BOOKS
Fit Audience
Br FRANK KERMODE
HAT meaning, if any, can one attach to the
expression 'a key book of the .present decade'? It is used as a blurb in a new reprint of Mr. J. D. Salinger's famous novel,* which was first published in 1951. Whoever remembers the book .will suppose that this is a serious claim, implying perhaps that The Catcher, as well as be-
ing extremely successful, is a work of art existing in some more or less profound relationship with the spirit of the age.' It is, anyway, quite different from saying that No Orchids for Miss Blandish is a key book. On the other hand, there is an equally clear distinction between this book and such key novels as Ulysses or A Passage to India. For it is elementary that, although these books have been read by very large numbers of people, one may reasonably distinguish between a smaller, 'true' audience and bigger audiences which read them quite differently, and were formerly a fortuitous addition to the 'highbrow' public. But although Salinger is certainly a `highbrow' novelist, it would be unreal to speak of his audience, large though it Is, as divided in this way. What we now have is a new reader who is not only common but pretty share. This new reader is also a pampered con- sumer, so that the goods supplied him rapidly 1,r,°w obsolete; which may explain why I found ne Catcher somewhat less enchanting on a second reading. It is, of course, a book of extraordinary ac- complishment; I don't know how one reviewer came to call it 'untidy.' Nothing inept, nothing that does not look good and work well as long as it is needed, will satisfy this new public. Structural vir- tuosity is now taken for granted, particularly in American novels. This one is designed for readers Who can see a wood, and paths in a wood, as well as sturdy, primitive trees—a large, roughly calcul- able audience : fit audience though many. At the level of its untidy story, the book is !bout an adolescent crisis. A boy runs away from his expensive school because he is an academic failure and finds intolerable the coin- PallY of so many phoneys. He passes a lost weekend in New York, mostly in phoney hotels, night clubs and theatres, avoids going to bed with a prostitute and is beaten up by her ponce, meets ,,84/17fle phoney friends, talks to taxi-drivers, won- ers endearingly where the ducks from Central frk Lake go in winter, secretly visits his kid sister, indulges various fantasies of much charm and finally falls ill with exhaustion. He tells his artr°rY in a naive sophisticated dialect, partly in the Homeric Runyon tradition, partly something I1,°_ce modern. Repetitive, indecent, often very f"Ply, it is wonderfully sustained by the author, who achieves all those ancient effects to be got tom a hero who is in some ways inferior, and in ,,,,c4hers superior, to the reader. (His wisdom is „,7tural, ours artificial.) The effect is comfortably
he the boy, ungifted and isolated as L'e thinks himself to be, is getting his last pre-adult
* THE 2s 6 CATCHER IN THE RYE. (Penguin Books,
look at the adult world, our world, into which' he is being irresistibly projected. He can't stand the adolescent world either; clean, good children turn into pimply shavers with dirty minds. For sex is what alters the goodness of children. Of the girls Holden Caulfield knows, one is nice and lovable— for her he admits no sexual feeling, though her date with a crumby seducer helps to work him up to this crisis; one is a prostitute, operating in a hotel which is a comic emblem of the perverted adult world; and one is an arty phoney. Growing up is moving out of crumby phoneyness into per- verted phoneyness. These phoneys, they come in at the goddam window, using words like 'grand' and 'marvellous,' reading and writing stories about `phoney lean-jawed guys named David . . . and a lot of phoney girls named Marcia that are always lighting all the goddam Davids' pipes for them.' Successful people, even the Lunts, turn into phoneys because of all the phoneys who adore them, Holden, near enough to Nature to spot this, is himself knowingly infected by the false attitudes of the movies, the greatest single source of phoneyness. Only children are free of it, especially dead children.
This much you get from listening to the boy, and it sounds untidy. What Mr. Salinger adds is design. Holden is betrayed at the outset by a schoolmaster (phoney-crumby) and at the end by another (phoney-perverted). The only time his parents come into the story, he has to remain motionless in the dark with his sister. The boy's slang is used to suggest patterns he cannot be aware of : whatever pleases him 'kills' him, sends him off to join his dead brother; almost every- body, even the disappointed whore, is 'old so-and-so,' and 'old' suggests the past and stability. More important, the book has its big, focal pas- sages, wonderfully contrived. Holden hears a little neglected boy singing, `If a body catch a body, etc.' This kills him. Then he helps a little girl in Central Park to fasten her skates. Next he walks to the Museum of Natural History, which he loved as a child; it seemed `the only nice, dry cosy place in the world.' Nothing changed there among the stuffed Indians and Eskimos; except you. You changed every time you went in. The thought that his little sister must also feel that whenever she went in depresses him; so he tries to help some kids on a see-saw, but they don't want him around. When he reaches the museum he won't go in. This is a beautiful little parable, and part of my point is that nobody will miss it. Another is the climactic scene when Holden is waiting for his sister to come out of school. Full of rage at the `— yous' written on the school walls, he goes into the Egyptian Room of the museum and explains to a couple of scared children why the mummies don't rot. Of course, he likes mummies; though the kids, naturally, don't. But even in there, in the congenial at- mosphere of undecaying death, somebody has written you' on the wall. There is nowhere free from crumbiness and sex. He retreats into his catcher fantasy as Phoebe rides the carousel; and then into illness.
This is only a hint of the complexity of Mr. Salinger's 'highbrow' plotting. There is much more; consider the perfectly 'placed' discussion between the boy and his sister in which he tells her about the phoneys at school. She complains that he doesn't like anything, and challenges him to mention something he does. After a struggle, he speaks of two casually encountered nuns, a boy who threw himself out of a window, and his dead brother. He daren't grow up, for fear of turn- ing into a phoney; but behind him Eden is shut for ever.
Why, then, with all this to admire, do I find something phoney in the book itself? Not because there is 'faking,' as Mr. Forster calls it. In his sense, 'faking' doesn't lead one directly to some prefabricated attitude, and this does happen in The Catcher. The mixed-up kid totters on the brink of a society which is corrupt in a conven- tional way; its evils are fashionably known to be such, and don't have.to be proved, made valid in the book. Similarly, the adult view of adolescence, insinuated by skilful faking, is agiee- able to a predictable public taste. Again, we like to look at the book and see the Libido having a bad time while the Death Wish does well, as in the museum scenes; but I don't feel that this situation occurs in the book as it were by natural growth, any more than sub-threshold advertising grows on film. The Catcher has a built-in death wish; it is what the consumer needs, just as he might ask that a toothpaste taste good and con- tain a smart prophylactic against pyorrhoea. The predictable consumer-reaction is a double one: how good! and how clever ! The boy's attitudes to religion, authority, art, sex and so on are what smart people would like other people to have, but cannot have themselves because of their superior understanding. They hold fogether in a single thought purity and mess, and feel good. The author's success springs from his having, with perfect understanding, supplied their de- mand for this kind of satisfaction.
It is this rapport between author and public, or high-class rabblement, that would have astonished Joyce. Its presence in The Catcher may be roughly established by comparison with Keith Waterhouse's There is a Happy Land, obviously influenced by Salinger. It is in some ways a more genuine book; the growth of a positive evil out of the sordid innocence of a proletarian childhood is worked out in a way that prevents anybody feel- ing superior about it. But it isn't a 'key' book, because it is not designed for the smart-common reader. These may seem hard sayings, when The Catcher has given me so much pleasure. But I speak as a consumer myself, asking why the book, a few years on, seems so much less im- pressive. The answer seems to be that new needs are readily engendered in us, and readily supplied. Books will not last us any longer than motor- cars. Of the rabblement from which we came, we retain one characteristic, its fickleness. What pleases us will not keep, of its very nature. Joyce was right not to seek his readers in the walks of the bestia trionfante, Forster to stand by his aristocracy. Mr. Salinger is not like them. Since few men will write for nobody, this fine artist writes for the sharp common reader.
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