***Holden Caulfield Is Me And You- J.D. Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye-Take Two

 

Book Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Catcher In The Rye, J. D. Salinger, Little Brown and Company, New York, 1945, 1991   

Yeah, I know, you and I were the only ones who ever suffered the horrors of growing up absurd in America-name your generation. Whether it was my generation, the angst-filled generation of ’68 that tried, tried like hell to seek a newer world and got our fingers burned for the efforts, efforts that faded as the decade passed and many got tired and weary of rolling that Promethean rock up the mountain, or the millennium just struggling to get out of the damn house and being able to fly on ones’ own. Yeah, whatever battle –scarred generation we, you and I, were the only ones who suffered the pangs of teen angst and alienation like it didn’t come with the territory of being a teenager ever since they invented the category back a hundred plus years ago. Hell maybe going back to Adams and Eve, or before, but you’ll have to ask Cain and Abel about that. Yeah, like every kid didn’t balk at the prospects in front of him or her in facing a society that they did not create, and had no say in creating. Just keep your head down and your eyes ahead, or else.

Personally for a long time I believed that my generation, that now hoary and aged generation of ’68, like I said the ones who made a lot of noise for a time about turning the world upside down and who today they make nostalgia films about, was the only generation that faced the grinding. Then I started talking to younger people about what had been on their minds back in their youths and, not so strangely, we could have copied each other scripts with the exception of specifics derived from generational differences. The real show-stopper though occurred one day when I was driving along to some medical appointment and listening to a talk show on NPR that was discussing the impact of J. D. Salinger’s book, the book under review, The Catcher In The Rye, on various generations. One caller, a millennial, took a couple of moments to describe his angst-filled youth and the book. Jesus, the kid, this working-class kid, described my own traumas growing up the 1950s: the eternal struggle to get out from under “know-nothing” parents; the confusion about identity, including sexual identity; the need to fit in, fit in where the others kids laughed at you and your raggedy ways; the eternal struggle to figure out girls and what they wanted (today in a more generous time just fill in the relationship struggle you are trying to figure out). Jesus.

Strange as it may seem now some of us from my time for a time made Holden Caulfield, the central figure in the book and the one who is at his wit’s end trying to figure out his world that he had not created, and had no say in creating, our literary hero, the kid who “spoke” to us in our coming of age time. That is Holden held us in thrall until we, having come of age in the early 1960s, “discovered” Sal and Dean in Jack Kerouac’s On The Road and began to listen to our own beat, to understand being beaten down, beaten around but also blessed beat. But before that sea-change Holden held forth in many minds. We would even, a schoolboy friend of mine and me, if you can believe this, while we sat out in the steamy, sultry summer night on the front steps of our old high school with no money and no prospects, ask each other what Holden would do in any given situation that preoccupied us at the moment.

While there were many elements of Holden’s personality that might not ring true, or be off-putting, for any individual then (or today) like his put-downs of some of his schoolmates, his penchant for rationalizing everything to his benefit, and his snobbishness with the hired help (from elevator operators to cabbies), collectively his plight resonated. Problems of sexual identity (including homosexual yearnings not fully articulated in writings and books in the immediate post-World War II period), of intellectual identity (seemingly as a prototype for the later beat and hippie generations, of a hipster drop-out from the academy with his feeling hemmed in by institutionalized learning but with a great love of books), of class, of falseness and perversity, of the clash of household generations (ah, parents and grandparents), of fighting against a system stacked up against the young, of personal depression, they are all there. As well as are some less savory traits, a certain elitism, a certain distain of the masses, and of women, well girls really, and lots of mannerisms like having a negative spin on almost everything that one would hope he will grow out of soon.  Attributes which easy to say now but which we found, my friend and I, well, cool.              

The story line of the book is fairly simple for all the complex issues that arise in young Holden’s life in a Jetstream torrent - a couple of tough winter days in the life of a well-off New York teenager whose problem at the moment was to hide the fact, postpone really, that once again he had been kicked out of a school for, ah, “not applying himself (sound familiar).” The momentary solution to that situation which sounded reasonable to anybody who actually had been a troubled teenager was to say the hell with it and do a junior version of wine, women and song. Except, at least on the surface, our man Holden takes no pleasure in that-carping against everything not nailed down, fellow classmates, teachers, past and present, cab drivers, elevator operators, whores, dicey girlfriends. Everything. By the end it is an open book whether he will be a CEO of a major corporation or wind up on skid row. While some of the stream-of-consciousness devise used by Salinger to make his point about the modern teen condition is a little over the top, at least on my recent re-re-reading this is a great American literary work of art from one of the best of the “non-beat” New York writers hanging around in the post- World War II period. Read the book, read the book more than once like I did.

 

 

 

While there were many elements of Holden’s personality that might not ring true for any individual collectively his plight resonated. Problems of sexual identity, of intellectual identity, of class, of falseness and perversity, of the clash of household generations, of fighting against a system stacked up against the young, of personal depression, they are all there. As well as some less savory traits, a certain elitism, a certain distain of the masses, and of women, well girls really, and lots of mannerisms like having a negative on almost everything that one would hope he will grow out of.             

The story line here is fairly simple- a couple of tough winter days in the life of a well-off New York teenager whose problem at the moment was to hide the fact, postpone really, that once again he had been kicked out of a school for, ah, “not applying himself (sound familiar). The momentary solution to that situation which sounded reasonable to anybody who actually had been a troubled teenager was to say the hell with it and do a junior version of wine, women and song. Except, at least on the surface our man Holden takes no pleasure in that-carping against everything not nailed down, fellow classmates, teachers, past and present, cab drivers, elevator operators, whores, dicey girlfriends. Everything. By the end it is an open book whether he will be a CEO of a major corporation or windup on skid row. While some of the stream-of-consciousness devise used by Salinger to make his point about the modern teen condition this is a great American literary work of art from one of the best of the “non-beat” New York writers hanging around in the post- World War II period. Read the book, read the book more than once like I did.