Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye

Sarah Graham

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781441143105
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

J. D. Salinger's 1951 novel, The Catcher in the Rye, is the definitive coming-of-age novel and Holden Caulfield remains one of the most famous characters in modern literature. This jargon-free guide to the text sets The Catcher in the Rye in its historical, intellectual and cultural contexts, offering analyses of its themes, style and structure, and presenting an up-to-date account of its critical reception.

CHAPTER 1

CONTEXTS

When J. D. Salinger published The Catcher in the Rye in 1951, he could not have foreseen that it would become one of the best known and most popular novels to emerge from post-war America, and make him internationally famous. Although he published his last new fiction in 1965, public interest in Salinger has continued, in spite (and because) of his decision to withdraw from his career as a publishing author. Salinger’s absence from the public eye has not stopped Catcher from finding new readers every year: it has sold millions of copies, been translated into many languages, and consistently appears near the top of polls of favourite novels, alongside other key texts of American literature like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). However, Salinger’s novel has attracted controversy as well as acclaim: although popular, it has been removed from many high school reading lists for fear that its expletives, sexual content and the ‘anti-social’ behaviour of its protagonist may corrupt young readers.

Set in 1949, Catcher tells the story of the two days just before Christmas that 16-year-old Holden Caulfield spends in New York after he has been expelled from his boarding school, Pencey Prep. As he wanders around the city he reflects on his past, his family and friends, drinks, smokes and thinks about sex, a subject that frightens and fascinates him. He is angry, melancholy and alienated, and shares his feelings with the reader in a unique voice. Although it is perhaps not difficult to see why parents might be doubtful about Holden’s suitability as a role model, it is important to acknowledge that he is sensitive and kind as well as rebellious, with a keen sense of right and wrong. In many ways Holden is a product of his time and place – although he is sometimes read as the archetypal adolescent, a universally recognizable teenager – and he faces the uncertainties of being young in post-war America with insight and anxiety.

This chapter places the novel in context by offering a brief biography of the author, including information about his other work, and exploring the society of the time.

SALINGER’S LIFE AND CAREER

Jerome David Salinger, nicknamed ‘Sonny’ by his family, was born in New York on 1 January 1919. His father, Solomon, made a good living importing luxury foods from Europe and had moved his wife Miriam and daughter Doris to New York from Chicago before his son was born. Sol’s growing business success in the 1930s, despite the constraints of the nation’s economic slump, enabled Salinger to move from state to private school when he was 13. Although he enjoyed writing and drama, he had little academic success at his new school, McBurney, and was asked not to return at the end of his second year there. Concerned that his son was more interested in acting than business, Sol sent him to Valley Forge Military Academy near Philadelphia, a school that prioritized discipline and physical activities. Perhaps surprisingly, Salinger performed well in this environment: Valley Forge may share some aspects with Pencey Prep (not least the cannon on the hill that symbolizes the school’s traditional values), but Salinger seems to have been a happier, less wayward student than Holden Caulfield. This is not to deny that Catcher is, in some respects, autobiographical: during the several years that he took to complete the novel, Salinger referred to Holden more than once as a version of his younger self (Hamilton 1998: 66).

After Valley Forge, Salinger drifted. He knew he wanted to be a writer, but Sol wanted him to join the import business. To appease his father, Salinger went to Europe to gain business experience, a trip he summed up in a biographical note written to accompany one of his earliest publications:

He visited […] Vienna when he was eighteen, winning high honors in beer hoisting. In Poland he worked in a ham factory and slaughterhouse and on returning to America […] he attended Columbia, and studied with Whit Burnett’s short-story group. (Alexander 1999: 72–3)

Salinger’s writing teacher became his first publisher when his story The Young Folks’ appeared in Whit Burnett’s journal, Story, in 1940. From then on, Salinger was ‘intent on placing his work in magazines’ (Fosburgh 1974: n.p.), and his work was published regularly in prestigious American titles such as the Saturday Evening Post. However, the magazine every American short-story writer of the time wanted to appear in was The New Yorker, which had a reputation for publishing the best fiction by the most famous names in literature. Salinger had a story accepted by The New Yorker when he was only 22, a significant achievement.

Disappointingly, this success was marred by events beyond Salinger’s control. The New Yorker had agreed to publish a story titled ‘Slight Rebellion off Madison’, which featured a new character named Holden Caulfield. Home from school for Christmas, Holden goes on a date with his girlfriend Sally. The story suggests that Holden is a conventional upper middle-class Manhattan adolescent, until his ‘slight rebellion’: he urges Sally to run away with him and live in a cabin in the countryside, but she refuses because ‘You can’t just do something like that’ (Salinger 1946: n.p.). Many of the events in the story appear in Catcher, but one significant difference between the two is that the story has an omniscient (an all-knowing third-person) narrator, while the novel uses the instantly recognizable voice of Holden in the first person. The New Yorker planned to run ‘Slight Rebellion’ in December 1941, but on the 7th of that month, Japanese forces attacked the American Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and the United States abruptly entered the Second World War. Perhaps The New Yorker felt that Salinger’s story was too light for such a sombre time; whatever the reason, they postponed publication.

By the time the story finally appeared (in December 1946), references to Holden Caulfield had been made in stories Salinger had published in other magazines, not least ‘I’m Crazy’ (1945), which, narrated by Holden himself, describes his last day at ‘Pentey’ Prep, from which he has been expelled. The story is dominated by Holden’s description of his elderly teacher Mr Spencer, whose advanced age obviously disgusts him. Holden then goes home to his little sisters, Phoebe and Viola, and prepares to face his parents’ disappointment. Like ‘Slight Rebellion off Madison’, much of ‘I’m Crazy’ survives more or less intact in Catcher, including many incidents that the novel expands upon. Both stories are funny and touching, like all of Salinger’s best work, but the latter has the advantage of featuring Holden’s narrative voice, which many consider to be Salinger’s greatest achievement as a writer.

Participation in the war brought huge changes to American society, and transformed Salinger’s life when he was drafted in spring 1942. After training in various locations in the USA he became a member of the Counter Intelligence Corps and was transferred to England in early 1944 to prepare for D-Day, the invasion of occupied Europe by American, British and Canadian forces. Salinger’s active service was dangerous and exhausting; many of his comrades were killed or badly injured in the long battles of 1944 and 1945 in Western Europe that contributed to the German surrender. Salinger’s work continued to appear in American magazines and his stories of this time were, unsurprisingly, concerned with war and soldiers’ experiences, expressing admiration for the men involved, if not for the conflict itself.

During this period, Salinger began to establish a cast of characters that he developed across his fiction and through which he could, apparently, represent himself: some of his wartime publications feature a soldier named John ‘Babe’ Gladwaller, who has the same Army serial number and rank as J. D. Salinger. Babe, like Salinger, has a miserable time on battlefields in France; his friend Vincent Caulfield and Vincent’s brother Holden are also enlisted. Babe survives the war, but Vincent is killed at Hurtgen Forest in Germany (where Salinger saw action) and Holden goes missing in the Pacific. Salinger’s characters in this era do not have consistent biographies: in Catcher, Holden’s brother is called D. B., not Vincent (although both characters are writers) and Holden himself is too young to have fought in the war. After Catcher, Salinger dropped his Caulfield and Gladwaller characters and focused his writing on the extensive Glass family, constructing a dynasty whose biography tallies across several stories. In these later works, Salinger appears to depict himself in both Buddy Glass, a writer, and in his brother Seymour, a soldier so traumatized by his wartime experiences that he commits suicide.

Although a collection of Salinger’s post-war short stories was published in 1953 (as Nine Stories in the USA and as For Esme -With Love and Squalor in Britain), he has never permitted his wartime or pre-war stories to be reprinted; in fact, he took legal action against an unauthorized anthology {The Complete Uncollected Short Stories) that appeared in the USA in 1974. Salinger rarely agrees to interviews, but following this incident he contacted a New York Times reporter to explain that he wanted his early stories to ‘die a perfectly natural death’, claiming that they ‘were not worthy of publishing’ (Fosburgh 1974: n.p.). Despite Salinger’s explanation, many readers would much prefer to keep all of his work alive, evidenced by the fact that the publisher sold 25,000 copies of the illegal anthology in two months.

By 1965 Salinger had published one novel {The Catcher in the Rye), five long stories (’Franny’, ‘Zooey’, ‘Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters’, ‘Seymour: An Introduction’ and ‘Hapworth 16, 1924’) and 30 short stories, of which only eight have been collected (one of the Nine Stories was new for the collection). References have been found to several other stories which have either been lost or absorbed into published work. This publication history means that much of Salinger’s reputation rests on his novel about Holden Caulfield (1951) and the longer stories concerned with the Glass family (1955-65). His work prior to the publication of A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ (1948) in The New Yorker is increasingly difficult to locate. While the period between his first published story and ‘Bananafish’ is only a matter of eight years, it creates a significant gap in readers’ knowledge of Salinger’s work. More significant still is the silence that began in 1965 after the appearance of ‘Hapworth 16, 1924’ in the New Yorker, the story that is, to date, Salinger’s final publication.

Despite great success with his short stories, Salinger struggled with Catcher for several years and began to doubt that he would ever finish it. He claimed to be ‘a dash man not a miler’, meaning that he was more comfortable with the short story (the ‘dash’) than the novel form (the ‘mile’), and maintained that ‘it is probable that I will never write a novel’ (Hamilton 1998: 94). After ten years, however, The Catcher in the Rye was finally ready for publication in July 1951 and it stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for the rest of the year. It was a success almost in spite of Salinger’s efforts: he was reluctant to undertake publicity for the novel, disliked the bright red cover (an image of a carrousel horse) and accompanying author photograph, and tended to fall out with his publishers, apparently distrusting their motives. Although some later paperback editions would have even more gaudy covers, Salinger eventually managed to have all of his work produced in plain jackets without any notes, reviews, or author photograph. Nothing about the presentation of the work advertises, describes (or distracts the reader from) the text within. Despite Salinger’s apparent lack of enthusiasm, the novel was reviewed widely in the USA, principally because of his status as a New Yorker writer, and received much praise. Unusually for a first novel, Catcher was the ‘Book-of-the-Month’ Club’s choice for summer 1951, guaranteeing substantial sales.

Salinger’s response to Catcher’s positive reception was ambivalent: he commented in 1952 that he ‘enjoyed a small part of it, but most of it I found hectic and professionally and personally demoralizing’ (Hamilton 1998:121), though it is not clear why he reacted this way. The novel sold well and, once it appeared in paperback in 1953, made Salinger famous, especially among young adult readers. Catcher and the later Glass family fiction express challenging ideas about life in modern America that struck a chord with post-war youth hungry for new perspectives. Before long, Catcher was appearing on university reading lists, and by the late 1950s the first serious critical essays on the novel were appearing in literary journals. In the more than 50 years since its publication, millions of copies of the novel have been sold worldwide and the flow of detailed analysis has been more or less constant.

Although Salinger continued to publish fiction for 14 years after Catcher, the frequency decreased dramatically, and his final story appeared after a six-year silence. He retreated from the public eye, refused to give interviews and moved out of New York to Cornish, New Hampshire, where he bought a remote farmhouse in which he has lived ever since. He married Claire Douglas in 1955 and had two children with her (Margaret and Matthew) but they divorced after 12 years; Margaret has written a memoir of her life, Dream Catcher (2000), which offers some insight into her father’s personality, not least the traumatic impact of his war experiences. In 1972 Salinger had a relationship with a young writer, Joyce Maynard, who describes her life with him in her memoir, At Home in the World(1998). Aside from these texts, very little is known about Salinger and rumours about him – from the plausible (he continues to write but chooses not to publish) to the bizarre (he and the equally reclusive author Thomas Pynchon are the same person) – have flowed freely since he ceased to make public statements about his life and work.

POST-WAR AMERICA: SOCIETY AND CULTURE

Although Catcher is understood to be a novel that captures the unease of American society in the 1950s and articulates the emerging phenomenon of adolescent identity, the novel is in many ways a product of the 1940s. It is set in 1949 and draws on ‘Slight Rebellion off Madison’, which Salinger had completed before he joined the Army in 1942. The Second World War so dominates the decade that the post-war 1940s tend to be forgotten, but those years saw the beginning of social changes in the US that would shape the 1950s and 1960s.

America’s participation in the war pulled the country out of the ‘Great Depression’ (the economic crisis that had a profound effect on society in the 1930s) and by 1945 the US was prosperous. Deploying the atomic bomb at the end of the war not only presented ’a dramatic image of American power to the world’ (Henriksen 1997:15), forcing Japan to surrender, it also took the world into a new age. The horror of conventional warfare (which had taken 35 million lives in the Second World War alone) had now been superseded by the threat of atomic war. Holden assumes that such a disaster is inevitable and expresses both his anti-war feelings and his preoccupation with death and suicide when he comments, ‘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’ (Salinger 1994a: 127).

By the time that Catcher was published in 1951, the United States was enmeshed in the Cold War. Although the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) had been an ally to the US against Nazi Germany, post-war America was anxious about Communist ideologies that were taking hold in Eastern Europe and China and the possibility that the Soviets would develop atomic weapons, which they achieved in 1949, ending America’s nuclear monopoly. Despite the ever-present threat of a Third World War, the Cold War against the Soviet Union concretized rapidly. This was an ideological, rather than a physical, conflict based on American hostility to Communism, the antithesis of its capitalist principles.

Holden’s anti-war beliefs and hatred of phonies can be related to the ethos of post-war America, which was pre-occupied with matters of secrecy and security. Government policies focused on identifying anyone who might betray the nation. The ‘House Un-American Activities Committee’ (HUAC) had been established in 1937 to identify ‘subversives’, principally Communists, within Federal government, union-organized workforces and, most famously, Hollywood, on the basis that anti-American propaganda might infiltrate films. Those brought to trial by the HUAC were asked to testify about their allegiance to Communism and name other sympathizers: such accusations, even if untrue, ruined many people’s careers. From 1950, the HUAC’s work was supported by the rise to prominence of Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose obsession with identifying subversives without much regard for facts has made ‘McCarthyism’ a synonym for persecution and government-sponsored repression.

McCarthy’s so-called ‘witch trials’ were satirized in Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible (1953), which drew an analogy between the self-serving deceptions of Puritanism and the betrayals provoked by the HUAC’s interrogations, but the danger of being associated with Communism was well-established. For example, while the campaign for the racial desegregation of schools was given legal power by the ‘Brown v. Board of Education’ decision (1954), progress towards equality for African Americans was often undermined by propaganda that associated a desire for civil rights with the ‘evil’ of Communism: the film / was a Communist for the FBI (1951) ‘shows the [Communist] Party taking credit for race riots’ (Whitfield 1996: 21). However, the association of civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr with Christianity both reflected the high level of church-going among African Americans – mirroring the post-war rise in church-going among white Americans – and distanced the civil rights movement from damaging associations with secular Communism.

A key aspect of Catcher’s impact in the early 1950s is that it presents a rebel against the status quo as its hero, critiquing the equilibrium that government policy was struggling to maintain. The fears provoked by the Cold War produced a conservative ethos in American society in the 1940s and 1950s, supported by an economic boom that was especially beneficial to middle-class white Americans. More people than ever before were able to buy their own home and car, and many moved to the new suburbs which grew up as a result of the post-war surge in home-building. The ideal of the time was to re-establish the conventional family that had been disrupted by the war, with a father who went out to work and a mother who stayed at home and raised the children.

These values constituted a signi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Furtherreading
• eCopyright