On July 16, 1951, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye hit bookstore shelves. Clad in a red, white and yellow dust jacket with a carousel horse leaping across a cityscape, this short novel, now 70 years old, refuses to fade away. The subject of 26 book-length studies and hundreds of articles, with thousands of magazine, newspaper, film, television, song — even cartoon — references, Catcher, narrated by eternal teenager Holden Caulfield, is available in four formats, including a Kindle edition. Tens of millions of copies have sold.
Catcher made Salinger moderately rich. As he confided to his close friend, Lillian Ross of The New Yorker: “That little boy, I owe so much to him. He made it possible for me to have my freedom to do what I love.”
The film rights alone could have purchased him all of Cornish, where he lived from 1953 until his death in 2010. The author, however, was to forbid further monetization of the work, adamant to preserve his readers’ intimate relationship with its main character. But Holden’s voice, as he tells his story of flunking out of prep school and embarking on a three-day odyssey through Manhattan, would gain international recognition.
Realizing that Catcher would celebrate a milestone birthday this year, I began to reminisce (having just turned 70 myself) about my attachment to the book.
On my 16th birthday, my mother gave me a copy and my lifelong obsession was born, growing to embrace other Salinger works and to inform my own publications on the author and his writings. I wondered whether Holden’s voice might still speak as clearly to us veteran fans and, if at all, to those younger. I had already queried my niece in high school a number of years ago, when the novel was included on her mandatory reading list. “Everybody loves Holden,” she assured me.
But at a recent visit to my family doctor, I learned that her son in middle school had selected the novel from a list of suggested titles. Once a staple of the college and then of the high school syllabus, was Catcher in danger of being elbowed aside? I looked to others in the field for some answers.
I first heard from Ennio Ranaboldo, author of Invito alla lettura di Salinger (Invitation to the Reading of Salinger), who told me of the Scuola Holden, a college founded in Turin, Italy, with its aim “to create a school Holden Caulfield would never be expelled from.” And British author Geoff Dyer responded: “Catcher was a defining reading experience for me. … What was extraordinary is how, in 1972, a 15-year-old schoolboy in an English town found himself entirely at home within this foreign idiom.”
Catcher “had an electric impact on me,” Jay McInerney related. “Holden’s voice was mesmerizing and remained remarkably fresh some 20 years after … though, as I grew older, it was the short stories that really impressed me.”
Salinger biographer Kenneth Slawenski questioned whether “the novel itself is as relevant to the present generation as in times past.” Indeed, on Catcher’s 50th birthday, in 2001, Louis Menand of The New Yorker had opined: “The book keeps acquiring readers not because kids keep discovering it but because grownups who read it when they were kids keep getting kids to read it.”
Some encouraging news arrived from Japan.
Yasuhiro Takeuchi, professor and a leading Salinger scholar with an upcoming book, Nazotoki Salinger (Deciphering Salinger), drew my attention to the 2019 anime movie Weathering with You, “whose hero is carrying a copy of (Haruki) Murakami’s translation (of Catcher) with him.” The movie has spiked a new tsunami of interest in the novel.
Brad McDuffie, professor and author of Teaching Salinger’s Nine Stories, remarked on Salinger’s attempt to reconcile his conflict with World War II and its aftermath in his writing. McDuffie sees “the conflict” addressed in Holden’s grief over the death of his brother, Allie. “Holden finds a way to reconcile himself with the world (even the phonies). This is (Salinger’s) great gift … an enduring legacy that resonates just as powerfully 70 years after its publication.”
Roger Lathbury of Orchises Press summed up Catcher’s relevance: “This one novel, like The Great Gatsby, has come to be emblematic of a slice of American life, and to influence succeeding generations. Its intensity, its reserves of humor and sadness, and its absolute authenticity of style and perspective ensure the permanence of its appeal. More than just a loved book, (Catcher) is an event in the lives of Americans in their quest for maturity and judgment.”
Yet even those who valued Catcher and the 1953 collection, Nine Stories, condemned the later works.
John Updike may have delivered the harshest blow in his 1961 review of Franny and Zooey: “Salinger loves (his characters) the Glasses more than God loves them. … He loves them to the detriment of artistic moderation.”
When I asked Gordon Lish for his thoughts, he felt, “regrettably,” that Updike’s “will be the dominant posture among those you interrogate vis-à-vis reactions to Salinger’s writing.” But he stressed the importance of “keeping Salinger’s work noted.”
In 1965, The New Yorker published Hapworth 16, 1924. While two previous books had received a hostile reception, this last story suffered outright dismissal. Salinger’s voice went silent.
Ironically, the author’s withdrawal from the literary scene only served to bolster curiosity about his personal life and his efforts to protect it from scrutiny. I was not surprised when Anna Johnston, of Sydney, Australia, told me that, in founding her business with its goal to “consult, train, publish, blog and tweet on all things privacy,” she decided on the name “Salinger Privacy.”
With Salinger’s passing in 2010, Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker wrote: “And so his death throws us back from the myth to the magical world of his writing as it really is, with its matchless comedy, its ear for American speech, its contagious ardor and incomparable charm.”
The New York Times carried British critic and novelist David Lodge’s appraisal: “His was arguably the first truly original voice in American prose fiction after the generation of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner.”
During the author’s lifetime, his reputation as a writer survived devastating memoirs by Joyce Maynard and his own daughter, Margaret. But with the advent of #MeToo and Maynard’s subsequent articles, Jan. 1, 2019, saw the centennial of his birth come and go with hardly a mention, “a startling fact,” journalist Cathy Young observed, “that almost certainly has more to do with the cultural and sexual politics of this moment than with Salinger’s place in literature.”
The J.D. Salinger Literary Trust revealed, later in 2019, that 50 years’ worth of unpublished material will eventually be released. Matt Salinger, the author’s son, estimated “another five to seven years” to ready the works for publication. If you don’t want to wait, I can offer a sneak preview. Go to the paperback Centennial Edition of Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour — An Introduction. There you will find, hiding on the inside flap, three sentences by Buddy Glass that have not been seen before.
Along with Catcher, many of Salinger’s stories have been cherished by decades of readers, and some have become embedded in their lives. Novelist Maxine Hong Kingston shared: “When my friend, Bill Ogilvie, was on his deathbed, I read The Laughing Man to him. Fun remembering New York, and Hong, the giant Mongolian whose tongue had been burned out by white men.”
For an entire swath of us, the desire to see new books takes on urgency. “Like everyone else,” remarked Ranaboldo, “I hope to read some of his unpublished work before I die!”
Bruce F. Mueller, of San Francisco, is an independent Salinger scholar and the author, with Will Hochman, of Critical Companion to J.D. Salinger.