Secular Days, Sacred Moments: The America Columns of Robert Coles

July 31, 1999. Many of us who took to Holden Caulfield, embracing his laid-back words, his wisecracks, his cool, also worried about him. Would he make it?

102  july 31, 1999 Many of us who took to Holden Caulfield, embracing his laid-back words, his wisecracks, his cool, also worried about him. Would he make it? D uring the middle years of this fast-waning century J. D. Salinger ’s The Catcher in the Rye became a kind of biblical guide for many young members of the bourgeoisie in the United States. The novel’s protagonist, Holden Caulfield, had much going for him—a comfortable suburban life and a privileged educational background in a private school. Yet he seemed ironically vulnerable, for all his sharp intelligence and affluent background. Much of the time he is sardonic, if not cynical, as he takes the measure of teachers and other adults—their inadequacies, their self-importance and smugness, if not arrogance, as those qualities come across in gestures, remarks, and overall manner. Salinger is, of course, walking the familiar path of many a writing storyteller. He spots human frailty and duplicity; he chronicles events; he observes scenes; he tells of the ambiguities, the complexities of a particular world, wherein “phonies” appear to abound. That word is a favorite of Holden’s, and one that his creator has him throwing in the face of almost everybody in sight and, by more than implication, at a broad segment of the world’s richest, strongest nation.  103 Needless to say, many of us who took to Holden, embracing his laidback words, his wisecracks, his cool, it might be called, his mix of wry comment and clever asides meant to put people in their proper places, also worried about him. Would he make it through his bouts of notso -disguised melancholy, his anger turned into relentlessly unforgiving social scorn, his intense self-absorption having become the reason for a constant isolation and loneliness (the pose of the unyielding outsider a feignedexpressionofanurgent need forattention)?Still,hesawsomuch, had evident and contagious humor available to him, and so, we mostly concluded, he would prevail. And so doing he would leave the rest of us clear-headed,asaconsequenceofhisbravejoustswithpowerfulhypocrisy and his mental unmasking of pretense. What he dared see (see through) we could consider our own property. Hence our own consequent clean candor. All the shady deals, all the fake arrangements and agreements, all the deceptions ignored in the name of the conventional, the regular and, alas (speaking of psychiatry as a compliant servant of both), the so-called “normal,” had been put squarely on the table by him, enabling an in-your-face attitude on our part, courtesy of a novel’s authority and general acceptance, at no cost to us, the eager readers. Not that Holden was known to everyone, everywhere in his country, as I would eventually discover in the 1960s and beyond, when I got to meet youths who had never heard of him or met him, and some who had passed him by all too readily, even eagerly and angrily, in the course of theirhighschoolreading.“Thisdude,hebesweetonhimself,butheturns sour on everyone else!” So I was told by an African American young man who had initiated desegregation in a school full of white and well-to-do students often quite willing to proclaim their affinity to Holden (or his kin, Franny and Zooey, whose names headed other Salinger sagas). The 104  aforementioned loner by virtue of race, amid an ocean of enthusiasts for The Catcher in the Rye, went on: “They all caught up in themselves—they thinkthere’snothingtheydon’tknowaboutanyonetheireyesfallon,just like their buddy, H.C. I call him.” I was so busy then, catching (if I may!) the echo of “caught” with respect to the novel’s title, that I failed to take seriously or respectfully that tough psychological appraisal pointedly put forward. No wonder, years later, in New Haven, as I talked with Anna Freud, hearing her speak of the “young people” she’d met “in the States” as well as England, that African American high schooler came to my mind. “I’m puzzledbytheunqualifiedenthusiasmofsomanyyoungpeopleImeetfor their age-mate in the story, The Catcher in the Rye,” Ms. Freud remarked. A pause (while I noted her distinctive, even idiosyncratic way of putting things), and then this: “For many of these high school students, this Mr. Caulfield is a saint—when, in fact, from my reading I gather he is more than frank to admit being a sinner! He never misses an opportunity to let us know how distrustful he is of people, suspicious of them. He is charming...