J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye

A Routledge Study Guide

Sarah Graham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134286546
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951) is a twentieth-century classic. Despite being one of the most frequently banned books in America, generations of readers have identified with the narrator, Holden Caulfield, an angry young man who articulates the confusion, cynicism and vulnerability of adolescence with humour and sincerity.

This guide to Salinger's provocative novel offers:

• an accessible introduction to the text and contexts of The Catcher in the Rye
• acritical history, surveying the many interpretations of the text from publication to the present
• a selection of new critical essays on the The Catcher in the Rye, by Sally Robinson, Renee R. Curry, Denis Jonnes, Livia Hekanaho and Clive Baldwin, providing a range of perspectives on the novel and extending the coverage of key critical approaches identified in the survey section
• cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism
• suggestions for further reading.

Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of The Catcher in the Rye and seeking not only a guide to the novel, but a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds Salinger's text.

1
Text and contexts

The Catcher in the Rye is one of the most famous novels written in the United States of America in the twentieth century. With sales of more than 60 million copies, it has made Holden Caulfield famous to generations of readers and made a reluctant star of Jerome David Salinger. This chapter begins with Salinger’s career, exploring his writing technique and principal concerns, and making connections between Catcher and his other works of fiction. The chapter goes on to place Catcher into its original context of post-war America, by considering the political and social character of the 1940s and 1950s. It also discusses the controversy that still surrounds Catcher in the USA, where it has consistently achieved the status of being simultaneously one of America’s best-loved and most-frequently banned novels. Finally, the chapter offers a detailed reading of the whole novel, discussing its structure, characters, language and themes.

Salinger: life and works

Salinger was born on 1 January 1919 in New York City. His father, Solomon (‘Sol’), was Jewish and his mother, Miriam, was Christian. Miriam had changed her name from Marie to appease Sol’s family. Salinger includes a version of this situation in Catcher: Holden remarks that his ‘parents are different religions’ (Ch. 14, p. 90) and explains that ‘my father was a Catholic once. He quit, though, when he married my mother’ (Ch. 15, p. 101). Salinger had an older sister, Doris; the family lived in Manhattan and Sol had a successful career working for a company that imported luxury foods from Europe. When Salinger (then known to his family as ‘Sonny’) was thirteen, Sol enrolled him in a private school in New York, McBurney. There is a brief reference to the school in Catcher: when Holden loses the Pencey fencing team’s equipment, they are scheduled to compete with McBurney (Ch. 1, p. 3). A detail like this encourages the reader to make connections between Salinger and Holden that are interesting, but may be misleading: Catcher may reflect some of Salinger’s experiences, but it is not an autobiography. Salinger’s grades were so poor that he was asked to leave McBurney after two years; his final report from the school summed him up: ‘Ability: plenty. Industry: did not know the word.’¹ Like Holden, Salinger ‘got the ax’ from school (Ch. 1, p. 3).

Salinger was then enrolled at Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania where, amongst greater achievements, he lost the Valley Forge fencing team’s equipment on the subway.² He graduated with a respectable record in 1936, and travelled to Europe to learn aspects of his father’s importing business, but his aim was always to be a writer. He decided to go to college, eventually enrolling in an evening class in creative writing at Columbia University in 1939. This class was run by Whit Burnett, the editor of Story, the magazine that would be the first to publish Salinger’s work: ‘The Young Folks’ (1940), a description of a party featuring characters who are bored and do not like each other much. Over the next two years, Salinger’s short stories were published in major magazines, and in 1941 Salinger wrote to a friend that he was also working on a novel, ‘a portrait of himself when young’ that would become Catcher.³ In fact, a story in which Holden Caulfield appears, ‘Slight Rebellion off Madison’ was accepted by The New Yorker in 1941, though it did not appear in print until 1946.

Salinger had attempted to enlist in the US Army in 1941, but had been rejected; however, when the United States entered the Second World War, Salinger found that he was now eligible for the draft and in April 1942, at the age of twentythree, he began his army service. Many of the stories that Salinger wrote during this period were concerned with the war and army life. Typical of these is ‘Death of a Dogface’ (1944), which disparages the lies told by the war films that Hollywood was then producing. The soldier Philly Burns tells his wife that the problem with Hollywood’s version of war is that: ‘You see a lot of real handsome guys always getting shot pretty neat, right where it don’t spoil their looks none, and they always got plenty of time, before they croak, to give their love to some doll back home.’⁴

By contrast, Philly tells his wife, a real war death is more like that experienced by his sergeant (the ‘dogface’ of the title) who died an ugly, painful death ‘all by himself, and he didn’t have no messages to give to no girl or nobody’.⁵ Although Catcher is very different from this story in terms of its subject matter, there are important similarities. Like Philly, Holden disparages the tendency of Hollywood films to distort the realities of experience. When Maurice (the ‘elevator guy’ and pimp) punches him, Holden copes by acting like a character in a film, as if he’s been shot in the stomach: ‘I sort of started pretending I had a bullet in my guts. [. . .] Now I was on the way to the bathroom to get a good shot of bourbon or something to help me steady my nerves and help me really go into action’ (Ch. 14, p. 93). Although his fantasy distracts Holden from his fear and pain, he recognises that the capacity of film to distort real experience is dangerous: ‘The goddam movies. They can ruin you. I’m not kidding’ (Ch. 14, p. 94).

In early 1944, Staff Sergeant Salinger was transferred to England, in preparation for the planned Allied attack on occupied Europe in June, known as ‘D-Day’, in which he participated. Despite his army duties, he continued to write, and the division between his fiction and his own experiences becomes increasingly blurred. For example, in ‘The Last Day of the Last Furlough’ (1944), the main character is a soldier just about to be posted overseas. Although the protagonist’s name is John ‘Babe’ Gladwaller, he has the same rank and army serial number as Salinger. Before Babe leaves he meets up with a friend, Vincent Caulfield, who tells him that his brother Holden has been reported missing in action. Salinger is overtly placing himself into his fiction (giving his army number to Babe) while creating one of the families that would dominate his writing in the future. Salinger’s use of his cast of characters (usually of the Caulfield or Glass families) is not always consistent between texts: Holden Caulfield in Catcher is too young to have fought in the war and does not have a brother called Vincent.

From D-Day until the end of the war, Salinger saw a great deal of heavy fighting in France and Germany. The trauma of his experiences is hinted at in his stories, especially ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ (1948), in which Seymour Glass – a war veteran – kills himself, and in the story ‘A Boy in France’ (1945) in which Babe Gladwaller struggles to survive on a filthy battlefield. One of Salinger’s most famous stories, ‘For Esmé – With Love and Squalor’ (1950), features ‘Sergeant X’, who participates in the D-Day landings and is deeply disturbed by his experiences of combat. Some time after the German surrender, Salinger was admitted to hospital for ‘battle fatigue’; Sergeant X and Sergeant Salinger seem to have much in common.

When Salinger returned to the USA he brought with him his wife, a European woman named Sylvia; Salinger’s biographer describes her as French, but Salinger’s sister remembered her as ‘very German’.⁶ In any case, the marriage lasted only a few months. The war continued to reverberate in Salinger’s fiction: in the story ‘The Stranger’ (1945), Babe Gladwaller makes it home alive, but Vincent Caulfield has been killed. Like Holden in Catcher, Babe has a beloved ten-year-old sister, Mattie; as they walk home through the Manhattan streets, Mattie takes Babe’s hand and asks him a question:

‘Are you glad to be home?’

‘Yes, baby.’

‘Ow! You’re hurting my hand.’⁷

All of Babe’s frustration and pain about the war is communicated in his physical response to Mattie’s question, an unconscious reaction that undermines his positive words. What Babe actually does to Mattie’s hand is not described, an effective and recurring strategy of Salinger’s writing, which uses inference skilfully and avoids telling the reader how to interpret the text. Equally, the reverse strategy is used for comic effect in Catcher, when Holden explains something quite obvious: ‘ “Lift up, willya? You’re on my towel,” Stradlater said. I was sitting on his stupid towel’ (Ch. 4, p. 27).

In Catcher, devices such as leaving certain things unsaid or ambiguous, using language that evokes the intimacy and informality of speech rather than writing, or offering details that contradict Holden’s descriptions, are all central to the richness of the novel. These techniques allow readers to make their own decisions about what Holden is really feeling or doing, offering an interpretive freedom that is usually very difficult to achieve in a first-person narrative, especially one that is overtly addressing ‘you’. A prime example of this is in the scene with Mr Antolini, when Holden wakes up to find that his ex-teacher is ‘sort of petting me or patting me on the goddam head’ (Ch. 24, p. 172). After he has left Antolini’s apartment, Holden wonders if his interpretation of events (that the teacher was making a ‘flitty pass’ at him) was correct (Ch. 25, p. 175). The reader is similarly uncertain: despite the dominance of Holden’s perspective, Salinger frees, or even forces, the reader to make her or his own decisions about what Antolini’s intentions might have been; there is, after all, a difference between sexual ‘petting’ and friendly ‘patting’, and Holden does not know which word to use.

Salinger’s last published story of 1945 was ‘I’m Crazy’, narrated by Holden Caulfield. It begins with Holden visiting his teacher, Mr Spencer, the night he leaves ‘Pentey’ Prep and much of the scene survives into Catcher unchanged. Overall, however, it is less comic than in the novel: Holden pities Spencer more overtly, and his reflections on his own situation are less subtle (‘I wasn’t saying much that I wanted to say. I never do. I’m crazy. No kidding’), disallowing that freedom for reader interpretation that characterises the novel.⁸ Comparing the two also shows how Salinger’s style sharpens in Catcher. In the story, ‘Old Spencer handled my exam paper as though it were something catching that he had to handle for the good of science or something, like Pasteur or one of those guys’.⁹ In the novel, Spencer simply ‘started handling my exam paper like it was a turd or something’ (Ch. 2, p. 10), which is more vivid and succinct.

Similarly, the rest of the story lacks the light touch of Catcher. Holden goes home and talks to his sisters, Phoebe and Viola: Phoebe is much as she is in Catcher and Viola is a toddler with a craving for olives. Both of them, says Holden, are ‘one of us’ although it is not clear whether the ‘us’ is the Caulfield family or a like-minded community that includes the reader.¹⁰ Holden and Phoebe have a compressed version of the conversation they share in the novel but without any of Holden’s digressions about James Castle or his wish to be the catcher in the rye. The story ends:

I lay awake for a pretty long time, feeling lousy. I knew everybody was right and I was wrong. I knew that I wasn’t going to be one of those successful guys, [. . .] that I wasn’t going back to school again ever, that I wouldn’t like working in an office. I started wondering again where the ducks in Central Park went when the lagoon was frozen over, and finally I went to sleep.¹¹

The story is much more conclusive about Holden’s future than the novel and much less optimistic; he is sadly resigned to moving into the adult world of work and already believes himself to be a failure.

‘Slight Rebellion off Madison’ was finally published in The New Yorker in December 1946, five years after the magazine had purchased it. Written in the third person, the story concerns Holden’s date with Sally. As in the novel, Holden expresses his hatred for school, which Sally doesn’t understand, and he suggests that they run away together, which she declines to do. The story is concise and, like all of Salinger’s work, dominated by dialogue. What description there is tends to be comic, as when Holden’s dancing style is described as ‘long, slow side steps back and forth, as though he were dancing over an open manhole’, a perspective on Holden that the first-person form of Catcher does not allow.¹² Despite the omniscient narrator, the story has much in common with the novel, sharing its tendency to shift unexpectedly from humour into pathos. Here, as in ‘I’m Crazy’ and Catcher, Holden can be funny, angry and sad in the space of a few short scenes. These rapid shifts in mood can leave the reader in a state of uncertainty that may mirror Holden’s own instability.

Meantime, the novel about Holden remained unfinished and Salinger seems to have had doubts about his capacity to complete it. He described himself in 1945 as ‘a dash man not a miler’ – a short-story writer rather than a novelist – and said it was ‘probable that I will never write a novel’.¹³ Around this time, plans were being made for a collection of Salinger’s stories but Salinger seems to have decided against the idea and, indeed, has never given permission for twenty-one of his early stories to be anthologised, including the Gladwaller and Caulfield stories discussed here. When a publisher reprinted and sold the stories as an unauthorised collection in 1974, the author filed a civil law suit against him. In a rare comment to a journalist at that time, Salinger said that he had blocked publication of the stories because he ‘wanted them to die a perfectly natural death’.¹⁴ However, Salinger did allow a selection of his post-war stories (most of which first appeared in The New Yorker) to be published together as Nine Stories (1953), including such key works as ‘For Esmé – With Love and Squalor’, ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ and ‘Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut’. The latter was made into a film, released in 1949 under the title My Foolish Heart. The film bore little relation to the original story: according to the New York Times, the film ‘dishes up sentiment by the bowlful’ and Salinger hated it.¹⁵ This unhappy experience probably guaranteed that none of his other works would ever be made available for adaptation.

By 1950 Salinger had completed The Catcher in the Rye and Little, Brown agreed to publish it in July 1951. Salinger was reluctant to engage in publicity activities, but there was significant interest in the novel anyway: Catcher was reviewed in newspapers and magazines across the USA and was generally well received (see Critical history, page). It was selected as the Book-of-the-Month Club’s choice for summer 1951, a situation that guaranteed publicity and sales. It was originally published in a bright jacket with an image of a carrousel horse and an author photograph, which Salinger insisted be removed for the reprinted edition. Although it was not the best-selling novel of 1951, it stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for the rest of the year.

It is likely that Salinger did not anticipate just how successful his novel would be. In February 1952 he commented that he was ‘relieved that the season for success of [Catcher] is over. I enjoyed a small part of it, but most of it I found hectic and professionally and personally demoralising.’¹⁶ Of course, the novel continued to sell and by the late 1950s it was being assigned to university courses and discussed by literary critics. It is probable that the interest in Salinger that was sparked by the success of Catcher played a significant role in his retreat, first into seclusion (when he moved away from New York to a plain farmhouse in Cornish, New Hampshire, where he has lived ever since) and then into silence (when he ceased to publish his work after 1965). The simple covers on his books are his choice, as if he wants nothing – no image, no author photograph – to distract readers from the content. Although he did publish five long stories (see Further reading, p. 121) after Catcher, the frequency decreased dramatically; his final publication, ‘Hapworth 16, 1924’ (1965) was his first new work for six years. In 1970 he repaid the advance that his publisher had given him after his last book, Franny and Zooey (a reprint of two stories) and was free of any further obligation to produce work for publication.

Since then, communications from and about Salinger have been rare. He gave his last interview in 1953, to a girl from a high school local to his new home; he married Claire Douglas in 1955 and they had a daughter (Margaret, born in 1955) and a son (Matthew, born in 1960). Margaret’s memoir, Dream Catcher (2000), offers fascinating insights into Salinger as a writer and a person. In 1967 his marriage to Claire ended in divorce. Salinger had a relationship in 1972 – 3 with Joyce Maynard, an eighteen-year-old undergraduate, who eventually published a memoir of her time with him, At Home in the World (1998). Since the late 1980s Salinger has been married to Colleen O’Neill, about whom very little is known. Throughout this time Salinger has lived in reclusion which, as his daughter Margaret attests, ‘doesn’t mean that you have stopped entertaining formally; it means that you do not lay eyes on a living soul’.¹⁷ Many anecdotal reports suggest that Salinger has continued to write, but it seems unlikely that he will publish any of his work. In 1974 he asserted: ‘I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure. [. . .] I don’t necessarily intend to publish posthumously, [. . .] but I do like to write for myself.’¹⁸ While most authors write in the hope of being published and gaining a readership, Salinger has experienced fame that few other writers have known and has rejected it.

Salinger told Joyce Maynard: ‘The minute you publish a book, you’d better understand, it’s out of your hands. In come the reviewers, aiming to make a name for themselves by destroying your own.’¹⁹ The Catcher in the Rye went out of

Salinger’s hands in 1951 and it has been reviewed and discussed by thousands of people since then, but there is little sign that Salinger’s name has been destroyed. Clearly, there are echoes of Catcher, in terms of style and content, in the stories that preceded it. However, the place and time in which Salinger lived and into which his novel arrived is also relevant to any interpretation of Catcher. The next part of this chapter will explore the society and culture of the USA in the 1940s and 1950s to contextualise the novel.

Post-war America: society and culture

To understand something of post-war America, it is necessary to look a little further back. The period from the Wall S...