The Catcher in the Rye

"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." This opening sentence has grabbed many a youthful reader of one of the most important novels in American literature, The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger. His death last week at 91 has prompted an outpouring of contemplation by Web sites and magazines that value books, and it prompted me to read or re-read his most important works.

I had read The Catcher in the Rye, of course. I say of course because, as it has been pointed out, this may be the last literary classic that most of the population has read. It has sold sixty-five million copies. However, as so many were, I was not assigned this book in school. When I was in college I decided to read it on my own. If I remember correctly, I bought it on a visit to my father in about 1982 when he lived in the Chicago suburbs. I bought the paperback edition that is burgundy with yellow type, the title and author simply etched on both sides of the book, without any illustration or blurb, like the Quotations of Chairman Mao or The Bible. After his death I found it in my ancient bookcase, the one my grandfather made for me when I was about seven years old. The pages are now yellowed, and the spine cracked a bit upon being opened again after so many years.

The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951, is one of the most significant books in American literature. Many articles I read over the week conclude that it is one of three, following Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, which define the American character. Salinger's hero, the sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield, has become a benchmark of youthful alienation, as we spend about forty-eight hours with him, after he has been kicked out of his boarding school and then wanders Manhattan, eager to avoid the "phonies" that bedevil him, while at the same time unable to break the bonds of familial affection in the form of his younger sister, Phoebe.

Reading it at age forty-eight is certainly different at reading at sixteen, or fourteen, or whatever age most kids read it at the time. The language, Holden's, is purposely callow and rough-edged (he refers to almost everyone, no matter their age, as "old," as in "old Phoebe" or "old Sally Hayes") and sloppily ends paragraphs with the unnecessary, "it really is." This has led some academics and snobs to dismiss Salinger's literary talent, but has anyone ever climbed inside the head of anguished youth like he did with Holden Caulfield. S.E. Hinton came close in her books, but Salinger is much more honestly brutal with Caulfield. The book doesn't avoid sentimentality, though, especially in regards to Phoebe, when the book ends while he watches her ride the carousel in Central Park.

The book struck a chord with every kid who at one time or another had a moment where they just wanted to hop on a train or some other conveyance and leave everything behind--family, school, friends, etc. Reading it as an adult one can see the folly of thinking that way, but also remember those feelings, and understand them even though one knows that things seem to always get better, and over time one learns to suffer humiliation and hypocrisy with a smile. Holden doesn't know it at the time, but chances are one day some kid will see him as a phony. Or perhaps he ended up living away from it all, just like his creator.

Upon his death, The New Yorker, which published almost all of Salinger's short stories, made them available to subscribers in their digital archives. During downtime at work I read several of them, experiencing them as those did in the '40s and '50s, side-by-side with wanly humorous cartoons. His first story for them, "A Slight Rebellion Off Madison," was a preview of a section of Catcher, in which Holden takes a girl to a play, and runs into one of her insufferable friends, who refers to the Lunts as "angels": "You should've seen him when old Sally asked him how he liked the play. He was the kind of phony that had to give themselves room when they answered somebody's question. He stepped back, and stepped right on the lady's foot behind him. He probably broke every toe in her body. He said the play itself was no masterpiece, but that the Lunts, of course, were absolute angels. Angels. For Chrissake. Angels. That killed me."

This passage indicates the level of humor that pervades the book. No matter how down and out Holden becomes, even when he's sleeping in the waiting room of Grand Central Station, he never loses his sense of humor. There are brief curleycues of bawdiness, such as this treat when he meets a female acquaintance at a club: "Her name was Lillian Simmons. My brother D.B. used to go around with her for a while. She had very big knockers."

The Catcher in the Rye, despite its ubiquitous presence on high-school syllabi, has also been banned in many places. This is readily apparent upon reading it, as for 1951, it's language is fairly frank. It's full of "goddams" and then, in the last few pages, confronts the reader with "Fuck You," although it is not spoken by Holden, but he finds it scrawled on the walls of his sister's school (and then again at the Museum of Natural History). That, and a tawdry scene in which he is visited by a scrawny, teenage prostitute, well, bluenoses everywhere must have been up in arms. But the honesty of these scenes are what makes the book great. I could picture the nastiness of the encounter with the prostitute, when the elevator operator/pimp comes to collect the five dollars that he says Holden owes him. Even to someone of my vast experience it is shockingly bold.

When I speak of picturing these scenes, it becomes time to wonder whether Salinger's death will change the status of his works staying away from cinematic treatment. He wrote to a producer that he would never sell the rights to Catcher, and eloquently reasoned that the book was in the head of its main character. True enough, a film version of Catcher in the Rye would either be a series of episodes that a churlish youth would experience without much impact, or it would have to be over-saturated with voiceovers. Salinger, his friends recall, loved to watch movies, though Holden has a different opinion: "If there's one thing I hate, it's the movies," though he mentions seeing several during the course of the book. Without ever being made into a movie, the novel, as well as Salinger's other work, has made an imprint on the history of cinema. As Dana Stevens points out on Slate.com, a line of movie characters can be seen to have developed from Caulfield, from Marlon Brando in The Wild One to James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause to Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate. In many ways, Caulfield was the first shot fired in the culture wars. Wes Anderson is the filmmaker who has been most influenced by Salinger. His Max of Rushmore is a kind of descendant of Holden, albeit one who loves his school, rather than loathes it, and the family of prodigies in The Royal Tenenbaums are obviously modeled after the Glass family featured in Salinger's work, most notably the stories "Franny" and "Zooey" (Tenenbaum is the married name of one of the Glass sisters). If I were the Salinger children, and I decided to sell the rights to the book, I'd give Anderson a call.

Salinger moved to a New Hampshire farmhouse and turned his back on celebrity, refusing interviews, and ceasied to publish from 1965 on. He ironically became famous for shunning fame. His work continued to make a huge imprint, both positive and negative (it was clutched by John Lennon's assassin, Mark David Chapman, when he was apprehended for the crime--the book can be a tonic for the paranoid). He became something of a myth to many. W.P. Kinsella, in his book Shoeless Joe (the basis for the film Field of Dreams) has his main character kidnap Salinger and take him to a Red Sox game (in the film the character was changed to a fictitious black writer played by James Earl Jones, an obvious maneuver to keep the litigious Salinger at bay). It is therefore a bit poignant to read Holden say, of his favorite writers, "What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it." No doubt many of Salinger's readers felt the same way upon reading his masterpiece, but alas, his number was unlisted.