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FLUNKING EVERYTHING ELSE EXCEPT ENGLISH ANYWAY: HOLDEN CAULFIELD,AUTHOR

The imagination also has a history … the imagination is also part of autobiography. Leonard Cohen, Interview (2006) 1

Few self-accounts, whether autobiography or novel, display quite so ostensibly disaffecting a take-it-or-leave-it bravura as The Catcher in the Rye. From Holden’s opening disparagement of his early childhood as “all that kind David Caulfield kind of crap” through to his last, peremptory “that’s all I’m going to tell about”,2 J.D. Salinger has his narrator sound the very model of scepticism about whether indeed we do “really want to hear about it” (3). Yet given the book’s spectacular popularity since its publication in 1951, clearly only the most obdurate of readers have proved resistant to wanting to hear about it and to Holden’s different virtuoso flights of scorn or dismay or selective approval. Yet however Holden has most come to be regarded – one of the classic isolates of modern times, the savvy but endlessly vulnerable witness to crassness and bad faith, post-war American adolescence itself – he also engages to become the catcher of his own broken self. That is, he invites a conscious, at times near conspiratorial, tryst with his reader, a reciprocal, and so redeeming, companion awareness. In giving notice, at virtually every turn, of the need to establish a usable signature in life, so he shows himself, knowingly or not, as nothing other that the author-in-waiting of The Catcher in the Rye. To that end, and in kind, he consciously and recurrently reaches out to the reader

1 Interview with Leonard Cohen, PBS News Hour Poetry Series, 29 June 2006. 2 J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1951, 3 and 276. All other references will be in the text. 390 Gothic to Multicultural for a mutuality of spirit, the collaborative saving effort of co- imagination.3 In part the appeal of the novel accrues to Salinger’s originality in conceiving as his narrator the seventeen-year-old who hovers dauntingly at “six foot two and a half” (3), whose hair has turned its celebrated and premature grey on the right side of his head, and who writes of Pencey Prep and his all but Lost Weekend in New York from his West Coast psychiatric ward in the wake of his nervous breakdown. But, to use a key term from the novel, the “composition” (37) Holden offers is far from some merely offbeat recollections of an endlessly put-upon and precocious teenager. His final composition can be seen as the latest in a trajectory that time upon time has seen Holden composing with quite extraordinary fertility other themes, other selves, other identities. Each, however, has hitherto been of the moment, a spontaneous if never other than highly particular creation conjured into being to meet a required part, or to win or deflect attention, or to fill up the spaces of his loneliness, or, often enough, simply to make good on his sheer creative overdrive. Whatever the occasion, this serial of made-up identities could not be more inviting or more often hugely funny, a kind of inspired, even euphoric, ventriloquy on Holden’s part, and at the same time a set of rehearsals, a repertoire, to be called back into play in the role of catcher as eventual author-autobiographer. In this connection, too, it cannot surprise us that nearly all the qualities and people Holden reveals himself to prize possess a humanity marked out by style, and an authenticity not only of heart or the senses, but also of art. Indeed, these are people like Holden himself – the Holden who can be wilful, contrary, often impossible, yet in a manner insistently of his own making and at odds with whatever is to be deemed dull, conformist, mere formula. Each

3 Oddly, this aspect of Holden has not been much covered in the criticism. But I do want to acknowledge the following: Eugene McNamara, “Holden as Novelist”, English Journal, 54 (March 1965), 166-70, and Warren French, “The Artist as a Very Nervous Young Man”, Chapter 8, in J.D. Salinger, NY: Twayne, 1963, 102-29. Other criticism with a bearing includes Maxwell Geismar, “The Wise Child and the New Yorker School of Fiction”, in American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity, NY: Hill and Wang, 1958, 195-205; Donald P. Costello, “The Language of The Catcher in the Rye”, American Speech, 34 (October 1959); and Carl F. Strauch, “Kings in the Back Row: Meaning Through Structure – A Reading of Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye”, Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 2 (Winter 1961), 5-30.