J.D. Salinger and “The Catcher in the Rye”
PART ONE OF A TWO-PART PROFILE
J.D. SALINGER began his novel “The Catcher in the Rye,” by having his teenage narrator Holden Caulfield say, “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…”
Well, I don’t mind going into it. Jerome David Salinger was born in 1919 and raised in New York City, the son of Sol Salinger, a wealthy Jewish meat-and-cheese importer, and a Scottish-Irish mother who was Christian. In 1928, when Jerry Salinger was nine, the family moved to 221 West 82nd St, near the Museum of American History and the Central Park Zoo, both of them central to Salinger’s fictional New York.
In 1932, the Salingers moved to Park Avenue and 91st Street on the East Side. Jerry was put in the McBurney School, but flunked out after about a year, and was enrolled by his parents at the Valley Forge Military Academy, near Wayne, Pennsylvania. It was not a lousy childhood but, as with any sensitive child, there were hurts which Jerry Salinger carried, always.
Salinger wrote brilliant short stories for The New Yorker and then in 1951 published “The Catcher in the Rye,” one of the best American novels of the 20th century. It’s a first person tale narrated by a naïve, troubled teenager who hasn’t seen much of life, or done anything very interesting. Try writing a novel under those limitations, and you’ll see how skilled Salinger was.
Salinger had his teenage narrator Holden Caulfield say that you should be able to pick up the phone and call an author whose work you like. Many readers felt they knew Holden Caulfield, considered him a friend, and were eager to meet Salinger, his creator. The philosopher Karl Popper in England, who liked very few modern books, called “The Catcher in the Rye” a “very good story of adolescent psychology,” and it is that. Salinger wrote like a teenager, talking about true things almost never treated in novels, like how white and unhairy old men’s legs look at the beach.
We enjoy Holden’s harsh and comical pet peeves: the baleful effect of Hollywood on storytelling; the false ways that prep schools advertise themselves in magazines; the stupidity of making a cult out of winning prep school football games; the dreary quality of a school with no girls around; how sad it is when nice girls are “homely” and lovely girls are mean; and how depressing it is to have your possessions stolen.
That’s just from the first few pages, before Salinger hits us with his first set piece: Holden loyally going over to say goodbye to one of his teachers, Mr. Spencer, who has flunked him. We sit in a cramped little room which smells like Vicks Nose Drops; we see Mr. Spencer 70 years old, in a ratty bathrobe, getting over a cold, and Salinger shows us the good in this teacher as well as the petty sadist. Spencer knows that Holden is in some danger, and we the reader sense that Holden is in danger — but does Holden know?
Again and again in “The Catcher in the Rye,” Holden tells us how easily the good things in life are spoiled, and how pervasive the depressing things are. He shows us the phony sophisticate Carl Luce who deigns to have a drink with lonely Holden and can’t stop putting Holden in his place.
Holden’s younger brother has died of leukemia and Holden can’t express his grief and his parents haven’t helped. Salinger shows us Holden restless in the evening, desperately lonely and hoping that seeing and talking to people from his past may soothe some of his sadness. We see Holden’s urge to escape the world fighting with his love of it. He tells us how awful it is to leave a place for good without realizing it was the last time, without feeling the need to summon up any sort of goodbye.
As a reader, you find yourself trying to protect Holden. You watch for “phonies” in the world, wanting to point them out to Holden. The writer James Wallenstein has said about “The Catcher in the Rye”: “It sweeps you up and takes you along and talks to you and makes you feel privately important.”
Valley Forge Academy, with its Revolutionary War cannon, is the clear model for Pencey Prep, where Holden Caulfield so badly failed to fit in and was asked to leave.
Salinger was a bit of a wiseass at Valley Forge Academy, but well within convention. He made up stories about himself to see if he could pass them off as true. At least once he snuck off campus with a friend after “lights out.” But his grades were fine, and he was literary editor of the yearbook.
In 1942, at Columbia University, Salinger signed up for a short story writing course taught by Whit Burnett, the editor of Story magazine. Salinger liked the hardworking, unpretentious Burnett, who made sensible suggestions, and took students seriously.
Burnett liked Salinger and admired his precocious knack for dialogue, for nailing people in just a few words of description or dialogue, mocking the conceited, whether teenage girls or mean old men. A young writer is sternly advised to avoid cliches, but Salinger collected cliches, riffed on them, and put them in the mouths of characters he disliked.
His progress as a writer was savagely interrupted by World War Two. Salinger was drafted, and on D-Day, June 6, 1944, just five hours after the first U.S. forces landed at Utah Beach, Salinger’s division landed behind them. He fought right through the Battle of the Bulge, and most of the men in his unit were slaughtered. This seems to have had severe effects on his psyche, though he was loathe to discuss it.
He wrote briskly to Whit Burnett, “Am still writing whenever I can find the time and an unoccupied foxhole.” He enclosed with his letter a $200 check and told the editor to use the money to help some young writers.
In the early- and mid-1950’s, J. D. Salinger published striking stories in the New Yorker magazine, including “For Esme — With Love and Squalor” and “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” — stories that made poignant art out of Salinger’s post-traumatic stress.
Salinger had a great ear for the way people talk, and by juxtaposing the shell-shocked narrator of “Esme” with the girl Esme, or Seymour Glass with his young wife, he got down in dialogue marvelously well the way “normal” people react to the disturbed. Esme is a precocious child whose charm to the damaged adult comes not, as the girl believes, in the information she proudly displays for his benefit but in her freshness, in being undamaged, a quality which the narrator loves, and yearns to protect.
John Updike was one of many young writers who felt Salinger spoke to them, as an earlier generation had felt spoken to by Dorothy Parker or Ernest Hemingway. Updike said, “Salinger’s stories were not wised up. They were very open to tender invasions.”
There were strong recurring themes in his work. One was the corruption of the world, the way it yields to fake, phony people with money, and so often strangles real human feeling. Another recurring Salinger theme is the goodness of children, the unselfconscious purity of people too young to be corrupted.
He made his wealthy characters shallow, and he seemed to love nuns and anyone on a spiritual search, anyone who was humble and hard-working, anyone who comforted the poor or grief-stricken. Salinger hated phonies.
Once he was invited to go to Sarah Lawrence College and address a short story class about writing. I see him in a herring-bone suit, with a sweater vest, his face bemused, his tie slightly askew, his hair slicked down with Vaseline. Asked to ‘discuss his craft’ with students, Salinger felt later that he’d grown very “oracular and literary” and wished that, instead, he’d only shouted the names of some of his favorite writers: Kafka, Flaubert, Tolstoy. He claimed to have enjoyed the chance to lecture about writing, but he never did such a thing again.
“The Laughing Man” is a Salinger short story which tells a real tale of young love around a hackneyed story of the supernatural. The story is narrated by a child for whom the supernatural story makes much more sense than the love story; but for us the adult reader, the opposite is the case, and again Salinger shows a poignant difference between children and adults.
“De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” is an intensely touching story told by a narrator recalling the confused young man he once was, grieving his mother’s recent death. The young man’s extravagant ambitions as a painter and “man of the world” have vastly outpaced his modest talent for painting.
Salinger was preoccupied with super-bright, precocious children and he created a whole family of them, the Glass family, headed by Seymour Glass. Holden Caulfield’s sister Phoebe was a precocious child, as was the title character in the short story “Teddy.” You sensed that these wise children cheered him.
Negative thinking was always strong in him, though. Signet Books bought the paperback rights to “The Catcher in the Rye” and in 1953 released the paperback edition. On the cover was an artist’s rendering of Holden, a suitcase in his hand, and his red hunting hat on backwards. Salinger was not merely dismayed but offended by this second-rate painting, and when the contract with Signet was up, Salinger sold the paperback rights to Bantam Books.
More and more, he wanted his writing to speak for him; but journalists were always trying to coax him to talk. Salinger was a celebrity and silence in a celebrity seemed to many people unseemly.
That same year of 1953, J.D. Salinger, disturbed by the ways that celebrity was stealing his time and eating into his privacy, left New York City for a comfortable but not lavish home on a hill in Cornish, New Hampshire. There he became a recluse. He most definitely did NOT want his readers to pick up the telephone and call him.
END OF PART ONE