And Holden Caulfield Had a Great Fall

Transcription

1 6 And Holden Caulfield Had a Great Fall "I have a feeling that you're riding for some kind of terrible, terrible fall." Mr. Antolini If Sunny represents a commercial/sexual threat to Holden's innocence, one could argue that Sally Hayes, Holden's nominal girlfriend, represents yet another. For she stands for the phony incarnate, for all that is conventional and socially "correct." Stick with her and a predictable life lies ahead. As Holden observes, she has a penchant for the word "grand" and "if there's one word I hate, it's grand" (106). But for all her affectations, Sally also has her attractions: she "knew quite a lot about the theater and plays and literature and all that stuff" (105), and even Holden admits that she's a great necker, perhaps too good. As he puts it: "If somebody knows quite a lot about those things [e.g., theater, literature], it takes you quite a while to find out whether they're really stupid or not. It took me years to find it out, in old Sally's case. I think I'd have found it out a lot sooner if we hadn't necked so damn much" (105). 72

2 And Holden Caulfield Had a Great Fall Nonetheless, Holden calls her, after considering the possibility of giving Jane Gallagher "a buzz" and, once again, rejecting it. The "conversation," or what passes for one, is both revealing and laced with the double levels of meaning that Salinger consistently layers into teenage slang: First she told me about some Harvard guy it probably was a freshman, but she didn't say, naturally that was rushing hell out of her. Calling her up night and day. Night and day that killed me. Then she told me about some other guy, some West Point cadet, that was cutting his throat over her too. Big deal. I told her to meet me under the clock at the Biltmore at two o'clock, and not to be late, because the show probably started at two-thirty. She was always late. Then I hung up. She gave me a pain in the ass, but she was very good-looking. (106) If Holden's exasperation is overstated, one might say the same thing about Sally Hayes's efforts at playing the coquette. But what ripples through Holden's account as well are certain charged phrases "that killed me"; "cutting his throat over her" that suggest just how confused Holden remains about sexuality, and just how obsessed he still is with the death question. For despite Holden's efforts to sweep these preoccupations under the rug with a dismissive "very big deal," the novel's dark subtext is very much in evidence. Nor is the play that Holden and Sally will attend simply another instance of appropriate "local color," what such people might well do on a date in Manhattan. For it too raises a whole host of what one might call aesthetic issues. After all, one can easily chart Holden's attitudes about art in everything from his disgust that D.B. has given up writing serious short stories in favor of Hollywood scripts to his telling remark after aping a Warner Bros. 1930s gangster film "The goddam movies. They can ruin you" (104). Furthermore, his discussion of those novels he likes (The Great Gatsby) and those he doesn't (A Farewell to Arms) and his musical tastes (he likes Estelle Fletcher's rendition of "Little Shirley Beans") provide further clues. Perhaps most significant, his conversation with the nuns who talk about Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet far more candidly, far more generous- 73

3 THE CATCHER IN THE RYE ly, than Holden had thought possible, given the nature of the play and what he imagines (wrongly) is the nature of nuns, proves extremely revealing. Ultimately, Holden regards Broadway plays much as he does Hollywood films, that is, as artificial, phony, and nearly always wrongly appreciated by those in the audience. Moreover, Holden has reasons closer to home to be suspicious: "My father's quite wealthy.... I don't know how much he makes he's never discussed that stuff with me but I imagine quite a lot. He's a corporation lawyer. Those boys really haul it in. Another reason I know he's quite well off, he's always investing money in shows on Broadway. They always flop, though, and it drives my mother crazy when he does it" (107). By contrast, he prefers the kid who sings his own (albeit, incorrect) version of "Comin' through the Rye" that begins "If a body catch a body." Indeed, everything about his aesthetic performance strikes Holden as right-headed and on the mark: The kid was swell. He was walking in the street, instead of on the sidewalk, but right next to the curb. He was making out like he was walking a very straight line, the way kids do, and the whole time he kept singing and humming. I got up closer so I could hear what he was singing. He was singing that song "If a body catch a body coming through the rye." He had a pretty little voice, too. He was just singing for the hell of it, you could tell. The cars zoomed by, brakes screeched all over the place, his parents paid no attention to him, and he kept on walking next to the curb and singing "If a body catch a body coming through the rye." It made me feel better. It made me feel not so depressed any more. (115) The song Holden mishears (Phoebe points out, correctly, that it derives from a poem by Robert Burns, and that the first line of the song is "If a body meet a body") 1 is the occasion that generates Salinger's title and, later, Holden's most memorable speech. For his vision of standing "at the edge of some crazy cliff," as children play innocently, without concern in a rye field, is the novel's central image. Behind it, however, lies a complex network of contributing images: memories of his dead brother Allie rotting unprotected in the 74

4 And Holden Caulfield Had a Great Fall ground; the fate of ducks during unrelenting winters in Central Park; and, perhaps most of all, memories of James Castle, a fellow student at Elkton Hills who jumped to his death after unspeakable humiliations. Mr. Antolini covered the battered corpse with his sports coat (reminding us of Holden's earlier worry that he might jump to his own suicidal death and then lie on the pavement, uncovered, as people gawked at him), but nobody, not even Mr. Antolini, caught James Castle. He simply fell to his tragic, senseless death. Some critics have argued that James Castle's name is highly suggestive, even symbolic, and that his initials link his martyrdom to that of Jesus Christ. R. W. Stallman once made a similar case with regard to the Jim Conklin of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895), but one need not be either so ingenious or so insistent. Even Freud argued that a cigar is sometimes merely a good smoke. More important, the novel supports quite another interpretation. Holden may not have known James Castle well (he was, as Holden puts it, "one of these very quiet guys"), but he is inextricably linked with Holden nonetheless: "... his name was always right ahead of me at roll call. Cabel, R., Cabel, W., Castle, Caulfield I can still remember it" (171). Here, the names matter, partly because Castle is an extension, a secret sharer, of all that Holden fears about the world: its misguided sense of principle, its seemingly endless capacity for cruelty, its lack of fair play and simple justice. Nor should the subtext of sexual perversion come as a surprise in a novel filled with them, and with Holden's increasingly desperate effort to act heroically as the savior of other would-be Castles. In short, Castle is close enough to Caulfield not merely in the roll call, but also, more important, in his essential condition to fill the role as a doppelganger, a psychological double of sorts. After all, it is hardly a coincidence that when James Castle jumps to his death, he is wearing a turtleneck sweater Holden had lent him. Salinger is simply too careful a writer, too much the craftsman, to have chosen the detail "accidentally." There is plenty of textual evidence, then, to support the view that Holden's quest has a religious dimension without inventing nuances where none exist. After all, thoughts about monasteries and encounters with nuns, talk about biblical characters and a variety of 75

5 THE CATCHER IN THE RYE "falls," play a significant role in Holden's retrospective narration. In this sense, Castle's fall is thematically important because it links up with other falls, not because his initials are the same as Christ's. Indeed, as Holden remembers the moment, one can see its inexorable connection to the "catcher" speech that appears but a few pages later. Given a world that depresses Holden far more than it cheers him up, given the competitiveness, the phoniness, the sheer inhumanity of man to man, what could make for a more appealing life's work than to be a "catcher in the rye": "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" (173). So, if anyone is a Christ figure in Salinger's novel, it is Holden Caulfield rather than James Castle. Here, those readers who talk about his self-styled "sainthood" are on firmer ground. For Holden has little difficulty in casting himself as a morally superior being. At the same time, however, most readers will go on to suggest that saints can, and often do, make life uncomfortable for lesser, more vulnerable human beings. If Holden is a would-be saint, he is also an uncompromising critic and, as I have already mentioned, something of a prig. I say this because genuine saints struggle with inner doubt and sinfulness far more than Holden does; he is fashioned from thinner cloth. Holden's vision of innocence protected and of himself as savior is a way of answering that most dreaded of questions adults regularly put to adolescents namely, "And what do you want to be when you grow up?" Far better, Holden would no doubt argue, is a world where nobody grows up, where nobody "falls," and where nothing changes. Unfortunately, the world Holden yearns for exists only in museums, where, as he puts it, "Everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving the same blanket. Nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different would be you" (121). 76

6 And Holden Caulfield Had a Great Fall Those uncharitable enough to point out that even museum exhibits change are, of course, correct, but they have badly missed Holden's point. For what he seeks so passionately is the same stasis, the same immutable permanence, that Keats discovered in a Grecian urn or that Wordsworth found at Tintern Abbey. But as attractive as these visions are, they value art over life, the pure and unchanging over the transient and the messy. There is something antiseptic about such a stance, especially if one tries to translate an aesthetic impulse into a blueprint for behavior. Meanwhile, those who would point out, as John Milton did in Paradise Lost, that the very richness of life is predicated on a "fall" into the human condition, and moreover that the fall is as fortunate as it is inevitable, find themselves faced with the obstinacy, and righteous indignation, of a character like Holden Caulfield. Granted, one falls out of an Eden where no ripe fruit falls, no brows sweat, and, best of all (at least in Holden's view), nobody dies, but it is the "human condition" in all its flux and even sorrow that makes us fully human. Phoebe, Holden's ten-year-old sister and one of the few characters who can call his assumptions into serious question, puts it this way: "You don't like anything that's happening.... You don't like any schools. You don't like a million things. You don't" (169). Holden insists that he likes Allie (an example Phoebe won't accept because "Allie's dead" but that defines Holden's "problem" nonetheless) and that he would like to be a "catcher in the rye." Phoebe may be less a counterweight than she is an emblem of innocence, of authenticity, of everything that, in effect, knocks Holden out about kids, but she gives voice to alternatives that Holden, armed with certainty and an "attitude," tends to overlook. By contrast, Mr. Antolini perhaps the only other major character, and with the possible exception of the nuns Holden encounters briefly at the train station, the only adult Holden respects enough to listen to is a teacher, and so prone to temper a genuine concern about Holden's difficulties with lectures meant to set him straight. Thus, when Holden explains in chapter 24 that he failed Oral Expression because if a classmate digresses during his speech, "you're supposed to yell 'Digression' at 77

7 THE CATCHER IN THE RYE him as fast as you can" (183), Mr. Antolini presses him to explain. And Holden in yet another of those observations that so endear him to younger readers, and that lay Salinger open to charges of being terminally, predictably "cute" puts it this way: "The trouble with me is, I like it when somebody digresses. It's more mteresting and all" (183). After all, Holden has a point especially if his story about Richard Kinsella, the boy who made a speech about the farm his father had bought in Vermont but who got sidetracked along the way, is even half true: They kept yelling "Digression!" at him the whole time he was making it, and this teacher, Mr. Vinson, gave him an F on it because he hadn't told what kind of aminals and vegetables and stuff grew on the farm and all. What he did was, Richard Kinsella, he'd start telling you all about that stuff then all of a sudden he'd start telling you about this letter his mother got from his uncle, and how his uncle got polio and all when he was forty-two years old, and how he wouldn't let anybody come to see him in the hospital because he didn't want anybody to see him with a brace on. It didn't have much to do with the farm I admit it but it was nice. It's nice when somebody tells you about their uncle. Especially when they start out telling you about their father's farm and then all of a sudden get more interested in their uncle. I mean it's dirty to keep yelling "Digression!" at him when he's all nice and excited. (184) The Catcher in the Rye is jam-packed with indictments against prep school education its small-minded teachers and even smaller minded students, its boring classes and conformist atmosphere but nothing in the novel strikes me as half so telling an image of misplaced pedagogy and the sheer cruelty it can induce as this one. Holden's refusal to join in the chorus of hearty, blood-curdling "Digression!"s is very different from, say, his glib "Very big deal!" to soothe the pains of loneliness during his description of the Pencey-Saxon game. For what is at stake as his fellow students are encouraged to shout down Richard Kinsella's digressions is nothing less than competition's meanest, most inhuman face. If Holden suffers through antiheroic moments when he 78

8 And Holden Caulfield Had a Great fall buckles under the fists of a Stradlater or a Maurice, one can confidently assert that his unwillingness to participate in the destructive games that the Oral Expression crowd play is a sure sign of courage. On the other hand, however, Mr. Antolini is not entirely wrong when he wonders if "someone starts out to tell you about his father's farm, [then] he should stick to his guns.... Or, if his uncle's brace is such a provocative subject, shouldn't he have selected it in the first place as his subject not the farm?" (184). But Holden's answer "lots of time you don't know what interests you most till you start talking about something that doesn't interest you most" (184) rings true. The word for what Holden overlooks, for what he himself lacks, is, of course, discipline. In this sense, I agree that Kinsella probably picked the wrong subject something he might well have considered in his dorm room rather than on the spot and I'm not at all sure that I would, or could, have given him a mark radically different from the one Mr. Vinson actually inked on his grade sheet. But that said, I'm also sure that neither Richard Kinsella nor any of those shouting him down have learned anything valuable about Oral Expression in the process. And I am even more convinced that they have learned precisely the wrong lessons about how a good man should live in a competitive society. And what, then, would be the right lessons, not so much for a particular course, but for an education as a whole? Mr. Antolini suggests one direction when he tries to convince Holden that "once you get past all the Mr. Vinsons" (189), what looms ahead isn't education so much as history, poetry: "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" (189). That, of course, is the dream underlying teaching at its best, and learning at its most engaged. Education is and here I very much agree with Mr. Antolini an offer, an opportunity, but one that requires the 79

9 THE CATCHER IN THE RYE imagination first be tempered by voices of the past, and then be disciplined by the writer who wishes to add his or her installment to the larger saga of how a self wrestles with the claims of society. The nightmare despite what Holden may think as he ticks off the "war stories" he's collected at no less than three prep schools is not that teachers or schools usually settle for the second-rate, but rather that a student like Holden will end up racing toward a romantic destruction. As Mr. Antolini puts it, "I don't want to scare you.... but I can very clearly see you dying nobly, one way or another, for some highly unworthy cause" (188). Not surprisingly, Holden is too impatient, too confused, and, most of all, too self-righteously angry to see beyond the Mr. Vinsons and their obsessions about sticking to a thesis. It's nice when people mention small details like an uncle's brace; it's also an additional piece of evidence (as if more were needed!) that Holden collects images of disease and death in something of the way that Hamlet collected evidences of human baseness. But it is also worth noting that Holden is so exhausted that he can barely keep from yawning. Moreover, what Holden observed earlier about Mr. Spencer that "You can't stop a teacher when they want to do something" (11) applies equally to Mr. Antolini. True, he cares about Holden a good deal more than the selfjustifying Mr. Spencer, and, true, he remains, in Holden's words, "about the best teacher I ever had" (174), but he is still a teacher, and once he is launched into a stump speech (even one filled with insight and good intentions), all Holden can do is sit there and take it 2 : "Something else an academic education will do for you. If you go along with it any considerable distance, it'll begin to give you an idea what size mind you have. What it'll fit and, maybe, what it won't. After a while, you'll have an idea what kind of thoughts your particular size mind should be wearing. For one thing, it may save you an extraordinary amount of time trying on ideas that don't suit you, aren't becoming to you. You'll begin to know your true measurements and dress your mind accordingly" (192). Objections to Mr. Antolini's extended metaphor (ideas as hats, education as a haberdashery) aside, what he says makes as decent sense as the hour and the liquor he has drunk will allow. 80

10 And Holden Caulfield Had a Great Fall Nonetheless, some aspects of his late-night instruction get through, at least at the unconscious level. And this is especially the case when he elaborates on the "special kind of fall" Holden seems headed for: "The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement's designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn't supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started" (187). But even Mr. Antolini has somewhat missed the point that Holden is nearly at the end of his physical tether and needs a warm bed far more than he needs a good talking to. Furthermore, the whole issue of getting him back on the straight-and-narrow academic track (the object, after all, of his well-meaning sermonizing) must wait until Holden loosens the grip on his pristine dreams and begins the difficult, complex task of engineering a separate peace with the world. And therein lies the rub. Mr. Antolini may drift off target in his psychoanalytic profile of Holden as a self-destructive romantic, and on the differences between mature and immature personalities "The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one" (188), but he is dead right about the psychodymanics of Holden's fall. For the final pages of the novel precisely recount that disorienting sense of plummeting through space without either anchor or definition. And indeed, no sooner does Holden fend off what he judges to be Mr. Antolini's perverted, homosexual "pass" and consider himself lucky to be on Fifth Avenue rather than inside the Antolinis' "very swanky apartment over on Sutton Place" than "something very spooky started happening. Every time I came to the end of a block and stepped off the goddam curb, I had this feeling that I'd never get to the other side of the street. I thought I'd just go down, down, down, and nobody'd ever see me again" (197). Holden's "fall" unlike James Castle's, or even the potential tumble of the children who play at the edge of cliffs is not the sort that ends in broken bones and blood; this fall risks an extinction of personality, of the self. I would agree with Mr. Antolini about Holden's penchant for certain aspects of romanti- 81

11 THE CATCHER IN THE RYE cism (adding, of course, that he is a character in a novel rather than the speaker of a romantic poem), but it is hard to think of him as going down in flames for causes either worthy or unworthy. He is too antiheroic, too self-conscious, too much the schlemiel for that. Rather, Holden is far more likely to play out his script in contradictory, largely internal ways. Consider Holden's response to his fateful meeting with Mr. Antolini. Unlike his obligatory visit with Mr. Spencer, this visit leaves Holden a sadder, perhaps wiser, and certainly more confused young man than he was before. Indeed, Holden begins (perhaps for the first time) to wonder if an instinctive judgment in this case, that Mr. Antolini should be numbered among the world's perverts as opposed to its great teachers might possibly, just possibly, be wrong: "I mean I wondered if just maybe I was wrong about thinking he was making a flitty pass at me. I wondered if maybe he just liked to pat guys on the head when they're asleep. I mean how can you tell about that stuff for sure? You can't. I even started wondering if maybe I should've got my bags and gone back to his house, the way I'd said I would. I mean I started thinking that even if he was a flit he certainly'd been very nice to me" (195). Most critics hedge their bets when commenting on this passage, and for understandable reasons. After all, Salinger has purposely left the matter of what might or might not have been a homosexual pass decidedly ambiguous. On one hand, everything about the Antolinis, from their apartment to their mannerisms, suggests the ambiance of sophistication verging toward the jaded. Their talk (unlike that of, say, Sally Hayes) points toward the dark rather than toward the phony. The effect is rather like that of the dialogue in a play by Harold Pinter: the spaces between the words often speak louder and more ominously than the words themselves. In short, tone points us to what may or may not be a subtext. And when one adds Mr. Antolini's alcohol to the mixture, the result might well be the stuff of which homosexual seductions are made. Indeed, those readers inclined to argue that Holden was right, that there is something vaguely disturbing about Mr. Antolini, will talk 82

12 And Holden Caulfield Had a Great "Pall generally about the nuances and small accretions of tone surrounding their conversation, and then point to the following passage: Then something happened. I don't even like to talk about it. I woke up all of a sudden. I don't know what time it was or anything, but I woke up. I felt something on my head, some guy's hand. Boy, it really scared hell out of me. What it was, it was Mr. Antolini's hand. What he was doing was, he was sitting on the floor right near to the couch, in the dark and all, and he was sort of petting me or patting me on the goddam head. Boy, I'll bet I jumped about a thousand feet. "What the hellya doing?" I said. "Nothing! I'm simply sitting here, admiring " "What're ya doing anyway?" I said over again. I didn't know what the hell to say I mean I was embarrassed as hell. "How 'bout keeping your voice down? I'm simply sitting here." (192) Other readers might use the same passage to make the opposite point that Mr. Antolini's actions are entirely innocent and his intentions wholly admirable. For such readers, it is Holden's accusing voice that so rattles Mr. Antolini, rather than either what he did or planned to do. There is little question that, in this scene, Holden is cast in the role of accuser. But since his narrative is studded with references to those he writes off as "flits," one has good reason to be skeptical about his hair-trigger judgments. Not that Holden is a homophobe as the term is currently defined, or even that he speaks about homosexuality with the same deep conviction with which he ladles out judgments about art, Ivy League phonies, or other people in general. Holden would be the first to admit that he is deeply confused about who is, or is not, a homosexual much less about how one ought to process that information. In this regard, one of his memories of life at the Whooton School deserves special mention. Carl Luce, his student adviser, used to hold court on the one topic certain to gather an eager prep school 83

13 THE CATCHER IN THE RYE audience: sex. As Holden remembers it, Luce took perversion as his general province and made homosexuality his specialty: "Old Luce knew who every flit and Lesbian in the United States was" (143) especially those public personalities not usually counted among the gay and lesbian: "Sometimes it was hard to believe, the people he said were flits and Lesbians and all, movie actors and like that. Some of the ones he said were flits were even married, for God's sake. You'd keep saying to him, 'You mean Joe Blow's a flit? Joe Blow! That big, tough guy that plays gangsters and cowboys all the time?' Old Luce'd say, 'Certainly.'... He said you could turn into one practically overnight, if you had all the traits and all. He used to scare the hell out of us. I kept waiting to turn into a flit or something" (143). Granted, Holden is shrewd enough to notice that Luce also liked to "goose the hell out of you while you were going down the corridor" (143), and to conclude that Luce struck him as something of a flit himself. But he isn't sure, for while Holden can spot a phony without breaking stride, homosexuals (especially those hunkered away in closets) bring him up short. When Holden meets Luce for a drink and what Luce quickly regards as yet another "typical Caulfield conversation," in chapter 19, Holden's overeager curiosity is pitted against Luce's overstated sophistication. A representative sampling of their doomed efforts at conversation should be sufficient: "Listen. How long you been going around with her, this sculpture babe?" I asked him. I was really interested. "Did you know her when you were at Whooton?" "Hardly. She just arrived in this country a few months ago." "She did? Where's she from?" "She happens to be from Shanghai." "No kidding! She's Chinese, for Chrissake?" "Obviously." (148) The comedy of Salinger's novel is often made from crossed purposes and strained juxtapositions of precisely this sort. In this case, a manic Holden revved up and dying to get the real scoop on sex from 84

14 And Holden Caulfield Had a Great Pall somebody is matched against a Luce who tries desperately to preserve a dignified, appropriately blase posture. But as Holden grows ever more animated and his voice ever shriller, that is not an easy task. Luce attempts to explain why sex is "better in the East": "They simply happen to regard sex as both a physical and a spiritual experience" (146). No sooner are Luce's word out of his smug, tight-jawed mouth than Holden gives them what can only be called a "Caulfield spin": "So do I! So do I regard it as a wuddayacallit a physical and spiritual experience and all. I really do. But it depends on who the hell I'm doing it with. If I'm doing it with somebody I don't even " (146). Not surprisingly, Holden's nervous repetitions thoroughly exasperate a would-be wordly customer like Luce, especially when he offers up the following observation: "Maybe I'll go to China. My sex life is lousy" (149). Leaving for the East or the West or the New England North is merely an offhand thought, a dream built on the thin hope that problems will not find a way into his suitcases. On the other hand, Holden is dead right when he notices that the same Luce who'd "make you describe the most personal stuff that happened to you" got defensive when people started asking him questions. As Luce would have it, the cure for Holden's problem namely, immaturity is a good psychiatrist; after all, Luce's father is a psychiatrist and he had helped his son to "adjust" himself. Holden, however, is suspicious (as well he should be, given Luce), but his sexual confusions will not only continue to bother him, they will be greatly aggravated by his evening at the Antolinis. For what it may be worth, my hunch is that Mr. Antolini sees in Holden all the confusion and desperate idealism, all the inchoate rage and ersatz rebellion, that characterized his own youth. I can cite no lines in support of this view, but what I am pointing toward is clear enough from the text the deep sense of caring and identification Mr. Antolini feels for a badly mixed-up young boy. In this sense, is his stroking of Holden's head really so unnatural, so perverted? At the same time, it might well be that Mr. Antolini has crossed the fragile line between love as agape and love as eros, between wanting to pat Holden and wanting to pet him. Once again, Salinger allows 85

15 THE CATCHER IN THE RYE for both possibilities. What strikes me as more important, more central to the reading of the novel, is how Holden responds to moral complexities to the possibility that Mr. Antolini might be a good friend as well as a homosexual, to a vision that includes shadings of gray and measures of compassion rather than one in which right and wrong come in neatly divided, black-and-white packages. Holden puts it in an interior monologue that differs markedly from the self-righteous, thoroughly confident Holden who mows down phonies in his mind: "I started thinking that even if he was a flit he certainly'd been very nice to me. I thought how he hadn't minded it when I'd called him up so late, and how he'd told me to come right over if I felt like it. And how he went to all that trouble giving me advice about finding out the size of your mind and all" (194). Holden's remorseful words echo those of Huckleberry Finn when he first realizes that Jim is a human being, capable of hurt and anger. To fool him is, in effect, to fool your brother, or, as Jim so eloquently puts it in chapter 15, to heap trash on the head of a friend (Twain, 79). In a similar way, what Holden learns is infinitely more important than whether Mr. Antolini was, or was not, a homosexual. In this sense, Mr. Antolini can take a small measure of comfort from the Holden who watches his sister riding her heart out on Central Park's carousel. Once again, Salinger paints the scene with meticulous attention to detail in this case, not only a realistic description of the "big, brown, beat-up looking old horse" (211) on which Phoebe rides or the five or six kids who were on the ride with her, but also the fact that the music being played is "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." The tune is, of course, perfectly appropriate for a carousel, but if one remembers that one line preceeding it is "When a lovely flame dies...," the scene takes on additional connotations: There were only about five or six other kids on the ride, and the song the carrousel was playing was "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." It was playing it very jazzy and funny. All the kids kept trying to grab for the gold ring, and so was old Phoebe, and I was sort of afraid she'd fall off the goddam horse, but I didn't say anything or do anything. The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold 86

16 And Holden Caulfield Had a Great Fall ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but it's bad if you say anything to them. (211) This Holden differs markedly from the one who harbored designs about being a "catcher in the rye" and thus the self-appointed savior of those children who played too close to the edge, or the Holden who tried so desperately to wash the dirty words from the walls of Phoebe's school. Innocence will, alas, always be under the thumb of the world's pressure. Holden puts it in lines that retain the power to crack the heart no matter how many times one has encountered them: "That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write Tuck you' right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it'll say 'Holden Caulfield' on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it'll say 'Fuck you.' I'm positive, in fact" (204). One fights against such despair, hoping against hope that the world is not as Holden paints it here, but the message that floods in from the evening newspapers and our television sets, to say nothing of the messages spray-painted on urban walls and subway cars, suggests that he might well be right. If, as Holden observes, somebody could crayon "Fuck you" in the same room in which Egyptian mummies are kept, apparently nothing is sacred, and nothing is safe. Does this, then, mean that any efforts on behalf of the good, the true, and the beautiful are doomed in advance? I think not, but I'm also convinced that those genuinely interested in a more attractive world go about their business in less grandiose, less "romantic" ways than Holden. To cling to a vision of a prelapsarian world, one without "falls" and without the complexities of sin, is to pitch one's tent in such lands as never were and can never be. By contrast, to realize that children will want to grab for the gold rings on carousels, and that we must let them, even if they fall, is to join (however tentatively) the adult world. There, falling into the quotidian and messy world is a risk, as are possibilities like compromise, conformity, and, yes, phoniness. 87

17 THE CATCHER IN THE RYE One fights against the worst that these possibilities suggest, but one has no choice about where the battle will be raged. It is much the same thing with competition, a concept that gives Holden the willies. Who knows, it might be better (certainly, it would be kinder and gentler) if people did not grasp for the brass rings and the material prizes that they signify, but the materialism that Holden is often so contemptuous of is also a fact of life. For far too many, it becomes life itself (and it is here that Holden's arguments continue to have force), but there is much more space than he has imagined between the world of limos, swank apartments, doormen, and maids, and the world of monastic deprivation. While it may be all too true that the world has a way of turning our early idealism into pragmatism, and then into cynicism, it is also true that, as Robert Frost's "Birches" (1916) states, "Earth's the right place for love." Holden could never have given Phoebe the silent permission to grab at life's brass ring had he actually found the cliff and rye field of his rigidly uncompromising romantic imagination. 88