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Literary Review
Salinger's sorrows
RAVI VYAS
PERHAPS because life comes up short pretty reliably there are few things we seem to be more dedicated to than unhappiness. Reasons to be inconsolable abound: "the frailty of our bodies, the fickleness of love, the insincerities of social life, the compromises of friendship, the deadening effects of habit". Very simply, "life's fretful fevers". So it is quite understandable why unhappiness should be the most addictive of literary emotions with each generation disappointed in its own special way and wanting its own literature of disaffection. J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, first published in July 1951, is the purest extract of that mood by going a step further: it provided the unhappiness of eternal disappointment in life with its main character, Holden Caufield — taken after Hamlet? — the sorrow king of modern times. Looking back on The Catcher's 50-plus years and its huge success — it has sold well over 60 million copies with several attempts at rewrites — it has established a literary genre all its own.
The Catcher in the Rye is a sympathetic portrait of a boy, Holden Caufield, who refuses to be socialised — the novel opens at the point when Holden is about to be "kicked out" of his third school — and just wants to be himself. He talks like a teenager and this makes it natural to assume that he thinks like a teenager. This is how he starts off: "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. In the first place, the stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two haemorrhages apiece if I told anything personal about them." Holden is 14 years old. It is adolescence, that "extended period of rage", where the turbulence is necessary to effect the painful separation of the child from the parent and the development of the individual. Salinger has given voice to what every adolescent or at least what every middle class adolescent thinks but is too inhibited to say, which is that success is a sham and that successful people are mostly phonies. What has attracted adolescents to The Catcher — most pick it up when they are around 14 or so on the recommendation of their parents or teachers — is that it reminds them of their own selves.
After all, it is natural when reading the description of certain fictional characters not at the same time to imagine the real-life acquaintances who they most closely, if often unexpectedly, resemble.
For adolescents — even adults when they look back on their childhood and youth — Holden is the literary equivalent of looking into the mirror for the first time.
Holden is no dumb clod; he thinks like an adult. He sees through human beings quickly and he sums them up like a novelist. Here are three passages taken at random:
"He was always asking you to do him a big favor. You take a very handsome guy, or a guy that thinks he's a real hot-shot, and they're always asking you to do them a big favor. Just because they're crazy about themselves, they think you're crazy about them, too, and that you're dying to do them a favor. It's sort of funny, in a way." "She was blocking up the whole goddam traffic in the aisle. You could tell she liked to block up a lot of traffic. The waiter was waiting for her to move out of the way, but she didn't even notice him. It was funny. You could tell the waiter didn't like her much, you could tell even the Navy guy didn't like her much, even though he was dating her. And I didn't like her much. Nobody did. You had to feel sort of sorry for her, in a way." "His name was George or something — I didn't even remember — and he went to Andover. Big, big deal. You should've seen him when old Sally asked him how he liked the play. He was the kind of phony that have to give themselves room when they answer somebody's question. He stepped back, and he stepped on the lady's foot behind him. He probably broke every toe in her body. He said the play itself was no masterpiece, but that the Lunts, of course, were absolute angels. Angels. For Chrissake. Angels. That killed me." The secret of Holden's authority as a narrator and why he cuts across the generation gap is that he never lets anything stand by itself. He has every one docketed and pegged. That's why he is so funny and that is how he has darkened his satire and put sadness into his humour, much like Chekhov did with his social observations, faint sorrows and compassionate humour. Holden has an attitude to life, "standing at a slight angle to the universe" that makes his character so addictive.
As you go through the book we think Holden will change his easy-come-easy-go attitude to life and that his alienation is just a passing phase of adolescence. But attitudes don't change so easily — child psychologists believe that our basic patterns are set by five — and besides, it is a fairly useful attitude to have. Surely, one of the aims of education in an over-consumptive society is that while it is necessary to teach people to want the rewards that life has to offer, it is also to teach them a modest degree of contempt for these rewards. In the affluent west and increasingly in the upper class of ours, ("buy one, take two" kind of stuff) the rewards are constantly being advertised as yours for the taking, the feeling of disappointment is a lot more common than the feeling of success and if we don't learn how not to care, our failures would destroy us. Failure is a kind of luck (because it turns you on) as long as it doesn't kill you. Reading The Catcher in the Rye provides a thick coat of psychic insulation, a defence mechanism that will see you through the "slings and arrows" even if you manage the "outrageous fortune". Salinger is trying not merely to explore the spiritual poverty of a conformist culture; or about alienation or the "youth culture". Beneath the façade of what appears as tomfoolery, it is about loss and a world gone hopelessly wrong. Holden's unhappiness is less personal than it appears — it is really a protest against modern life if you deconstruct the metaphors:
... I kept walking and walking up Fifth Avenue, without any tie or anything. Then all of a sudden, something very spooky started happening.
Every time I came to the end of a block and stepped off the goddam curb, I had this feeling that I'd never get to the other side of the street. I thought I'd just go down, down, down, and nobody'd ever see me again... I started to sweat like a bastard — my whole shirt and underwear and everything. Then I started doing something else. Every time I'd get to the end of a block I'd make believe I was talking to my brother Allie.
I'd say to him, "Allie, don't let me disappear. Allie, don't let me disappear... Please, Allie." And when I'd reach the other side of the street without disappearing, I'd thank him. Then it would start all over again as soon as I got to the next corner. But I kept going and all. I was sort of afraid to stop... Finally, what I decided I'd do, I decided I'd go away. I decided I'd never go home again and I'd never go away to another school again... What I'd do, I figured, I'd go down to the Holland Tunnel and bum a ride, and then I'd bum another one, and another one, and another one, and in a few days I'd be somewhere out West where it was pretty and sunny and where nobody'd know me and I'd get a job... "I don't know where I'm going but I'm on my way", as the old ditty put it.
That Holden has a mordant contempt for everyone and everything, including ourselves makes the book very funny. But the subtext, as some of these extracts show, is about loss and frustration and defeat. That is why it has hit a generational nerve, as if no one had told that story before. Of course there is a whole literature of alienation, "the end of the road" kind but the notes, the music of words, are so different here.
It is as if Holden is just taking it off his chest.
What makes the melancholy so irresistible? Is it nostalgia that grows with age but aren't emotions keenest when we are young? Isn't nostalgia for youth culture completely spurious? Quite often it invites you to indulge in bittersweet memories of a childhood you never had, an idyll of pop songs and television shows and soap operas that bears little relation to any experience of your own. Or is it the sheer force of language, spare, frugal, hard-boiled that only the best writers can ever do at all? Salinger wrote in the eternal present tense.
If you are down and out, "in the dumps", as Salinger might say, there is perhaps no greater intellectual thrill than reading The Catcher in the Rye. The only greater thrill is to read it again and again.
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger, first published in serial form, 1945-46; in book form, 1951, Penguin, Special Indian price, £4.50.
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