–By J.S. Porter
For Kaizen
My eldest grandson was required to read Salinger’s novel for his high school English course in Toronto last year. I asked him if the novel, published in 1951, still spoke to the young. He thought it did, especially on the theme of phoniness. That doesn’t get stale and maybe, in part, accounts for there being nearly 80 million readers worldwide for a story about a troubled, sensitive youth.
Catcher is a book of talk—the talk (the narrative) of Holden Caulfield and the talk of those who verbally engage with him. Caulfield has conversations with a cab driver, a prostitute, a pimp, a nun, an old girlfriend, a teacher, and his sister in his walkabout in New York City. The “talk,” according to Wikipedia, made Catcher between 1961 and 1982 “the most censored book in American high schools for its themes of alienation, sexuality, and rebellion against authority.” Maybe that’s another reason the novel has appeal—young and old alike, like a good rebellion story: someone who swims against the current, someone who has the courage to be an I in a mob of We.
Does Catcher still speak to me? At 75, the same age as the book, I’d answer yes, with a few minor reservations. Holden Caulfield’s rants get tiresome at times, his profanity is repetitious, his attitude-plus irksome. And yet, there is so much life in the book, so much compassion, that one forgives the narrator’s exaggerations, his simplifications, his lack of nuance. Catcher in the Rye is, for me, still the deepest and most complete fictional presentation of adolescence I’ve come across. Nothing else so successfully presents the ambivalence, the contradictory emotions, the fragility of youth. People are fragile. Holden Caulfield is fragile.
When I first read the novel as a 16-year-old, the same age as Holden Caulfield when he narrated it, I missed a lot of things. I didn’t remember the seduction scene by a former English teacher, didn’t remember the smoking and drinking, didn’t remember how lost and damaged the adolescent speaker was. I had forgotten how rich Caulfield was—upper-middle class, how elitist his prep school was, how privileged he was in many ways. I didn’t remember what a good reader he was, what a good literary critic he was. (His thoughts on Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet are worth listening to.) What I did remember was Caulfield’s love of his sister Phoebe, though not his extreme sensitivity and protectiveness around girls in general. I had forgotten how quickly he shifts from being sullen and morose, moody and touchy, to being kind and fair-minded, even generous.
I don’t, as a rule, reread books, especially not novels. Catcher I reread in fits and starts, starting at the beginning, where even that first glorious sentence didn’t hold me for long: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
It’s a great first sentence, up there with Saul Bellow’s opening in The Adventures of Augie March, published two years after Salinger’s novel: “I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that sombre city—and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted.” Holden Caulfield goes at things as he taught himself, freestyle, and constructs his autobiography his way.
The great strength of Salinger’s novel is Caulfield’s voice, how it incarnates a personality, an attitude, a stance towards life. That voice shapes a fully formed character, as real as any in literature, as real as Huck Finn or Jay Gatsby. When you meet him on the page, it’s as if you’re meeting him in real life. Even so, initially, those first few pages weren’t enough to hold me. I put the book down.
I stopped, took a break for a few weeks, and started again, this time in the middle of the novel. I read from the middle to the end and then went back to the beginning and realized how accurate and necessary that first sentence is. Holden really does tell you about a lonely childhood, how lousy it was, and something about his occupied parents. What he tells, he doesn’t want to tell; he’s reluctant to tell. The novel is a strange mix of revelation and concealment.
You learn what Holden hates—movies, for instance, and people who pretend to be more than they are, like his screenwriting brother- and you learn what he loves. He loves his sister above all. He admires sensitive people and delicate sensibilities. “Where do the ducks in Central Park go in the winter?” he asks. He has had multiple breakdowns; he’s hurting, he’s damaged, he’s writing from a psychiatric institute. Is the novel, his autobiography, a required exercise in healing? The alchemy of not-giving-a-damn and caring deeply about certain individuals—his sister, his dead younger brother, strangers—combusts mysteriously into a fascinating personality. Salinger subtly intimates how the adolescent incorporates many ages: the child, the teenager, the adult—all in one body. Caulfield is sometimes 16 going on six and at other times is 16 going on 60.
His beloved Phoebe questions the value of her brother’s defense mechanism of negativity. “You don’t like anything that’s happening,” she says. He denies that, but she presses on, “Name one thing.” He names Allie, the younger brother who died from leukemia at age 11. “All right, name something else,” Phoebe insists. “Name something you’d like to be. Like a scientist. Or a lawyer or something.” Out of desperation, Holden launches into an elaborate remaking of the Robbie Burns’ poem, “Comin’ thro’ the Rye,” and voices one of the most beautiful dreams in world literature:
“I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around — nobody big, I mean — except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.”
Holden Caulfield wants to expand his circle of care from himself to others; he wants to be a protector of children, a saviour of children. Imagine putting that on your job application or your CV. If he can’t save himself, maybe he can save an innocent child.
