all but ignored.

"That record was so important to me," he sighs. "I was disappointed – extremely – that the Guardian never even reviewed it. That stayed with me. I kept waiting week after week: 'Come on, if you're thinking they don't make records like they used to, if you're looking for personal vision, something unusual – I'm your guy!' But it never came."

He dusted himself down to re-record and release, in 2009, an album of 1992 demos (Let's Change the World With Music, which was reviewed by this paper). And now he's done something similar with Crimson/Red, which comprises worked-up versions of tracks from the vaults, this time from between 1997 and 2012. Although it's credited to Prefab Sprout, McAloon played everything – guitar, bass, drums, keyboards – only handing the recordings over to engineer Calum Malcolm for polishing and editing. Even the highly self-critical McAloon is happy with the results.

"I look on it as a grail quest – to do whatever is humanly possible to make it work," he says, heading back out into the sunshine of Durham where the locals either give a wide berth to the strange bearded man in the white suit or presume he's "just flown in from the fantastic hyper-reality world of Los Angeles".

"I was 28 when Steve McQueen came out, you know? I'm double that age now." He pauses, then laughs one final time. "Every 28 years I come up with a good 'un."

Watch the legend grow.

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/sep/05/paddy-mcaloon-prefab-sprout-make-music

Last night's set lists

At The Habit, York: -

Ron: -
Need Your Love So Bad
I'll See You In My Dreams

Da: -
For No One
You're Still On My Mind

The Elderly Brothers: -
Walk Right Back
When You Walk In The Room
Proud Mary
When I Saw Her Standing There
Bye Bye Love

A busy-ish night of music, fun and beer, after the by now almost ritual sup in the Last Drop Inn and a meal in the Happy Valley Chinese.

Plenty of turns including a couple of duos and a 5-piece band! The Elderly's set actually got one or two folks dancing - whatever next?

By the way, there will be no post next week due to Steve Harper's testimonial match.

Salinger (2013) - film review

Salinger
There are a few genuine gems buried within Shane Salerno's broad-yet-shallow documentary about J.D. Salinger.

Andrew Barker

Senior Features Writer

3 September 2013

Unlike its titular subject, who could map out the deepest recesses of the human psyche with a few surgically crafted paragraphs, Shane Salerno’s “Salinger” takes a rather long time to get to a rather simple point. After more than two hours of broad-yet-shallow biography, exhaustively researched yet often garishly presented, the film drops its bombshell: The notoriously reclusive author completed five works prior to his death, which are set to be published between 2015 and 2020. With that ultimate unveiling in mind, much of what precedes it ends up feeling like a long-winded carnival-barker pitch, even though a goodly number of genuine gems are buried within its noisy confines. Promoted alongside an identically named new biography, it should be a solid draw with arthouse crowds.

This Weinstein Co. release has been preceded by a rather unusual amount of mystery-box marketing for a documentary, with ads boasting such taglines as “What Happened to J.D. Salinger?” and “Uncover the Mystery.” The impending publication of his unread work is certainly momentous literary news — although, as Vladimir Nabokov’s “The Original of Laura” and Ralph Ellison’s “Juneteenth” illustrate, such holy grails of lost literature are often more interesting as mythical relics than as commercially available novels — but the mystery of Salinger’s life turns out to be anticlimactic from a narrative standpoint.

After he ceased publishing new work in 1965, the author, who died in 2010, seems to have spent the intervening years living a simple life in his Cornish, N.H., cabin, working on novels in private and occasionally striking up chaste yet intimate correspondence with a handful of teenage girls. For decades, devoted fans and literary paparazzi mounted pilgrimages to his home seeking gnomic kernels of wisdom and SLR snapshots, yet even those who actually made contact have little of interest to report. As one acolyte recalls being told by Salinger after tracking him down in the late ’70s: “I’m a fiction writer, not a counselor.”

Appropriately, the documentary is best when it focuses on Salinger as simply a writer, rather than the MacGuffin at the center of a potboiler, and Salerno, who spent nine years working on the production, certainly unearths some fascinating tidbits.

The film details Salinger’s early arrogance in pursuit of literary greatness; his horrific combat experiences in World War II; and his sudden elevation to, and hasty retreat from, literary celebrity. Without ever reading aloud from Salinger’s published prose, the litany of talking heads — including former associates, biographers, fellow writers like E.L. Doctorow and Tom Wolfe, and thesps John Cusack, Martin Sheen and Philip Seymour Hoffman — provide adequate context on the postwar maturation of Salinger’s style and the explosive impact of “The Catcher in the Rye,” which has sold more than 60 million copies since its 1951 publication.

Yet it’s difficult to get past the film’s restless, ill-fittingly bombastic style. Handicapped by the obvious dearth of images of the hermetic scribe, the docu resorts to displaying the same few black-and-white photos over and over, along with some rather ill-advised re-enactments, the worst of which repeatedly place a Salinger lookalike at a typewriter onstage with a screen projecting images of wartime carnage and past lovers buzzing busily behind him.

Jumpy cuts are frequent, well-worn period stock footage is prevalent, and Lorne Balfe’s wildly inappropriate score is almost comically out of sync with the subject, full of Zimmerian sub-bass pulses and saccharine string swells. There are moments when the film veers dangerously close to the sort of hyper-literal approach with which VH1’s “Behind the Music” series tackled the tales of Motley Crue and Def Leppard — the sentence “he stormed out the door” is accompanied by a cutaway to a slamming door, for example — and this is surely the first literary bio to include a Coldplay song and “South Park” clips over the end credits.

Appropriately, “Salinger” finds its most revealing anecdotes when it bothers to slow down. Erudite former paramour Jean Miller recalls first meeting Salinger at Daytona Beach when she was 14 and he was 30. After maintaining years of correspondence, and using her as inspiration for his peerless short story “For Esme — With Love and Squalor,” Salinger began to essentially date Miller when she was a college student, yet as soon as the 20-year-old finally initiated sex, Salinger froze her out. Salinger repeated a similar pattern with other girls — especially the mediagenic author Joyce Maynard, who also appears here — yet Miller provides the film’s most humanizing details, vividly describing Salinger’s conversational style and their nights together at home dancing along to “The Lawrence Welk Show.”

These epistolary obsessions with young girls are certainly eyebrow-raising, yet at no point is Salinger accused or even suspected of impropriety. Likewise, his shortcomings as a father and a husband seem to be due to simple neglect, and the closer the docu zooms in on the man behind the curtain, the more uncomfortable the focus starts to feel.

Needless to say, Salinger would have surely been horrified to see his personal life posthumously excavated to such a degree, and the filmmakers never really make a compelling argument that it should be. Despite bouts of armchair analysis, they fail to draw any meaningful connections between Salinger’s reclusivity and the themes of his work, and Salinger’s fellow Greatest Generation novelist-turned-longtime New England shut-in Thomas Pynchon is strangely never mentioned. Photographers interviewed here proudly spin tales of hiding in bushes or staging stakeouts in cars to snap a few photos of Salinger retrieving his mail or walking his dog, yet no blurry image of the aging man or revelation of his personal quirks can hope to equal the resonance of a single one of his sentences, and one waits in vain for the filmmakers to acknowledge this.

http://variety.com/2013/film/reviews/salinger-review-1200597654/