Catcher in the Rye (J. D. Salinger)

July 14, 2006

I was excited to discover that– serendipitously– an online book discussion group was going to be discussing Catcher in the Rye just as I was finishing my re-reading. Unfortunately, the second thread in the conversation revolved around whether or not Holden was “clinically depressed” and how much better it would have been for him if he’d had access to today’s anti-depressants… and perhaps “group therapy with his cold, distant parents.” I ran screaming from the virtual room at that point, fearing the almost inevitable self-help generation speculations about incest between Holden and Phoebe and the likely feminist attacks on Salinger.

No matter– I loved this book more the second-time than I did the first time I read it, back when I was Holden’s age… What I most admire about Catcher is the undeniable solidity of truth that peeks through the intense and cloudy adolescent narrative. Like most precocious teens, Holden is a diamond in the rough– alternately insightful and dull. I started noting his insightful observations and found myself making marginal notes every few pages. For instance:

Holden on girls: I mean it, I was half in love with her by the time we sat down. That’s the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they’re not much to look at, or even if they’re sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.

Holden on lawyers: “Lawyers are all right, I guess– but it doesn’t appeal to me,” I said. “I mean they’re all right if they go around saving innocent guys’ lives all the time, and like that, but you don’t do that kind of stuff if you’re a lawyer. All you do is make a lot of dough and play golf and play bridge and buy cars and drink Martinis and look like a hot-shot. And besides. Even if you did go around saving guys’ lives and all, how would you know if you did it because you really wanted to save guys’ lives, or because you did it because what you really wanted to do was be a terrific lawyer, with everybody slapping you on the back and congratulating you in court when the goddam trial was over, the reporters and everybody, the way it is in dirty movies? How would you know you weren’t being a phony? The trouble is, you wouldn’t.

Holden on “perverts”: I’m not kidding, the hotel was lousy with perverts. I was probably the only normal bastard in the whole place– and that isn’t saying much. I damn near sent a telagram to old Stradlater telling him to take the first train to New York. He’d have been the king of the hotel. The trouble was, that kind of junk is sort of fascinating to watch, even if you don’t want it to be.

I can cite dozens more (and eventually will, over in the Commonplace Book) but that’s enough to make my point. I don’t know whether this recognition of truisms in Holden’s observations is an indication of my own youthful intelligence or an indictment of my adult self, cleaving to a foolish consistency with that younger self.

Reading Catcher in the Rye as an adult is a bittersweet experience. I mourn both the Holden inside myself that I’ve lost and that part of me that remains stubbornly unchanged. I miss the intensity of emotion characteristic of that age, while being grateful that I no longer have to suffer the constant ambiguity from which it sprang. When Phoebe presses her meager savings into Holden’s hand and he spontaneously starts crying, I know that he’s not crying because Phoebe’s the one person in his life that is undeniably not a phony, or because she’s so obviously destined to the kind of harsh conflict with lousy reality that none of the Caulfield’s have escaped. He’s not crying at the loss of his little brother, whose presence is palpable when he talks with Phoebe. He’s not crying at the sudden realization that, all his protestations to the contrary, he is himself becoming, inevitably a phony… No, Holden’s crying because of– and in spite of– all of these things, stretched to the breaking point by that surfeit of emotion that stretches the teenage emotional landscape in ways we tend to forget (or render as nostalgia) in adulthood.

I also love that Catcher ends without resolution. Had Salinger never written anything else, I’d have understood… as it is, his real-life seclusion doesn’t surprise me. I imagine that to some degree he must have felt like there wasn’t a lot left to say that wouldn’t merely be repetition. The idea that we learn everything we need to know in Kindergarten is self-help pablum; that perhaps we’ve been taught more than we really need to know by the time we hit our teens– the rest of our lives being a kind of cosmic cruelty… that’s the stuff of the highest art.

Or maybe there’s a simpler explanation. Maybe being an adult means being inescapably phony and Salinger didn’t want to demonstrate that conclusively by example, an artist who stumbled across a beautiful, irresistible refutation of his own craft…

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