100 Years After His Birth, Salinger Is Still Keeping Watch Over How We See Youth and Childhood

It's not just The Catcher in the Rye — the theme of "youth" that Salinger worked over has run on through more than half a century of pop culture, in one variation after another.

If Holden Caulfield were alive today, he would be 84. In 1951 this 16-year-old walked out of the American writer J. D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye to become the most famous truant since Huckleberry Finn, and the most famous anti-hero in pop culture.

He dropped out after failing four subjects (everything but English literature), and spent his days drifting around the streets, out of step with the adult world the whole time. His two favorite words were "phony" and "goddam," which he applied to everything from people to inanimate objects. The invention of the atomic bomb even excited him a little: "If there's ever another war, I'm going to sit right the hell on top of it."

The most famous part, of course, is still his dream job:

"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 — I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all."

Like Peter Pan in the fairy tale, Holden refuses to grow up and has no trust at all in the phony, artificial adult world. Critics were unimpressed by him, but American readers coming out of World War II felt a strong kinship with him. And not only in the America of 1951: even today, The Catcher in the Rye sells around 200,000 copies a year and stays on bestseller lists around the world.

But as the ending of the novel hints, Holden will grow up eventually. The author himself — the model for his protagonist — shows one possible fate.

Salinger was born in Manhattan on New Year's Day, 1919, the younger son in a family of four. After being expelled from one high school, he was sent to Valley Forge Military Academy, the model for the school that throws Holden out in the novel. Between 1937 and 1941 he had little formal education. He traveled with his father to Austria and Poland to learn the family business, and got back to the United States a week before the German occupation. He took night-school writing classes and tried submitting work to The New Yorker, the most respected of the literary magazines.

The drifting ended in 1941, when Salinger was drafted and sent to the European theater to do intelligence work. In 1945 he was hospitalized with psychological problems brought on by the war. Afterward he moved back into his parents' home in New York and kept writing.

The Catcher in the Rye created a lovable good-for-nothing, but no one would deny that the novel won Salinger himself a place in the literary world — a place more important than anyone expected at the time. American writers of his own generation and after, John Updike among them, were deeply influenced by Salinger, and to this day still live under the ghost of "Holden," which refuses to disperse.

Part of that lasting appeal comes from the value Salinger found in adolescence. In the past, people praised children's innocence or pitied their misfortunes, described the adult world by an entirely different logic, and paid little attention to what boys in secondary school actually cared about. Those boys had not yet shed their childishness, but were past the age when they could point out that the emperor had no clothes. They had to learn to accept the rules of adult society and rein in the rebellious, self-important adolescent ideas filling their heads.

In the words of the American writer Philip Roth, Salinger "was closer to the times than anyone else, and captured a momentous struggle taking place between the self and culture." The 1950s and 1960s, when he was active, were also the years when countercultures such as the Beat Generation and the hippies rose. Older readers had Kerouac, and they had mystical religions from the East, to set against the whole mainstream establishment, from education to politics.

Their optimism and their eagerness to get involved would probably have made Salinger uneasy. His characters were cynical, but they were also sunk in disillusionment and gloom.

As early as 1948, Salinger published "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" in The New Yorker, introducing the Glasses, the large family he would write about again and again. The Glass children were all exceptionally intelligent, and had — by choice or not — run into the "great ideas" of everyone from Jesus to Laozi to Siddhartha Gautama while still young. For them, the "wisdom" that religious insight offered counted for far more than the "knowledge" schools liked to boast about.

Yet it was exactly this Platonic insight that kept bringing them into friction with society, and left them torn apart inside. As adults, the Glass children met different ends: one killed himself, one took work he had no passion for, one stayed wary of society while wrestling with the self-consciousness behind that wariness. In Zooey, published in 1957, Franny Glass, a college sophomore, prays in the manner of the mystics, and is troubled all the while by her motives for praying:

"What I want is enlightenment, or peace of mind — not money, or privilege, or fame, or anything of that kind — but that doesn't mean I'm any less self-centered, any less busy looking for myself, than anybody else. If anything, I'm worse!"

About "be yourself," a phrase being cheapened a little more every day, Salinger made a sharp prediction long ago: no such once-and-for-all solution holds up, and it can be worse than the problem it sets out to solve.

In 2010, Salinger died at 91. The obituaries left many readers feeling they had woken from a decades-long dream — for half a century he had all but vanished from public view, living as a recluse in New Hampshire. He asked publishers to take his photograph off the covers, turned down nearly every interview, and went on writing without publishing. At the same time he was unusually warm toward certain young female fans, and had several relationships with them. He treated privacy as sacred, yet the lawsuits he brought against reporters and biographers for "invading his privacy" exposed his life to public view, which is the reverse of what he wanted.

This was the answer Salinger himself gave: extreme, and not necessarily a satisfying one.

Countless readers have been shaped by Salinger — or by Holden. QDaily has picked out seven of them. Their lives, in fact, could hardly be more different, and neither could their readings of Salinger. Writers who catch the spirit of their age always risk being misread, or having their name borrowed for causes not their own. It's just that Salinger never once stepped forward to announce what he had actually meant.

A 100-year-old Salinger would probably still have nothing but contempt for the essays written to mark his centenary — he would sneer at "one more phony writer," or fire off an angry letter from his lawyer.

Allen Ginsberg's Sixties

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness." In 1955 the poet Allen Ginsberg opened with that line and took hold of young readers.

Like The Catcher in the Rye, Howl was treated as heresy by mainstream values, and its writing about sex — homosexuality above all — drew particular fire from conservatives. In 1956 law enforcement seized copies of Howl. The following year a court ruled that Howl was not obscene, and asked a question of its own: "If a writer is limited to bland, safe euphemisms, where is the freedom of the press and of speech?"

Ginsberg, born in 1926, wrote capitalism's destruction of the individual mind into his poetry, and struck a chord with a generation's disillusionment and appetite for change. These people came to be called the Beat Generation, and their bible was Jack Kerouac's On the Road, published in 1957 — one of whose characters is Ginsberg himself.

The characters of On the Road were tired of East Coast middle-class culture, and crossed America looking for a utopian way of living. On drugs and sex, they went much further than Holden did. However rebellious Salinger's characters were, they never made a clean, final break with family or morality.

After the Beat Generation came the more radical American 1960s. Ginsberg was still the standard-bearer of the decade. He appeared in San Francisco alongside Timothy Leary, the "LSD expert," urging people to enjoy the freedom that music and psychedelics offered. At another event, he chanted a Hindu prayer with the "spiritual master" Prabhupada. Both men were looking for spiritual strength in Eastern thought — Hinduism, Taoism, Zen — and on that count both were students of Seymour Glass, the eldest of the Glass children.

If Ginsberg, Leary and the rest played Salinger's part in the 1960s, Salinger himself did not belong to the decade. He was an onlooker who kept far from the crowd, and his pleasure came from writing itself, not from publishing or being heard. San Francisco at full volume would probably have made him dizzy — fans wanting autographs, or inviting him to stay a few days in a shared apartment.

You can almost hear the Glass children protesting loudly (at home): no, communication is hard, and it can even be an act of aggression. They are better suited to solitude than to a utopia made of crowds. Politics doesn't interest them much either. Yes, World War II shadowed the Glass family and Salinger himself, but what Salinger was good at, and obsessed with, was the fine-grained description of ordinary scenes — the truths of life lying in wait inside trivial, delicate family conversations. Seen that way, the grand narrative of "love and peace" is one more form of alienation.

Today Howl and Other Poems has gone from banned book to American classic, and Holden, who had barely a good word for education, has been put into high-school textbooks. Every counterculture carries the potential to become the mainstream — or, to put it the other way, the risk of being absorbed by it. And that, too, is part of the "struggle between the self and culture."

William Shawn and His New Yorker

"I urge my editor, mentor and (heaven help him) closest friend, William Shawn, genius domus of The New Yorker, lover of the long shot, protector of the unprolific, defender of the hopelessly flamboyant, most unreasonably modest of born great artist-editors, to accept this pretty little book of mine."

Salinger wrote that in the dedication to his story collection Nine Stories in 1961. As you can see, in front of a true friend Salinger was not stingy with words so admiring they verged on excess.

Shawn was born in Chicago in 1907. His name is tied tightly to one magazine: The New Yorker. In 1945, Shawn talked founder Harold Ross into giving a whole issue over to John Hersey's "Hiroshima," a long piece of reporting on the lives of survivors of the atomic bombing. It is a decision that looks unimaginable today, and it affirmed both the power of writing and the standing of the writer.

From then on The New Yorker changed from a humorous literary magazine stuffed with cartoons into something more serious and more weighty. By the time Shawn took over as editor in 1952, the magazine was already a shortcut to literary fame. It introduced American readers in quick succession to young writers such as Salinger and Truman Capote.

What held up The New Yorker's near-sacred standing was Shawn's craftsmanship as an editor. In 1950s America, television had not yet taken off, print was the main way people learned about the world, and writing still had the dignity of a trade. Under Shawn, editing a single piece could take more than a year, until every detail had been checked. He would telephone writers himself, and the care he took and the effort he put in astonished them.

Inside the trade, Shawn was called a "saint," a reputation that also came from the principles he edited by. He published Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which set off worldwide concern about the ecological damage done by pesticides. When Israel tried the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, he sent the political philosopher Hannah Arendt to sit in on the trial, and her pieces were later collected as the book Eichmann in Jerusalem. A subject like "the banality of evil" might please few readers, but Shawn insisted: "They need to read this."

This way of editing, which never let the marketing department into the newsroom, did not of course make much money. At first the magazine's authority was hard enough to replace that it stayed financially healthy. But as television rose, along with People and its coverage of TV stars, The New Yorker's subscriptions started downhill.

In 1987 the new owner forced Shawn to retire. He did not attend the farewell ceremony. Short and taciturn, Shawn was, like Salinger, a shy man afraid of crowds.

Of everything Salinger published, Nine Stories is considered the most literary, and seven of the nine first ran in The New Yorker. The New Yorker made him, and he in turn shaped New York's image of itself. Among those drawn to that image was Woody Allen.

Woody Allen and the Self-Mockery of the Cultured

Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue starts up, the camera threads among Manhattan's towers, drops into the busy streets, nods at Central Park, then dissolves into the lights of a night football game and the neon of Broadway. Off-screen the narrator, a middle-aged male intellectual, keeps rewriting his description of the city:

"Chapter One. He adored New York City, although to him it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. How hard it was to exist in a society desensitized by drugs, loud music, television, crime, garbage!" Too angry. That's not what I want. "Chapter One. He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat." I like this. "New York was his town, and it always would be."

In 1979, the 44-year-old Woody Allen wrote, directed and starred in Manhattan, a talky film about the love life of a middle-aged intellectual. The Brooklyn-born, writer-turned-director made no effort to hold back his feelings for New York. He read The Catcher in the Rye at 18, and Holden's New York "resonated with his own fantasies about Manhattan, about the Upper East Side, about the whole city."

Woody Allen habitually talks about the city's intellectuals through irony. In Midnight in Paris, an art-history "expert" shows off his shallow opinions about paintings in front of a woman, and gets thoroughly humiliated by a friend who has traveled back to the 1920s and met Picasso. In Annie Hall, a man mocks Fellini's films and Marshall McLuhan's theories of media, at which point McLuhan appears out of nowhere and dresses him down in person.

Woody Allen despises the hypocrisy and snobbery of the cultural world no less than Salinger did. In their respective work, both men also mock the useless man of letters — the grand talk in cafés and bars that has either been going on for decades or means to settle overnight a question no one has settled in centuries.

But don't forget that Woody Allen's position has always been that of an insider in the cultural world. Ironic as he is, he keeps his sympathy for most of his characters. Only he would think of inviting a scholar like McLuhan into a film world crowded with cinephile references, reading lists and philosophical musing. In a way, his irony props up the authority of knowledge, which was plainly not what interested Salinger. Even if Salinger could set aside his distaste for film, would he really not find Woody Allen's name-dropping insufferable?

Mark Chapman's Fatal Misreading

On December 8, 1980, Mark Chapman, a 25-year-old night security guard, shot and killed the former Beatles frontman John Lennon with a .38-caliber revolver outside a building near Central Park in New York, then sat down at the curb and started reading The Catcher in the Rye.

Chapman was arrested on the spot. Over the police radio he was described as a "local punk," though he was in fact from Hawaii.

At the trial that followed, Chapman recited Holden's famous declaration in open court. Even before he killed Lennon, his love of The Catcher in the Rye had turned into obsession; he had gone so far as to change his signature to "Holden Caulfield." By his own account, he killed Lennon to protect an innocence he was losing.

Chapman was sentenced to life in prison, and on grounds of his "dangerousness," his parole applications have been turned down ten times.

Chapman was not the only assassin "inspired" by Holden. In 1981 the 26-year-old John Hinckley Jr. shot and wounded the then president, Ronald Reagan, in an attack that also left a press officer dead. Police found a copy of The Catcher in the Rye in his hotel room.

Defense lawyers like to plead "mental illness" for killers, and prosecutors stress a killer's dangerousness with a motive like "killing to get famous." But to Charles Taylor, writing in The Nation, Chapman's killing stood for the collision of two cultural "totems," Salinger and Lennon. The tension between them was real.

In the 1970s Lennon began a solo career. In 1971 he released "Imagine," which conquered the world with a vision of a place without religion, without conflict, without private property. He married Yoko Ono and had a child with her, and Double Fantasy, written with Ono and released in 1980, was full of the sweetness of love.

Whether that display of affection, which even music critics could hardly stomach, also enraged Chapman is unknown. But watching Lennon sing "imagine no possessions" and walk into a luxury apartment in the middle of New York, the word "phony" must have shot through Chapman's mind.

In the end, whether with the Beatles or on his own, Lennon was chasing something positive. He assumed the world could get better, that you could live the life you wanted. Chapman, who believed Holden had taken possession of him, did not wait for the author's blessing before using a revolver to say "no" to that view of the world.

Bill Gates and the Success Story of Rebellion

Microsoft's founder Bill Gates reads Holden far more cheerfully.

In a blog post only two lines long, Gates, who is said to read every night, calls The Catcher in the Rye one of his "favorites." As he sees it, the book "validates that it's okay for young people to be a little confused, while still being smart, and to see things in a different way than adults do."

"It isn't people who read books; it's books that read people." Gates's own life is one more piece of evidence for that.

Gates was 13 when he first opened The Catcher in the Rye, just as he started at Lakeside School, a well-known private school in Seattle. His parents' decision gave Gates pause at first: he wasn't sure he could get used to wearing a uniform and tie every day, calling teachers "master," and going to chapel each morning, as if, like Pencey Prep in the novel, the school existed to "turn boys into outstanding, thoughtful young men."

By Gates's own account, he was quite a troublemaker as a child, questioning whether rules made any sense and fighting constantly with his parents. They took him to a psychologist, who talked him into reading some psychology and Freud, and into no longer challenging them.

Holden's impression of Pencey Prep was terrible, but Lakeside had something new in it that was enough to draw Gates in. In the late 1960s the school brought in a batch of expensive computers. Gates soon discovered an interest in programming, built an electronic class schedule, and hacked the scheduling system to put himself in a class full of girls. He also met Paul Allen there.

In 1975 Gates became one more famous dropout. Except that his school was Harvard, and the year he left, he founded Microsoft with Allen.

Looking back on his school years, Gates shows nothing but warmth. In a 2005 homecoming speech he said, "Lakeside was one of the best things that ever happened to me." He also has the 1960s to thank. The open, free atmosphere of California in that decade drew a group of technical elites who used the idea of the "personal computer" to challenge the mainframe culture that IBM stood for. Microsoft, later, was part of that current.

Academics have even taken an interest in the psychology behind it. One study found a correlation between adolescent traits like resisting authority and refusing to compromise — the traits Gates showed — and higher income in adulthood.

Once mainstream culture began to link breaking the rules with the potential to innovate, the whole mode of production and the work ethic shifted with it. What would happen if Holden had a computer? A world that keeps turning out new dimensions, new subcultures, new escape hatches lies beyond anything Salinger could imagine in the 1950s.

Haruki Murakami, Lost in Tokyo

The literary magazine The Paris Review called Haruki Murakami "Japan's Salinger of the 1980s." In 1987 Murakami published his first realist novel, Norwegian Wood. In The Paris Review's view, this novel of youth, love and melancholy made Murakami literature's "superstar" and "the voice of a generation."

Murakami had more direct contact with Salinger. In 2003 the publisher Hakusuisha invited him to retranslate The Catcher in the Rye. Murakami finished the translation, but the long afterword he wrote was vetoed by Salinger's agent. That should not have surprised him: Salinger had always resisted publishers' marketing, and refused any preface that carried the weight of an official endorsement. Before the Chinese edition of Franny and Zooey came out, Salinger's side likewise demanded that photographs and the author biography be cut.

An "undeterred" Murakami later co-wrote a book interpreting Salinger. That book, The Salinger War Chronicles, took in the "afterword that disappeared," making up for the "shortcoming" of the Japanese Catcher in the Rye.

Translation, as the title of the film Lost in Translation suggests, always reflects power in its small details. Salinger could not stop Murakami from telling Holden's story in his own language, or from smuggling in his own goods around the edges of the translation. And Murakami — who translated Carver, Fitzgerald and Salinger, and who lived in the United States for a long stretch — was in turn treated as an outsider by Japan's literary establishment.

From The Old Man and the Sea and Moby-Dick in the 1950s, to Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan in the 1970s, to the Salingers that Murakami translated, the tastes of postwar Japanese readers look as though they were trained on an English major's book list — with a lag, sometimes short, sometimes long.

The same question remains: does Holden's experience apply outside America? Or, in the words of Reed Johnson, writing in The New Yorker, can you imagine a Holden who speaks Russian?

The Catcher in the Rye was published at the start of the Cold War. After Khrushchev came to power, the novel was brought into the Soviet Union and became a bestseller there in the 1960s. According to the official reading, the book exposed the rotten core of American capitalism. Ordinary readers took Holden for a figure who refused to conform, and put on his voice in Russian.

Not quite Holden's own voice, though. Johnson points out that the Russian translator smoothed out Salinger's language to fit the "fine traditions" of Russian literature better. When a publisher brought out a new translation in 2008, many Russian readers noticed that the translator had deliberately kept American speech habits, playing up the anti-idol stance that had been read into the book. And that is exactly the kind of "phoniness" Salinger could not stand.

Readers soon threw that translation aside.

The Innocent Childhood in Wes Anderson's Lens

One American has tried to fuse Salinger with Japanese culture: the director Wes Anderson.

In 2018 the animated film Isle of Dogs came out. In it, Mayor Kobayashi, who rules by corruption and fear, uses a "dog flu" of his own staging as a pretext to exile every dog to "Trash Island." The mayor's 12-year-old adopted son, Atari Kobayashi, flies to the island alone, finds his beloved dog, and leads the dogs in exposing the mayor's plot.

As The New Republic noted, the film's boy hero understands the world in terms of good and evil. His idealism is simple and pure. He is capable of pure love, but has not yet been through the mess of real sex. His manliness has not yet turned into aggression. His earnestness is both endearing and a little naive — to adults, at least.

Anderson has never hidden his love of Salinger. After Salinger died, he borrowed a line from Fitzgerald to say that Salinger's writing showed moments of redemption that reality can never reach, moments whose wounds "no miracle medicine could heal," and whose beauty "no blade, however sharp, could cut away."

Anderson has in fact gone on "stealing" ideas from Salinger for his films. His 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums introduces a large family, the Tenenbaums, whose children are all prodigies. The Chinese title alone — literally "the family of geniuses" — tells you how much they resemble the Glasses. The film's "bathtub conversation" is a note-perfect reproduction of the famous scene in Zooey.

Unlike the melancholy and inner struggle that will not lift in Salinger's fiction, Anderson gives the world brighter colors. Children like Atari Kobayashi seem able to do anything, as if born to change the world. In Moonrise Kingdom, from 2012, the Boy Scout Sam and the "problem girl" Suzy somehow slip past their scoutmaster and their parents and run away together; caught, they escape again with help from their friends.

They happen to be 12 as well.

In a sense, Anderson has stepped back from Salinger's coming-of-age literature and returned to the tradition of the fairy tale. The innocence of the child's world is used once again to set off the adult world. The "elopement" of Moonrise Kingdom's young leads amuses audiences — but is the seemingly orderly love life of the adult world any less absurd?

Anderson, born in 1969, cannot know what World War II did to Salinger, but he clearly understands how much people today want to be healed. We left behind the era that treated swearing as taboo long ago, and we did not get real freedom out of it. Thanks to the work of educators and psychologists, we are used to treating adolescence scientifically, sure that the stage will pass safely — parents can relax a little too. And as "growing up early" becomes more common, we are in fact losing our childhoods, exactly like Salinger's precocious geniuses.

So we would rather turn back from Holden into the children in Anderson's lens.

Cover and banner image: the film The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), from: Douban

Long-format cover image from: Time magazine archive / Wikipedia