16 July

J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is published. It will go on to sell 60 million copies and be translated into almost all the world’s languages

1951 From his first slangy words of self-introduction, it’s clear that Holden Caulfield’s story is going to be different. He’ll tell us nothing about his ‘lousy’ childhood and parents. It’s not going to be another David Copperfield, he says.

Not that there’s any risk of the reader being reminded of Dickens. Unlike David Copperfield, The Catcher in the Rye is no Bildungsroman, because the narrator/protagonist doesn’t want to grow up. What’s really being evoked here is the opening of Huckleberry Finn (1884), in which another first-person narrator speaks conversationally without introducing himself, as though you already knew him, before embarking on an unconventional story, in the course of which he shows himself to be as alienated from the social norms around him as he is from the conventions of literary narrative.

Except that Huck is naively oppositional, while Holden Caulfield knows he detests all the ‘phonies’ he meets on his winter weekend in New York after being kicked out of Pencey Prep. And Huck’s childhood really was severely disadvantaged, whereas, as we soon learn, ‘lousy’ is just one of Holden’s routine modifiers – along with ‘sort-of’, ‘old’ (used affectionately as well as not), ‘corny’, ‘goddam’, and of course ‘phony’.

Great American fiction is supposed to resemble the romance more than the novel. ‘In American romance, it will not matter much what class people come from’, Richard Chase has written, ‘and where the novelist would arouse our interest in a character by exploring his origin, the romancer will probably do so by enveloping it in mystery’.1 In the novel character is more important than the action; in romance the action is more melodramatic, less believable, than in the novel. And so on.

By this definition, The Catcher in the Rye barely qualifies as American romance. Despite his refusal to talk about his past, Holden is (most novelistically) fixed within the economic and social realities of his time and place. He has been brought up in an apartment with a live-in maid, on the Upper East Side of New York City, has been expensively educated, has had his clothes bought for him at Brooks Brothers.

Unlike in so much American fiction, class is an issue here. Holden knows instantly, by a hundred details of clothing and speech, when someone is ‘corny’ – that is, poor – or (as his parents would no doubt put it) comes from a less advantaged background. What redeems his acidic observations is that he so often feels guilty for uttering them, and sorry for their victims.

So notwithstanding objections to Holden’s colloquial profanity that have rivalled the reaction to Huck Finn’s (see 18 February), why have millions of corny Americans gone for The Catcher in the Rye, and so many English teachers set the book for required reading? Why has the book become such an iconic expression of American anxiety, not to mention an international bestseller?

It might have something to do with the perennial appeal of stories about disruptive, naughty boys who are good at heart: Huck Finn, of course, but before that, Thomas Bailey Aldridge’s Story of a Bad Boy (1869) and Mark Twain’s other legend, Tom Sawyer (1876). But the figure isn’t absent from European literature, as the popularity of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio (1882) makes clear.

But there’s also the Peter Pan appeal. Tom Sawyer grows up, after all, and Pinocchio gradually becomes more human. Huck and Holden, on the other hand, refuse accommodation to the adult world. Huck lights out for the Territory rather than get re-assimilated into the stifling pieties of St Petersburg.

For Holden the problem is that the phonies (or, as he would say, the people who have ‘prostituted’ their talent and good intentions) include his brother, the writer D.B., who now works in Hollywood, the jazz pianist ‘Old Ernie’, who no longer knows whether he’s playing well or not, because of ‘all those dopes who clap their heads off’, and even his own father, who could be doing pro bono defences, but is a corporation lawyer instead.

If he were a gifted piano player, says Holden, he’d play in a ‘goddam closet’. But who would hear him? There may be a clue to Salinger’s famous reclusiveness here, right up to his death in January 2010 at the age of 91. Holden’s phonies are just people who have to earn a living, grown-ups with mortgages to pay and families to support. Boring, of course, but pretty goddam important, if you really want to know.

1 Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition, New York, 1957; reprinted Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, p. 19.