I first read Catcher in the Rye a mere 71 years ago, or four years after its initial publication in 1951. I was blown away by it. I was an uninterested student, like J.D. Salinger’s hero, Holden Caulfield, who, as the novel begins, has just flunked out of his fourth prep school. Like Holden, I prided myself on my street smarts. With him, you might say, I could identify.
At 17, Holden’s age as the novel begins, he was better read than I. He is already reading Isak Dinesen, enjoys Ring Lardner, and admires the novels of Thomas Hardy. My own chief reading during my teenage years was of novels about working-class young men attempting to get a hold on life: Irving Shulman’s The Amboy Dukes; Harold Robbins’s A Stone for Danny Fisher; Willard Motley’s Knock on Any Door. The motto of the hero of Knock on Any Door is “Live fast, die young, and have a good-looking corpse.” On page 129 of The Amboy Dukes (if, after all these years, I remember that page correctly), female breasts are described as “jugs,” a small porno touch for the day. In Catcher in the Rye, Holden calls them “knockers.”
Not that Catcher in the Rye is in any way pornographic, though its language is risqué; lots of “pain in the ass,” “goddamn,” and the occasional “fuck you.” The word moron comes up a lot. Holden also uses the word flit—a new one for me—for homosexual. But the one word without which the novel would cease to exist is phony, which appears at least 300, perhaps 400, times throughout.
