Salinger

by David Shields

  Holden Caulfield was James Dean before James Dean, cool before “cool.” He was Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift. In the words of screenwriter Nicholas Meyer, he was an “icon of restlessness, discontent, rebellion, opposition to the status quo.” As critic Geoff Pevere writes, “If the teenager as we know it was a creature that crawled from the shadows of the atom bomb, World War II and the numbing malaise of affluence, Salinger’s expelled boarding school brat was one of the first fully-formed figures to emerge from the fallout. By the end of the decade, Caulfield’s grip could be felt in every spasm of pop cultural adolescent cage-rattling from Marlon Brando’s Wild One, James Dean’s Rebel without a Cause, Elvis, Kerouac, Blackboard Jungle and the insolent uptown vulgarity of Lenny Bruce.

  “I remember it being the first book that you took with you when you walked around,” actor John Cusack recalls. “You just wanted to have it with you.” “Carrying Catcher in the Rye around was code,” says biographer A. Scott Berg. “It suggested you had lost your literary virginity. It suggested you were in the know: there were certain rules in society and it was okay to break them. We really hadn’t seen that kind of rebellion yet.”

  Catcher became a password to a subversive secret club, as society seemed divided into those who knew Holden and those who didn’t. For those who did, no explanation was necessary; for those who didn’t, no explanation was possible. In 1957, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road would be hailed for launching the Beat Generation, but Kerouac was six years late—Salinger had already done it; the beatniks who hitchhiked on those long highways to find America did so with The Catcher in the Rye tucked in the pockets of their jeans. Salinger was a seminal influence in the creation of the counterculture, his creation Holden not only the original beatnik but also an inspirational figure to the hippie generation.

  “[Holden Caulfield is] the Malcolm X of white suburban boys,” actor Jake Gyllenhaal says.

  —

  The writer Andy Rogers has a different theory—that Catcher, although published in the 1950s, is a novel of the 1940s: a war novel. In “The Inverted Forest,” Salinger writes, “A poet doesn’t invent his poetry—he finds it. . . . The place where . . . Alph the sacred river ran—was found out, not invented.” Salinger found out Holden on the battlefields of Europe. “Holden Caulfield,” Rogers writes, “has more in common with a traumatized soldier than an alienated teenager. His prematurely gray hair serves as fodder for teasing and insecurity, but it also symbolizes something rather obvious: Holden is an old man in a young man’s body.

  It rained on his lousy tombstone, and it rained on the grass on his stomach.

  “This places Holden in an estimable literary lineage of characters who feel that their youth has been lost in the war.” Salinger didn’t write a book about a soldier at war with the enemy; he wrote a book about an adolescent at war with society and with himself. And like Salinger, Holden could not find the help he needed to heal. “The mental health professionals who are there to help him [Salinger] will not listen to his recounting of the horrors he witnessed and endured,” Rogers writes. “Salinger then return[s] home having learned to remain outside of a mental institution and witnesses the pageantry of a society overjoyed to see [him] hide his symptoms.

  “The brutality, the stupidity, the cruelty, the horror of war is transmogrified into saccharine and mindless speeches, songs, and movies. And what good would it do to point out the truth about the war when the problem is not that people just don’t know better, but that people just don’t care.”

  If you sat around there long enough and heard all the phonies applauding and all, you got to hate everybody in the world, I swear you did.

  It’s that indifference that fuels Holden’s anger: “Salinger’s quarrel,” says Rogers, “if not his struggle for his very existence, would no longer have been against a set of experiences that permanently damaged him, but against a society of willful naivety that manufactures death and destruction and continues on after ‘Victory’ in its cannibalism with cheers for those who won’t call it what it is, and mental institutions for those who do.”

  Salinger couldn’t write directly about it; he had to “change the context, choose characters and situations who had nothing to do with the war, universalize the sense of alienation to gain the approval of a mass audience; his own experiences and thoughts could then emerge in such a context, safe from the psychiatrists and patriots of the world, and his quarrel with phoniness/bullshit could be presented.” And so he invented Holden Caulfield.

  Salinger can’t summon up the memories of his slaughtered comrades, so Holden remembers the crushed body of James Castle. Salinger can’t grieve for them, so Holden misses Ackley and Stradlater. Salinger can’t recall his own suicidal despair after Kaufering, so he has Holden contemplate self-destruction. “Salinger will never be the boy who went to prep school again,” Rogers writes, “thus Holden is Salinger and the Salinger who will never be again.”

  When I was really drunk, I started that stupid business with the bullet in my guts again. I was the only guy at the bar with a bullet in their guts. I kept putting my hand under my jacket, on my stomach and all, to keep the blood from dripping all over the place. I didn’t want anybody to know I was even wounded. I was concealing the fact that I was a wounded sonuvabitch.

  Holden dances with his kid sister, Phoebe, and “Then, just for the hell of it, I gave her a pinch on the behind. It was sticking way out in the breeze, the way she was laying on her side. She has hardly any behind.” Flirtation with the girl-child’s body is the beginning of spiritual awakening. “You should’ve seen her. She was sitting smack in the middle of the bed, outside the covers, with her legs folded like one of those Yogi guys. She was listening to the music. She kills me.” The author’s sensuality is private trauma. This is how paranoids, mystics, and pedophiles think: “I don’t like people that dance with little kids, because most of the time it looks terrible. I mean if you’re out at a restaurant somewhere and you see some old guy take his little kid out on the dance floor. Usually they keep yanking the kid’s dress up in back by mistake, and the kid can’t dance worth a damn anyway, and it looks terrible, but I don’t do it out in public with Phoebe or anything. We just horse around in the house.” Kids are potentially the adult dead. They need to be homeschooled by the sage of Hürtgen. Ultimately, Holden’s/Salinger’s world is MIA; nervous breakdown is spiritual-military progression. There is vacillation on the nerves between a veteran’s silence (“Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”), isolation (“I was the only one left in the tomb then. I sort of liked it, in a way. It was so nice and peaceful.”), loss of the body (“I felt better after I passed out.”), and the new bullet of obliteration (“Anyway, I’m sort of glad they’ve got the atomic bomb invented. If there’s ever another war, I’m going to sit right the hell on top of it. I’ll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will.”). Catcher is America’s endless war in words.

  When you think of World War II authors, you generally think of Norman Mailer and James Jones, but is it possible that J. D. Salinger wrote in the same book the last novel of the war and the first novel of the counterculture?

  The critic Ihab Hassan writes about Catcher, “The controlling mood of the novel—and it is so consistent as to be a principle of unity—is one of acute depression always on the point of breaking loose.” However, as psychologist Jay Martin says, “One of the processes we see in creativity is that the creative person solves a problem. That is, he’s depressed, he’s anxious, he’s uncertain, he’s mourning, he’s grieving. He writes, and in the process of writing, he doesn’t necessarily cure himself, but he gets some perspective by writing. By putting one sentence down after another, you get a perspective on your own disorder. . . . I would guess that if Salinger was depressed, he found a way to rid himself of his depression by giving it to someone else. It’s almost like black magic, in which you put your anger or hatred into a character and discharge it there.” After the war, Salinger was p
rofoundly, suicidally depressed, but he found a way to rid himself, temporarily, of his depression by giving it to someone else—to Holden (“I was feeling sort of lousy. Depressed and all. I almost wished I was dead.”) and to us, which is why so many people worship the book. He names our sadness for us and converts it into a weird kind of joy. The black magic played out like this:

  —

  Within two years of publication, Catcher was being banned. Pamela Hunt Steinle, the author of In Cold Fear: The Catcher in the Rye, Censorship Controversies, and Postwar American Character, has pointed out that it is simultaneously the most frequently taught novel in American high schools and the second most frequently censored. Teachers were fired for assigning The Catcher in the Rye. In 1963, the American Book Publishers Council noted that Catcher had become the most censored book in America’s public schools. “I’m aware,” Salinger had written in a statement that the publisher omitted from the book’s jacket, “that a number of my friends will be saddened and shocked, or shocked-saddened, over some of the chapters of The Catcher in the Rye. Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all of my best friends are children. It’s almost unbearable to me to realize that my book will be kept on a shelf out of their reach.”

  It wasn’t just the language, although words like “crap” and “fuck”—a few years earlier Norman Mailer’s novel The Naked and the Dead used “fug”—and endless “goddams” certainly played a part. The chief objection to the book was that it was un-American.

  Catcher wasn’t the phony America that Madison Avenue was foisting on a public that had just discovered television. It wasn’t the insanely paranoid America of the McCarthy hearings or the sanitized America of Disney. It was real. Real thoughts, real feelings, real pain.

  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.

  As Michael Silverblatt, the host of the nationally syndicated radio show Bookworm, says, “Here was someone saying, ‘I have access to authenticity.’ ” “Salinger was prescient,” the scholar John C. Unrue writes, “He knew where the country was going. Catcher in the Rye is as relevant today as it was in 1951. We have the same conditions. We have the same liars, the same frauds, the same hypocrites, speaking daily, not entirely on our behalf.” But it wasn’t just about rebellion and alienation. Salinger was not just another nihilist; Holden was not just another lost boy. The book and the boy were spiritual. Holden was not just on the run from something; he was seeking transcendence of the materially obsessed culture.

  Catcher is a rescue fantasy. As Phoebe points out to Holden, he has the Robert Burns line wrong: it’s not “if a body catch a body”; it’s “if a body meet a body.” Holden doesn’t want to love other people—he wants to save other people. Big difference. “Readers tend to romanticize Holden Caulfield’s failure to fit in,” John Wenke says. “But at a deeper level, there is a spiritual hunger. It’s the spiritual hunger that works with people. The spiritual hunger is what leads people to not only see themselves in him but to celebrate the book. Ironically, of course, Salinger became the very kind of absent presence that he wrote about. He was so ambitious and then he rejected the very thing that he most desired: the fame and recognition that The Catcher in the Rye brought him.”

  The film and stage director Elia Kazan, who wanted to turn Catcher into a play and bring it to Broadway, found Salinger’s house, knocked on the door, and said, “Mr. Salinger, I’m Elia Kazan.”

  “That’s nice,” Salinger said.

  I can be quite sarcastic when I’m in the mood.

  Then Salinger closed the door.

  Elia Kazan.

  Billy Wilder took a shot at it, too. His agent in New York hounded Salinger for the movie rights. “One day,” Wilder said, “a young man came to the office of Leland Hayward, my agent, in New York, and said, ‘Please tell Mr. Leland Hayward to lay off. He’s very, very insensitive.’ And he walked out. That was the entire speech. I never saw him. That was J. D. Salinger and that was Catcher in the Rye.”

  Billy Wilder.

  Everyone from Jerry Lewis to Steven Spielberg to Harvey Weinstein offered Salinger as much as $10 million for the film rights to the book. Salinger turned them all down.

  The goddam movies. They can ruin you. I’m not kidding.

  So we don’t have a movie image of Holden, and that’s probably a good thing. He lives in our imaginations. But, in a sense, he’s already been portrayed in Rebel without a Cause, The 400 Blows, The Graduate, Less than Zero, and a thousand other movies about alienated youth in an emotional wasteland. It’s virtually impossible to imagine modern film without the presence of Holden Caulfield.

  So, too, Ishmael, Natty Bumppo, Huckleberry Finn, Tom Joad, Holden Caulfield: they’re all wanderers, pilgrims, searchers, lost saints. Their journeys have no end; their wanderings are wired into the collective American psyche. “Holden Caulfield is not likely to go away,” says literary critic Nancy C. Ralston. “The echo of his voice hovers over the ubiquitous examples of phoniness whenever and wherever they dare to appear. His shadow haunts every display of obscene graffiti scrawled in millions of public places. Holden knows no generation gap. He is the super-adolescent of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.”

  In 1961, Catcher was selling 250,000 copies a year and was being taught at 275 American colleges. By 1981 translations of Catcher had appeared in twenty-seven countries; in eleven countries, all four of Salinger’s books had been published. Here’s another number, which will tell you that Holden’s not going anywhere: 65 million. The Catcher in the Rye has sold more than 65 million copies worldwide. And if 65 million people have bought the book, that means that hundreds of millions are likely to have read it. It’s tough to get a hard count on this kind of thing, but it’s something like the eleventh bestselling single-volume book of all time. A recent Harris poll has The Catcher in the Rye, sixty-two years after its publication, as the tenth-favorite book of all time among American readers.

  After the publication of Catcher in the fall of 1951, Salinger was an overnight success. He was rich, famous, and sought after: the American dream. And he walked away from it.

  People always clap for the wrong things.

  When he stayed away, people said he was crazy and phony. He continued to stay away.

  I don’t care if it’s a sad good-by or a bad good-by, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it.

  Did Salinger see a crazy, phony version of himself—propelled by fame and success—running headlong through a field of rye toward a cliff, with only his authentic self to save him? He came to profoundly regret writing and publishing the book, because of the way in which fame framed and warped the last sixty years of his life—the way it enslaved him, “froze him in time,” as Phoebe Hoban says, in the public’s imagination. But if Catcher became Salinger’s burden, it also was a gift. “The compensations are few, but when they come, they’re very beautiful.” He had to know the pride of writing not only a great novel but one that spoke at the most profound level to tens of millions of readers. So, too, without it, he would never have had the worldwide platform to use his next three books to “circulate” (his word) the ideas of the Vedanta religion. But in his lifetime, he never published another novel or another word about Holden. Following the massive public outpouring of adulation for Catcher, he pivoted into an increasingly private and obscure realm, both in his work and in his life. He did everything possible not to repeat the success of Catcher.

  “I suspect,” the author Lawrence Grobel says, “Holden Caulfield went up to New Hampshire, found himself a place to live, kept his hunting cap on, found a wife, had kids, and that’s it. We never hear from him again. That’s what I think happened to Holden Caulfield because that’s what happened to J. D. Salinger.”

  Sleep tight, ya morons!

  He went to Cornish.

  11

  WE CAN STILL RUN AWAY

  NEW YORK CITY; CORNISH, NEW HAMPSHIRE, 195
2–1953

  Salinger’s New York life mimics Holden’s psychic difficulties and behaviors: flirtation, antisocial overreaction, and, finally, disappearance to a ninety-acre woodland in Cornish, New Hampshire—the embodiment of Holden’s seclusion. Catcher takes hold not only as a book but as a cult. A cult needs a leader—a role Salinger can’t and won’t fill.

  PAMELA HUNT STEINLE: First published in mid-July 1951 by Little, Brown and Company, Catcher in the Rye was simultaneously published as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. By the end of July, Little, Brown and Company was reprinting the novel for the fifth time, and by late August, Catcher had reached fourth place on the New York Times best-seller list.

  PHOEBE HOBAN: I don’t think Salinger was prepared for the instant celebrity of The Catcher in the Rye.

  A. E. HOTCHNER: Overnight, Catcher in the Rye transported Salinger from being a relatively obscure writer who had written a few stories into a major writer and personality.

  HARVEY JASON: I think that when an author achieves a tremendous amount of fame at a very early age, it’s bound to have repercussions across the board. To somebody like Truman Capote, all it did was increase an already inflated ego. For Harper Lee, it forced her into hiding. It’s intimidating to achieve tremendous fame at an early age, and it could go either way for you, depending upon your psychological makeup.