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 March-April, 2010
Holden
Caulfield, a heartsick Hamlet
A few weeks after J.D. Salinger
died on
January 27, I reread The Catcher in the
Rye. One highlight was Holden Caulfield’s riffs on
literature. At various
points he weighs in on Shakespeare, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Hardy,
Ring
Lardner, Charles Dickens, Somerset Maugham, Isak Dinesen, Ernest
Hemingway,
Emily Dickinson, Rupert Brooke and Robert Burns – to say nothing
of his views
on The Gospels and Beowulf.
I was especially fond of
his take on Hamlet:
"D.B. took Phoebe and I to
see it last year. He treated us to
lunch first, and then he took us. He’d already seen it, and the
way he talked
about it at lunch, I was anxious as hell to see it too. But I
didn’t enjoy it
much. I just don’t see what’s so marvelous about Sir
Laurence Olivier, that’s
all. He has a terrific voice, and he’s a helluva handsome guy,
and he’s very
nice to watch when he’s walking or dueling or something, but he
wasn’t at all
the way D.B. said Hamlet was. He was too much like a goddamn general,
instead
of a sad, screwed-up type guy" (117).
Why does Olivier’s
alpha-Hamlet bother Holden so much? What’s
phony about it?
The straightforward answer
is that Holden perceives himself as the exemplar of
the “sad,
screwed-up type.” As such, he often contrasts himself with the
handsome,
athletic Oliviers of his world – the Steerforths to his
Copperfield. His Pencey
Prep roommate, Ward Stradlater, is the novel’s prominent Olivier:
“He was a
very strong guy. I’m a very weak guy,” observes Holden
after Stradlater easily
breaks his half-nelson (39).
In Holden’s limited
worldview, handsome jocks are never sad
or screwed-up. After all, it’s the jocks that get to make out
with girls like
Jane Gallagher. Stradlater notoriously gives Jane “the
time” in Ed Banky’s car
(42). And a hotshot diver from Choate, whom Holden describes as
“all muscles
and no brains,” also gets in Jane’s pants (135).
But Holden never does, and
his melancholy about this is the
novel’s driving force. It is as responsible for his sad,
screwed-up state as
the death of his brother Allie. And these two formative, teenage
traumas are commingled
in the text. Holden’s fistfight with Stradlater – fueled by
his Othello-esque
sexual jealousy of Stradlater’s success with Jane – occurs
only moments after
Stradlater insults Holden’s essay about Allie’s mitt. And
Holden is impotent to
harm Stradlater because of Allie: Holden
literally lost the power to “make a good fist” thanks to
the injury he
sustained punching garage windows in raging at Allie’s death
(43).
The altercation with
Stradlater and the punching out of
garage windows are two of the only times Holden acts on his passions.
For the
most part, Holden – like Hamlet – is all talk and no walk.
He packs the perfect
snowball with his bare hands but never throws it (36). On nine separate
occasions, he thinks about contacting Jane (32, 59, 63, 76, 105, 116,
135, 150,
202). But he never does, despite the obvious grip she has on his heart
and
loins. He prefers the emotional safety of Robert Ackley, Faith
Cavendish, Carl
Luce and Sally Hayes.
There’s another
reason Holden won’t call Jane: He wants her
fixed in his mind as an ideal. To contact her would risk tainting the
memory of
their hand-holding summer in Maine,
PG-rated though it was. Of course, Holden never says this about Jane.
But in the
book’s longest paragraph – a three-page discourse on the Museum of Natural History
– he writes:
"The best thing, though, in
that museum was that everything
always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. You could go
there one 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 the squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving
that
same blanket. Nobody’d be different" (121).
The erotic language is no
accident. Mixed with the museum memories
are romantic flashbacks of an awkward childhood: “You’d be
two rows of kids,
and you’d have a partner. Most of the time my partner was this
girl named
Gertrude Levine. She always wanted to hold your hand, and her hand was
always
sticky or sweaty or something” (120).
That last sentence, on its
own, may not seem like much. But
it gains power as a follow-up to Holden’s description of holding
hands with
Jane: “We’d start holding hands, and we wouldn’t quit
till the movie was over.
And without changing the position or making a big deal of it. You never
even
worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not” (79).
And so we come, at last, to the
real reasons Holden is afraid to contact Jane. He can't stand the
thought of being her Gertrude Levine. And he would rather not confront
the adulthood reality of her holding hands with someone else -- someone
who isn't so screwed-up or sad.
January-February,
2010
Emily
Dickinson & The Left Hand of
Darkness
December, 2009
Q
& A with James Ellroy
November, 2009
Flannery
O'Connor's "The River"
October, 2009
Breaking
Down The Black Dahlia
August-September,
2009
Emily
Dickinson, War Poet
July, 2009
Jaime
Lannister's Fever Dream
June, 2009
Underground
with Philip Roth
April-May,
2009
Bradbury
and Bellow, Jupiter and Saturn
February-March,
2009
Tedious
reviews of Philip Roth; NFL draft + recession (Matthew Stafford + Mark
Sanchez are not first-round worthy; Chase Coffman + Zac Robinson are)
January, 2009
Dirge
of the dying year (Shelley, Browning, Harold Bloom); Israel's
Lincolnesque strategy + Obama's silence; NFL rookie wrap-up
December, 2008
Politically
incorrect moments in literature; Rolling
Stone's 100 greatest singers; the NBA's most improved players;
Ursula K. Le Guin and George R. R. Martin
November, 2008
The
brilliance of Bergman, the busts of the NFL draft
October, 2008
How
Wal-Mart blackwashed its image; when the movie beats the book
August-September,
2008
Tavis
Smiley and Charlie Rose are lazy; fiction and football, blogs and Bruce
Springsteen
July, 2008
WALL-E,
Robinson Crusoe, Abraham Lincoln, Najeh Davenport
June, 2008
SAT
scores, NBA draft
May, 2008
It
was 20 years ago today; Steve McNair versus Jim Kelly
April, 2008
Russell
Banks, meet Stephen Vincent Benét; Chris Paul is not the MVP
March, 2008
Hillary Clinton forgets Holden Caulfield; Steve Slaton,
steal of the NFL draft
February, 2008
The
NY Times Magazine insults our intelligence; the truth about
Gilbert Arenas and Jeremy Shockey
January, 2008
The
Gayness of Henry James, the Inspiration of Rod Smith
December, 2007
El
Salvador, Eels, and Jose Calderon
November, 2007
Imus,
Kucinich, and the Houston Rockets
Ilan Mochari's fiction has been published in Keyhole and honored by Glimmer Train.
In 2009, he received a Literature Artist Fellowship grant from the
Somerville Arts Council, a local agency supported by the Massachusetts
Cultural Council. He is a former staff writer for Inc, and he has also
written for Fortune Small Business and CFO. He has a B.A. in English from Yale University.
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