S N Behrman
Holden Caulfield, the sixteen-year-old protagonist of J D Salinger’s first novel, “The Catcher in the Rye,” which has been published by Little, Brown and chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club, refers to himself as an illiterate, but he is a reader. One of the tests to which he puts the books he reads is whether he feels like calling the author up.
Salinger’s brilliant, funny, meaningful novel is written in the first person. Holden Caulfield is made to tell his own story, in his own strange idiom. Holden is not a normal boy.
He is hypersensitive and hyper-imaginative (perhaps these are synonymous). He is double-minded. He is inexorably self-critical; at various times, he refers to himself as yellow, as a terrible liar, a madman, a moron. He is driven crazy by “phoniness,” a heading under which he loosely lumps not only insincerity but snobbery, injustice, callousness to the tears in things, and a lot more.
The book covers Holden’s last day at Pencey, a fashionable prep school, from which he has flunked out, and the following two days, which he spends in hiding in New York City. Stradlater, Holden’s roommate, is handsome, gross, and a successful amorist. On Holden’s last night at school, a Saturday night, he is in a frenzy of jealousy because Stradlater has dated up Jane Gallagher, with whom Holden is in love.
The hero and heroine of this novel, Holden’s dead brother Allie and Jane Gallagher, never appear in it, but as they are always in Holden’s consciousness, together with his sister Phoebe—these three constitute his emotional frame of reference—the reader knows them better, finally, than the characters Holden encounters, who are, except for Phoebe, marginal. It is characteristic of Holden that although he is crazy about Jane, always thinking of her, always wanting to call her up, he never does call her up.
Holden is always regretting that you didn’t know Allie. “You’d have liked him,” he keeps saying: the human impulse to make a silent voice audible to others, a lost essence palpable.
The literalness and innocence of Holden’s point of view in the face of the tremendously complicated and often depraved facts of life make for the humor of this novel: serious haggles with belligerent taxi-drivers; abortive conversational attempts with a laconic prostitute in a hurry; an “intellectual” discussion with a pompous and phony intellectual only a few years older than himself; an expedition with Sally Hayes, which is one of the funniest expeditions, surely, in the history of juvenilia.
Holden’s contacts with the outside world are generally extremely funny. It is his self-communings that are tragic and touching—a dark whirlpool churning fiercely below the unflagging hilarity of his surface activities. Holden’s difficulties affect his nervous system but never his vision. It is the vision of an innocent.
Holden will be all right. One day, he will probably find himself in the mood to call up Jane. He will even become more tolerant of phonies—it is part of the mechanics of living—as he has already had to endure the agony of saying “Glad to’ve met you” to people he isn’t glad to have met. He may even, someday, write a novel. I would like to read it. I loved this one. I mean it—I really did.
