"It was all about hormones. It described how you should look, your face and eyes and all, if your hormones were in good shape, and I didn't look that way at all. I looked exactly like the guy in the article with lousy hormones."
--Holden Caulfield
One nice thing about the stay at home COVID19 time is I can take down off the shelf the books I know I should have read or should have appreciated and finally get to them. I've just finished "Catcher in the Rye," and will start "Of Mice and Men" poste haste.
My clearest memory of "Catcher" is that of Bruce Lewis, a junior high school English teacher who had a class of all the best and brightest 8th grade kids--which did not include me somehow--and he marched them down the hill from Western Junior High School to the Little Falls Library, off school grounds in 1960, so they could read "Catcher." Mr. Lewis looked at me through a school window while I stood on the ground outside, with his Eurasian eyes and asked if I had read the book and I lied. I had started the book, but got bored or disenchanted, I can't recall, and I don't know why I didn't just say, "No," but for whatever reason I asserted I had and when Mr. Lewis asked me what the one thing I got out of it was I said I could only recall the one word I got out of it, "godam."
Mr. Lewis looked at me piteously and I'm sure I confirmed the reason in that instant why I had not been selected for his class.
"Catcher" was such a masterpiece, apparently, in Mr. Lewis's eyes, that it was worth defying the Montgomery County schools and marching his students off campus to read it.
Reading it now, it strikes me as very much a period piece, a tale "told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
The language is supposed to be that of a 17 year old upper class boy, the son of a corporate lawyer who lives in his manse on East 71st Street in Manhattan and sends his children to private schools. Holden has annoying verbal ticks, using "and all" the way kids today use "like" as a place holder, a breathing point and it's just as annoying. These expressions, "swell" and "and all" and "I'm not crazy about" are supposed to be the mode of post war adolescence, and for all I know, it might be accurate enough.
We learn he is good looking, has a crew cut, is six feet two and he feels confident enough to walk into a Manhattan hotel and sign in, and to order up an in-house prostitute and to go to bars in midtown and Greenich Village and order cocktails, which, because he is big enough, are sometimes provided although he may look under-aged.
Caulfield is searing in his descriptions of teen aged boys popping their pimples, cutting their toenails, combing their hair narcissisticly, and being unwilling to share their knowledge of girls with him.
He spends most of his time in New York, when he's not ordering drinks in bars from unwilling waiters, calling old girl friends from phone booths and dealing with their parents, who answer the phone and lying about the reason for his calls.
But what really struck me was his casual cruelty--he pities homely girls. Girls are either really good looking or homely. That's all we really see of Holden's girls. His sister is the only girl who actually has much to say, and she's prepubescent. But the girls he phones and the girl he meets to take to the ice skating rink have little to say. He does mention, with barely concealed hostility, the skimpy ice skating skirt his date insists on pulling on, a skirt designed to expose her rear end tantalizingly. In his description is the complaint that he is being teased by a girl who knows exactly what she is doing, but she can barely skate, and her ankles fail to support her, presenting, not the spinning seductress but a pathetic clown. You can say this is the adolescent perception, but this is the classic male, some would say, misogynist complaint: Those women, they flaunt their sexuality only to exert their power over us men. They are just daring us, and we have to sit there and take it.
And he refuses to fork over $5 to the prostitute's pimp, on principle, although she clearly could use the money, and he refuses to defuse, just as he did with his school mates. He fights fights which a man would simply step away from--knowing the risks are not worth the benefits.
Most revealingly, he takes his little sister to a shoe store where they make the poor store clerk bring out every shoe in the store, before buying the simple pair of moccasins they came for, simply for the joy of abusing this poor clerk. The fun in running this poor worker into the ground just "knocked out" Phoebe, so it pleased Holden. It's the sort of thing a really wealthy boy might do and it was the one scene that really rang true. A rich, privileged pair of children exerting their power in teasing a poor work-a-day slob. Caulfield is no kinder to his school mates and he demonstrates his callowness for the reader by persisting in questioning his friends about sex, which at first sounds simply naive, but then, later he reveals he is not a virgin. Then he goes after a former dorm counselor in a crowded bar at a full volume voice, about the mysteries of sex and about his fascination about sex with an Asian woman. What is that like? Did I, even as a 17 year old think of sex with an Asian woman as something like sex with a Martian? I distinctly remember being not much older and the Asian girls I knew were simply girls I would have been very happy to have been invited to explore. No, this is not adolescence; this is white supremacy.
He is also unwilling to humor his unfortunate history teacher who asked him to write a simply essay on ancient Egypt, in which he says he knows only Egypt is in North Africa and were good at mummies. After considerable effort on the part of the teacher, that is all Holden would give him in return, and it pained the teacher to have to fail him, but Holden shrugs it off.
Salinger drops in the story of Holden's brother just about the time you are ready to throw the book across the room to rid yourself of this entitled, self indulgent, whiner, to let you know that he's not simply alienated by the effete faculty of elitist prep schools but he has a bone fide deep hurt connected to the death of someone who really mattered to him. And once that cheap pitch to inner hurt starts to wear thin, he throws in the school mate who jumped out of the dorm window for no good reason, but that seems to encapsulate the unfeeling, ruthless and utterly cruel nature of upper class private schools. Except you never really find out enough about this child, the circumstances to actually make it matter to you. To Holden, the episode was just another example of how phony everyone at prep schools are: the boys involved never went to jail, but were only expelled. Of course, you never find out whether that was a reasonable response or not. You just hear from Holden it was phony.
Hemingway, I've read, noted that Holden Caulfield was guilty of every offense of which he accused others. I counted up callousness, insensitivity, pettiness, avarice, jealously, envy, unwarranted rage. He begins by telling you he is the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. He finds exaggeration the height of hilarity: every one over thirty is a hundred and fifty years old, distances are always hundreds of miles--all of which is supposed to be authentically adolescent talk of the mid 1940's I suppose, and I'm not able to gainsay it. Maybe people really sounded like that back then.
In fact, in the Trump era, listening to Holden Caulfield through the 192 page slog struck me as somehow familiar. A minimally verbal, angry child, who has lost a brother at an early age, struts around New York City, entitled, casually cruel, obliquely, possibly incestuous, complaining the world has done him wrong before he ever makes any attempt to put himself in a position to change the world--not unfamiliar.
Salinger does cleave to "the voice" of the narrator consistently, which would be wonderful if that voice were the voice of Huckleberry Finn or Jack Crabb, or Scout Finch or Frederick Henry, but this voice is simply a dozen or so eructations, by which everyone is "old" so and so and bad things "stink" or are "crumy" and all.
And pity the poor room mate or acquaintance who might "bring out the old sadist" in him.
Despite the relentless teen talk manner of expression, what jarred me was the completely incomprehensible assurance of a 17 year old who navigated his way around hotels, bars, jazz joints, demanding to be served alcohol, dealing with prostitutes and older women, and confronting an adult world which made sense to him in a way totally beyond my ken as a 17 or even 21 year old, but then again, maybe I was just a case of arrested development.
The fact is, any boy of 17 who could navigate the big city driven by those raging hormones like Caulfield probably would find Choate, Andover or Exeter pretty tame.
In the end, it made me feel better to know I hadn't missed much in Salinger all these years, at least not in "Catcher." And it re confirmed, if I ever needed it, what school teachers in my school boy days were like.
--Holden Caulfield
One nice thing about the stay at home COVID19 time is I can take down off the shelf the books I know I should have read or should have appreciated and finally get to them. I've just finished "Catcher in the Rye," and will start "Of Mice and Men" poste haste.
My clearest memory of "Catcher" is that of Bruce Lewis, a junior high school English teacher who had a class of all the best and brightest 8th grade kids--which did not include me somehow--and he marched them down the hill from Western Junior High School to the Little Falls Library, off school grounds in 1960, so they could read "Catcher." Mr. Lewis looked at me through a school window while I stood on the ground outside, with his Eurasian eyes and asked if I had read the book and I lied. I had started the book, but got bored or disenchanted, I can't recall, and I don't know why I didn't just say, "No," but for whatever reason I asserted I had and when Mr. Lewis asked me what the one thing I got out of it was I said I could only recall the one word I got out of it, "godam."
Mr. Lewis looked at me piteously and I'm sure I confirmed the reason in that instant why I had not been selected for his class.
"Catcher" was such a masterpiece, apparently, in Mr. Lewis's eyes, that it was worth defying the Montgomery County schools and marching his students off campus to read it.
Reading it now, it strikes me as very much a period piece, a tale "told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
The language is supposed to be that of a 17 year old upper class boy, the son of a corporate lawyer who lives in his manse on East 71st Street in Manhattan and sends his children to private schools. Holden has annoying verbal ticks, using "and all" the way kids today use "like" as a place holder, a breathing point and it's just as annoying. These expressions, "swell" and "and all" and "I'm not crazy about" are supposed to be the mode of post war adolescence, and for all I know, it might be accurate enough.
We learn he is good looking, has a crew cut, is six feet two and he feels confident enough to walk into a Manhattan hotel and sign in, and to order up an in-house prostitute and to go to bars in midtown and Greenich Village and order cocktails, which, because he is big enough, are sometimes provided although he may look under-aged.
Caulfield is searing in his descriptions of teen aged boys popping their pimples, cutting their toenails, combing their hair narcissisticly, and being unwilling to share their knowledge of girls with him.
He spends most of his time in New York, when he's not ordering drinks in bars from unwilling waiters, calling old girl friends from phone booths and dealing with their parents, who answer the phone and lying about the reason for his calls.
But what really struck me was his casual cruelty--he pities homely girls. Girls are either really good looking or homely. That's all we really see of Holden's girls. His sister is the only girl who actually has much to say, and she's prepubescent. But the girls he phones and the girl he meets to take to the ice skating rink have little to say. He does mention, with barely concealed hostility, the skimpy ice skating skirt his date insists on pulling on, a skirt designed to expose her rear end tantalizingly. In his description is the complaint that he is being teased by a girl who knows exactly what she is doing, but she can barely skate, and her ankles fail to support her, presenting, not the spinning seductress but a pathetic clown. You can say this is the adolescent perception, but this is the classic male, some would say, misogynist complaint: Those women, they flaunt their sexuality only to exert their power over us men. They are just daring us, and we have to sit there and take it.
And he refuses to fork over $5 to the prostitute's pimp, on principle, although she clearly could use the money, and he refuses to defuse, just as he did with his school mates. He fights fights which a man would simply step away from--knowing the risks are not worth the benefits.
Most revealingly, he takes his little sister to a shoe store where they make the poor store clerk bring out every shoe in the store, before buying the simple pair of moccasins they came for, simply for the joy of abusing this poor clerk. The fun in running this poor worker into the ground just "knocked out" Phoebe, so it pleased Holden. It's the sort of thing a really wealthy boy might do and it was the one scene that really rang true. A rich, privileged pair of children exerting their power in teasing a poor work-a-day slob. Caulfield is no kinder to his school mates and he demonstrates his callowness for the reader by persisting in questioning his friends about sex, which at first sounds simply naive, but then, later he reveals he is not a virgin. Then he goes after a former dorm counselor in a crowded bar at a full volume voice, about the mysteries of sex and about his fascination about sex with an Asian woman. What is that like? Did I, even as a 17 year old think of sex with an Asian woman as something like sex with a Martian? I distinctly remember being not much older and the Asian girls I knew were simply girls I would have been very happy to have been invited to explore. No, this is not adolescence; this is white supremacy.
He is also unwilling to humor his unfortunate history teacher who asked him to write a simply essay on ancient Egypt, in which he says he knows only Egypt is in North Africa and were good at mummies. After considerable effort on the part of the teacher, that is all Holden would give him in return, and it pained the teacher to have to fail him, but Holden shrugs it off.
Salinger drops in the story of Holden's brother just about the time you are ready to throw the book across the room to rid yourself of this entitled, self indulgent, whiner, to let you know that he's not simply alienated by the effete faculty of elitist prep schools but he has a bone fide deep hurt connected to the death of someone who really mattered to him. And once that cheap pitch to inner hurt starts to wear thin, he throws in the school mate who jumped out of the dorm window for no good reason, but that seems to encapsulate the unfeeling, ruthless and utterly cruel nature of upper class private schools. Except you never really find out enough about this child, the circumstances to actually make it matter to you. To Holden, the episode was just another example of how phony everyone at prep schools are: the boys involved never went to jail, but were only expelled. Of course, you never find out whether that was a reasonable response or not. You just hear from Holden it was phony.
Hemingway, I've read, noted that Holden Caulfield was guilty of every offense of which he accused others. I counted up callousness, insensitivity, pettiness, avarice, jealously, envy, unwarranted rage. He begins by telling you he is the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. He finds exaggeration the height of hilarity: every one over thirty is a hundred and fifty years old, distances are always hundreds of miles--all of which is supposed to be authentically adolescent talk of the mid 1940's I suppose, and I'm not able to gainsay it. Maybe people really sounded like that back then.
In fact, in the Trump era, listening to Holden Caulfield through the 192 page slog struck me as somehow familiar. A minimally verbal, angry child, who has lost a brother at an early age, struts around New York City, entitled, casually cruel, obliquely, possibly incestuous, complaining the world has done him wrong before he ever makes any attempt to put himself in a position to change the world--not unfamiliar.
Salinger does cleave to "the voice" of the narrator consistently, which would be wonderful if that voice were the voice of Huckleberry Finn or Jack Crabb, or Scout Finch or Frederick Henry, but this voice is simply a dozen or so eructations, by which everyone is "old" so and so and bad things "stink" or are "crumy" and all.
And pity the poor room mate or acquaintance who might "bring out the old sadist" in him.
Despite the relentless teen talk manner of expression, what jarred me was the completely incomprehensible assurance of a 17 year old who navigated his way around hotels, bars, jazz joints, demanding to be served alcohol, dealing with prostitutes and older women, and confronting an adult world which made sense to him in a way totally beyond my ken as a 17 or even 21 year old, but then again, maybe I was just a case of arrested development.
The fact is, any boy of 17 who could navigate the big city driven by those raging hormones like Caulfield probably would find Choate, Andover or Exeter pretty tame.
In the end, it made me feel better to know I hadn't missed much in Salinger all these years, at least not in "Catcher." And it re confirmed, if I ever needed it, what school teachers in my school boy days were like.
Phantom,
ReplyDeleteYour junior high English teacher made a grave error in not having you in that class- you certainly would have added some interesting and entertaining perspective. I agree that in school, readers of the book were divided into two camps- those that were moved and enlightened by it and those who decidedly were not. I resented the expectation that you had to like the book. I agree Holden a very difficult character to warm to and surely no Huck or Scout. But then I wouldn't put Catcher in the Rye in the same league as Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird.
I haven't read Of Mice and Men since school- you'll have to let us know your take on it now. When I was out of school-in my late 20's or early 30's, I read Steinbeck's East of Eden and was a huge fan.it was one of my favorite books and I'd like to reread that sometime to see if I still felt the same.
Maud
Maud,
ReplyDeleteI will go right to East of Eden.
No, I do think people are more like insects than we like to think--they really go from larva to pupa to all the later stages and in Jr. high school I was not all that bright, or if I had some flickers of brightness, they were smothered by a compulsion to try to say what I thought adults wanted to hear. I was not the kid in the back of the car flashing the finger at passing cars. I was more like Holden's roommates, just trying to survive in a world dominated by a heavy adult hand.
I did realize, on some level, my public school teachers were somehow deficient and not to be trusted and had nothing much to teach me.
At college, I suddenly confronted teachers who actually answered questions by showing they knew not just the answer but a host of stuff to which that answer led
You ask about why Atticus Finch defended his client and you got a history of Southern justice, lynching, the idea of justice in an unjust land, jury nullification, the myth of the man unwilling to cave into prevailing power, from High Noon to the Last of the Mohicans.
That was thrilling.
Phantom