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Yet there is something more important, more durable about The Catcher in the Rye. In the interstices of the memoir were seedling predictions, just waiting for the rain. And it came, it came. Take my love/hate for movies. Wouldn't you know that College English would run a piece, without irony, suggesting that my name, "one suspects"—one maybe, two never—"is an amalgam of the last names of Movie Stars William Holden and Joan Caulfield." Yeah, well . . . And yet my obsessive cinematic fantasies were really everyone's hang-up with nostalgia, camp and collective memory. Remember me camping it up with my roommate Stradlater: "I'm the goddam Governor's son ... He doesn't want me to be a tap dancer. He wants me to go to Oxford. But it's in my goddam blood, tap-dancing." Movies made all of us. That's why we don't know how to really feel about them. Half the time I'm still crazy about them; the other half I'm very grateful Salinger never sold me to Hollywood. (Can't you see the movie of Catcher, with Warren Beatty, probably, all cut up inside, haunted-looking because the director wouldn't let him eat for two days before filming?)
As for my deep animus toward "athletic bastards who stick together," see Bouton, Meggyesy, et al. And as for my hatred of those teachers who overinstruct but undernourish, yelling "digression!" in Oral Expression every time a student gets interesting, the romantic critiques of Kozol and Herndon have left me winded.
My distaste for mechanization, my preference for the four-footed over the four-wheeled ("A horse is at least human, for God's sake")—well, that has become a contagion by now. As has that yearning for Thoreauesque communal living in New England: "We'll stay in these cabin camps and stuff like that till the dough runs out . . . We could live somewhere with a brook and all and ... I could chop all our own wood in the wintertime and all."
Obsession with vulgarity and physical decay? Look around. The bookstores, the grind houses. That's not even sex, it's cold cuts. And the shlock stores are shlockier. I saw a brass statue of a guy rolling a stone up a hill. Underneath it was a label: "That's life." The myth of Sisyphus became a piece of shoddy merch.
And yet . . . and yet . . . Somehow, I have a feeling all things have not deteriorated. Some unexpected people have awakened to the voices of their children, who have turned out to be—surprise!—the holders of moral strength. Innocence is no longer suspect. Sally Hayes called me a sacrilegious atheist because I thought Jesus would have puked at the Radio City Music Hall Christmas stage show. I said, "The thing Jesus really would've liked would be the guy that plays the kettle drums in the orchestra." Well, maybe that humanizing is behind some of the Jesus Revolution. Anyway, he would have liked the drummer at Superstar. Not the show, though. And I see I'm not the only one to wonder about the ducks in Central Park. Now they're worried about species I never even heard of.
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