Original reviews of THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by Salinger

Catcher in the Rye reviews

New York Times July 16 (Mon.), 1951

Books of The Times

By Nash K. Burger

It is just before Christmas and 16-year-old Holden Caulfield has been kicked out of exclusive Pencey Prep, a boys' school in Pennsylvania. Considering everything, this reflects more credit on Holden than on Pencey. Life at Pencey is dreary, regimented, artificial and, of course, expensive. This happens, however, to be only the latest of a series of schools from which Holden has been expelled. Understandably he is in no hurry to encounter his parents, but he is also reluctant to linger a moment longer than necessary at Pencey. He therefore takes what money he has and departs for New York, where he passes several days in a weird jumble of adventures and experiences, is involved with a variety of persons including taxi driers, two nuns, an elevator man, three girls from Seattle, a prostitute, and a former teacher from whom Holden thinks it best to flee in the middle of the night and most of all from himself.

Holden's story is told in Holden's own strange, wonderful language by J.D. Salinger in an unusually brilliantly first novel, "The Catcher in the Rye." The Book-of-the-Month Club has chosen it as its current selection.

Adolescence Speaking for Itself

Holden is bewildered, lonely, ludicrous and pitiful. His troubles, his failings are not of his own making but of a world that is out of joint. There is nothing wrong with him that a little understanding and affection, preferably from his parents, couldn't have set right. Though confused and unsure of himself, like most 16-year-olds, he is observant and perceptive and willed with a certain wisdom. His minor delinquencies seem minor indeed when contrasted with the adult delinquencies with which he is confronted.

Mr. Salinger, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere, tells a story well, in this case under the special difficulties of casting it in the form of Holden's first-person narrative. This was a perilous undertaking, but one that has been successfully achieved. Mr. Salinger's rendering of teen-age speech is wonderful: the unconscious humor, the repetitions, the slang and profanity, the emphasis, all are just right. Holden's mercurial changes of mood, his stubborn refusal to admit his own sensitiveness and emotions, his cheerful disregard of what is sometimes known as reality are typically and heart breakingly adolescent.

The author evidently takes a dim view of prep school life, and few writers have presented it with more effortless devastation. Holden's reminiscences and observations are short and to the point. "Pencey," he tells us, "was full of crooks. Quite a few guys came from these very wealthy families, but it was full of crooks anyway. The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has. I'm not kidding." Holden is sometimes, but not for long, a little bitter, and it may be he has a tendency to generalize from too little evidence ( in this case his camel's-hair coat, had been stolen out of his room), but he has seen and done a lot for a 16-year-old, and a lot has been done to him. Mr. Salinger, gives us a peek at Pencey's headmaster, who knows just which parents to talk with, which to ignore, gives a glimpse, too, of alumni and assorted students. Then there is a fine chapter in which Holden calls to say good-bye to an ancient teacher, an unlovable Mr. Chips without wisdom or imagination.

Poignant Reflections of Youth

In New York Holden's nightmarish efforts to escape from himself by liquor, sex, night clubs, movies, sociability - anything and everything - are fruitless. Misadventure piles on misadventure, but he bears it all with a grim cheerfulness and stubborn courage. He is finally saved as a result of his meeting with his little sister Phoebe, like Holden a wonderful creation. She is the single person who supplies - and just in time - the affection that Holden needs.

Certainly you'll look a long time before you'll meet another youngster like Holden Caulfield, as likable and, in spite of his failings, as sound. And though he's still not out of the woods entirely, there at the end, still we think he is going to turn out all right. We couldn't even be surprised if he grew up to write a few books (he talks about books quite a lot), books like "Of Human Bondage," "Look Homeward, Angel," or "The Catcher in the Rye" - nothing so childish and innocent as "Seventeen," though.

A pretty good small volume of Holden's observations could be put together right now out of Mr. Salinger's book: call it "The Maxims and Moral Reflections of Holden Caulfield," say. Thus, On the Movies: "I can understand somebody going to the movies because there is nothing else to do, but when somebody really wants to go, then it depresses hell out of me." On Life is a Game: "If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it's a game, all right. But if you get on the other side, where there aren't any hot-shots, then what's a game about it? Nothing. No game." On Teachers: "You don't have to think too hard when you talk to a teacher." On War: "I don't think I could stand it if they'd just take you out and shoot you, but you have to stay in the Army so *** long."

Newsweek July 16, 1951

Problem Boy

Jerry Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" begins with a description by its 16-year-old narrator of Pencey Prep in Agerstown, Pa. "They advertise in about a thousand magazines, always showing some hot-shot guy on a horse jumping over a fence... And underneath the guy on he horse's picture, it always says 'Since 1888 we have been molding boys into splendid, clear-thinking men.' Strictly for the birds. They don't do any damn more molding at Pencey than they do at any other school."

Young Holden Caulfield knew. He had been expelled from two other schools, and Pencey was no different. Watching the last game of the year from beside the Revolutionary War cannon on Thomsen Hill - he wasn't at the field - freezing cold because somebody had stolen his camel's hair coat and fur-lined gloves, this youthful philosopher reflected that he was really hanging around "trying to feel some kind of a good-bye."

Epic Loneliness: A good part of Salinger's humor is in his hero's unawareness of the awesome turmoil such attempts to experience emotion involve. His hero's good-by to Pencey is well-nigh heroic - a visit to his old history teacher ("Life is a game, boy"), an epic fight with his roommate (who came in late and secretive from a date with a nice girl Holden knew) and, finally, an operatic exit: "I stood for a while next to the stairs and took a last look down the goddam corridor. I was sort of crying. I didn't know why. I put my red hunting cap on and turned the peak around to the back, the way I liked it, and then I yelled at the top of my goddam voice, 'Sleep tight, ya morons!'"

Then he went underground for three days in New York. The hotel in which he stayed turned out also to be filled with "morons." When he tried to buy a drink in its night club, the waiter asked him how old he was. The elevator man sent a girl to his room, but "If you want to know the truth, I'm a virgin ... I felt more depressed than sexy, if you want to know the truth. She was depressing." Lonelier and sadder than ever, he wondered what happened to the ducks on the lake in Central Park when it was frozen over. He asked one taxi driver, but the man looked at him as if he were a madman. The next one he asked gave him a phony answer. His kid-sister was more understanding when he sneaked into their apartment to see her. She even lent him her Christmas money. But in the end Holden thought he would bum his way out West, build a cabin, and pretended to be a deaf mute to avoid stupid, useless conversation with people. (THE CATCHER IN THE RYE. By J.D. Salinger, 277 pages. Little Brown $3)

Saturday Review of Literature July 14, 1951

Fiction. Four books reviewed this week were among those that were singled out by the nation's book critics for their lists of recommended summer reading ("In the Critic's Hammock," SRL June 23). A first novel by a young man who has won wide critical acclaim for his short stories popped up on many list: it is J. D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye," which Harrison Smith discusses below. Other recommended books include Edwin G. Huddleston's entertaining picture of life in a small Tennessee town, "The Claybooks"....

Manhattan Ulysses, Junior

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE. By J.D.Salinger. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 277 pp. $3.

By Harrison Smith

That there is something wrong or lacking in the novels of despair and frustration that many of our younger writers are turning out has long been apparent. The sour note of bitterness and the recurring theme of sadism have become almost a convention, never thoroughly explained by the author's dependence on a psychoanalytical interpretation of a major character. The boys who are spoiled or turned into budding homosexuals by their mothers and a loveless home life are as familiar to us today as stalwart and dependable young heroes were to an earlier generation. We have accepted this interpretation of the restlessness and bewilderment of our young men and boys because no one had anything better to offer. It is tragic to hear the anguished cry of parents: "What have we done to harm him? Why doesn't he care about anything? He is a bright boy, but why does he fail to pass his examinations? Why won't he talk to us?"

A remarkable and absorbing novel has appeared, J. D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye," which may serve to calm the apprehensions of fathers and mothers about their own responsibilities, though it doesn't attempt to explain why all boys who dismay their elders have failed to pass successfully the barrier between childhood and young manhood. It is profoundly moving and a disturbing book, but it is not hopeless. Holden Caulfield, sixteen years old and six foot two inches in height, narrates his own story from the time when he was dismissed from his third private school to return, ill and in a state of physical and mental shock, to the shelter of his home in New York three days later. What happens to him is heart-rending. To many readers some of his words and accidents that befall him may seem to be too raw to be expressed in the words of a childish youth. If readers can be shocked in this manner they should be advised to let the book alone.

What was wrong with Holden was his moral revulsion against anything that was ugly, evil, cruel, or what he called "phoney" and his acute responsiveness to beauty and innocence, especially the innocence of the very young, in whom he saw reflected his own lost childhood. The book is full of the voices and the delightful antics of children. Especially he adored his stalwart and understanding little sister, who in the end undoubtedly saved him from suicide. And there were the memories of his dead brother, whom he had loved, and a teacher in the first school from which he was dismissed. He had no other friends, dead or alive. He accepted his parents, whose union had been happy, as one of the stable factors in a devastating world. When he ran away from school he knew that he had three days before they would hear of his dismissal from the headmaster. His desire to escape from the ordeal of their disappointment in him and to hide in New York, to go underground, is understandable. Not every boy would have done it, but the reader is convinced that Holden would and that his behavior throughout the book is equally natural and inevitable.

The magic of this novel does not depend on this boy's horrifying experience but on the authenticity of the language he uses and the emotions and memories which overwhelm him. Without realizing it he is seeking the understanding and affection which adults could give him - or even his classmates, who are perhaps an unreasonably repulsive lot of lads. But how could they be fond of this overgrown, precocious, and yet childish boy? His roommate was an arrogant hunter of girls; the boy next door never brushed his teeth and was always picking at his pimples; the group of "intellectuals," the grinds, and the athletes were all phonies to him. But Holden's sense of phoniness is never contempt. It is worse; it is despair.

When he fled to New York he had plenty of money: a doting grandfather who seemed to think that he had a birthday every three months had sent him some, and he had also roused a rich boy out of bed and sold him a costly new typewriter for twenty dollars. On the train he met the mother of one of his least attractive classmates and lied to her about her son to make her happy. The hotel he went to was crawling with prostitutes and "queers." In spite of his height waiters would not serve him a drink. Three older women left him their check to pay; a prostitute came to his room and took ten dollars away from him for five minutes' distraught conversation. He wandered through the city night and day like a lost soul.

He slipped into his parents' apartment after midnight to look at his sleeping little sister and then visited the one teacher he thought he could help him. The man was slightly intoxicated, and he told Holden, "This fall I think you are riding for - is a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling." He writes out a text for the boy to remember: "The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mature man wants to live humbly for one." None of this is any use to Holden, who simply wants to know what makes him find so many people false and ignoble at the same time that he is aware of his own capacity for love.

Whatever effect the man's wisdom might have had is ruined when the boy wakes up in the night in horror to find the man stroking his head. Holden dashes into his clothes and escapes. "Boy, I was shaking like a madman."

"The Catcher in the Rye" is not all horror of this sort. There is a wry humor in this sixteen-year-old's trying to live up to his height, to drink with men, to understand mature sex and why he is still a virgin at his age. His affection for children is spontaneous and delightful. There are few little girls in modern fiction as charming and lovable as his little sister, Phoebe. Altogether this is a book to be read thoughtfully and more than once. It is about an unusually sensitive and intelligent boy; but, then, are not all boys unusual and worthy of understanding? If they are bewildered at the complexity of modern life, unsure of themselves, shocked by the spectacle of perversity and evil around them - are not adults equally shocked by the knowledge that even children cannot escape this contact and awareness?

Time July 16, 1951

With Love & 20-20 Vision

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE (277 pp.) - J.D. Salinger - Little, Brown ($3)

"Some of my best friends are children," says Jerome David Salinger, 32. "In fact, all of my best friends are children." And Salinger has written short stories about his best friends with love, brilliance and 20-20 vision. In his tough-tender first novel, The Catcher in the Rye ( a Book-of-Month Club midsummer choice), he charts the miseries and ecstasies of an adolescent rebel, and deals out some of the most acidly humorous deadpan satire since the late great Ring Lardner.

Some Cheap Hotel. A lanky, crew-cut 16, well-born Holden Caulfield is sure all the world is out of step but him. His code is the survival of the flippest, and he talks a lingo as forthright and gamy in its way, as a soldier's. Flunking four subjects out of five, he has just been fired from his fourth school.

Afraid to go home ahead of his bad news, he checks in at a cheap New York hotel; in the next 48 hours, he tries on a man-about-town role several sizes too large for him. Getting sickly drunk at a bar, he slithers away in a Walter Mitty mood, pretending: "Rocky's mob got me ... I kept putting my hand under the jacket, on my stomach and all, to keep the blood dripping all over the places. I didn't want anybody to know that I was even wounded ... Boy, was I drunk."

Some Crazy Cliff. When the seedy night elevator man proposes sending a young prostitute to his room, bravado makes him play along. Besides: "I worry about that stuff sometimes. I read this book once ... that had this very sophisticated, suave, sexy guy in it...and all he did in his spare time was beat women off with a club...He said, in this one part, that a woman's body is like a violin and all, and that it takes a terrific musician to play it right. It was a very corny book - I realize that - but I couldn't get that violin stuff out of my mind anyway." His enthusiasm for that kind of fiddling practice fades in hopeless embarrassment as soon as the tart snakes out of her dress.

Scolded by testy cab drivers, seared by his best girl's refusal to elope with him and surrounded by an adult world of "phonies," he loses control of his tight-lipped histrionics. He sneaks home for a midnight chat with his perky ten-year-old sister, breaks down and cries on her bed. In a moving moment, he tells her what he would really like to do and be: "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. I know it's crazy ..."

For U.S. readers, the prize catch in The Catcher in the Rye may well be Novelist Salinger himself. He can understand an adolescent mind without displaying one.

The Christian Science Monitor, July 19, 1951

New Novels in the News

The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger. (Boston: Little, Brown & Co.277 pp. $3.)

By T. Morris Longstreth

Mr. Salinger is a war veteran in his early thirties who has written short stories for The New Yorker and other magazines. This, his first novel, is the midsummer selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. A sixteen-year-old schoolboy, Holden Caulfield, tells the story - with the paradoxical result that is not fit for children to read.

Mr. Salinger says, "All of my best friends are children. It's almost unbearable to me to realize that my book will be kept on a shelf out of their reach." Many adults as well will not wish to condition themselves to Holden's language. Indeed, one finds it hard to believe that a true lover of children could father this tale.

Twice there is a reminder of Shakespeare. It has comes near Macbeth's despairing definition of life, "a tale told by an idiot...signifying nothing." And Salinger has taken a more sensitive than normal child, just as Shakespeare took a more than normally sensitive man in Hamlet. It could be debated long just how irrational is Holden Caulfield, as likewise, Hamlet.

Holden, who is the clown, villain, and even moderately, the hero of this tale, is asked not to return to his school after Christmas. This is his third expulsion and he cannot endure to face his parents, so he hides out in New York, where his conduct is a nightmarish medley of loneliness, bravado, and supineness. Jerome David Salinger is an extremely skillful writer, and Holden's dead-pan narrative is quick-moving, absurd, and wholly repellent in its mingled vulgarity, naïveté, and sly perversion.

"The Catcher in the Rye" purports to be the "Seventeen" of our times, though it is as remote in conception from the Tarkington masterpiece, still much alive, as the television age from Indiana in 1916.

Holden Caulfield is so super-sensitive to others' faults that he has no friends, among boys at least. He is as unbalanced as, a rooster on a tightrope. He asks a girl to elope with him and then calls her names. He suffers from loneliness because he has shut himself away from the normal activities of boyhood, games, the outdoors, friendship.

He is capable of love, for a dead brother, for a lively younger sister, for all young things, as his explanation of the book's title makes clear - an oddly psychopathic one, it must be noted. (For Holden has mistaken the words of "Coming Through the Rye," as "If a body catch a body," and fancies himself the heroic rescuer of children in danger of plunging over a cliff in the field.)

But he is also capable of wholesome revulsion from contact with the human dregs, and impulsively seeks a kind of absolution by offering help to others. He hates what is wrong with the movies, and in the end he forgets himself and his hoped-for escape into freedom to help his sister. He is alive, human, preposterous, profane and pathetic beyond belief.

Fortunately, there cannot be many of him yet. But one fears that a book like this given wide circulation may multiply his kind - as too easily happens when immortality and perversion are recounted by writers of talent whose work is countenanced in the name of art or good intention.

New York Herald Tribune Book Review , August 19, 1951

On the Books & On an Author

By John K. Hutchens

J. D. Salinger

Shortly before his "Catcher in the Rye" appeared, Jerome David Salinger not only asked his publisher's office (Little, Brown) to send him no reviews of his novel but actually made them promise not to. "That" said a friend of his the other day, "will give you an idea of the kind of guy he is, "together with the Salinger reaction to his publisher's phone call informing him that the Book-of-the-Month Club has chosen "Catcher" as its midsummer selection.

"That's good, is it?" said Mr. Salinger. Later he asked that there be no special publicity to-do about him, "because I might get to believe it." As a matter of fact, he was inclined to be annoyed by the picture of him that filled the back of the book's jacket. Too big, he said.

He was born in New York City on Jan. 1, 1915,(1919 ?) went to military school at fifteen, and started writing stories there - wrote them under the bedcovers at night, by flashlight. He went to several colleges, graduated from none of them, and passed a year in Austria and Poland, presumably to learn the export business. He kept writing, if not selling. In 1939 he was in Whit Burnett's short-story class at Columbia, and his first published short story, "The Young Folks," appeared in the Burnett "Story" magazine in March, 1940.

Mr. Burnett recalls with some pride his share in the auspices of that debut, and has another pleasant memory of Mr. Salinger. In 1945, by which time the writer was selling regularly to the large-paying "slicks," "Collier's" and "The Post," there arrives in the "Story" office his check for $250 for the help of other writers. It had been sent from Europe, where Mr. Salinger was then with the 4^th Division, Counter-Intelligence Corps. The check helped finance "Story's" armed services writing contest.

The first Salinger story in "The New Yorker," where a number of his greatest admirers first became aware of him, was "Slight Rebellion Off Madison," sold in 1941 but not published until 1946. Right now, according to a Salinger authority, one of his best stories is locked away in the safe of a woman's magazine which paid a lot for it but for some reason is nervous about using it. His thirty published stories will presently appear in book form, it's said, which will emphasize another of his talents - i. e. a gift for titles. "For Esmé -With Love and Squalor" is probably the best known of them.

He works with "infinite labor, infinite patience and infinite thought for the technical aspects of what he is writing," according to his friend William Maxwell, of "The New Yorker." who in a recent article quotes him as saying: "I think writing is a hard life. But it's brought to me enough happiness that I don't think I'd ever deliberately dissuade anybody (if he had talent) from taking it up. The compensations are few, but when they come, if they come, they're very beautiful."