I originally posted this as a note on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/j1m1LL3R) in July of 2009. but it seems appropriate to repost here.
The first time I’d heard of The Catcher in the Rye was as I was trying to memorize the lyrics to Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire (1989). This was the summer prior to eighth grade. I asked my mom about the reference: even then I think I understood that in order to adequately memorize a thing I had to know that thing (this fact made declamation contests in Latin classes impossibly hard for me later on, as I was a rather weak student of the classics). Mom told me that The Catcher In the Rye was a book that was first published when she was a child and it was notorious for its foul language (at least, notorious in Virginia), she also admitted she’d never gotten around to reading it herself, but she could tell I was rather titillated at the idea of a book filled with curses. What could such a novel possibly explore? Sex. Clearly.
At my request, mom gave me her visa card as I ran into Nashville’s indie bookseller, David-Kidd, to buy the paperback with a simple burgundy cover and yellow lettering—Gryffindor colors, really. My parents took a by-any-means-necessary approach when it came to my reading, and they probably would have bought me Anais Nin, Henry Miller or Brett Easton Ellis had I asked. The cover was so simple that it proved to be quite provocative: nothing dirty of the cover. It made me think of the “plain brown wrappers” that adult magazines ordered by my friends’ fathers supposedly arrived in. As mom probably hoped against but predicted, I read the first chapter, did not understand the dated language and quickly shelved the book in favor of a syndicated episode of Saved By the Bell.
It wasn’t until freshman year that I decided to revisit the book. It was 1990 and a young and idealistic teacher at my rather stodgy boys’ school was inspiring me to read everything I could get my hands on. In fact, this was the start of a long trend of my reading books that I wanted to read rather than books that I had been assigned—a trend that proved crushing to my high school GPA and was the worst possible outcome to my parents’ plan to raise a lover of words (at least I didn’t become a writer).
I wanted to start a conversation with Mr. Moxley about the text without actually looking too much like a craven teacher’s pet so I couldn’t come out and tell him I was reading the book, and having an extracurricular read “fall out” of my ever-present pile of reading would have invited a whooping by my classmates who prided themselves as being naturally endowed with intellect that they didn’t want to spoil with academia. I eventually settled on asking Mr. Moxley what "grippe" was. He explained that it was an outdated expression for flu and then he followed up by asking if I was reading Catcher—success! He asked for my review and I reported that the main character seemed to go in circles a lot and the book didn’t seem to have too much plot to it. Mr. Moxley told me that I may be a bit too young for it and that I should revisit the book in a few years. Jesus, that hurt to hear from him… too young? I can’t recall if I finished the book or not. The next year, Catcher In the Rye was added to the freshman summer reading list. It was almost fifty, and therefore worthy of making my school’s canonical cut. I reckon the incoming class was, in general, just really mature for their age...
Through high school, I wanted to be identified as teenage literati by my schoolmates and by the girls I wanted to attract, so while hanging out at Mosko’s on Elliston Place or the newly opened Bongo Java on Belmont, I often listed Catcher In the Rye as one of my favorite reads, along with Anais Nin, Henry Miller and Brett Easton Ellis. That’s what teenage literati do: read dirty books, drink over-priced coffee and smoke clove cigarettes, right?
My second read of Catcher In the Rye took place after college. It was around the millennium and I had been teaching middle school for a year. My old copy was pretty beaten up. It had travelled with me to college, lived in a couple apartments and on various shelves, not because I was reading and rereading it, but because it was important that a worn copy of that particular novel be on my shelf. At any rate, I read the book with newfound interest. For the first time I really fell in love with Holden and I especially fell in love with his love for his sister, Phoebe. The characters rang true for me. I recognized Holden’s inertia, nausea, and anger in me and thus empathized with him. I knew what it felt like to have no compass. A few years early, I had been suspended from the University of Kentucky when I decided to stay in bed for a semester or so rather than go to class. It was my first really profound failure in life: Holden's three days adrift in New York was my semester in bed.
And I saw fragments of Holden in my students. While they were just middle school students and Holden had been an upperclassman, I saw the same angst in them---it just goes to show how much faster we demand our children raise themselves these days. Perhaps Mr. Moxley had been right after all.
Last night I completed my third read of Catcher In the Rye because it is a summer text for my students; therefore, I read the book not so much for what it offered me, but what it will offer the young ones I'll soon be teaching. As usual, there were times that I wanted to shout at Holden or to slap him around a little. There were things I had forgotten since my previous two reads: Allie’s poetry covered baseball glove, Holden’s awareness of “flittiness” in others and the weird petting incident with Mr. Antolini. Despite the increasing distance in age and time between Holden and me, I still see some of me in him: particularly his fear of change, and his love of a child’s truthful innocence, and of course his fear of becoming a phony.
Change was a regular fact of life in my youth. As a United Methodist pastor’s kid, my family moved like clockwork. It afforded me terrific survival skills and it gave me a wealth of stories to share and it cemented a very close bond with my parents, because after all they’ve been the only constants throughout my life. But for the last ten years, I have worked at the same school and taught, more or less, the same thing. That school had become the most regular part of my life and my tenure there marks the longest epoch of my life to date, so as most signs were pointing to a need for change in my career path, I must confess I felt the paralysis of Holden Caulfield. Walking away from something that I felt was finally “permanent” in a life of impermanence scared the hell out of me.
Rereading the book I’d discovered twenty summers ago has been a tiring journey, I have to tell you. Not so much because of where I went with the book, but because of where the book went in me. I wonder where Holden will hit me in ten years, and I hope he eventually came to the serenity that I see on the horizon for me.
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notes:
1. "The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move... Nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different would be you." Holden Caulfield, The Catcher In the Rye (1945)
2. “We read to know we’re not alone.” Peter Whistler, Shadowlands (1993)
3. ”So our relationship with books is a profoundly, intensely, essentially democratic one... If we don't bring our own best qualities to the encounter, we will bring little away. Furthermore, it isn't static: there is no final, unquestionable, unchanging authority. It's dynamic. It changes and develops as our understanding grows, as our experience of reading - and of life itself -increases. Books we once thought great come to seem shallow and meretricious; books we once thought boring reveal their subtle treasures of wit, their unsuspected shafts of wisdom.” Philip Pullman, “the War on Words” The Guardian (2004)
4. As much as I’ve read about the nature of reading, the article quoted in 3 is my all-time favorite. Caution: here there be dragons.
