J. D. Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye (1951)•
J. D. Salinger (1919-2010)J. D. Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
[Hospice Shop, Birkenhead - 3/6/25]:
J. D. Salinger. The Catcher in the Rye. 1951. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2014.
I bought a small pocket-sized hardback copy of J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye the other day in the Hospice Shop. I already have an old Penguin edition - which must be the one I read as a teenager, some 50-odd years ago. It seemed like time for a re-up.
Another reason for this interest on my part was because I'd just finished writing a post about that famous (or infamous) online meme the "Red-Flag" Bookshelf:
In many of the suggested additions to this list - and to its predecessors in the digital media - Salinger's Catcher in the Rye stands front and centre. One respondent noted a "collapse of boundaries between book and reader" in this particular case:
In my personal experience, any man over a certain age who still idolizes this book also still acts like a child.Is that really true? I noted in my own post that:
a recent viewing of the 2013 Salinger documentary revealed just how many earnest seekers would try and hunt down the author in order to receive personal wisdom from him, so there could be something to be said for this point of view. It's a little extreme to equate everyone who "idolizes" the book with those who simply read it, though.Can you read it without becoming a Holden freak? That remains to be seen, I guess.
Certainly the book has been immensely influential in a variety of media: partially because it strongly articulates themes already endemic in American culture: the Huckleberry Finn-like boy runaway; Lost Weekend-esque fugue states as an escape from oppressive reality; Thoreau's Walden, and its accompanying dream of a carefree, "authentic" life in the woods ...
So potent is the mixture of these ingredients in The Catcher in the Rye, though, that it's achieved a comparably mythic status in its own right. Let's trace it through a few of its avatars:
Though not among Stephen King's better known works, this collaboration with his late colleague Peter Straub has a fiercely loyal fan-base of its own. Their aptly named boy hero "Jack Sawyer" undertakes a quest on foot across America to save his mother, Lily Cavanaugh, the so-called "Queen of the B's" (B-movies, that is) in both our world and a parallel fantasy realm called "the Territories".
While the most obvious influence here is Huckleberry Finn, the prep-school scenes, where boys and masters mutate into monsters, are particularly reminiscent of Catcher in the Rye. The book as a whole is a preposterous mixture of genres and styles which ought not to work but somehow does. It definitely repays rereading, even for those allergic to the rest of the Master's oeuvre.
Talking of Prep Schools, the buttoned-up young conformists compelled into rebellion by the inspirational teaching of Robin Williams in Peter Weir's Dead Poets Society clearly have a healthy slice of Holden Caulfield hidden within them.
And, while Mr. Keating doesn't turn out to be a head-patting phony (like Mr. Antolini in the novel), he too is expelled in disgrace at the end of the movie. No amount of standing on desks can cover up that fact.
Perhaps it is he who is the true Holden ...
An even more direct invocation of The Catcher in the Rye comes up in the Kevin Costner vehicle Field of Dreams. In the 1982 novel it's based on, W. P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe, the protagonist actually kidnaps J. D. Salinger himself in order to "ease his pain" through the magic of baseball.
The movie elides this into the abduction of a (black) Salinger lookalike called "Terence Mann," a writer and activist from the 1960s, but no-one - then or since - is likely to miss the analogy.
A similar schtick informs Finding Forrester, where Sean Connery (no less) plays a certain "William Forrester," author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Avalon Landing, who's never published a follow-up book due to a combination of agoraphobia and publicity-shyness. He's winkled out of his shell by a street-wise young black teenager, Jamal, whose own talent he fosters and promotes, despite the evil machinations of Salieri (that is to say, F. Murray Abraham).
Having escaped, finally, from his apartment in the Bronx, Forrester goes off to see the world - and dies a year later, having bequeathed the manuscript of his second novel to Jamal, with instructions to write a foreword. Score!
Wonder Boys, one of my favourite films of all time, plays a number of variations on the Lost Weekend theme - though it's not booze but pot, as well as a unique form of writer's block called "failure to finish", which dominate Grady Tripp's bizarre antics. Tobey Maguire plays, I suppose, a kind of Holden Caulfield figure to Michael Douglas's Ernest Hemingway (or should I say Raymond Carver?).
It's all a lot more fun than Holden's grim sojourn in New York, self-exiled from home - in the form of his parents' swishy apartment - but there's fear and disorder at the roots of Michael Chabon's story, too.
Alexander Payne's dazzling The Holdovers somehow manages to make a new thing out of all of these hackneyed themes. We have the oppressive boarding school - we have the escape to the city (in this case Boston rather than New York) - we even have the insitutionalised mad parent ... But it's Da'Vine Joy Randolph's Oscar-winning performance as cafeteria manager Mary Lamb, whose only son has just died in Vietnam - unlike any of his white classmates - which really steals the show.
It isn't that The Catcher in the Rye is lacking in female characters - it's just that most of them are type-cast as bubble-headed flirts or business-like working girls. Holden admires the two nuns he meets, and adores his saintly younger sister, but he's too immature to understand or empathise with them on any deep level.
The Holdovers, by contrast, allows a real, mature woman a voice in the plot - albeit a small cameo grown into a major part by sheer chutzpah on the part of a fearless artist.
Which leaves us where, exactly?
It was high time that someone made a concerted attempt to uncover at least some of the truths about the great recluse. And no-one could accuse Shane Salerno and his collaborators of slacking off on the job.
While Salinger's distinctly paedophilic tendencies must have come as a nasty shock to his fans, they can hardly be said to have surprised anyone else, given the basic tenor of so much of his writing.
In any case, that was only one small aspect of this admirably thorough documentary. Salinger's war experiences, and his first marriage - to a German "displaced person" - are explored in depth.
The speculations at the end about what - if anything - Salinger had actually written over all his years of publishing silence have not yet been supplemented or credibly contradicted, given the failure of the Salinger estate to issue anything as yet in the way of new, previously unseen work. The jury remains out on that one, accordingly.
The only other direct recent film treatment of Salinger I'm aware of is this slight, but rather charming bio-pic based on a memoir by American writer Joanna Rakoff, who was an intern at a New York Literary Agency in 1995, tasked with responding to J. D. Salinger's fan mail during the year she worked for them.
Various complications ensue from this, eventuating in letters and phone calls from Salinger himself - even a fleeting personal encounter. He comes across, for once, as an essentially benign presence - a little like the presiding deity of Shoeless Joe or Finding Forrester, only this time for real.
Books I own are marked in bold:
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Novels:
- The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
- The Catcher in the Rye. 1951. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
- The Catcher in the Rye. 1951. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2014.
- Nine Stories [aka "For Esmé — with Love and Squalor"] (1953) [Nine]
- A Perfect Day for Bananafish (1948)
- Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut (1948)
- Just Before the War with the Eskimos (1948)
- The Laughing Man (1949)
- Down at the Dinghy (1949)
- For Esmé — with Love and Squalor (1950)
- Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes (1951)
- De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period (1952)
- Teddy (1953)
- For Esmé – with Love and Squalor. 1953. NEL Signet Modern Classics. The New English Library Limited, 1968.
- Franny and Zooey [reworked from "Ivanoff, the Terrible," 1956] (1961) [F & Z]
- Franny (1955)
- Zooey (1957)
- Franny and Zooey. 1955, 1957 & 1961. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.
- Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963) [Raise]
- Raise High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters (1955)
- Seymour: An Introduction (1959)
- Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. 1955, 1959 & 1963. A Bantam Book. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, Inc., 1971.
- The Complete Uncollected Short Stories of J. D. Salinger [Unauthorized]. 2 vols (1974) [Bootleg]
- Blue Melody (Cosmopolitan, September 1948)
- Both Parties Concerned (The Saturday Evening Post, 26 February 1944)
- A Boy in France (The Saturday Evening Post, 31 March 1945)
- Elaine (Story, March–April 1945)
- A Girl I Knew (Good Housekeeping, February 1948)
- Go See Eddie (University of Kansas City Review, December 1940)
- The Hang of It (Collier's, 12 July 1941)
- Hapworth 16, 1924 (The New Yorker, 19 June 1965)
- The Heart of a Broken Story (Esquire, September 1941)
- I'm Crazy (Collier’s, 22 December 1945)
- The Inverted Forest (Cosmopolitan, December 1947)
- Last Day of the Last Furlough (Saturday Evening Post, 14 July 1944)
- The Long Debut of Lois Taggett (Story, September–October 1942)
- Once a Week Won't Kill You (Story, November–December 1944)
- Personal Notes of an Infantryman (Collier’s, 12 December 1942)
- Slight Rebellion off Madison (The New Yorker, 21 December 1946)
- Soft-Boiled Sergeant (Saturday Evening Post, 26 February 1944)
- The Stranger (Collier’s, 1 December 1945)
- The Varioni Brothers (Saturday Evening Post, 17 July 1943)
- This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise (Esquire, October 1945)
- The Young Folks (Story, March–April 1940)
- A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All (Mademoiselle, May 1947)
- Three Early Stories (2014) [Three]
- The Young Folks (1940)
- Go See Eddie (1940)
- Once a Week Won't Kill You (1944)
- The Survivors (1939) [Unpublished]
- The Young Folks (1940) [Bootleg] [Three]
- Go See Eddie (1940) [Bootleg] [Three]
- The long hotel story (1940) [Unpublished]
- The Hang of It [In "The Kit Book for Soldiers, Sailors and Marines," 1943] (1941) [Bootleg]
- The Heart of a Broken Story (1941) [Bootleg]
- The Fishermen (1941) [Unpublished]
- Lunch for Three (1941) [Unpublished]
- I Went to School with Adolf Hitler (1941) [Unpublished]
- Monologue for a Watery Highball (1941) [Unpublished]
- The Lovely Dead Girl at Table Six (1941) [Unpublished]
- Personal Notes of an Infantryman (1942) [Bootleg]
- The Long Debut of Lois Taggett [In "Stories: The Fiction of the Forties," ed. Whit Burnett, 1949] (1942) [Bootleg]
- Mrs. Hincher [aka "Paula"] (1942) [Unpublished]
- The Kissless Life of Reilly (1942) [Unpublished]
- The Last and Best of the Peter Pans (1942) [Unpublished]
- Holden On the Bus (1942) [Unpublished]
- Men Without Hemingway (1942) [Unpublished]
- Over the Sea Let’s Go, Twentieth Century Fox (1942) [Unpublished]
- The Varioni Brothers (1943) [Bootleg]
- The Broken Children (1943) [Unpublished]
- Paris (1943) [Unpublished]
- Rex Passard on the Planet Mars (1943) [Unpublished]
- Bitsey (1943) [Unpublished]
- Both Parties Concerned (1944) [Bootleg]
- Once a Week Won't Kill You (1944) [Bootleg] [Three]
- Soft-Boiled Sergeant (1944) [Bootleg]
- Last Day of the Last Furlough (1944) [Bootleg]
- What Got Into Curtis in the Woodshed (1944) [Unpublished]
- The Children's Echelon [aka "Total War Diary"] (1944) [Unpublished]
- Boy Standing in Tennessee (1944) [Unpublished]
- The Magic Foxhole (1944) [Unpublished]
- Two Lonely Men (1944) [Unpublished]
- A Young Man in a Stuffed Shirt (1944) [Unpublished]
- Elaine (1945) [Bootleg]
- The Stranger (1945) [Bootleg]
- I'm Crazy (1945) [Bootleg]
- A Boy in France [reworked from "What Babe Saw, or Ooh-La-La!" 1944; In "Post Stories 1942–45," ed. Ben Hibbs, 1946] (1945) [Bootleg]
- This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise [In "The Armchair Esquire," ed. L. Rust Hills, 1959] (1945) [Bootleg]
- The Daughter of the Late, Great Man (1945) [Unpublished]
- Slight Rebellion off Madison [In "Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker," ed. David Remnick, 2000] (1946) [Bootleg]
- Birthday Boy [aka "The Male Goodbye"] (1946) [Unpublished]
- A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All (1947) [Bootleg]
- The Inverted Forest (1947) [Bootleg]
- The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls (1947) [Unpublished]
- A Perfect Day for Bananafish (1948) [Nine]
- Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut (1948) [Nine]
- Just Before the War with the Eskimos (1948) [Nine]
- Blue Melody (1948) [Bootleg]
- A Girl I Knew [In "Best American Short Stories 1949," ed. Martha Foley, 1949] (1948) [Bootleg]
- The Boy in the People Shooting Hat (1948) [Unpublished]
- The Laughing Man (1949) [Nine]
- Down at the Dinghy (1949) [Nine]
- A Summer Accident (1949) [Unpublished]
- For Esmé — with Love and Squalor (1950) [Nine]
- Requiem for the Phantom of the Opera (1950) [Unpublished]
- Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes (1951) [Nine]
- De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period (1952) [Nine]
- Teddy (1953) [Nine]
- Franny (1955) [F & Z]
- Raise High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters (1955) [Raise]
- Ivanoff, the Terrible [Reworked in "Franny & Zooey," 1961] (1956)
- Zooey (1957) [F & Z]
- Seymour: An Introduction (1959) [Raise]
- Hapworth 16, 1924 (1965) [Bootleg]
- Hamilton, Ian. In Search of J. D. Salinger. 1988. Minerva. London: Heinemann / Mandarin, 1989.
- Salinger, Margaret A. Dream Catcher: A Memoir. A Washington Square Press Publication of Pocket Books. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2000.
- Shields, David, & Shane Salerno. Salinger. London: Simon & Schuster UK Ltd., 2013.
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