Millions of people who all over the world have read J. D. Salinger’s book The Catcher in the Rye know that the seventeeen-year old Holden Caulfield is recovering from a nervous breakdown in a sanitarium after being thrown out of a prep school the previous year and spending some crazy two days in New York. As an icon of the teenagers’ rebellion against the conventions of adult life, all of us who have at some time shared his angst and fears ask ourselves what happened to Holden after the crisis that left him so shaken that he required such a long stay in a mental hospital.
The last page of the book offers us a relatively optimistic perspective of full recovery, although serious doubts remain. In his own words: “A lot of people, especially this one psychoanalyst guy they have here, keeps asking me if I’m going to apply myself when I go back to school next September. It’s such a stupid question, in my opinion. I mean how do you know what you’re going to do till you do it? The answer is, you don’t. I think I am, but how do I know? I swear it’s a stupid question.”
This statement, typical of the book’s main character and narrator, is very far from the soothing epilogues of many novels where, according to Henry James, there is a distribution at last of “prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs, and cheerful remarks.” No wonder that, in children books, these closings are common because they help to tranquilize young minds fearful of a tragic end. But even recently, in the Harry Potter saga, we have been shown the characters – older and with well-developed families – in a happy ending worthy of Hollywood in the best of times.
However, by leaving us in the dark, Salinger only stimulates the intelectual curiosity of those still awed by the almost mystical force of a literary figure first seen in 1951, but who, according to the book’s cronology, would be more than one hundred years old by now.
The desire to know what happened to Holden after he faced everyday tribulations again is certainly not limited to a few since it has already spawned two literary efforts to answer this existential question. In 2009, the Sweedish author Fredrik Colting wrote “60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye”, a book in which a 76 years-old Holden Caulfield escapes from a retirement home and drifts around the town as his genuine alter ego had done decades before. Angered, Salinger was able to obtain a judicial order banning the sale of the book. More recently, Mary O’Connell wrote “In the Rye”, in which Holden Caulfield once more runs around Manhattan, in this case apparently looking for a woman who was his teacher of American literature. Due to the legal complications raised by Salinger, this novel was never published. If we know about these two cases, it is not difficult to imagine how many more Holden Caulfield reincarnations lie in the drawers of frustrated writers who have dreamt about the day-after of the hero of their youth.
One speculative line of investigation would lead us to Salinger’s own works because, curiously enough, he used the name Holden Caulfield in several short stories written before The Catcher in the Rye, beginning with the one entitled “Slight Rebellion off Madison”, bought by The New Yorker in 1941, but, due to the Second World War, only appearing in that prestigious magazine five years later. Nevertheless, these short stories do not reveal a consistent time-line, and the characters bearing that name present very different features, sometimes even contradictory. The most remarkable example of this can be found in the short story in which Holden Caulfield is a soldier who died in action in 1944 – when the Holden of the Catcher was sixteen years old in 1949. Therefore, it remains a mystery why the author had such a fixation on this name since, unfortunately, the short stories cannot provide any indication about the future of “our” Holden.
Another possible line of research derives from the similarities between Salinger himself and the young man who roams the streets of New York to avoid confessing to his parents that he had been expelled from school. Both the real-life author and his literary creation belonged to high middle-class families, lived in excelent apartments in the best neighborhoods, had problems in school and showed complex personalities. The convergencies, however, are even deeper and more somber.
As a sergeant in the Counterintelligence Corps of the Army, Salinger would interrogate war prisoners thanks to his fluency in German and French. But, althoug he did not participate directly in combat action, he disembarked in the shore of Normandy on the famous D Day, in June of 1944, and witnessed all the slaughter that took place there and during the long march that crossed the Ardennes and took him to Germany in the following year. In April 1945, he entered the Kaufering IV death camp, part of the Dachau complex, where he saw piles of charred corpses. In one of his few remarks about what he saw during the war, he once told his daughter Margaret that “You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live.” Thus, it is not surprising that a few days after the end of the war, deeply troubled, Salinger entered a hospital in Nuremberg due to what at the time was called “combat fatigue” but nowadays is characterized as a “post-traumatic stress disorder.”
And the man who came back from Europe was not the same who enlisted as a soldier years before. Despite having had two glorious meetings with the war correspondent Ernest Hemingway, the death of thousands of companions during the campaign tainted with bitterness the passages later used in The Catcher in the Rye, which he continued to write even during the bombardments, placing his typing machine under a table. And, not long after the book was published, making him more famous than he wished, Salinger moved in 1953 to the boondocks of New Hampshire where he lived as a recluse until he died in 2010, aged 91.
Therefore, it is highly probable that the writing of The Catcher in the Rye may have meant a liberation to Salinger, a huge catharsis, because in truth he was writing a war book while transmuting it into the experiences of a problematic teenager who closely resembled the author himself in his youth. Nevertheless, what is difficult to see in a first reading, when the zanny adventures of the young man take hold of our perceptions, is that he also transferred to Holden Caulfield his post-traumatic stress disorder – and perhaps even more in terms of mental illness.
In Holden’s case, the trauma is caused by the loss of Allie, the younger brother he loved, who dies of leukemia on a day precisely registered – July 18, 1946. And he remembers: “I was only thirteen, and they were going to have me psychoanalysed and all, because I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it. I even tried to break all the windows of the station wagon we had that summer, but my hand was already broken and everything by that time, and I couldn’t do it. It was a very stupid thing to do, I’ll admit, but I hardly didn’t even know I was doing it, and you didn’t know Allie. My hand still hurts me once in a while, when it rains and all, and I can’t make a real fist any more – not a tight one, I mean – but outside of that I don’t care much. I mean I’m not going to be a goddam surgeon or a violinist or anything anyway.”
The description of a psychotic break could not be clearer, but it is not equally clear if Holden’s parents really offered him at the time of Allie’s death the kind of treatment that he needed to have a few years later. The fact is that, throughout the book, Holden’s expressions of rebellion against adult hyprocrisy are accompanied by frequent references to the brother and the depression caused by his loss, including, as an obvious symptom of the disorder, the wish to commit suicide. On the other hand, it is quite possible that Holden would recover entirely with the help of the older brother D.B. (who visits him at the sanitarium a shortly before his discharge), and of his marvellous younger sister Phoebe, who seems to understand him better than anybody else and had shown herself so protective when she felt he was entering into such a deep crisis.
Running counter to this optimistic hypothesis is the sad possiblity that Holden truly suffered from a bipolar disorder that, depending on its severty, could have haunted him during all his adult life. This is strangely suggested by the circumstance that reading The Catcher in the Rye gave rise to powerful emotions in various persons who were without doubt mentally ill. As if, in some odd ways, they had felt the negative vibrations that innumerable healthy readers do not perceive. As a matter of fact, many violent episodes are associated with the novel, including the murder of the actress Rebecca Schaeffer by Robert John Bardo and the attempted murder of Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley Jr. And, in the most famous case, after killing John Lennon Mark David Chapman was arrested carrying one copy of the book he had bought the same day and on which he had written: “To Holden Caulfield, from Holden Caulfield. This is my statement.”
Nevertheless, there may be a less tragic epilogue because Salinger, since he authorized the publication of his last work in 1965, wrote relentlessly until he died. His son Matt Salinger and the author’s widow, Colleen O’Neill, are responsible for selecting the writings of almost half a century that one day will see the light of the day – and perhaps the fact that Matt has played the role of Captain America in Hollywood movies serves a guarantee that he has the necessary stamina to carry out such a monumental task. Considering that some people affirm that this literary treasure contains nothing less than 15 novels, we are justified in dreaming that one of them will be a sequel to The Catcher in the Rye and that we may then finally learn what happened with our good old friend Holden Caulfield.
However, J. D. Salinger’s unpublished works remain a mystery, but even if they hold the key to Holden’s future, the enduring power of The Catcher in the Rye lies in its exploration of universal themes – loss, youth rebellion, and the search for meaning in life. Holden Caufield’s journey may end in a cliffhanger, but it is a journey that continues to resonate with readers of all ages throughout the world.
By Jorio Dauster