All I'd Like to Be

Last weekend, I re-read J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye for the first time in about 30 years. It's different, reading it on this side of youth, but it struck me as being just as brilliant, maybe even more so. What a sure touch! What vivid creation of character and personality, what control of dialogue, what humor and poignant sadness and truth! 

I was a big Salinger fan growing up - my grandmother used to clip the stories from the New Yorker, some which never made it into a book, and my mother also read and re-read his works and loved to talk about the characters; a particular favorite was "For Esmé, With Love and Squalor." Maybe that's partly why this book seemed to jump off the shelf into my hands last week.

Funny thing, though -- Salinger and I ended up being neighbors, practically -- he's a reclusive resident of a neighboring town up here. The local people who know him help protect him from intrusions. I only saw him once, when he left a cloth and yarn shop I used to frequent, and afterwards the clerk told me who the previous customer had been. I was told he used to occasionally appear behind customers at the local bookstore, wait for them to pick up one of his books, take it out of their hands and autograph it, and then disappear. I love "Franny and Zooey" the best, and have read it and Nine Stories more often, but "Catcher in the Rye" knocked me out.

What gets me is how anyone who had read it could possibly wonder WHY this man dropped out of the literary world to become a recluse. It's right there, in words. I'm just grateful he didn't take the route of Seymour Glass and end it all.

What I didn't remember was how the book got its name. Toward the end of the book, Holden, who's gotten kicked out of yet another prep school and is delaying the confrontation with his parents, is having a conversation with his little sister, Phoebe. He's trying to remember the Robert Burns song, "If a body meet a body coming through the rye," except he remembers it as "if a body catch a body." Phoebe corrects him. Holden doesn't care, though, and says:

"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff..."

..."That's all I'd do all day.  I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all.  I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be."

My book is a creased, beat-up, 50-cent Signet edition, with a gold cover and white title on a red field. It was printed in 1959, the twelfth printing of the 1945 manuscript, and it says this is a reprint of the original hardcover edition by Little, Brown & Co. (I certainly didn't read it the first time before 1966 or so.) On the cover there's a watercolor illustration of Holden Caulfield carrying his suitcase with its "Pencey Prep" stickers and wearing his red hunting cap, turned backwards, walkng through a sleazy section of New York. A boxed sidebar reads: "This unusual book may shock you, will make you laugh, and may break your heart - but you will never forget it."

And on the inside, on the first page, there's a quote from the New York Times: "An unusally brilliant first novel."

Comments

[blork]

"The Catcher in the Rye" is probably my favorite novel of all time, but I'm always a bit reluctant to admit it because so many other people cite it as their favorite. It makes me feel unoriginal, or worse, like I'm (in Holden's words) a "phoney."

I came to it late; I was in my late 20s when I read it. But I was going through a lot of changes at the time, and questioning a lot of things, so it really shook me. I'm still shaking.

I've never re-read it. I think I'm afraid that a second reading might cast it in a different light, that it might fall off the exhalted pillar where it sits in my mind.

[blork]

Oh yeah, and check this out:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/blork/188894096/

[Beth]

That's it!! Amazing.

[margaret]

You expressed my own experience of the novel, and feelings so well.

And "Franny & Zooey" remains my fave.

I'm now inspired to re-read both novels. Used to every year or so, but I realise it's been a long, long time.

[Chris Clarke]

You've made me want to re-read it now.