Posted on 10/23/2004 6:55:30 AM PDT by jalisco555
Precisely how old I was when I first read "The Catcher in the Rye," I cannot recall. When it was published, in 1951, I was 12 years old, and thus may have been a trifle young for it. Within the next two or three years, though, I was on a forced march through a couple of schools similar to Pencey Prep, from which J.D. Salinger's 16-year-old protagonist Holden Caulfield is dismissed as the novel begins, and I was an unhappy camper; what I had heard about "The Catcher in the Rye" surely convinced me that Caulfield was a kindred spirit.
By then "The Catcher in the Rye" was already well on the way to the status it has long enjoyed as an essential document of American adolescence -- the novel that every high school English teacher reflexively puts on every summer reading list -- but I couldn't see what all the excitement was about. I shared Caulfield's contempt for "phonies" as well as his sense of being different and his loneliness, but he seemed to me just about as phony as those he criticized as well as an unregenerate whiner and egotist. It was easy enough to identify with his adolescent angst, but his puerile attitudinizing was something else altogether.
That was then. This is half a century later. "The Catcher in the Rye" is now, you'll be told just about anywhere you ask, an "American classic," right up there with the book that was published the following year, Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea." They are two of the most durable and beloved books in American literature and, by any reasonable critical standard, two of the worst. Rereading "The Catcher in the Rye" after all those years was almost literally a painful experience.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
J.D. Salinger should have restricted his writing to sh*t house walls. That's where it belonged in the first place.
You should kiss her. She could have made you read Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles...*shudder*
Thank God I can choose what I teach in Brit Lit! Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare, Paradise Lost, etc. That's real literature!
Never, either. I selected the handle from an old memory of the sound of the name & a vague impression left over from seeing the movie when I was too young to remember much about it. Holly's name trips off of the tongue so delightfully, does it not? Still, she is a Holiday, while I am not.
The movie was a love story. The book was a tragedy. Holly was written as a tragic figure. And in ny event, Bonwitt Teller is long out of business.
(-former English teacher of British lit)
So they say. I caught a small portion of the movie shortly after I selected the handle. IMO, even the movie could not hide the tragedy. About all I could see was a shallow, empty existence. Maybe if I had watched the whole thing, I would have gotten a different impression.
The book was a tragedy. Holly was written as a tragic figure.
I guess because of "In Cold Blood", I always thought Capote's work was grim & dark. It got great reviews, so I picked it up & began reading it, but couldn't force myself through it. Add in his media appearances, they left me with the feeling that he was a bit creepy. I was surprised to find out he'd written "Breakfast at Tiffany's", as again, it was billed as such a wonderful love story.
Bonwitt Teller is long out of business.
I didn't know that, but I'm far from NY. I'm just a small town gal & not into shopping anyway. LOL
Holly's existance not so shallow as may first be assumed.
Remember, Capote, in spite of everything, was a small town Southern guy.
And In Cold Blood was a breakthrough book. Nobody had ever written a murder story like that before, that is, using the novelist's tools of the trade. Norman Mailer called it the product of a bankrupt imagination, then copied the exact same technique twenty years later with Executioner's Song, but did a lousy job of it.
In Cold Blood Bonus Trivia: Capote spent months in Kansas interviewing everyone involved. However, when he sensed hostility regarding his "lifestyle," he called his childhood/life long friend, Harper Lee (author of To Kill a Mockingbird) who promptly got on a train for Kansas with her father's old .45 and acted as his bodyguard for the duration of the interviewing process.
Yup.
Regarding Holly, the first term that came to mind was brittle, defined in the sense of brittle laugher. When I say shallow, it's not the fluffy headed type of shallow, where there is no knowing any better. It's where you understand greater meanings, yet do not persue them. You attempt of to fill the emptiness with busyness, meaningless doings.
I'm sure "In Cold Blood" is a great read for many people. Delving into difficult, dark subjects is in some ways necessary, for some, for others...
Maybe I'm strange, but I mull & have for as long as I can remember. Writing my response to you brought another murder back into my mind, one that happened around the same time as Capote's book was published. The adults didn't talk about it around children, but you'd catch them talking about it with each other in hushed tones. I grew up in a small town & young women were just not found dead in a pool of their own blood, with over 30 stab wounds, not in small town, middle America. Diane had been a neighbor & my favorite babysitter when I was younger. Her murder has never been solved.
Anyway, I try to be careful about the kinds of things I bring into my psyche to mull about.
Your bonus trivia, LOL Yes, I can see that!
Holly was the type of character you can trace back to Becky Sharp (Thackery's Vanity Fair) etc.
And yeah, Capote was somewhat fascinated by the dark side of life, which he eventually fell into. I'd argue that he more or less squandered his talent, which was sizeable. Too many parties, too many drugs, too many wasted days yakking with rich women.
Bonus Capote Material (Warning: somewhat racey): Capote never went to college. Rather, he took a job in the mail room of The New Yorker Magazine. The story circulates, which he never denied, that one of his jobs was going across the street to a hotel where humorist/cartoonist James Thurber would meet his mistress. Thurber, who was by then almost blind, would have young Truman help him dress for his return to the office. Although Thurber's wife would dress him in the morning and undress him at night, vanity prevented asking his mistress to help. Unhappy with his assignment and ever the moralist, Truman turned the old man's socks inside out, so that his wife would be sure to notice when she helped undress him at night.
One of those stories that is repeated so often that it's almost as good as true.
I loved "Catcher" when I read it at age 14. Don't know if I'd still like it. Dad was in the IV infantry division in Europe with Salinger during WWII and actually knew the guy. By the time the IV got from the beaches of Normandy to Germany they had suffered a casualty rate of over 200%. However, Dad said that Salinger was a real oddball.
I will say that my daughter recently read Catcher (high school assignment) and liked it a lot. She is a no nonsense, no frills, upbeat, happy kid, so that amounts to a recommendation, IMO.
As for Hemingway, I have always adored "The Old Man and the Sea" and don't get the scorn being heaped on it on this thread. Influence of PC, I guess. I understand that Hemingway was supposed to have been a jerk, but he certainly could write!
Some folks seem to want to call those whose literary taste differs from there own liberals. An unhealthy habit, I think.
Wow----I haven't heard anyone mention Stop-Time in ages!
I read it just when it came out, when was that,in '67?
It got lots of attention, first because of its literary quality, and secondarily because of the (then) novelty of such a young (and completely unknown)writer breaking into literature with what was basically an AUTOBIOGRAPHY, as if he were already famous. Conroy was somewhere in his early 30s at the time and eventually as you no doubt know ran the Iowa Writers Workshop for many many years, I think he just announced his intention to resign a few months ago, and a successor has been chosen.(Marilynne Robinson, another writer who has written very little) I know he had a second book but I can't remember whether it was anovel or stories, and it didn't get that much attention (too long a wait between books will queer a critic's enthusiasm.)
I don't understand the fascination with JD Salinger. Just let the guy fade away already.
It's hard to say. I liked "Old Man and the Sea" but I really disliked "For Whom the Bell Tolls." Of course, I didn't like much Hemmingway anyway.
What was wrong with Butterfield 8? If you said, Rage to Live, I'd understand. But Butterfield 8?
You are so right! I've made the "off the interstates" a point all of my life. When I traveled overseas, I used the same principles. Yeah, check out the 'popular' spots but try the ones off of the beaten path. I can't even begin to describe the rewards of that philosophy. Sad to say, one of my ex-girlfriends lost me forever after wanting to go to the Orlando tourist traps instead of just 'exploring'. Oh, well....
That's right ,MIDAIR, couldn't remember the name. Of Dos Passos, I've only read USA and Three Soldiers, but nothing of Lawrence Durrell. His friend Henry Miller has given me as much pleasure as any other practitioner of fiction (though Miller was usually autobiographical) BLACK SPRING is unforgettable. Thinking about it some time ago, I realized that most of my favorite books ARE in fact basically autobiographies. The aforementioned Miller, Diary of a Madman by Strindberg, Because I was Flesh by Edward Dahlberg---this last one probably impressed me at the age of 21 or 22 as much as anything I've ever read. Here's another great American novel from about 1964: Richard Yates's REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, the first and best novel to anatomize the earliest generation to come of age after WW2(his own), settle in suburbia (Revolutionary Road is the name of the section of the development they live in), and lead rather unhappily conflicted lives of "quiet desperation". A GREAT NOVEL.
----BTW ---I noticed scrolling down this thread you mentioned Knowles as the author of THE COLLECTOR. It was Fowles. Didn't read the novel but the movie I remember as outstanding. Also I saw you mentioned Duke of Deception and Boy's Life by the Woolf brothers. Both fine books. Geoffrey is a friend of a writer friend of mine from the late 60s, who also has a coming of age novel that's good and worth reading, and basically is all about US in the late 60s early 70s---James Atlas, "The Great Pretender".
Ashamed to say, I haven't read Yates. One of the holes in my fiction education. However, I despise Henry Miller for reasons I don't quite understand. I read about three paragraphs of the guy and want to slap him silly. Durrell probably shouldn't be missed, though out of fashion. Also, if you're into honest writing, check out Jim Harrison, particularly his new memoir, Life on the Side. He was part of that whole montana group, including McGuane etc. And, he remains the only "celebrity" who has ever intimidated me.
Our teacher made us read a WHOLE collection of Salinger stories: it was absolutely mind numbing rot. Also on our high school literary agenda was "Black Like Me" (guilt), "The Pearl" (if you ever strike it rich, it'll make you greedy and your life will turn to tragedy etc). And a collection of Edgar A. Poe (by the way, drugs are bad).
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