In the summer of 1951, a modest 277-page book was published. Its author: the little-known short-story writer J.D. Salinger. Its narrator: Holden Caulfield, a 16-year-old whose picaresque journey took him from Pencey Prep (the third private school from which he had been dismissed) to his home in New York City three days later. The Catcher in the Rye became a prodigious bestseller, transfiguring the emotional landscape, the mores and insights of an entire generation. It gave Salinger an abrupt prominence throughout America, Europe. Asia and Africa, and triggered what Critic George Steiner resentfully labeled "the Salinger industry"—a furious parsing of the author's fragile corpus.
But as Salinger's last story, Hapworth, noted, quoting Proust: "A cathedral, a wave in a storm, a dancer's leap never turn out to be as high as we had hoped." The tide has gone out; the factories of the Salinger industry have experienced vast layoffs; the author himself has not communicated with his readers for seven years. And Holden Caulfield—has his voice been muted by his creator's silence? What happens to a prodigy two decades after his debut, when he is pushing 40? An admirer can only hazard a guess:
IF you really want to hear about it, with the stylistic tics and all, the what-ever-happened-to-Soames-Forsyte kind of crap, you'll have to look elsewhere. When I was a cynosure I spake as a cynosure, and when I grew up I gave the vocabulary to the parodists. Actuarially speaking, a generation has grown since I first appeared. Gazing at that boy with the red hunting cap on the old Signet paperback, I wonder: What would he think of me today? But then that gray-and-white snapshot in your high school yearbook—what is that youth to you? Would you have anything to say to each other now?
Anyway, when we last left me, I was in a California institution for the emotionally disturbed. In ascending order I was suffering from 1) underweight, 2) pneumonia, 3) debilitation, and 4) terminal sanctity. The first three were cured handily. My brother D.B. kept driving over from Hollywood with sandwiches and books; the books were supposed to cure No. 4. Perhaps they did.
Maybe you were one of those who felt that after all the maundering I would wind up exactly like my father—that all along I was a conformist manqué. You were right. Boy, were you right! For a while. A long while. At first I bought the whole shot. My head got straight; I went to Columbia—after I said I would never go to any of those phony Ivy schools—and even tried a year of law school. I wore a Tattersall vest. I even wore a hat, for God's sake. Not a red hunting cap, I mean a hat. A whaddyacall it. A fedora. My father used to rate me like a New York pollution inspector: good, acceptable, unhealthy. I became a Good Boy.
It shouldn't surprise you. In those days I was always being compared to Huckleberry Finn. You know how he ended? According to Mark Twain, as a "justice of the peace in a remote village in Montana, and was a good citizen and greatly respected." If you get slipped a Finn like that, what can you reasonably expect of me?