By Kate Rix
When J.D. Salinger died last year he was eulogized as a misanthropic genius who had captured the alienation of adolescence — perhaps even defined teenage experience as distinct from that of adults — with his most famous work, Catcher in the Rye.
True enough, says Berkeley English professor Scott Saul, but what is less known is that Salinger created the book’s hero, Holden Caulfield, a prep-school dropout adrift in the adult world of New York City, partly as a stand-in for anguished soldiers returning home from fighting in World War II.
A veteran himself who saw combat on D-Day and in the Battle of the Bulge, Salinger later suffered a mental breakdown and was hospitalized for wartime stress. He shared stories with his daughter about the human carnage he witnessed during the war. He found it difficult to write about the emotional fallout of the war, however. Only in “For Esme — with Love & Squalor” did Salinger write from the inside of the pain suffered by veterans.
“It was difficult to write about anguished masculinity during and after World War II,” says Saul, who specializes in 20th century American literature. “The culture was allergic to it, especially after the Cold War began and America seemed to be gearing up for a battle of another sort. So Salinger created a character that was younger and less burdened by the obligation to be heroic. Catcher looks back in a disguised way towards World War II. The culture opened up and accommodated it.”
Salinger lamented what he saw as a kind of stoic heroism that characterized the writing of the World War II generation, writers like Norman Mailer and James Jones, author of From Here to Eternity.
“So far, the novels of this war have too much of the strength, maturity, and craftsmanship that critics are looking for and too little of the glorious imperfections which teeter and fall off the best minds,” Salinger wrote in a 1945 letter to Esquire magazine.
“The men who have been in this war deserve some sort of trembling melody rendered without embarrassment or regret.”
That “trembling melody” that Salinger found to be absent from 1940s fiction is a hallmark of Holden Caulfield’s voice. Caulfield wanders the city’s streets observing the people around him, judging them, picking up details and following the digressive tangents of his own thoughts in a slangy first-person narration.
“The reason that it comes off so well is because Holden is so observant,” Saul says. “He seems to see through other people’s performances, and that ironic vantage point allows him to make a lot of satirical observations about how society works and the invisible rules that govern human behavior.”
Yet Salinger’s art is complicated. At the same time that Caulfield is judging others, he invites us to analyze him. When he rants internally about a woman he encounters in a bar who is “blocking up the whole goddam traffic in the aisle” and how she enjoys taking up so much space, he almost seems to take pleasure in complaining. He is ill at ease in the world, “touchy” as he calls himself, and struggles to endure interactions with other people.
“That’s a delicate dance for a writer. You want the narrator to be likable and shrewd but also open to our scrutiny,” Saul says. When lecturing on Catcher, Saul moves slowly through the language, so students can get a sense of the craft.
What’s at stake for Caulfield is his search for an appropriate way to be in the world. If the character were a soldier returning home, the story might have touched too raw a nerve. “There was widespread anxiety after the war — a fear that returning veterans would find no place for themselves. Perhaps they might become disaffected, like German veterans after World War I, or perhaps they’d simply be walking wounded — mentally unhinged from all the violence they’d witnessed,” Saul says. “And a society full of walking wounded was not going to be the victory culture that America imagined itself to be.”
Eventually the G.I. Bill was conceived as a political solution to the problem. Veterans were able to attend college and receive job training. Meanwhile, by the mid-1950s, the paperback revolution had started, transforming book publishing, and Catcher was one of the industry’s first paperback sensations. Rather than a disguised war novel, it was taken as a cutting analysis of postwar conformity.
“People saw it as a novel that questioned the ‘man with the gray flannel suit’ and was suspicious of the hidden discipline of social role-playing,” Saul says. But Salinger was ambivalent about the book’s appeal to young readers and loathed being a public figure himself. For all of the psychological openness of Salinger’s writing style, he did not want to share his own story.
He eventually retreated to a secluded home in New England and strenuously fought to protect his privacy. He famously and successfully sued to stop the publication of a biography in the late 1980s.
Some of Saul’s students do not relate to Holden Caulfield. Caulfield, after all, is the product of a privileged childhood and lives in a world that, for all of its pain, can seem like a protected bubble to some. Yet other students of his respond to Catcher very intensely. Salinger may have intended the book for an audience of adults, but the story advances the idea that American teenagers have their own particular experience, their own privileges and anxieties.
“It remains American literature’s greatest handbook of cool,” Saul notes, “a guide for how to keep your integrity in a world that has lost it.”
