Doesn’tCatcher seem like the sort of book that might do well in the new format?

 

And so it does, going on to sell over 60 million copies. Moreover, in 1956, some dam in critical interest seems to burst. Study after study is published; the 1950s are dubbed “the Decade of Salinger”; contemporaneous writers complain of neglect. Holden Caulfield is compared not only to Huck Finn but to Billy Budd, David Copperfield, Natty Bumppo, Quentin Compson, Ishmael, Peter Pan, Hamlet, Jesus Christ, Adam, Stephen Dedalus, and Leopold Bloom put together. What critic George Steiner calls the “Salinger industry” swells fantastically, until it sits like a large, determined bird on a bunker-like egg.

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More important, Salinger seems to have shared Holden’s disaffection. Numerous youthful acquaintances remember him as sardonic, rant-prone, a loner. Margaret Salinger likewise traces the alienation in the book to him, though it does not reflect for her either her father’s innate temperament or difficult adolescence so much as his experiences of anti-Semitism and, as an adult, war. Where Salinger fought in some of the bloodiest and most senseless campaigns of World War II and apparently suffered a nervous breakdown toward its end, shortly after which—while still in Europe—he is known to have been working on Catcher—it is hardly surprising that Holden’s reactions should evoke not only adolescent turmoil but also the awful seesaw of a vet’s return to civilian life. Holden may be a rebel without a cause, but he is not a rebel without an explanation: it is easy to read the death of his brother as a stand-in for unspeakable trauma. And witness the notable vehemence with which Holden talks about the war—declaring, for instance, “I’m sort of glad they’ve got the atomic bomb invented. If there’s ever another war, I’m going to sit right the hell on top of it. I’ll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will.”

 

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Interestingly, Salinger’s sister, in an interview, while supporting the anti-Semitism thesis, focuses on his in-betweenness as well. “It wasn’t nice to be part-Jewish in those days,” she says. “It was no asset to be Jewish either, but at least you belonged somewhere. This way you were neither fish nor fowl.” Additionally complicating the picture is the fact that Salinger seems to have grown up revered by his Irish-Catholic mother but disparaged by his Jewish father, who wanted him to enter the family food-import business. Fish and fowl, adored and criticized, Salinger was remembered by some military academy classmates as a guy whose conversation “was laced with sarcasm,” but by others as “a regular guy,” and by teachers as “quiet, thoughtful, always anxious to please.” Strikingly, this sometimes scathing student wrote a class song so convincingly straight (“Goodbyes are said, we march ahead / Success we go to find. / Our forms are gone from Valley Forge / Our hearts are left behind”) it is still sung at graduation. He edited the yearbook, too, with what so completely passed as earnest conscientiousness that though it is tempting, given his active interest in acting, to view his activities as virtuoso performances of deep subterfuge, they might also be imagined to have been painfully disconcerting. Holden’s description of himself as “the most terrific liar you ever saw” might well have applied to Salinger, and Salinger’s own judgment of his divided nature, in this era before “situational selves,” might well have involved the word that haunts his book, “phony.”

 

A poignant part of Salinger’s genius seems, in any case, to include the way that he transmutes—as he perhaps feels he must—his particular issues and injuries into a more enigmatic “autobiography” of alienation. And it can only be counted ironic that the result comes to exemplify American authenticity: like James Dean, Holden Caulfield is for many the very picture of the postwar rebel. Young, crude, misunderstood, he stands up to conformist pressures, is drawn to innocence, et cetera. Never mind that Holden is white, male, straight, sophisticated, rich, and a product of the 1940s; he personifies anguished resistance to ’50s America—indeed, for many, America’s truest self. Whether Salinger intended his creation to assume anything like this role—indeed, if he had any notion of the projection of a national identity as a desirable literary goal (as did his contemporary, John Updike, for example)—is unclear.

 

And is there not something if not phony, then at least a little wacky, about Holden’s enshrinement in American culture? To some degree, academia took its cue from the culture; Catcher’s skyrocketing sales amid the mid-’ 50s “youthquake” fairly demanded explanation. Critics like George Steiner saw the book as all too fitting for the paperback market—short, easy to read, and flattering “the very ignorance and moral shallowness of his young readers.” But others saw its success as a promising development, indicative of something enduringly young, defiant, and truth-loving in the American spirit. Drawing on the work of Donald Pease, critic Leerom Medovoi has described how a new cold war American canon arose around this time, in which American Renaissance works like Moby-Dick and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finnwere cast as a “coherent tradition that dramatized the emergence of American freedom as a literary ideal, somehow already waging its heroic struggle against a prefigured totalitarianism.” He provocatively describes how Catcher came to join those works and how the lot of them, read as national allegories, located the very essence of Americanness in principled dissent, even as McCarthyism cast it as un-American.

 

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Unless, that is, one is interested in how a book can hit home with no evidence of its author’s ever having read Henry James’s “The Art of Fiction.” Catcher demonstrates, among other things, how variously and mysteriously novels finally work, and how even sophisticated audiences tend to genuflect to art but yield to testimony. We are enthralled by voices that tell it like it is. Or, in the case of Catcher, that seem to. My sixteen-year- old son—who has, coincidentally, been reading Catcher for his tenth-grade English class even as I write—puts it this way: “You feel [with Catcher] like you’re in on the real story,” but in the end Catcher is a break from reality rather than a source of information about it. He likens Holden’s appeal to that of Harry Potter: just as Harry speaks to children because Harry is like them, only “special” and able to do magic, Holden interests my son because Holden rebels and “gets away with it” in a way my son guesses—rightly—he would never. In short, one part of Catcher’s appeal lies in its purveyance of fantasy. This can have value—helping an audience reflect on the real limits of its freedom, for example—but can support solipsism, too. Alfred Kazin takes the harsh view, characterizing Salinger’s audience as “the vast number who have been released by our society to think of themselves as endlessly sensitive, spiritually alone, [and] gifted, and whose suffering lies in the narrowing of their consciousness to themselves”—ranks that would no doubt include Mark David Chapman, who had a copy of Catcher in his pocket when he assassinated “phony” John Lennon, as well as John Hinckley who, also under Holden’s influence, attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan.

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Academia, too, presses on. Critic Alan Nadel, noting that the cold war blossomed in the period between 1946—when, for unknown reasons, Salinger withdrew from publication a ninety-page version of the book—and 1951, when it was published, interestingly sees in Holden not so much heroic nonconformity as a reflection of McCarthyism. Many features of the narrative—the obsession with control in its rhetorical patterns, as well as its preoccupation with duplicity and the compulsion to “name names”—bespeak, for Nadel, a psychic imprisonment in which the performance of truth-telling can never yield truth. And indeed, the insistence of phrases such as “I really mean it” and “to tell the truth” do finally seem to signal quicksand more than terra firma. Holden at story’s end is under interrogation— more isolated than independent, more defeated than defiant. “D. B. [Holden’s brother] asked me what I thought about all this stuff I just finished telling you about . . . If you want to know the truth, I don’t know what I think about it,” he says, touchingly. “I don’t know what I think about it”: Is this the author of the military-academy class hymn wondering about the act and value of writing? Has Holden, the avatar of American authenticity, become an avatar of American inauthenticity? Here Salinger’s funhouse proves, once again, I think, ours.