Why Do People Love 'Catcher in the Rye'?

To remember J. D. Salinger is, of course, to remember The Catcher in the Rye—though not, perhaps, how some critics didn't like it in 1951. Catholic World noted its "formidably excessive use of amateur swearing and coarse language," and there seemed to be some question as to whether an alienated, hard-drinking, chain-smoking flunkie like Holden Caulfield was going to prove a good influence on the young. Other critics did say it made them "chuckle and ... even laugh aloud," and many immediately compared Holden to Huck Finn. Still, Harcourt Brace, which rejected the book, did not yet have much to live down: The overall critical reception was decidedly un-extraordinary. Sales-wise, too, Catcher did reasonably but not exceptionally well. But, now, that was in hardcover. What with the recent invention of the "perfect binding"--a book binding using glue rather than stitching--there was the paperback to consider, as well. Did not Catcher seem like the sort of book that might do well in the new format?

And so it did, going on to sell over 60 million copies. Moreover, in 1956, some dam in critical interest seemed to burst. So many Catcher studies appeared that the '50s were dubbed "the Decade of Salinger"; contemporaneous writers complained of neglect as Holden Caulfield was compared not only to Huck Finn but to Billy Budd, David Copperfield, Natty Bumpo, Quentin Compson, Ishmael, Peter Pan, Hamlet, Jesus Christ, Adam, and Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom put together. What critic George Steiner was to call the "Salinger industry" began to swell fantastically, until it sat like a large, determined bird on a bunker-like egg.

Where did all this start? In a 1940 letter to a friend, a 21-year-old Salinger described his novel-in-progress as "autobiographical"; and decades later, too, in an interview with a high school reporter--the only interview he's ever given--Salinger said, "My boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the book." Of course, there were differences: unlike Holden, Salinger was, among other things, a half-Jewish, half-Catholic brotherless World War II vet who attended a military academy. He did, though, like Holden, flunk out of prep school. And he was also, like Holden, manager of his high school fencing team, in which capacity he apparently really did once lose the team gear en route to a meet.

More importantly, Salinger seems to have shared Holden's disaffection. Numerous youthful acquaintances remember him as sardonic, rant-prone, a loner. His daughter, 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."

But what of Margaret Salinger's theory regarding anti-Semitism? She characterizes Salinger as sensitive about his Jewishness with good cause—noting, for example, that a few years before her father’s arrival at the military academy, a Jew who had graduated second in his class found his picture printed on a perforated page of the yearbook so that it could be torn out. Ian Hamilton's unofficial biography of Salinger, too, cites a letter from the father of a girl to whom Salinger once proposed, describing him as "an odd fellow. He didn't mingle much with the other guests [at their Daytona Beach hotel]. … He was—well, is he Jewish? I thought that might explain the way he acted. ... I thought he had a chip on his shoulder."

Interestingly, though, Salinger's sister, in an interview, focuses on his in-between-ness 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 to view his activities as virtuoso performances of deep subterfuge--given his youthful interest in acting, especially--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."