Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

After re-reading Slaughter-House Five, a favorite of my teen-age years, I thought I’d re-read another early favorite, Catcher in the Rye. I’ve re-read both books many times over the years and continued to find them enjoyable and worthy. But frankly, I was a little hesitant about re-visiting Catcher in the Rye. I didn’t want to spoil a good memory. I’ve read more than one essay in the past few years saying the book no longer holds up, that it’s 1950s milieu has started to show it’s sexist and homophobic seams, that Caulfield’s dilemma no longer resonates, that, in any case, there are better young adult novels available now for high school literature classes to assign. I bristled even hearing Catcher in the Rye labeled a “young adult” novel. That felt cheap. It always felt like literature to me, even when I read it as a young adult.

I’m happy to say I still think it’s a great book. I found it held up better even than Slaughter-House Five, which I also enjoyed. I didn’t find Holden’s comments about “flits” and “perverts” to be offensive, just of the age, and of his age – he’s 16. And I found his problem to be touching, and true, I think, for a lot of teens.

The biggest revelation I had this read-through, though, is that Holden is kind of a jerk. That’s partly why his comments about homosexuals and women, and so on, didn’t bother me. He’s not a hero; he’s a sympathetic character, but not likable, so who cares what he thinks? I feel sad for him. He’s troubled. He’s lost. But he’s not someone to emulate, nor do I think Salinger intends him to be a role model. Rather, he’s someone to pity.

The story begins on a Saturday afternoon at Pencey Prep in Pennsylvania. As in, For Whom the Bell Tolls, the entire novel takes place over a few days with a continuous narrative unfolding almost hour by hour. For Whom the Bell Tolls begins Saturday afternoon and ends Tuesday morning. Catcher in the Rye begins Saturday afternoon and ends Monday afternoon. It’s a week before Christmas, the end of Holden’s fall semester, although he’s been expelled, so he won’t be coming back after the break. Although Salinger doesn’t mention the year, it’s possible to date the novel exactly because on Sunday afternoon he goes to a play, “I Know My Love,” which ran on Broadway from November 1949 through June 1950. So it’s 1949, December 17, 18, and 19.

The first seven chapters, about a quarter of the book, take place at Pencey. Holden interacts with Mr. Spencer, his history teacher, and two boys in the dorms: Ackley and Stradlater. He ends up in a fist fight with Stradlater because Stradlater had a date with a girl, Jean Gallagher, that Holden used to be friendly with, and Holden is upset thinking that Stradlater might have had sex with her. The semester doesn’t end until Wednesday, but after the fight Holden decides to cut out early and hide out in New York for a few days before he confronts his parents with the bad news. This isn’t the first school he’s failed out of.

In Chapter Eight he takes a train to New York. The rest of the novel takes place in Manhattan. He gets a room at the Edmont Hotel. He dances with some ladies from out of town in the hotel club called, The Lavender Room. He visits a bar in Greenwich village and runs into an old girlfriend of his older brother, D.B, who is now a writer in Hollywood. Back at his hotel, the elevator man, Maurice, gets Holden to agree to a hire a prostitute. When “Sunny” arrives, Holden loses interest, then she tries to cheat him out of $5. The next morning Maurice beats him up and takes the $5. Holden checks out of the hotel. He makes a date to see a matinee with an old girlfriend, Sally Hayes. He buys a record for his kid sister, Phoebe. He sees the play with Sally then they go ice skating together and get in a fight. Alone, he watches the Christmas show and a movie at Radio City Music Hall. Then he meets a friend, Luce, for drinks at a club. Luce leaves and Holden gets drunk. He walks into Central Park. He accidentally breaks the record he bought for Phoebe. Then he decides to go home, sneak in, and say hello to his sister without waking his parents. Holden and Phoebe chat. Holden calls an old teacher, Mr. Antolini, and makes arrangements to spend the night at his place. Then the parents come home from a late party and Holden hides in the closet while they check in on Phoebe. Holden beds down on Mr. Antolini’s sofa but is awakened by the teacher “patting” his forehead. Holden leaves hurriedly. He sleeps the rest of the night on a bench in Grand Central Station. Monday morning he visits Phoebe’s school with the intention of saying good-bye to her. He plans to run away. Phoebe decides she wants to run-away, too, which spoils his plans. Instead they visit the Central Park Zoo, and the carousel. The novel ends with a short coda that shows Holden has had a break-down shortly after these events and he’s written the narrative from a sanitarium presumably as part of his therapy. He talks of plans of going back to school in September.

Holden thinks his problem is that the world is full of “phonies”. But the problem is that he doesn’t like anything. No one’s good enough for him. Everybody fails eventually. After ice-skating with Sally Hayes he says, starting with school:

“Well, I hate it. Boy, do I hate it,” I said. “But it isn’t just that. It’s everything. I hate living in New York and all. Taxi-cabs, and Madison Avenue buses, with the drivers and all always yelling at you to get out at the rear door, and being introduced to phony guys that call the Lunts angels, and going up and down in elevators when you just want to go outside, and guys fitting your pants all the time at Brooks, and people always–” (p. 132).

Sally interrupts him, but he goes on. Later, Phoebe gets it right during their Sunday night conversation in her bedroom:

“You don’t like anything that’s happening.”

“Yes I do. Yes I do. Sure I do. Don’t say that. Why the hell do you say that?”

“Because you don’t. You don’t like any schools. You don’t like a million things. You don’t.” (p. 172)

Phoebe presses him. Holden gets defensive. But over the next three pages Holden can’t name a single thing he likes except for his brother Allie, who died of Leukemia a few years before the novel takes place and Phoebe points out that Allie is dead, so he’s no longer around to disappoint Holden.

More to the point, Allie died while still a child. Holden believes in the sanctity of children, but he bemoans that every adult loses that innocence and falls to some kind of falseness or depravity. Thus the image that gives the novel its title. Holden hears a little boy singing to himself on the street Sunday morning presuming that the boy has just left church with his family. He sings:

“If a body catch a body coming through the rye.” (p. 118)

Later, Phoebe points out that the Burns poem is actually, “If a body meet a body” (p. 175)

But whether Holden mis-heard or the kid sang it wrong, Holden explains that his fantasy for what he would like to do in life, his ideal purpose, would be to be the adult who rescues children from falling into adulthood, as though children were playing in a field of rye next to a cliff and it was Holden’s job to catch them when they got too close to the edge.

But though it’s sweet to idolize the innocence of children, it’s also misanthropic, because children become adults. And adults have adult lives that include sex, and boring jobs, and polite lying, and bad days, and corny jokes, and imperfect aesthetic tastes, and all the other things that Holden constantly despises. Thus to like only children, is to dislike people, including himself.

Holden is as phony as anyone. He constantly talks about how much he hates the movies. But twice in two days he voluntarily goes to the movies. (Saturday night he goes with two friends from school although they end up not seeing anything. Sunday afternoon he goes by himself to Radio City). He says polite things he doesn’t mean. He lies constantly. When he gets insulted he backs down; when he gets uncomfortable, he flees. Throughout the book people care for him and try to help him and he ignores them all. The best advice he gets is this, about salvation through education and art, from Mr. Antolini:

“Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them–if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement.” (p. 192)

Holden yawns through this speech. And, of course, Mr. Antolini, too, soon disappoints Holden. (For more of my thoughts about the scene with Mr. Antolini click here.)

The other reason I wanted to re-read Catcher in the Rye, now, is because I’ve been reading war novels lately and I was convinced by a recent biography of Salinger that Catcher in the Rye is in some ways Salinger’s war novel. Salinger served in Counter Intelligence in World War II. He was drafted in 1942. In 1944 he was part of the D-Day invasion. He rode into Paris and met Hemingway there who was working as a war correspondent. He toured Nazi death camps. And all this time he had draft manuscripts of Holden Caufield stories with him. He completed the novel after the war, in 1950 (it’s copyrighted 1951) but some of the material began as short stories and was published serially, carrying copyrights from 1945 and 1946. Salinger was 25 on D-Day. It’s easy to see where he acquired his view of the tragic loss of childhood innocence.

There’s only one direct reference to the war in Catcher in the Rye. Salinger puts the experience in the character of Holden’s older brother called D.B., who goes by two initials just as J.D. Salinger does.

“My brother D.B. was in the Army for four goddam years. He was in the war, too–he landed on D-Day and all–but I really think he hated the Army worse than the war. I was practically a child at the time, but I remember when he used to come home on furlough and all, all he did was lie on his bed, practically. He hardly ever even came in the living room. Later, when he went overseas and was in the war and all, he didn’t get wounded or anything and he didn’t have to shoot anybody. All he had to do was drive some cowboy general around all day in a command car. He once told Allie and I that if he’d had to shoot anybody, he wouldn’t’ve known which direction to shoot in. He said the Army was practically as full of bastards as the Nazis were.” (p. 142).

Then there’s this:

“What gets me about D.B., though, he hated the war so much, and yet he got me to read this book A Farewell to Arms last summer. He said it was so terrific. That’s what I can’t understand. It had this guy in it named Lieutenant Henry that was supposed to be a nice guy and all. I don’t see how D.B. could hate the Army and war and all so much and still like a phony like that.”

D.B. admires A Farewell to Arms. Maybe it’s one of those “records of their troubles” that sensitive artists leave to us, as Mr. Antolini describes them. But Holden dismisses it. Lieutenant Henry is just a phony like nearly every other adult Holden encounters. Funnily, the book Holden says he likes is The Great Gatsby and Jay Gatsby really is a phony, a false invention of himself in order to win a girl – that’s the whole foundation of that story.

Endlessly disappointed with the adult world, Holden imagines an escape for himself: a private cabin in the woods out west. It sounds a lot like the escape Salinger actually made to a reclusive life in Cornish, New Hampshire in 1953, two years after Catcher in the Rye was published.

“What I’d do, I figured, I’d go down to the Holland Tunnel and bum a ride, and then I’d bum another one, and another one, and another one, and in a few days I’d be somewhere out West where it was very pretty and sunny and where nobody’d know me and I’d get a job. I figured I could get a job at a filling station somewhere, putting gas and oil in people’s cars. I didn’t care what kind of a job it was, though. Just so people didn’t know me and I didn’t know anybody.” (p. 201).

To make his isolation complete he further imagines himself pretending to be a deaf mute so he can entirely avoid having conversations with other people. He might even get a wife but only if she was a deaf-mute, an actual deaf-mute.

What a phony.