Catcher in the Rye (1951)

Do we really want to hear about it?

Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts, but the Boomers did more than perhaps any other to reinvent popular culture and explode the canon. So what did we, Generation X, make of the things they insisted were hits?

Expelled from yet another prep school, mixed-up 16-year-old Holden Caulfield absconds to New York before the end of term. Knowing he’s going to have to face his parents in a few days, Holden holes up in a hotel as he tries to think of what to do. After an excruciating experience with a prostitute, a disastrous date with an old girlfriend and an awkward visit to a sympathetic teacher, Holden meets up with his little sister Phoebe at a carousel in the park and decides to go home.

The Legend

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

Boys don’t read; everyone knows that. Especially adolescent boys. They can’t stand all that ‘David Copperfield kind of crap’. But what if you had a book about one of those adolescent boys who can’t stand Dickens? A book apparently written by one of those boys, in their voice, full of slang and non-sequiturs, and obsessed with sex and booze?

Then you’d press a copy of Catcher in the Rye into their hands and hope that the cloying stink of adult recommendation would wear off enough for them to start reading. Because surely, if they did, J. D. Salinger’s writing would draw them in, and they’d finally finish an actual novel.

It’s a decent bet. Catcher in the Rye was a smash hit, and is still frequently listed in catalogues of modern classics, so we can probably agree it's pretty readable. Indeed, the book was so popular that Salinger ended up going into hiding to get away from all the fans, eventually becoming a complete recluse.

And surely teenagers readers will recognise the peculiar agonies of adolescence that they share with Holden Caulfield: his inability to predict his own mood or actions; his craving to fit in, and his desire to stand out in his bright red hunting hat; his sorrows for lost childhood and his straining for maturity; his teenage combination of hopefulness and cynicism; his mistrust of anyone over 30.

Surely, even if it’s a set book in an English class and they are forced to slog through it instead of a weight of foggy Dickens, they will be overcome with the quality of the writing and the truth of the characters and come to you, eyes shining with an imaginative wonder you thought had been long lost in memes and pornography, and thank you for it? Surely they will tell you that, despite you being a phoney grown up, they kind of get a kick out of you, they really do.

The Reality

The Catcher in the Rye wasn’t written for teenagers. It was written for adults. It evolved out of a series of stories Salinger wrote for very grown-up magazines including Colliers and The New Yorker; the kind of magazines teenagers only read when they’d forgotten to take a comic to the loo.

Moreover, teenagers barely existed in 1951. Post-Second World War teen culture was just getting started with the bobbysoxers and Frank Sinatra fandom. Rock‘n’roll hadn’t been invented, Elvis hadn’t happened, and the Beatles were younger than Holden Caulfield.

The whole cultural and commercial brouhaha of Boomer adolescence was all yet to come. Catcher in the Rye is, instead, full of jazz clubs and ballroom dancing, houndstooth jackets, buzzcuts, and making sure your tie is straight. Part of what Salinger is doing is exhibiting this new generation — this coming thing, the teenager — to an adult audience.

All of this also means that Holden has the opinions of his time. And not just opinions: one of the mainsprings of adolescent culture is that style and slang change with a relentless, inventive verve, and Holden’s is 80 years old now, as well as having the cultural homophobia, misogyny and smoking habits of the late ‘40s.

All of which rather suggest that the adult who tries to make a teenage boy reach The Catcher in the Rye today is liable to come across as yet another out-of-touch, cringe, phoney grown up. At the very best they might earn some pity, like Holden's favourite teacher Mr Antolini, a ‘pretty young guy’ you could kid around with but still not trust.

Is it ok?

When I was Holden’s age our set text for ‘O’ Level English was Great Expectations (1860) rather than David Copperfield (1850), and I hated it. It was an unholy grind through the grimy maze of London streets and the verbal labyrinth of Dickens’s prose. I read it, but I refused to take it in. I resented it, and the experience put me off Dickens for a decade.

The Catcher in the Rye, though, I loved. I inhaled it, then I inhaled Salinger’s other books, particularly the Glass family books. Then I inhaled Ring Lardner, because Holden liked him, and then I inhaled all those other mid-century New Yorker writers like Dorothy Parker, James Thurber and S. J. Perelman, so entrancing was Salinger’s world.

Even forty years after it had been written, I identified with Holden Caulfield. This was partly because I was in the process of failing to fit in at a private school myself, being the kind of antisocial nerd who hides from sports in the library, reading S. J. Perelman, for crying out loud. But it’s also because the pain of being an adolescent is universal.

Holden is in considerably more pain than most teenagers: his younger brother has died of leukaemia, and he has witnessed the gruesome death of a bullied friend at a previous school. He is fairly obviously in a precarious mental state and suffering from a great deal of trauma. He is, after all, writing his narrative in an institution, as part of his treatment for his breakdown. But adolescence is nothing if not egomaniacal. One’s own pain is by far the greatest, and only the hyperbole of Holden’s misery is adequate to equal it. This is undoubtedly why the book had such resonance for mentally ill shooters like Mark David Chapman and John Hinckley Jr.

One central theme of the book is the earnestness of children. Like many adolescents, Holden is obsessed with ‘phoniness’ and honesty. He yearns for the openness of childish engagement with the world. For all the cynical affect of adolescence, one is still prone to these towering enthusiasms, falling in love with a character and a book and a writer.

But for all that, The Catcher in the Rye is still a book that was written for an adult audience, not an adolescent one. There is, one suspects, a good deal of J. D. Salinger in Holden Caulfield. His professional seclusion mimics Holden’s desire to live in a cabin in the woods, pretending to be a ‘deaf-mute’; his refusal to allow any adaptations of Catcher echoes the protagonist’s dislike of Hollywood. This sort of thing isn’t unusual in writers but Salinger uses it all expertly, just as he is no doubt using his own wartime trauma (D-Day, the Bulge, interrogating Nazis) to plumb the depth of Holden’s misery.

He captures the voice and character of a 16-year-old brilliantly. It may not be accurate as regards an ‘80s teenager or a 21st-century one, but it is true, which is more important and longer lasting. And because he is writing in the voice of a teenager, all his observations about the adult world that Holden doesn’t yet understand remain as subtext.

I didn’t spot this subtext when I was 16, because teenagers are bad readers who don’t like Dickens, for crying out loud. Landsakes, I was an idiot. There’s a lot of things that make me very grateful to be middle aged and not a mixed up, muddle-headed teenager any more, and enjoying Dickens is definitely one of them. If ever you needed an example for why adolescence is absolutely the worst time to take the exams that will influence the rest of your life, it's The Catcher in the Rye. Absolutely the worst age to teach anyone anything. Apart from all the other ages.

For example, at 16 I found Holden’s idealisation of small children hard to understand. Like a Wim Wenders film, the book is full of tots saying unexpectedly wise things or being conspicuously winsome. My experience of small children was not this. To the best of my knowledge they were grubby little brutes, the bullies of the playground and the dimwits of the classroom, who lived in their own inexplicable, irrational world of inchoate wants and needs.

On re-reading one finally realises that Holden desperately craves the wisdom he attributes to them, but he doesn’t want to go through the adult experiences required to earn it. He dreams of being ‘the catcher in the rye’, a person who stops children running over a cliff: a metaphor for his desire to arrest his own childhood as the endless plunge of adulthood approaches.

Re-reading it as an adult one identifies, inevitably, not with Holden Caulfield, but with all those phoney, exasperated adults around him who are just trying to do their best. Sure, plenty of them are phoneys, hypocrites and bullies, spouting platitudes about knuckling down and growing up. But the thing is, they’re not wrong. And many of them are trying to help Holden, like poor old Mr Antolini, who has this moody teenager crash the end of a party and who is just drunk and tired and trying to be nice, and not making the pass Holden thinks he is.

Drunk or not, all of Mr Antolini’s advice is excellent and all of it is wasted. I wish I’d paid attention to it when I first read the book, because goodness knows I needed it. But, like Holden, I was never going to heed it because I needed it. Adolescents need all the help they can get, and are largely determined to reject all of it. They are bent on fixing their own problems despite not yet having the requisite tools to do it competently.

Which is why so many of us spent our adulthood unpicking all those disasters we made for ourselves at 16.

Swear to god, we were just goddamn madmen sometimes.

I don’t know why.

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The British equivalent of Holden Caulfield is Adrian Mole. Discuss.