J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield, Aging Gracelessly

Washington Post ^ | October 19, 2004 | JONATHAN YARDLEY

[jalisco555]

Precisely how old I was when I first read "The Catcher in the Rye," I cannot recall. When it was published, in 1951, I was 12 years old, and thus may have been a trifle young for it. Within the next two or three years, though, I was on a forced march through a couple of schools similar to Pencey Prep, from which J.D. Salinger's 16-year-old protagonist Holden Caulfield is dismissed as the novel begins, and I was an unhappy camper; what I had heard about "The Catcher in the Rye" surely convinced me that Caulfield was a kindred spirit.

By then "The Catcher in the Rye" was already well on the way to the status it has long enjoyed as an essential document of American adolescence -- the novel that every high school English teacher reflexively puts on every summer reading list -- but I couldn't see what all the excitement was about. I shared Caulfield's contempt for "phonies" as well as his sense of being different and his loneliness, but he seemed to me just about as phony as those he criticized as well as an unregenerate whiner and egotist. It was easy enough to identify with his adolescent angst, but his puerile attitudinizing was something else altogether.

That was then. This is half a century later. "The Catcher in the Rye" is now, you'll be told just about anywhere you ask, an "American classic," right up there with the book that was published the following year, Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea." They are two of the most durable and beloved books in American literature and, by any reasonable critical standard, two of the worst. Rereading "The Catcher in the Rye" after all those years was almost literally a painful experience.

[willyboyishere]

I know lots of people have a BIG problem with Henry Miller,
men and women alike, and I can see their POV, since he was a non-romantic misogynistic sort, chauvinistic, user of women,etc. etc.
But for me his honesty is SO bracing, like Orwell's in DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON. Jim Harrison I know about, but haven't read. He probably made more money from Hollywood from that Brad Pitt movie than he got from his publishers ever.
But do try to read Yates---the most underrespected and underrated writer of his generation. He recently died, not terribly old, but a heavy drinker and smoker for decades, in and out of rehab, you know the story of so many writers.....
Miller's BLACK SPRING belongs in a very select class of barely disguisable autobiographical novels, like the ones I metioned, plus Genet's Thief's Journal. Denis Johnson is probably the best out there right now, and gets better and better know every year. ANGELS is a great book. Hope somebody makes it into a movie someday and does real justice to it. John Huston, where are you when we need you?

[durasell]

I actually liked the movie, Legends of the Fall. It was also the longest piece of fiction Esquire ever ran -- and that's when Esquire was Esquire. Orwell is very good, but misunderstood by the left who don't seem to realize he was a rabidly anti-communist, though lived a spartan life. Not a big Denis Johnson fan. Read Jesus' Son and kinda yawned -- paging Dr. Benway, paging Dr. Benway.

[flying Elvis]

I liked Bob Uecker's version better, "Catcher in the Wry."

[Old Professer]

I don't really know Yardley but I instinctively dislike him immensely; all this fuss about a boy (Holden - can you imagine, "Holden?") who can't even get a decent erection without blushing while, since his posturing and rambling and senseless dissembling Portnoy nearly matched the Apollo Missions' accomplishments on his bedroom ceiling (and failed only because of the limitations of gravity and his parents love of Victorian architecture) we're still to imagine that spermatamoza and Salmon share a common destiny?

[Old Professer]

The mighty heavens have smote me; I failed the spell check test.

Spermatozoa.

[Old Professer]

Why is Holden Caulfield nearly universally seen as "a symbol of purity and sensitivity" (as "The Oxford Companion to American Literature" puts it) when he's merely self-regarding and callow?

I would submit it might well be because it was the first book printed in about the fifty years preceding it that made the word "callow" a household term; I believe the author of this piece cleverly salted this peppery trail with this tidbit to see who suffered to the end of this tiresome and dreary cage-liner.

I have a love of the written word, the turn of a deft phrase, the excitement of being struck blindside by the twist upon the unsuspecting tongue but I do not parade in public my naked desperation to chase a long-departed train.

[Old Professer]

Well,isn't most of yesterday just unfinished tomorrows?

[Old Professer]

I am a thief of the highest order and from myself I freely steal, henceforth (until the muse moves me), my tagline shall be:

Isn't most of yesterday just an unfinished tomorrow?

[Hildy]

Whenever I hear something about J.D. Salinger, I think about FIELD OF DREAMS...the James Earl Jones character who is supposed to be a J.D. Salinger type who is pissed off because everyone blames him for hating their parents!

[Matt32]

Ah, what an interesting topic. I first read Catcher all of three years ago in my sophomore year of high school. I remember being struck most by the whole concept of this teenager completely slipping out of his environment, his role as a student at some private boarding school, and heading over to New York City to wander around for a while as if it were a "vacation." Admittedly I was at first sympathetic, even taken, with Holden's whole "philosophy" of criticizing every "phony" he came into contact with (although I do remember him being a gentleman to a group of nuns at one point, or something to that effect). But in some of the retrospective looks I've taken since maturing, I'd hope, over the years, I think it's pretty clear that Holden was intended as a look at the hypocrisy of adolescents. All the angst and projection is meant to be seen as a phase of sorts, one brought on by the transition from a childish outlook to a mature one on the world. Unfortunately too many people - including more adults than you'd expect - seem to ignore this and see Holden as some sort of brave dissenter decrying the hypocrisies of society, etc. I hold, conceding to not know much about the author, that it was Salinger's intention for Holden to be the most hypocritical of all. But, hey, I thought it was a good enough book, just that people take the wrong message and run away with it.

And yeah, take my word for it as I just left the public high school system behind, there is definitely some sort of concerted effort, literariture-wise, to canonize crap. Don't get me wrong, some of the required reading was good - Golding's Lord of the Flies, Huxley's Brave New World, O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods (a novel about a mentally disturbed Vietnam vet who runs for political office but loses in a landslide when it's revealed that he took part in the My Lai massacre... hmm... if only), Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, both of which were a lot better than I ever expected, and some others. But then there were some real stinkers too. Most notably Chopin's The Awakening, Morrison's The Bluest Eye, and The Bad Seed, the author of which I can't bother to remember. Also noteworthy was A Prayer for Owen Meany which, while pretty good at times, kept having the narrative jump into the future at random intervals so the protagonist could whine for 3-4 pages about how much he hated Ronald Reagan, all completely out of context. Pretty poor writing. There was also a list of books to choose from for summer reading one year, and every single book on the list, no matter which you picked, revolved entirely around the theme of how miserable life in America is for minorities. Smells like PC agenda...

And that's about a wrap. No Hemingway, no Mark Twain, not even Tolkien. I found it much more useful to circumvent the high school "canon" and read some things on my own. I'd be willing to wager I've gotten more out of Burgess's Clockwork Orange, the "mature" writings of C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity, Screwtape Letters, Till We Have Faces), Homer's Odyssey, and Plato and Aristotle than I had in four years of high school required reading. They weren't all stinkers, but there was definitely the presence of a PC/liberal-driven agenda.

[durasell]

You lucked out -- you read Catcher at just the right time. And may you have similar luck with books throughout your life.

And for the record, Golding never expected to win the Nobel Prize, while Burgess spent his entire life trying to snag one.

[Boiler Plate]

I haven't read that, but I am sure it is a lot more insightful.

[IronJack]

What was wrong with Butterfield 8?

Maybe it was just the comparison to Appointment. But to me, it seemed ponderous, unfocused, even preachy. Not on the scale of Ayn Rand, to be sure, but still not as ... readable ... as Appointment.

[durasell]

Yeah, okay. I can see that. Not as structured as Appointment or the majority of his short stories. He put the burden on poor Gloria and she wasn't up to the task. You should check out The Instrument -- basically O'Hara in decline, but still flashes of genius.

[IronJack]

I am a thief of the highest order and from myself I freely steal

I doubt the victim will lodge a complaint against the offender.

[Borges]

Do you just dislike Victorian Lit? Tess is one of the greatest prose tragedies in English.