A Reader’s Companion to J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye

A Reader’s Companion to

J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye

Second Edition

by

Peter G. Beidler

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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A Reader’s Companion to J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye Second Edition

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Copyright © 2011 by Coffeetown Press

Beidler, Peter G., 1940–

A Reader’s Companion to J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye / Second Edition by Peter G. Beidler

Includes bibliographical references, map, glossary, photographs, study questions, and indexes.

ISBN 978-1-60381-117-0 (ePub)

1. Salinger, J. D. (Jerome David), 1919–2010.—The Catcher in the Rye.

2. Characters—Holden Caulfield. 3. Caulfield, Holden (Fictitious character)—Film and video adaptations. 4. Criticism. 5. Explanatory notes. 6. Glossary for ESL and EFL readers. 7. Discussion and essay questions.

Cover image by Calloway M’Cloud

Cover design by Sabrina Sun

Produced in the United States of America

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Contents

Preface

Note on the Second Edition

Acknowledgments

Catching The Catcher in the Rye

1. Time line of The Catcher in the Rye

2. Biographical references

3. Salinger’s life in The Catcher in the Rye

4. From the stories to The Catcher in the Rye

5. Holden Caulfield’s appearance

6. The Catcher in the Rye in other fiction

7. The Catcher in the Rye in movie and song

8. The enduring appeal of The Catcher in the Rye

9. The aftermath of J. D. Salinger’s death

Explanatory Notes to The Catcher in the Rye

Holden says good-by to Pencey (chapters 1–7)

Holden goes to Manhattan (chapters 8–14)

Holden wanders Manhattan (chapters 15–20)

Holden goes home (chapters 21–26)

Glossary for ESL and EFL Readers

Questions for Readers of The Catcher in the Rye

Index to The Catcher in the Rye

Preface

In 1961 George R. Creeger predicted that perhaps in fifty years we shall need a scholarly edition of The Catcher in the Rye (Treacherous Desertion, reprinted in J. D. Salinger and the Critics, ed. William F. Belcher and James W. Lee [Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1962], p. 99). Creeger was thinking mostly about the prep-school jargon, which he thought would be far outdated by the twenty-first century. In fact, however, the language has remained remarkably fresh and readable, but other features of the novel now require explanations. This reader’s companion is by no means a scholarly edition of the novel. Rather, it is designed in part to give twenty-first-century readers and teachers annotations with cultural information about J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, information that would have been common knowledge to most first readers of the novel, but which is now lost in last-century mists. After all, it has been six decades since the now-classic narrative of the three-day fictional adventures of Holden Caulfield took place. Indeed, the novel now reads almost like a work of historical fiction. In addition to providing as much as I could find about the historical and cultural backdrop to the novel, I include many features not previously available in this detail and between one set of covers:

—some 250 detailed page-by-page explanations of the many references that Holden makes to his contemporary mid-twentieth-century people, places, and events.

—information and speculation on the extent to which Holden’s adventures mirror events in Salinger’s own life.

—discussion of some of the changes Salinger made when reworking material from two earlier short stories about Holden into a much expanded role for him in the novel.

—a detailed chronology of Holden’s adventures.

—information about the relevance of the books and authors Holden mentions.

—information about the movies and the movie actors Holden mentions.

—discussion of several post-Catcher novels and movies that show the influence of The Catcher in the Rye.

—stills from movies Holden mentions, and lines from several songs referred to in the novel.

—a map of Manhattan showing the places Holden visits.

—photographs of many of the New York City scenes that Holden mentions, particularly in Central Park, the Museum of Natural History, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

—brief quotations from literary critics about such issues as why the novel has been so popular, what kind of California institution Holden is in, the significance of Holden Caulfield’s name and red hunting hat, Mr. Antolini’s motives in patting Holden’s head, and Holden’s intense relationship with his sister.

—a glossary of more than 150 terms and phrases that ESL amd EFL readers may not understand.

—indexes to the more than 200 characters and people mentioned in The Catcher in the Rye and nearly 75 places.

—information about Salinger’s January 27, 2010, death at age 91, and a medley of reactions to it.

—study, discussion, and essay questions.

Note on the Second Edition

This second edition of A Companion to J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is required by the need to acknowledge Salinger’s death on January 27, 2010, to report on some of the many reactions to his death, and to incorporate information on two important books that have been published since the first edition: J. D. California’s novel 60 Years Later: Coming through the Rye, and Kenneth Slawenski’s biography J. D. Salinger: A Life Raised High. Bruce F. Mueller and Will Hochman’s Critical Companion to J. D. Salinger: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work (New York: Facts on File, 2011) appeared too late for detailed inclusion in this book. Readers of The Catcher in the Rye will be interested in pages 55–112 of this 500-page book. The authors kindly acknowledge incorporating material from the first edition of my book. I have also made a number of smaller changes, reported my discovery of the source of the Stekel quotation in chapter 24 of the novel, added a list of questions to guide readers of The Catcher in the Rye, and added an index.

Acknowledgments

I owe thanks to several people who have helped me with this project: Kathe Morrow and Pat Ward of the Lehigh University libraries, Molly K. Riley of the University of Washington libraries, and Ellen Fitzgerald of the Seattle Public Library for helping me to find many arcane dates and facts and printed materials; Steven Lichak of the digital media studios at Lehigh University for help in producing usable photographs; Emily Barth for her help in securing from the archives of the American Museum of Natural History photographs of the museum and some of its exhibits and dioramas; Dorothea Arnold for her help in locating information on the Egyptian tombs and mummies at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Ron Mandelbaum of Photofest in Manhattan for making available stills of a number of movies; Jo B. Lysholdt for help in designing the map of Manhattan; Calloway M’Cloud for the cover design; Marcela B. Gamallo for proofreading and helping with the glossary for ESL and EFL readers; Michelle Horwitz for help with the index; and especially Marion Frack Egge for information about the musical references in the novel and for her many helpful editorial and technicsl suggestions on various drafts of this book. I must also gratefully acknowledge the help of the World Wide Web in researching and checking certain facts.

I wish to thank Paul Acker, editor of ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews, for permission to use some materials from my article on Captains Courageous. I am grateful to the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, TIME magazine, and Photofest for permission to publish photos and stills. I took the photos in and around Central Park.

My quotations from J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye are taken from the widely accessible Little, Brown paperback edition (Boston, 1951). Page reference to quotations from the novel are placed parenthetically (usually without p. or pp.) in the text.

Catching The Catcher in the Rye

1. Time line of The Catcher in the Rye

The Catcher in the Rye apparently takes place in mid-December, 1949, on a Saturday, Sunday, and Monday a week or more before Christmas. There is repeated evidence for such specificity in dating, though not all of the movie and play references jibe perfectly. The key evidence for the year 1949 is that Holden tells us (38) that his ten-year-old brother Allie died on July 18, 1946, when Holden was thirteen. We know that Holden is sixteen (9) during the present action of the novel, which then must take place around three years later. We know from several references that the action takes place in December—it was December and all (4)—and in the pre-Christmas season. Given the reference to Holden’s going over to Sally Hayes’s place to help trim the tree, mid-December seems right. Other references corroborate that dating: She and old Marty were drinking Tom Collinses—in the middle of December, for God’s sake (74); Christmas was coming soon (118); It was [. . .] pretty near Christmas (197); and so on. Critics like Robert Miltner are wrong to say that Holden comes of age in the 1950s and that his father is a Fifties male (Mentor Mori; or, Sibling Society and the Catcher in the Bly in J. P. Steed, ed., The Catcher in the Rye: New Essays [New York: Peter Lang, 2002], pp. 33, 36). By 1950, the main action of the novel has ended.

If we assume any sort of temporal accuracy on Salinger’s part—that is, if we assume that he was really thinking of 1949 and that he consulted a calendar—we might accurately enough suppose that, since Christmas fell on a Saturday in 1949, the Saturday action of the novel may start on either Saturday, December 10, or Saturday, December 17. The 10th may be a better guess. The 17th seems late, since Phoebe tells Holden that their father will miss her play, which is on Friday, because he is flying to California (162). If the Saturday of the novel were the 17th, that would put her play the following Friday on Christmas Eve—not a probable time for a school pageant—and it would also mean that their father would probably not be home for Christmas Day, either. His missing Christmas is unlikely, in view of Phoebe’s reporting that D.B. may be coming home for Christmas (164). Surely Mr. Caulfield would not miss the family holiday reunion. The events of the novel seem to come well before Christmas because Phoebe tells Holden that she hasn’t started her Christmas shopping yet (178), and because the workmen are just unloading a big Christmas tree (196). I am, then, skeptical of Robert M. Slabey’s complex religious reading, since it is based on the assumption that the novel starts on December 17, during Advent (see "The Catcher in the Rye: Christian Theme and Symbol," CLA Journal 6 [1963]: 170–83). If the 10th is the right starting date, then the events of the novel take place from Saturday, December 10, to Monday, December 12, 1949. (See December 2nd in my explanatory notes to chapter 2, below). Since D.B. is coming home for Christmas, we are perhaps to assume that he takes Holden back with him to California in early 1950, where the change of scene and the sunny California weather will help him to recuperate. Holden would then be writing the novel in a California sanitarium in 1950—probable enough in view of the 1951 publication date of The Catcher in the Rye.

Saturday (chapters 1–8). Saturday starts badly for Holden. As manager of the Pencey Prep fencing team, he takes the team to New York City, where he loses the fencing gear on the subway. Unable to compete, he and the rest of the team return to Pencey Prep early, in time for the big football game with Saxon Hall. Then, while most other students are at the game, Holden pays a visit to Mr. Spencer, his history teacher. He returns to his dormitory and talks with his roommates Ackley and Stradlater. While Stradlater is on a date with Jane Gallagher, Holden goes out for burgers with Ackley and Brossard, then returns to write a composition for Stradlater about Allie’s baseball glove. When Stradlater returns, Holden picks a fight with him and gets his face bloodied. Around midnight Holden leaves Pencey Prep on the train, where he chats with Ernie Morrow’s mother. He finally arrives in New York City.

Sunday (chapters 9–20). Early Sunday morning, at the start of Holden’s longest day, he arrives at Penn Station. Following a circuitous cab ride to the Edmont Hotel, he checks in before going down to its Lavender Room, where he dances with three visitors from Seattle until the place closes. He then takes another cab to Ernie’s in Greenwich Village, engages in a conversation with Lillian Simmons and her date, and walks back to the Edmont, where he enlists the services of a prostitute named Sunny. Without having had sex with her, he pays and dismisses her, then goes to bed alone. After being beaten up by the pimp Maurice, he leaves the hotel with his bags, checks them at Grand Central Station, and then has breakfast with two nuns before going to—but not into—the Museum of Natural History. Later, he meets Sally Hayes at the Biltmore and takes her to the Sunday matinee of I Know My Love. They go skating at Rockefeller Center and part acrimoniously when he insults her. Holden takes in a movie alone at Radio City Music Hall, then meets Carl Luce at the Wicker Bar in the Seton Hotel. He wanders around a bit more, walks to Central Park to see if he can find the ducks, sits mournfully alone on a park bench, and finally walks home for a chat with Phoebe. It is by now very late indeed.

Monday (chapters 21–26). Monday starts early with Holden’s arrival home. He wakes Phoebe to talk with her, manages to avoid his parents, and then goes to the apartment of Mr. Antolini, his former English teacher. After talking with Mr. Antolini, Holden sleeps on the living room couch. Waking up to Mr. Antolini’s patting his head, Holden rushes away. It is already starting to get light. He goes to Grand Central Station and sleeps on a bench there for a couple of uncomfortable hours, then tries to eat a doughnut before heading north on Fifth Avenue. On the way he decides that he will hitchhike out West, where he plans to work in a gas station and build a cabin near the woods. He leaves a message with Phoebe at her school, instructing her to meet him on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art so he can return her money. He changes his mind about running away when she comes with her suitcase to join him. They go to the zoo in Central Park and then to the carrousel. Abandoning his plan to hitchhike West, Holden goes home.

2. Biographical references

Because I refer to the following works about Salinger’s life with some frequency in the pages below, I give the full citations, with brief annotations, here. I list them chronologically by date of appearance:

Henry Anatole Grunwald, The Invisible Man: A Biographical Collage in Grunwald, ed., Salinger: A Critical and Personal Portrait (New York: Harper, 1962; reissued as a Pocket Books Giant Cardinal edition in 1963), pp. 3–19. This chapter reprints Sonny: An Introduction, the September 15, 1961, TIME magazine cover story on J. D. Salinger (see Figure 1). The TIME article says little about Salinger’s first novel but speculates on why he had become so reclusive. Its cover is one of the few portraits of Salinger’s face. Artist Robert Vickrey painted it based on an earlier photograph of the author, since Salinger of course refused to sit for the portrait.

Warren French, That David Copperfield Kind of Crap in J. D. Salinger (New York: Twayne, 1963), pp. 21–35. This early sketch of the little that was known about Salinger’s life is somewhat helpful, but also snippy and judgmental. French has this to say, for example, about Salinger’s insistence on reclusive isolation: His seclusion may actually result from an inability to make the social adjustments expected of mature members of society (pp. 32–33).

Ian Hamilton, In Search of J. D. Salinger (New York: Vintage, 1988). Abbreviated as In Search below. This book, the first attempt at a full-length biography of Salinger, is as interesting for Hamilton’s narrative of his methods of uncovering information as it is for what it reveals of Salinger. Hamilton talked with Salinger’s friends and publishers, looked at old school records and talked with Salinger’s classmates, uncovered files of Salinger’s correspondence in university archives, and so on. The narrative ends with Hamilton’s somewhat embittered account of the legal issues between him and Salinger. Salinger’s lawyers filed an injunction against Hamilton and Random House, mostly on the basis of Hamilton’s plan to publish quotations from unpublished letters. By then Random House already had the book in bound galley proofs, a copy of which Salinger read and objected to. The case finally went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to review a lower court’s ruling that the book not be published. In Search of J. D. Salinger is a revision of that book, paraphrasing portions of the letters, and making certain other changes, as well. Hamilton did, however, donate a copy of the bound galley of the original biography to the Princeton University Library.

Figure 1: This September 15, 1961, cover of TIME magazine came out ten years after the publication of The Catcher in tne Rye. Robert Vickrey’s portrait is one of the very few we have of Salinger. Courtesy TIME.

Joyce Maynard, At Home in the World: A Memoir (New York: Picador, 1999). Abbreviated as At Home below. When Joyce Maynard published in the New York Times Magazine, at age eighteen, a personal essay in which she looked back on her life and her generation, J. D. Salinger wrote a letter to her at Yale. That letter started a several-month correspondence that led to her dropping out of Yale and moving into his home in Cornish, New Hampshire. Salinger was 35 years older than she and had a daughter, Margaret (see her book, below), not much more than a year younger than she, and a son considerably younger. At that time, both children spent most of their time living a short distance away with their mother, whom Salinger had long since divorced. Joyce Maynard stayed in Cornish with him for almost a year before he asked her to leave. In At Home in the World Maynard tells about her own troubled youth, her correspondence with Jerry, her stormy year with him, and her grief at their separation. She was by law not permitted to quote from his letters to her, but she paraphrases generously, revealing many details about her infatuation, his medical and dietary proclivities, and their sexual difficulties.

Paul Alexander, Salinger: A Biography (Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1999). Abbreviated as Salinger in the explanatory notes below. This biography has relatively few new insights to offer the reader about its elusive subject. It draws on some new sources, it picks up some materials from the bound galleys of Ian Hamilton’s unpublished biography, which Alexander consulted at Princeton, and it brings in information from journalists, most of them women, who managed to interview Salinger. Part of Alexander’s book consists of chronologically-organized plot summaries of Salinger’s early fiction, interwoven with the few known facts and Alexander’s conjectures about Salinger’s life. Alexander’s approach to Salinger’s biography is influenced by his inference that Much, if not all, of Salinger’s writing—at least after his return from the war—was, to a significant degree, autobiographical (p. 115). Given his approach to a man whom we know mostly through his fiction, Alexander perhaps was compelled to make such an inference, the validity of which is, of course, questionable. Alexander sees a dark pattern in Salinger’s attraction to young girls, both as his personal companions and as subjects for his fiction. He even speculates that one reason Salinger has insisted on a life of seclusion is that he sought and protected his privacy because he had a penchant for young women that he did not want to reveal to the public (pp. 312–13).

Margaret A. Salinger, Dream Catcher: A Memoir (New York: Washington Square Press, 2000). Abbreviated as Dream Catcher below. In her book, Margaret (Peggy) has consulted her mother Claire and her aunt Doris (J. D. Salinger’s older sister), as well as recounting her own memories, to write a detailed and personal account of her father’s life. She makes much of her father’s Jewish roots and possible experiences with anti-Semitism and, later, with various forms of Buddhism. She makes frequent references to Salinger’s fiction, which she clearly considers to be strongly connected to her father’s own life experiences. Her father did not cooperate in the book. At the end of the book a short essay, The Salingers: A Family Album, written by her father’s first cousin, Jay Goldberg, gives useful information about her paternal mother’s and her paternal grandfather’s origins. Included in the book are a number of family photos of Doris, Claire, Margaret, and Salinger himself.

Kenneth Slawenski, J. D. Salinger: A Life Raised High (Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, UK: Pomona, 2010). Abbreviated J. D. Salinger below, this biography