These Are the J.D. Salinger Secrets We've Been Waiting For

Some of those mysteries could be demystified soon. Yesterday, Deadline reported that filmmaker Shane Salerno has completed Salinger, a documentary eight years in the making that's being touted as "an unprecedented look into the mysterious life of the author of The Catcher In the Rye." Salerno had finished the film as early as 2009, but shelved the project in order to conduct more revealing interviews following Salinger's death at the age of 91 in 2010. "There were people who’ve been quiet 40 or 50 years, some of whom didn’t want to disappoint him," Salerno tells Deadline. "After his passing, it became part of some cathartic release they needed after being quiet so long."

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Salinger will air on PBS' American Masters in January 2014, and today Simon & Schuster announced that a biography co-written by Salerno will reach shelves in September. Publisher Jonathan Karp also promises that the book will reveal previously unknown aspects of Salinger's life, saying in a press release: "Many of us who read The Catcher in the Rye have, at some point in our lives, wished we could know the author better. Now, we finally can." 

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Of course people like Salerno would try to lure us in with the bait of new revelations about an infamously eccentric writer. But which questions about Salinger's life could we reasonable expects to be answered at this point? Here's what we still don't know about Salinger, along with some educated guesses about how these new projects might address the gray areas. 

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What happened during his service in Germany? 

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Salinger served in the U.S. Army during World War II, storming the beaches on D-Day, fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, and getting one of the first looks at liberated concentration camps. Vanity Fair's Kenneth Slawenski writes that the war "would brand itself upon every aspect of Salinger’s personality and reverberate through his work," and many have speculated that Salinger suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. Some say his story "For Esme—With Love and Squalor" is a thinly veiled portrait of a soldier suffering from PTSD. While posthumous diagnoses can never be definitive, more insight into Salinger's private life could shed light on his psychological struggle to process his wartime experiences. 

What did he ultimately believe in?

Throughout his life, Salinger adopted new religious practices about as often as people buy new shoes. He was raised Jewish, but went on to pursue Zen Buddhism, Catholicism, Vedantic Hinduism, Christian Science, and Dianetics (the seed L. Ron Hubbard later grew into Scientology). So what did he end up believing at the end of it all? The one person who stuck with him until the end, his widow Colleen O'Neill, has been press-averse since her husband's death. So it seems like a longshot to expect Salerno's film to clear up his shifting religious convictions. 

Will we ever see a Catcher in the Rye film? 

It's the million-dollar question, as far as Hollywood producers are concerned. The author was cantankerously opposed to a big screen adaptation of his iconic teenage angst novel. Sam Goldwyn, Steven Speilberg, and Billy Wilder all ran into brick walls trying to secure the rights from Salinger, who said that he himself was only person who could ever play Holden Caulfield (a bit of a casting problem, considering that the author was then a few decades past his teenage years). But there were hints that Salinger wasn't entirely against the possibility of a posthumous Catcher in the Rye film. In 1957, he wrote: "I toy very seriously with the idea of leaving the unsold rights to my wife and daughter as a kind of insurance policy." The Salinger estate won't divulge whether or not he instructed his trustees to prevent an adaptation. If any of the interviewees in this new project are privy to that information, we may find out whether we can expect a big screen Catcher in the Rye before 2046, when the copyright expires and filmmakers can help themselves.

What was his daily life like in Cornish, New Hampshire?

Salinger lived out his self-imposed exile from Manhattan in this small New England town, and reporters who've gone there to learn about his autumn years haven't been able to get the locals to say much about the author. They insist he wasn't a recluse, and they say Salinger enjoyed socializing with high schoolers when he first relocated there in the '50s. But according to The New York Times' Katie Zezima, we're not getting much else out of Cornishers. "His neighbors would not talk about him," she writes, "reflecting what one called 'the code of the hills.'" The better part of six decades is a long time to while away, and if Salerno's film features interviews from neighbors, we could stand to learn a lot about Salinger's life there. 

What was he like as a family man?

In her memoir Dream Catcher, Salinger's daughter Margaret writes of her father as a self-centered, abusive man who almost drove her mother to suicide. She says that at home, he spoke in tongues, drank his own urine and performed other bizarre spiritual rituals. But Salinger's children offer conflicting accounts of his behavior, with Margaret's brother Matt refuting her "gothic tales of our supposed childhood." Aside from his parenting skills, Salinger's merits as a husband have also been a matter of public interest. Joyce Maynard was 19 when Salinger convinced her to drop out of Yale to carry on an affair with him. She's one of the few women who've written about being romantically involved with Salinger, and the portrait she paints is one of intimidation. With many of Salinger's exes still living, we could learn more about Salinger's supposed "predatory, controlling relationships with women."

What's in all that unpublished work?

Though Salinger cut himself off from the literary establishment, he didn't stop writing. A bunch of his letters came to light after his death in 2010, many of which confirm that Salinger continued writing fiction throughout his life. The papers he didn't burn in dissatisfaction where stored away in a fire-proof vault in his writing studio. Kenneth Slawenski, author of J.D. Salinger: A Life, writes in Salon: 

Again, we'll have to hope that Salerno was able to ascertain the details of Salinger's will from one of his interviewees if we want to find out about any unpublished entries in the Glass family saga. 

Keeping all the above questions in mind, we may have to at some point accept that certain stones in Salinger's life will forever go unturned. In his February 2011 New York Times review of Kenneth Slawenski's J. D. Salinger: A Life, Jay McInerney wrote this about the lingering fascination with Salinger's private affairs, as well as his (mostly) successful efforts to thwart our curiosity:

Inset image: Shane Salerno