Counter-Currents
2,831 words
Literature can shape the way we look at the world — even without our knowing it, or being beware of the specific literature in question. A Bible verse shared during a church service or a few lines of poetry offered in a classroom can have this effect. With novels, well-drawn characters can stick with us until we view life through their fictional eyes. I imagine Ernest Hemingway had this in mind when he claimed that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” There is a little of Huck Finn in all of us, in other words.
By the 1960s, however, Huck Finn had been largely replaced by Holden Caulfield in the American imagination. Despite what an original character Holden is and how deftly author J. D. Salinger developed him in the 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, that’s hardly a good thing.
The story covers teenaged Caulfield’s premature escape from his New Jersey boarding school after he had been expelled (yet again) for poor grades. We experience Holden’s irritation in the presence of his peers, his impatience in the presence of adults, and his overall dour disposition and lack of responsibility as a young man. Something is bugging Holden, and we’re not sure what it is. Yet, because Salinger obviously decided to relay an entire novel from this boy’s perspective, we have to assume that whatever is bugging Holden, it isn’t that he is a lazy, foul-mouthed, ill-tempered, sarcastic, entitled brat in need of the kind of love and guidance a military academy could have provided him back then.
No, whatever is plaguing our young, disaffected protagonist has to be something indicative of our rotten world. So this something is as much about us as it is about him. Holden gives us a hint of what this something is on page 1 when, by way of an introduction, he eschews “all that David Copperfield kind of crap,” and alludes to “madman stuff” which transpired the previous Christmas and landed him wherever he is by the time he tells the story (some kind of sanitarium, it would seem).
You can buy Spencer Quinn’s novel White Like You here.
So, what is bugging Holden and what all this “madman stuff” was are the two questions the reader wants answered as the story unfolds. I’ll give a summary without any spoilers.
Annoyed at his classmates’ perceived phoniness, Holden picks a fight with one over a girl and loses. He then leaves his school at night and heads home to New York City. He has several awkward encounters with adults during this time, much of which involves Holden drinking alcohol, telling lies, or talking incessantly about sex. He goes on a date with an old flame, which ends in disaster when he insults her. He then sneaks into his parents’ apartment and speak with his younger sister Phoebe, who loves him and infers that he has been expelled. He leaves before his parents return from an outing and then has an instructive yet harrowing encounter with a former teacher. After suffering a mental breakdown while walking aimlessly in New York, Holden vows to run away and live alone in a cabin out west. He arranges to meet Phoebe the next day to say goodbye and abscond without informing his parents. This second meeting with his sister will likely be the most consequential moment in this young man’s life.
The Catcher in the Rye is a classic for good reason. It is three-quarters of a great novel, because it has given us a unique — I would even say immortal — character in Holden Caulfield. He is a joy to read, and he enthralls the reader with discovery and mystery on almost every page. But why? At first blush he is a typical East Coast, upper-class white kid from the time the novel was written (1945-51). Everything about him and his story is fairly ordinary — and yet, I don’t know. Salinger makes it interesting by revealing Holden’s character slowly enough, and with appropriate narrative tension, for what exactly is bugging him to dawn on the reader. Holden also dispenses with all storytelling pretense while narrating (as his little dig at Charles Dickens suggests). In real life, I can see this getting fairly tedious, but in the hands of Salinger, it’s a revelation.
Holden’s troubles stem from his sui generis sensitivity to the world around him. This could enable him to be great writer one day; English is his favorite class, after all, and he especially enjoys composition writing. But as a teenager at boarding school, he’s crushed with loneliness, since absolutely no one he knows shares this sensitivity.
He attacks a popular boy named Stradlater, not merely because Stradlater went on a date with a girl he likes, but also because Stradlater doesn’t appreciate her peculiar habit of never moving her kings on the checker board. Only someone as sensitive as Holden could do such a thing. Holden exasperates a pair of New York City cab drivers who are wondering where Central Park’s ducks go in the winter. He’s able to see through the pretensions of a popular black jazz pianist named Ernie. He bores three young women at a bar with his theories on dancing. And after seeing a show with his date, he has some insightful thoughts on the actors, who happen to be Broadway legends Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne.
Tell me if we don’t have a young Andrew Sarris in Holden here:
They didn’t act like people and they didn’t act like actors. It’s hard to explain. They acted more like they knew they were celebrities and all. I mean they were good, but they were too good. When one of them got finished making a speech, the other one said something very fast right after it. It was supposed to be like people really talking and interrupting each other and all. The trouble was, it was too much like people talking and interrupting each other. They acted a little bit the way old Ernie, down in the Village, plays the piano. If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don’t watch it, you start showing off. And then you’re not as good anymore.
This is good stuff. Holden is not reiterating someone else’s observations or applying notions of aesthetics he picked up in drama class. This is all sweet, raw honey coming straight from the heart. And the line he always repeats? “That kills me.” Anything unusual or inspired that someone does has the potential of killing him, apparently: a clever story by Ring Lardner, Phoebe’s precious attempts at writing fiction, his former girlfriend placing her hand on the back of his neck during a movie. These and many other things “kill” Holden Caulfield — which, I believe, has a double meaning. For one, he experiences something akin to “a little death” — and we all know what that is. Holden basically receives a burst of pleasure that his sensitive soul just doesn’t know how to handle right away. Secondly, however, this particular word choice intimates that Holden’s grasp on life may not be quite what it should be. Of course, this only adds to the tension found in The Catcher in the Rye.
Holden is clearly someone special. Others, especially adults, realize this, which is why the two teachers he meets since leaving school regret his wasted talent and are at pains to give him good advice. The problem is that Holden is so lonely and discouraged that he doesn’t feel he deserves their concern. In fact, the generosity of others depresses him. He states this several times, and is never comfortable when people give him gifts or try to help him. Perhaps this is why he avoids seeing his parents? Perhaps this is also why he is so harsh on himself?
Here is a passage which I underlined when I read this book in high school. Holden had just recalled how he had broken his hand punching out all the windows in his garage after his younger brother Allie died of leukemia:
It was a very stupid thing to do, I’ll admit, but I hardly didn’t even know I was doing it, and you didn’t know Allie. My hand still hurts me once in a while, when it rains and all, and I can’t make a real fist any more — not a tight one, I mean — but outside of that I don’t care much. I mean I’m not going to be a goddam surgeon or violinist or anything anyway.
On the flipside, however, he can be very kind and solicitous to others, such has his generosity to a pair of nuns he meets in the city, or his benign concern for a prostitute he encounters. This is evident towards the end of the novel, when he says that he wishes he could grow up to be like the catcher in the rye from that misremembered Robert Burns poem who saves people, especially children, from the loneliness and despair that’s crushing him.
Holden Caulfield is indeed a wonderful, unforgettable character. But then why is The Catcher in the Rye only three-quarters of a great novel? Why is it bad that Holden has replaced Huck as the character through which so many Americans see their world?
Because Salinger, through Holden, suggests that the failure of others to live up to Holden’s high standards of sensitivity is somehow a moral failing — and this moral failing could lead to a person losing his rights in the reader’s eyes, at the very least. Further, Salinger presents the culture of 1940s East Coast America as more corrupt, seedy, and alienating than it really was. This leads to unnecessary antagonism between Holden and the culture he was born into. It’s heartbreaking to witness Holden imploring his deceased brother not to let him disappear while he’s suffering his mental breakdown. On the other hand, it’s not heartbreaking when Holden asserts to an annoying classmate that his red hunting cap is a “people shooting hat.” This was written 15 years before the University of Texas tower mass shooting in 1966 in which 18 people were killed and 31 injured. Prior to this, no twentieth-century American school shooting save one ever resulted in more than two deaths — and most of these were either accidental or restricted to people who were personally involved. The one exception, in May 1940, resulted in five deaths, and the shooter was the school principal, not a student.
Salinger can therefore be forgiven for assuming his protagonist would not encourage young men to go on shooting rampages, since such events were virtually unheard of prior to 1951. I doubt, however, that “people shooting” was meant metaphorically. Late in the novel, Holden states how he would rather “push a guy out the window or chop his head off with an ax than sock him in the jaw.” He hates getting into fistfights, you see. Holden also attempts to murder Stradlater after the latter’s date with Holden’s checkers-playing girlfriend.
Don’t believe me? Judge for yourself [emphasis mine]:
The next part I don’t remember so hot. All I know is I got up from the bed, like I was going down to the can or something, and then I tried to sock him, with all my might, right smack in the toothbrush, so it would split his goddam throat open. Only, I missed. I didn’t connect. All I did was sort of get him on the side of the head or something. It probably hurt him a little bit, but not as much as I wanted.
This incident alone wouldn’t be so bad if Holden expressed any remorse for it at all, which he does not. Nor is the reader expected to have any sympathy for this Stradlater, who was perhaps an inch or two away from bleeding out on the bathroom floor of his prep academy. From Holden’s perspective, Stradlater is a smug phony, a “secret slob,” and indicative of all that he despises his world — and all that we the reader should despise as well. Even the sound of his footsteps Holden considers stupid.
That Holden himself is an admitted liar or that he holds others to unreasonably high standards of decency and hygiene is not impressed upon the reader enough by Salinger — simply because the sensitive and introspective Holden never addresses it himself. Holden cannot stand his peers for their very human foibles. They don’t clean their shaving kits. They trim their toenails where others can see. They have bad breath or whistle out of tune. Thus, they deserve his contempt. Perhaps this is why he shows no regret when, as the manager of the fencing team, he left the team’s equipment on the subway, forcing the fencers to forfeit a match. Perhaps this is why he shows no compunction when waking a classmate up in the middle of the night to pressure him to buy a typewriter he didn’t really need to sell. (Who’s the phony now, Holden?)
He’s equally as judgmental about adults, to the point of being a misanthrope. He skewers his school, Pencey Prep, for not being completely honest when promoting itself in magazines. He complains about how and when his school serves steak for dinner. He estimates that nine out of ten people who cry in the movie theater “are mean bastards at heart” — as if a boy who tries to murder his classmate isn’t also a mean bastard at heart. When in a nightclub he meets an ex-girlfriend of his older brother by chance, he’s standoffish and rude. Why? Because he finds her boring and thinks the Navy officer accompanying her “looked like he had a poker up his ass.” The fact that she was perfectly nice to him amounts to nothing. Salinger ends the chapter in Caulfieldian contempt: “People are always ruining things for you.”
None of this would be to the detriment of the novel had Salinger not molded Holden as the poster boy for revenge-minded alienated youth. Holden is treated so sympathetically by Salinger, especially at the end, that the reader is constantly tempted to view life through Holden’s jaundiced eyes — as if it’s the world that’s at fault, not Holden. This is dangerous. Given the connection between The Catcher in the Rye and John Lennon’s killer, Mark David Chapman, and others like him, yes, this is dangerous. Huck Finn may have viewed himself as an outlaw for helping Jim escape slavery, but he never saw himself as a predator constantly at odds with most of humanity the way Holden Caulfield seems to be at times.
What further enables the psychopath-as-hero reading of The Catcher in the Rye is the fact that so little is nice in Holden’s world. So much of it is dingy, seedy, or vomity, and, boy, does Holden Caulfield love dwelling on that. Other than during his dreamy walk through the museum, Holden fixates on the ugly and the revolting in New York City, as if that’s all there is. And his penchant for exaggeration doesn’t help. A hotel lobby smells like “50 million dead cigars.” Walking down steps to the sidewalk, he nearly breaks his neck over “10 million garbage pails.”
Even worse, Salinger normalizes sexual perversion. In a hotel Holden finds “a few pimpy-looking guys, and a few whory-looking blondes.” Through the open windows of his hotel, he sees a man trying on women’s clothing and a drunken couple squirting alcohol at each other from their mouths. “The hotel was lousy with perverts,” he states.
Later, Holden meets a former student advisor of his named Luce, whom he describes thusly:
The only thing he ever did though, was give these sex talks and all, late at night when there were a bunch of guys in his room. He knew quite a bit about sex, especially perverts and all. He was always telling us about a lot of creepy guys that go around having affairs with sheep, and guys that go around with girls’ pants sewed in the lining of their hats and all. And flits and lesbians. Old Luce knew who every flit and Lesbian in the United States was.
Most tragically, when a man Holden admires touches him inappropriately and forces him to flee into the night, Holden wasn’t even terribly surprised. He admits that “perverty” things like that have happened to him “about twenty times” before. Rounding that down to the more accurate-sounding once or twice, we still have the normalcy of perversion. It’s as if most American boys in Salinger’s world are forced to deal with unwelcome come-ons from grown men.
Who wouldn’t want to shoot up a world like that?
With such a splendid character as Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye could have been a much greater contribution to Western literature. Salinger only needed to tone down the murder in Holden’s heart and the perversion in Holden’s world. Instead, however, he was happy to paint the world to be a darker place than it really is, and make it cool to hate your fellow man.
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47 comments
I was disappointed in Catcher in the Rye the first time that I read it, which was after I’d read the Glass family stories—Franny and Zooey; Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenter; Seymour an Introduction; A Perfect Day for Bananafish, etc.—which I found wonderful. Catcher wasn’t the Glass family. I read it again decades later, and found it much more interesting. I was never at risk of adopting a Holden Caulfield attitude because I read it well into my twenties, after grad school, when my personality was pretty well developed. I believe that your seeing the misanthropy in the book is spot on. As far as I can tell (and I have read some biographical literature on Salinger), Salinger was a misanthrope, so it’s not surprising that his misanthropy expressed itself in his work. I can’t imagine withdrawing from society in rural New Hampshire if you don’t have a jaundiced view of humankind. Salinger’s son keeps promising the publication of work from the decades of seclusion, but I’m not aware that anything has yet appeared.
Like you, I can’t help but liking this novel against my own better judgment. You focused, rightly and thoughtfully, on a number of both the good and bad aspects of Holden, but I think you’re a little unfair to him. His description of his dead brother Allie really is genuinely moving, and it is Stradlater’s utter indifference to that account (Holden had written the description FOR Stradlater because the latter was too lazy and stupid to do his own assignment), surely, that gnaws at Holden and sets him in a rage. (It was almost as though he was punching the car windows out all over again.) He also despised Stradlater because he was going on a date with Jane, who represents something pure and pristine and perfect for Holden, something not to be sullied by the cheap and the tawdry—the “phonies”—that Stradlater represents.
That comment was posted before I was done. I didn’t mean to write “represents” twice in the last sentence. At any rate, I could say more—Holden’s relationship with Phoebe, his wanting to erase the “Fuck yous” from walls, and his lovely curiosity about the kid walking with one foot in the street and one foot on the sidewalk come to mind—but I’ll leave it at that for now.
Surely, though, his and the author’s own ambivalent relationship to their own secularized Judaism must play a role in all of what you so accurately describe about the novel and its unhealthy and subversive tendencies, which do indeed seem to stem from resentment.
Hi Wollzo, I get it. This is pretty much the standard take on this scene. But it was still an attempted murder that Holden never feels remorse over. From the way the story played out, it may not have occurred to Salinger to make Holden feel remorse, which is strange considering all the sweet things about Holden and his epiphany in the end. It’s hard to accept a protagonist as worthy of redemption if he doesn’t do this. All Salinger had do was ignore the toothbrush and have Holden intend to give Stradlater a fat black eye or something.
Given that Holden wears a people shooting hat and fantasizes about murder, I don’t see this as an oversight on Salinger’s part but an artistic gamble that does not pay off.
Fair enough, but I might want to smack Stradlater in the throat like that if he reacted to an essay I wrote for him about my dead kid brother while stroking his stomach.
I wouldn’t say it was seriously attempted murder. Holden’s description of the rage he felt towards Stradlater and what he wanted to do to him fits the pattern of adolescent exaggerations and overwhelming emotions all throughout the book. That is part of its perennial appeal, that you are being put inside a teenage head with very little moderation from the adult author. This is also why it has such as striking effect when you read it aged 15, 16, 17, especially while suffering similar alienations.
Thanks Petronius,
Interesting point. But when Holden exaggerates it is typically way beyond what’s plausible so the reader knows its an exaggeration. 10 million garbage pails, for instance. My reading of this scene is that at that moment Holden really wanted to kill Stradlater. It’s the detail of the toothbrush that links this moment to cold reality. A well timed and hard enough blow could do what Holden was imagining. If Holden had said he had wanted to beat Stradlater until every square inch of his face turned purple or something unrealistic like that, then I think your position would be stronger.
Again, it’s not the momentary murderous rage that I object to. It’s the lack of remorse from Holden or the lack of a comeuppance from Salinger. Salinger should have introduced either of these 2 things, or toned down the murder.
Great analysis, Spencer. I read the Catcher so many years ago, probably at around 15 years old, that I had forgotten most of it. But what I do member is the profound effect it had on me, noticed by my English teacher in an essay I wrote for her class. She was not impressed with my Holden Caulfield attitude. That effect, I now confess, was not very wholesome, moving me toward the kind of “revenge-minded alienated youth alienation” that you were suggesting as the detriment of the novel.
Yes, I think the novel was initially written for adults, but was later spoonfed to teenagers in school. That was a bad move I would say.
Yes, THAT was a mistake. The kids who like it independently often resent the fact that it’s then taught to them in high school.
I’m glad that someone got something out of it at least. My capsule summary is that it’s the gripping tale of a man going through a midlife crisis at the age of seventeen.
Given some of Holden’s recklessness, 17 just might be mid-life for him!
My paternal grandmother and Uncle Leon lived in Windsor, VT. They said Salinger used to eat lunch at the local diner on Main Street and would never talk to anyone.
I bet he wouldn’t tip either.
Salinger was Jewish.
According to Wikipedia, Salinger was part of a family of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. When you compare his work with that of Philip Roth, another Jew obsessed with decadence and bodily functions, it figures that Salinger was Jewish.
During my senior year in high school, a girl who was interested in me suggested we exchange the one of the books we read over summer vacation. I said sure. I gave her my Dad’s copy of Count Belasarius by the great English classical writer, Robert Graves. Belasarius was a great Byzantine general who led forces in the final days of the Roman Empire and served in the forces of the Byzantines.
The other book I read that summer was “Panzer Leader,” the WW2 memoir by German tank commander General Heinz Guderian. That was non-fiction and I didn’t think a girl would find it very interesting, unlike Count Belasarius which was a novel, albeit an historic one by a famous writer.
She gave me Cather in the Rye. Ugh! I never got much beyond 15 pages. What a piece of crap. Holden Caulfiend? Are you kidding. After reading about men like Belasarius and Heinz Guderian and the great issues and conflicts of their time, I really couldn’t relate to “Holden Caulfield” at any level. Well I never finished Catcher and she never finished Count Belasrius either. Some relationships are not meant to be I guess.
Catcher was crap. Thank God Salinger resisted any attempts to adapt it to a motion picture. Sameul Goldwyn, Billy Wilder, Harvey Weinstein (!) and Steven Spielberg all sought to obtain the movie rights…unsuccessfully thank God.
This literary atrocity was written by a sick Jew, one of many who polluted the American cultural and literary scene in the aftermath of WW2. Among his Jewish literary peers were Saul Bellow, Howard Fast, Phillip Roth and others.
I was brought up on good, healthy literature which explains why Catcher and other Jewish filth repelled me, even as a teenager. That’s why I value good literature, good reading, good books for young people. If you want to vaccinate young people against intellectual filth, introduce them to healthy intellectual fare. Introduce them to stories about the lives of great men of courage and vision. It worked for me and generations of other Gentile youth who came before me.
Anyone who thinks this sickening piece of Jew crap has any redeeming social or literary value has got problems.
It’s a great, fascinating book and it has enormous literary value. Struck me like a lightning when I was a teenager.
Hi Don, can’t say I agree, but I love your attitude. There is definitely truth in your analysis.
BTW, I’m sure Holden Caulfield would have had a less objectionable story to tell (from your perspective) if they had had Zoloft back then.
I disagree, and I don’t object that the book was written by a Jew per se, but I do believe it would be nowhere as famous as it is had it been written by a gentile. I thought it was sentimental. It’s a picture of how adults would like to think teenage boys are, when in fact they are egoistic and mean creatures. Why did Herr Petronius like catcher so much? What are its author’s true sexual proclivities, and has he acted upon them?
‘Egoistic and mean creatures’ – Aolescent men may have a tendency to be at times, but if not overly coarsened they possess a panoply of finer characteristics, often hidden under a carapace, more or less necessary.
Don, I will take a look at Count Belasarius one day soon and see if I can review it for CC. In the meantime, here are 2 novels I’ve read recently which were written a century apart that you might like:
From Double Eagle to Red Flag by PN Krassnoff and Burning Magnesium by Lennart Svensson. Did you ever read Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger or The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer? Those are on my queue.
Thanks for asking. I did read the Forgotten Solder by Guy Sajer. I was very young then and thought it was a memoir rather than a novel.
Although I found Holden to be a thoroughly unlikable protagonist, the book was orders of magnitude better than Portnoy’s Complaint, which I reviewed here a while back.
Well said Don.
I agree generally, but not sure wrt Bellow. I think he is at least arguably a great novelist. Roth most certainly was not (though I’ve still found some of his novels of interest). He should never have been ‘canonized’ via inclusion in the Library of America.
Morally and culturally proper quality authors for young people (and some oldsters, like me!) are Cooper, Dickens, Kipling, and Jack London. Also, CS Lewis for the very young, and the literarily lesser yet enjoyable and ethnoculturally appropriate Doyle, Lovecraft, Tolkien, Chesterton, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy Sayers for teens (though I still enjoy these latter, too).
According to the potted biographies of many decades ago, Salinger was Jewish on his father’s side and Irish (or Scots and Irish) on his mother’s. The fact that this always appeared in his profiles indicate that Salinger wanted everyone to know he wasn’t just another New York Jew. On the other hand, he bonded with Joyce Maynard in the early 70s over the fact that they were both half-Jews in New Hampshire.
Anyway this ancestral flair is the obvious background to Holden being Irish on the Caulfield side (his father was ex-Catholic). And then we have Salinger’s Glass family of “Quiz Kid” style radio prodigies (Franny, Zooey, Seymour, Buddy and the others), who are Australian-Jewish on their father’s side and Irish-American on their mother’s.
Holden Caulfield however, is clearly not Jewish on the non-Irish side, and Salinger may well have taken pains to excise any suggestion he was. Salinger worked with this character for nearly a decade, starting with a short story in 1941. While some of Salinger’s non-Holden stories have an implicit or explicit Jewish coloration (“Down at the Dinghy,” “The Laughing Man,” “For Esmé, With Love and Squalor,” “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” and the other Glass family stories), The Catcher in the Rye is remarkable for having absolutely none. In fact, I don’t even recall any Jews in the book. Pencey Prep and Manhattan are inhabited almost entirely by Anglo-Celts of no particular religious denomination. Given Salinger’s background, this an impressive feat of imagination.
The secret book of the “counter-culture” revolution of the 1960s was The Catcher in the Rye. This slim novella, published in 1951, was to take violent hold of the generation that came of age in the decade following. But what is the book about? It is a story told by a whiny, neurotic, perverted, and narcissistic loser who thinks he knows better than everyone in the adult world. Indeed, all adults are suspect in the book (“don’t trust anyone over 30”), and all adults are “phonies.” The protagonist is named Holden Caulfield, an iconic WASP name, and sure enough he goes to an expensive prep school with the WASP name of Pencey, and is sent to a sanitarium in California when his mental health breaks down — all marks of the upper class WASP. The book is at heart an attack on the entire WASP world, viewing it as cold, distant, frigid, and hollow — a stereotype that was to be replicated in the movie Ordinary People, another story involving an obnoxiously immature youth with a dead brother. But of course this all-out assault on the Old America, the America of the Mayflower and the Daughters of the American Revolution, was not written by an insider to that world. Oh no. Jerome David Salinger was born in Manhattan. His father, Sol Salinger, traded in kosher cheese, and was from a Jewish family from Lithuania. At the age of 13 the future J.D. Salinger had his bar mitzvah.
I read it at 15 or so, and thought (felt ?) the same thing. As a now middle aged man, I understand a little more about the world, but still thought Holden Caulfield was a whiny wanker at the time.
Douglas, if you’re the same Mr. Mercer who writes for NationalVanguard.org then I must give you a shout out to C-C readers. You are one of the best in the business: erudite, unapologetically forceful, and always funny. Plucking out an essay or two from your back catalogue is always the perfect night cap.
“Douglas Mercer” is an absolutely brilliant essayist and an essential thinker for anyone who views the world through a White Nationalist lens. His work is also to be found at nativewhiteamerica.blogspot.com. The blog is regularly updated.
Caulfield is an Irish name, says Holden, and he makes a point of saying that his father had been Catholic before marrying Holden’s mother. Holden gets mildly annoyed when people obliquely ask him if he’s Catholic.
Further, there’s no indication that the Caulfields are WASPs in the correct, E. Digby Baltzell sense of the world. I don’t think Salinger had the ability to depict that sort of world the way a Whit Stillman could. No mention of tony private clubs, cotillions, the Social Register, etc., while Pencey Prep seems to be a distinctly second-tier secondary school. In terrain and characters it’s somewhat based on Valley Forge Military Academy near the Philadelphia Main Line, though of course Pencey is not a military academy. It was however the only boarding school Salinger ever attended. En fin, I’d say the Caulfields are just well-off middle class folk on the Upper East Side.
To people from Brooklyn Salinger always epitomized Manhattan privilege and neuroticism. He is mildly amusing in this light as it was fun to go slumming in his exotic—to us—world. His life and myth were more interesting than the entirety of his stories.
Salinger’s plus is that he did make us realize the Holden Caulfield in all of us even if we never acted on it.
When I was in high school, we had to read Catcher. At the time, I though the main character was self-absorbed and had undue scorn for others.
Normie high school kids probably didn’t inspire him to write Catcher. It was probably normie adults. Teachers tend to like intelligent kids better than their peers do. The protection of the teachers fades when the intelligent kids graduate. Then, they’re at the mercy of their dolt peers for jobs, social status, and ultimately the privilege of passing on their genes.
In a highly social economy, everything is emotional give and take, and the equilibrium seems to be getting dumber and more formulaic. Hearing the terse back and forth of two millennials engaged in small talk feels like pacing over sharp gravel barefoot, as a few lifeless words from either side take turns making you miserable.
Intelligent people who are good at playing the small talk game either like it for superficial reasons or instrumental reasons. They’re either getting companionship or money, sex, etc. out of it.
The phoniness Salinger detected is real. If you subtract psychology from virtue, you get genuineness. If you subtract genuineness from society, which had culminated in my estimation by about 1920, you get the same idiotic society in the 1940s as we have now in many ways. People went to war for stupid reasons back then when they could have done things peacefully without killing anyone, and they’re doing the same thing today. Dumb people outbred smart people back then, and they seem to be doing it today too.
If most people’s minds were a car, there’d be nobody in the driver seat. It’s no wonder we’re veering off the road now with great leaps of dishonesty manifesting themselves as denialism over race, gender, genius, and merit. There’s nobody home to steer the metamind back on track.
I’m more sympathetic to Catcher now. Misfits like Salinger can be misfits for good and bad reasons. For being smarter and less manipulative (good traits) but less emotionally connected (a bad trait). It’s easy to dismiss the misfit, but you may be throwing out their good objections with the bad. It’s hard to ignore how one must be either unintelligent or willing to manipulate such people as a means of survival in many segments of American society. Misfits probably notice it more. Most people think it’s uncool to be in the driver’s seat. Cynicism, selling out, or burying oneself in marketable technical skills seem to be the only escapes.
By the way, the red hat thing reminds me of the lyrics of the song Pumped Up Kicks, which I thought were bad when they came out, but they probably never made anybody do a school shooting.
Mr Dunphy
I was taken by the pure mathematical simplicity of this comment:
If you subtract psychology from virtue, you get genuineness. If you subtract genuineness from society, which had culminated in my estimation by about 1920, you get the same idiotic society in the 1940s as we have now in many ways.
Thank you sir, I shall warm myself at that fire today, here in the cruellest month.
Idiocracy – A society of idiots ruled by idiots, yet we stagger on.
I enjoyed this essay and its recap of Holden, our modern Huck Finn (so said my Cliff Notes), and much of it recalls my piece The Salinger Year, previously on CC. I have to say I loved Catcher when I first read it at 19, and felt Holden was speaking to and for me, for I was lonely and sensitive, albeit in southern Missouri, but there were similar urges in adolescents everywhere, and I had my own set of phonies.
A lot of writers felt Salinger was pandering to the young, which is true; I don’t see this as a book adults forced on kids. But the young always have their own favorites. I know when I grew up, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was seen as dynamite. Anyone read him now? There is always someone who “tells you what it’s like to be you,” but Salinger had a great way with language, character, and setting. Holden sees all these pretty girls going by him, and he wonders what will happen to them; he thinks they’ll probably all marry guys who sit around and talk about how much mileage they get out of their cars. Pretty funny and true. Much like when he goes to Radio City Music Hall, and the one thing that pleases him is the timpani player, who really looks like he’s into it, and not a phony. I always watch at timpani players whenever I go to a concert; thank you, Holden. I thought his old girlfriend very funny and likable, as was Phoebe and the teacher. They could all offer him wisdom, but kids never take it; they’re too wrapped up in themselves. Salinger definitely nailed that.
As for showing the seediness of NYC, well, I think it’s there, and needs no elaboration. Where some writers show you hookers with a heart of gold, Holden’s hooker and her pimp are the real deal. I recall Salinger’s descriptions of hotels and voyeuristic locales when I view paintings of Edward Hopper.
It’s the same world, and if you object, then that’s your right.
I think Catcher should be re-red every ten years, and if so, one’s perception on Holden will change. You’ll adore him, hate him, see him as a jerk, feel he’s in pain, and so on. Catcher in the Rye is not a great novel, but it can get your heart when you’re young.
For another perspective, Miles Mathis offered an essay claiming Salinger barely wrote it, and Catcher was written by a CIA committee to work on alienation for youth. Miles states the proof is when Salinger’s other works, actually written by him, simply had no strength. I read Miles, you can go with this or not, but I don’t doubt the system grinds out phony lit like Orwell noted in 1984 (and, yes, Miles claims Orwell was an agent of the deep state and faked his death).
I’m tempted to write about a book that influenced my youth as a counter to Salinger. Now, how to do it and not bore you or look like a phony?
“I think Catcher should be re-red every ten years, and if so, one’s perception on Holden will change. You’ll adore him, hate him, see him as a jerk, feel he’s in pain, and so on. Catcher in the Rye is not a great novel, but it can get your heart when you’re young”.
I feel the same about Catch 22.
Salinger: Jew. Heller: Jew.
There do exist in the world novels not written by our existential enemies.
Don’t say anything critical about certain people, or your dad might take you for a ride in his pickup truck and tell you to get out and say it to their faces. The authorities know best. They brought you this public service announcement. Yeah, put a bullshit Band-Aid on a festering wound. That’ll do it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmPjzwB0EwY
He should have asked them about the USS Liberty. …
I watched the ADL-inspired propaganda video. Laughed out loud when “dad” spewed out the word “spewing”. Comments are, not surprisingly, turned off.
If one re-enables YouTube thumbs up/down via Google Chrome extension (“Return YouTube Dislike”), one can see this video has 7,400 dislikes to 1,100 likes.
Ratio!
Yeah, “spewing” is definitely not a Dad word. They didn’t really write convincing copy, did they? Sounds like a Glenn Beck word. Also note we see all those slim, handsome Jewish couples…and a black woman with a man. Really cover all bases, don’t they? I didn’t see a happy, Jewish trans couple, but give them time.
Admittedly, Holden Caulfield really touched me years ago when I read Catcher; at the time, I simply took his penchant for hyperbole to be the stock-in-trade one expects from young, above-average noticers, aware there are problems, but unsure of where to strike to fix them. It might be worth revisiting, however, in light of your take on the tale, expressed here.
Somewhat relatedly (in that it is also a coming-of-age story told from the perspective of a young adolescent boy), have you read Black Swan Green, by David Mitchell? Given the stuff you cover, I think you might appreciate it.
Hi James. I will check Black Swan Green out. Thanks.
I have never read Catcher in the Rye because I am not American and hence it wasn’t shoved down my throat as a kid by the public school system, and once again I thank my lucky stars for the circumstances surrounding my birth. The book seems to me a cliché in modern times, with nothing but negative connotations, Holden Caulfield striking me as the sourpuss queen of pissantsville wielding a name as clunky as his attitude.
On a more serious note, I believe this book preys on white youngsters in a pretty insidious way. If you believe that whites are inherently more individualistic, as per Kevin MacDonald, it makes sense that every man goes through a period of relative social isolation in puberty, separating himself from the group, which allows him to build character and independent thought. This could be a logical explanation for white “loner-ism” and is not inherently an anti-social thing. People such as Salinger however impose their own misanthropy on this sentiment and tells kids they seek isolation not to develop in harmony with the world, but to divorce themselves from it, because they hate the world and the world hates them. This effectively leaves these kids half-hatched, turning a period of growth into a period of resentment that gives them feelings of isolation and resentment that often stay with them for life. We all knew a kid from high school who “got stuck” this way, and the ideas portrayed in media such as this book play no small part in shaping their world view. You could call them weak for falling in this trap, but if they have no one to tell them the opposite, what else can they do? Luckily the vast majority of these people don’t turn to violence or school shootings, but many of them nonetheless live sub-optimal, anti-social lives. More should be done to ward teenagers against this.
You know, in the Russian translation of the novel all words for sexual perverts were censored and replaced by the word PSIKHI, which means crazy or mad people.
I read and re-read Catcher as a teen and it was probably the most memorable thing I read back then. I must have not taken the violent aspects seriously because I didn’t even remember them later. Much later than that I read The Bell Jar and thought it superior to Catcher; full of angst and self destructive thoughts, but not so full of hatred. The nearest thing to Catcher that I can think of now is Notes From Underground; Salinger almost certainly would have read Dostoyevsky. Perhaps there was some influence there.
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