Journey and Joy of Reading

The Catcher in the Rye 

by J.D. Salinger

“Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.”  - J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
On this day in 1951 J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye was published. Book dealers regard a signed copy of the first edition as "one of the most elusive of 20th century books." The last signed edition for sale, about fifteen years ago, was inscribed by Salinger to Harold Ross of The New Yorker; the first Salinger story that Ross bought was also the first appearance of Holden Caulfield.
The presence of literature as a natural part of the background and conversation is not surprising in Franny and Zooey, but it is, if not surprising, certainly interesting in the beginning chapters of The Catcher in the Rye. The protagonist (anti-hero), Holden Caulfield, is not an example of a serious student, in fact he is being asked to leave Pencey Prep because he was flunking most of his subjects and was "not applying" himself to his schoolwork. However, he is clearly not unintelligent, but rather just uninterested in the formal academics as practiced at Pencey Prep, or the several previous schools he had successively been asked to leave. In spite of this lack of interest in his schoolwork Holden is a reader. And quite an eclectic reader in spite of his own somewhat contradictory assessment: "I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot."(p 18). Obviously, before you are one quarter of the way through the book you are aware that he is not illiterate, and that you often must be attentive to what Holden does rather than what he says, in spite of his fascinating narrative voice. It is this voice that more than anything brings this reader back to the book again and again. But, regarding his reading and choice of authors, he has good taste in literature, at least for a teenager. For I, too was taken with Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native, although I found Clym Yeobright to be just as interesting, if not more, as Eustacia Vye - the heroine who Holden likes enough to want to "call old Thomas Hardy" and have a chat (how interesting that would be). Now, decades after I first read Catcher, and even more since, at about the same age as Holden I fell in love with the novels of Hardy, I find it fascinating that reading is an important aspect of the characters of J. D. Salinger, both when they are budding intellectuals and when they are merely fascinating "illiterates" on a journey of discovery.  Salinger has company in this regard as I remember that other literary favorites of mine, including David Copperfield and Philip Carey (Of Human Bondage), were also readers in their youth, escaping into literature to ease the pain of their fictional 'real' world.  Whether for discovery or escape, the journey and joy of reading is worth embracing for yourself.


The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger. Little, Brown & Co. 1951