@holdencaulfield: Sixty Years of The Catcher In The Rye0

by Brett Warner

The first copy of The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger I ever saw was an aged, ominous looking mass-market paperback sitting gravely at the top of my mother’s bookshelf. Its cover was a very solemn looking burgundy with gold font announcing its title and author. No picture on the front, no plot summary on the back – this book just simply existed. My mother, having passed on her uncanny hunger for books of all types and sorts, once shared the story of how my grandmother lost her shit when she found out her daughter was learning about this filth in school. I knew then I had to read this book right away.

For six decades, The Catcher in the Rye has been both the most ardently taught and fervently banned book in American literature. Along with James Dean and rock & roll, Salinger’s stream of conscious tale of angst and alienation invented the American teenager and, by extension, changed the way we create and market everything from clothes to music and movies. Its hero is a sixteen year-old, anti-social fuck up named Holden Caulfield, who has been kicked out of at least three private schools, has no qualms about going to New York for the weekend to have a few drinks and pick up some girls, and sees through all the insincere, “phony” bullshit that constitutes ninety-nine percent of our sad, pathetic adult lives.

Caulfield’s attitudes and viewpoints remain evocative of their time and place, when the ever-increasing gulf between childhood and adulthood had nearly imploded and the infuriating restraints of proper society threatened to strangle an entire generation. Yet, his anger and his fear resonate more than half a century later, those immortal words echoing through the dividing, massively constructed social schematas in which we live and breathe with little alternative. Is The Catcher in the Rye still meaningful in 2011? If anything, the book’s message is more imperative now than ever before.

Salinger himself was raised in post-WWI Manhattan by a working class Jewish family. A poor student, he dropped out of several schools before publishing “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” the story of a Manhattan teenager named Holden Caulfield. Drafted in 1942, Salinger’s regiment took part in the D-Day and Battle of the Bulge campaigns, with the author famously calling up Ernest Hemingway after Allied forces liberated Paris. Following the war, Salinger published several short stories in The New Yorker and elsewhere before The Catcher in the Rye appeared in hardcover during the summer of 1951. Despite mixed reviews, the novel was a popular success, especially amongst teenagers. Its then-blatant depictions of coarse language, substance abuse, and general miscreant behaviors and attitudes generated reoccurring waves of controversy and its rocky relationship with parents and teachers continues to this day.

Many have called the book “plotless,” which I suppose hinges on your personal definition. The story begins and ends in the rambling thoughts of young Holden Caulfield, recently expelled from the fictional Pencey Preparatory School in East Pennsylvania. Hoping to avoid the inevitable reunion with his upset parents, Caulfield leaves his dormitory in the middle of the night and takes a train to New York, where he spends the next three days in a lonely, often drunken stupor. He pays for a call girl, only to change his mind and decide he’d rather talk to the understandably baffled prostitute. Holden dances with a group of tourists, chats with a nun, visits a museum, and sneaks into his parents’ apartment in the middle of the night to visit his younger sister Phoebe, the only one who seems to value his particular set of morals.

The title is a reference to a nurtured fantasy of Holden’s in which he is the heroic savior of a group of children running through a rye field at the edge of a cliff. He equates adulthood and its vice-like social restraints with death, despite his penchants for drinking and fooling others into believing he is much older than sixteen. His hatred for all things “phony” and false stems from unrealized fears about life and death, likely culled from the tragic death of his younger brother, Allie. Holden Caulfield chooses genuine isolation over a false social life, and in the end it costs him his friends, his education, and (perhaps) his sanity. He moves from place to place, hoping to find some source of truth and honesty, but instead finds more structure, more sterility. More phonies.

Part of me feels that Twitter was created just for the Holden Caulfields of the world – their every waking thoughts and observations weaving together in some tightly wound manifesto of enlightened detachment. Still, I think were he around to see the phony shit we do today, he’d surely drown himself in the Central Park lagoon. The internet, once the great equalizer and enabler of humanity, has instead amplified all of our worst penchants: vanity, insecurity, and (most of all) loneliness. Words like “friend,” “favorite,” and “like” have been robbed of their simple, innate positivity and instead churn within us like cogs in a well-oiled machine. The desire to learn anything about one another is all but gone for good as we’ve boiled ourselves down to the barest of elements, genuinely believing that a handful of images and a well-rounded list of interests can accurately represent our hopes, dreams, fears, and desires. Who needs a Number of the Beast? We all have AIM screen names.

If Holden Caulfield can teach us anything today, it’s that isolation and inclusion are mutually exclusive, they cannot be successfully enmeshed the way our social media-driven lives are attempting to make them. We either have friends or we don’t. We’re lonely or we’re not. That struggle has only increased in severity since Salinger first wrote: “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do you’ll start missing everybody.” Without genuine, in-person and unrestrained interaction with each other, we are all spiritually dead – lying mangled in a rocky trench below the golden, billowing rye fields. Perhaps what scared all those livid parents about The Catcher in the Rye wasn’t the cursing and the sex, but the notion that they had become so structured and disciplined as to be beyond saving.

“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. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.” – Mr. Antolini, The Catcher in the Rye.