39. Catcher In The Rye: JD Salinger’s American Rebel

Did ‘The Catcher In The Rye’ create modern youth culture? What made JD Salinger’s writing so unique? And, how was the novel rooted in Salinger’s service in the Second World War? Join Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett as they delve into the fascinating story behind the writing of Catcher In The Rye, and the world it was born of. Download the Klarna app to stay on top of your money, so you can think about, well, anything else. Klarna balance account required to receive cashback points. Limitations, terms, and conditions apply. Exclusions apply. Learn more at https://www.klarna.com/uk/buyer-protection-description/. For analysis, book recommendations and more, sign up to our newsletter, Book Club Notes, introduced weekly by Tabby or Dominic. Sign up at: https://www.thebookclubhq.com/ Email us: ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠@thebookclubpodhq⁠⁠ X: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠@TheBookClubPodHQ⁠⁠ Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Assistant Producer: Alfie Norris Social Producer: Harry Balden Video Editor: Lorcan Moullier Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Klarna.

• 0:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Tabby, with our schedules getting busier and busier, loads of books to read and life admin piling up, I find that my time for daydreaming, which you know is very important to me, has now all but disappeared.

• 0:15Speaker 00

  And yet, so many authors credit their literary genius with letting their minds wander, and our bookshelves would be far emptier without that.

• 0:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  But you know, Tabby, that is why I absolutely love Klarna's free app. It helps me stay on top of my money admin, so I have more time to perfect the art of daydreaming.

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• 0:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  The app even has night and day assistance, so you can feel confident when you shop.

• 0:51Speaker 00

  Download the Klarna app to stay on top of your money, so you can think about, well, anything else. The Klarna app is a tool for managing everyday payments and spending activity. 18 plus UK residents only. Ts and Cs apply.

• 1:06Speaker 02

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• 2:04Dominic Sandbrook?

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• 2:43Speaker 00

  Daddy's gonna kill you, he's gonna kill you, she said.

• 2:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  I wasn't listening, though. I was thinking about something else, something crazy. You know what I'd like to be? I mean, if I had my goddamn choice.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  What? Stop swearing.

• 2:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  You know that song, if a body catch a body coming through the rye?

• 3:01Speaker 00

  It's if a body meet a body coming through the rye. It's a poem by Robert Burns.

• 3:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  I know it's a poem by Robert Burns. She was right, though. I thought it was if a body catch a body. Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all, thousands of little kids, and nobody's around, nobody big, I mean, except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody before they start to go over the cliff. I mean, if they're running and they don't know where they're going, I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's what I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.

• 3:47Speaker 00

  That was, of course, from The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, published as a novel in 1951. And it's one of the most famous novels about youth, a coming of age novel, though whether it is or not, we'll discuss. It often appears on lists of the best novels of the 20th century. It's widely considered to be one of the greatest American novels ever written, and it's a school classic in England, but more particularly, America. And it describes the alienation and disillusionment, and also grief of Holden Caulfield, its 16 year old protagonist and narrator.

• 4:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  And Dominic, as a famous teen rebel yourself, did you read this when you were young and relate to it? Or is this your first time reading it?

• 4:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  I first read this book, actually, when I was a teenager. It's one of those things, I don't know if other listeners have had this, when you start idly flicking through a book and you get to about page 100, you know, you're just kind of idly looking, you start reading, and then you end up reading the whole thing, but you miss out. Like, I'd actually never read the first 50 or 100 pages.

• 4:48Speaker 00

  No way?

• 4:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because I'd just sort of flick through it in the school library. Have you read this before, Tabby?

• 4:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I did it for my GCSEs, and I actually remember loving it. I really liked Holden, who I find to be a genuinely interesting character. You said, quite rightly, it is a very powerful window into 1950s America, and more specifically, New York. Most of the book is set in New York. The American writer and essayist Adam Gopnik wrote, "No book has ever captured a city better than Catcher in the Rye captured New York in the 50s."

• 5:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Wow.

• 5:24Speaker 00

  Which is a big statement.

• 5:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Basically, this is the first, I mean, maybe some listeners will be able to think of earlier examples, but this is the first moment in history when teenage alienation is a big kind of cultural theme. And I think that's actually linked to the invention of mass youth culture and the idea of the teenager. So Holden Caulfield becomes a kind of touchstone, doesn't he, in the 1950s? So certainly by the end of the decade, when is this published? 1951. So certainly by about, by the late 50s, Holden Caulfield is kind of a shorthand for teenage rebellion, somebody who's disaffected, somebody who doesn't accept the expectations of their society, their parents, their teachers, and so on.

• 6:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  And, you know, there have always been adolescents in literature and in culture. I think what this book absolutely reflects, I mean, this is actually quite a sort of banal point to make, is the creation, the popularisation of the idea of the teenager. And actually, when you look at the teenager, the word, I think the first uses of the word teenager have been traced back to the 1910s or 1920s in newspapers, but really, it was taken up in the 30s as a marketing slogan. So basically, what you had was, for the first time in history, you had young people aged, let's say, 16, 17, 18, with a disposable income that they wanted to spend on things that would mark them out as distinctive. So they're buying, you know, chewing gum, bicycles, motorbikes, records, records obviously

• 6:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  in particular, clothes, different fashions, they're not dressing like their parents.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're like a distinctive unit for the first time, aren't they?

• 6:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think up to that point, a teenager, 16 or 17, 18, or had been a little adult. And people had accepted, you know, there's a sort of grey area, but you became a little adult quite quickly. I think this is the first point in history where you have, I think they dressed differently, music is obviously very important, but also the way they speak, you know, the slang. And this is obviously one of the defining qualities of The Catcher in the Rye, is Holden's very, very distinctive voice.

• 7:25Speaker 00

  It's the beginning of such a big, a concept we are so familiar with today, the idea of disaffected, slightly depressed, disenchanted youths. But that was not the case at this time, was it? As I say, teens often had this, they were kind of jolly, as, you know, and then you got this idea of the teen rebel, the James Deans, or whatever it would be.

• 7:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  I'm really struggling, actually, to think of examples in Victorian or early 20th century literature of characters aged 17 who are miserable and disaffected, and who are not just comical. If they appear at all, they might be called a comical supporting characters, but by and large, they're on the margins. This is the first time that he has been given a voice himself, and the book really leans into his contempt for the phoniness and the inauthenticity and the hollowness of the adult world. I think that is what is groundbreaking about the book.

• 8:18Speaker 00

  So he's 16 years old. He is immortalised for this very famous hat that he wears. It's a red deer hunter, and he's devoted to it, and he likes to wear it back to front. Looks wise, he's compared at one point to an actor. This woman says, oh, you remind me of some actor, and people think it's probably Freddy Bartholomew, who was a child actor from the 1930s. He runs away from his prep school in Pennsylvania after being expelled just before the Christmas holidays, after a couple of scuffles with his roommates. And then he restlessly moves around New York. He drinks, he talks to people, he dances, he smokes his way through a couple of days there. He hires and then sends away a prostitute.

• 9:01Speaker 00

  He sneaks into his parents' apartment to get some money and speaks to his younger sister Phoebe. He breaks down in tears. He goes to see a former English teacher that he admired, and there's a slightly sinister interaction there. He thinks about, a lot throughout the book, actually, about his former neighbour, and I think crush, Jane Gallagher, and also his younger brother, Ali, who has died before the events of the novel. And then Holden decides to run away again. He meets Phoebe at the Met to say goodbye. And then when she tries to run away with him, and he won't let her, he takes her to the zoo to kind of make her happy so that she's not too upset about his leaving, and he watches her on the carousel in the rain.

• 9:42Speaker 00

  And then what happens after that is kind of, it's only really loosely implied. It's not really the point.

• 9:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Our expectation, or our assumption, is that he has ended up in a sanatorium of some kind, isn't it?

• 9:53Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah. And he, but you get the sense that he, you know, he meets up with his parents, he's potentially going to go back to school. It's not entirely negative. But where did Holden come from? Well, J.D. Salinger himself said that he was loosely based on himself as a boy, and that the whole book was sort of autobiographical. So let's meet Jerome David Salinger, because he is an intriguing figure. And also, he's very well known, I would say culturally, because he is thought of as a recluse. He hid himself away for so long, and so there's a mystique.

• 10:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  So he was born in Manhattan in 1919. He's from a Lithuanian family, Lithuanian Jews. They were upwardly mobile, weren't they? They were becoming respectable. They were an immigrant, they were a classic story of a sort of, an originally an immigrant family who are on the way up and were trying to turn themselves into Americans.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  They started living in kind of WASP-y parts of New York.

• 10:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes. So a good example of Salinger's own life, he starts off going to public schools, then he ends up going to a prestigious private school called MacBurney. And this is in the 30s. Salinger doesn't really fit in. He feels sort of slightly disaffected and alienated. He calls himself Jerry, so that he will sound like everybody else. He got kicked out after two years for not trying, so all very Holden. He gets sent to a military academy called Valley Forge in Pennsylvania. And there he writes stories under the bedclothes at night. So that's, you know, the origins of his life as a writer, but he's not a great academic star by any means. In fact, his, they said he was used, well, not used, as mediocre.

• 11:31Speaker 00

  The only slightly above average IQ school, but that school is probably the inspiration for the school in The Catcher in the Rye that Holden leaves, Penci Prep.

• 11:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right. So he went to New York University, he only lasted a year. He went travelling in Europe to learn about the food trade, the luxury food imports business. He again, doesn't quite find himself.

• 11:52Speaker 00

  Doesn't care about much.

• 11:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  No.

• 11:55Speaker 00

  That's the sense you get.

• 11:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Extraordinary to think that he's actually in Europe. You know, he's in Vienna, a month before the Anschluss.

• 12:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  So, and as actually as somebody with a Jewish background.

• 12:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  You know, he would have been vulnerable in that environment.

• 12:07Speaker 00

  And he seemed uninterested in all of that. Didn't really bother him.

• 12:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Classic teenager. So he comes back, he has another unhappy term at a different college in Pennsylvania. So he's really living the Holden Caulfield experience. And then he goes to New York and he enrolls at Columbia, does a course there. And he's taught a writing course by a guy called Whit Burnett, who edits a magazine called Story, which specialises in short stories, short fiction. And this guy Burnett, he's a talent spotter. He's very good at discovering up and coming writers. He encourages Salinger. And Salinger, basically after a slow start, sort of explodes into life and starts publishing his work in magazines. And one of the things that he's writing about from the very beginning, actually, you know,

• 12:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  writers often write about themselves. And he's writing about aimless, slightly alienated young men.

• 12:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. So by the time he's 21, he'd managed to get stories accepted by Esquire and the New Yorker. And New Yorker was his kind of Holy Grail. That's where he really wanted to work for. And those stories were about an estranged teenager called Holden Caulfield. So he has the name. But the difference is that in those stories, Holden is nervous about the war. This is the, this is his piece for the New Yorker. So Salinger's wartime experiences, he was drafted into the army as a counterintelligence agent. And at first he had a fairly easy time until about 1944, actually, moving around US army bases. And then in March 1944, Salinger's shipped to Tiverton in Devon in preparation for the Normandy invasion.

• 13:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think that's so interesting that he writes this in the build up to D-Day. And it could not seem more different in tone.

• 13:48Speaker 00

  I know. But I think, I guess he's drawing on a different part of his life and he hasn't yet been that damaged by the war.

• 13:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, okay. Yeah, because you think this really damaged him in the war. Do you?

• 13:59Speaker 00

  I do. Yeah, I do. Towards the end of the war, he was there when they started liberating the sub camps of Dachau, the Dachau concentration camp system. And that was obviously totally harrowing.

• 14:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Do you think this finds its way into The Catcher in the Rye? I mean, Catcher in the Rye does not seem a book even remotely connected with the Second World War. But do you think some of the anger and alienation reflects Salinger's own experiences in the war?

• 14:24Speaker 00

  A lot of critics and commentators have made the connection. It would give you a slightly pessimistic view of human nature, wouldn't it, of the world going through something like that? The concentration camps, I mean, that's surely like dented people's views of the world. Like even now, it's shaped the way that we see what humans are capable of.

• 14:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, part of this you can probably see reflected in his spiritual quest. So first of all, he gets into his Zen Buddhism, doesn't he?

• 14:51Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 14:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  And when he went on dates, he would give people his dates reading lists about Zen Buddhism.

• 14:58Speaker 00

  Oh God, be still my beating loins. I respect that.

• 15:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Wow.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  You know what? I'm full of respect. He goes to Germany to do a period of denazification, not obviously for himself. And there he meets this woman, Sylvia Velter, and he marries her after only a few weeks. And his second wife, Margaret's mother, Claire, said that according to Salinger, Sylvia turned out to be an evil woman who genuinely hated Jews, was genuinely anti Semitic. So the couple moved back to the US in 1946. Unsurprisingly, the marriage collapses.

• 15:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right. He tries to resume life as a writer. This bloke Whit Burnett helps him to put together a collection of short stories, which is going to be called Young Folks. And this is obviously, again, the emphasis on youth. But Salinger can't get a publisher. He says this is all Burnett's fault. They fall out. In 1947, he gets, you know, back in with the New Yorker, doesn't he? And that's really, and then he's off and running, really.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  He starts publishing, Salinger, almost exclusively for the New Yorker. And then he decided to set himself the challenge of developing all these sketches he'd been doing for years, these kind of chapters he'd written about this guy Holden Caulfield into a fully fledged novel. His agent at the manuscript, Little Brown and Company, and they published it as a full length novel in 1951. The publication caused a sensation. Salinger did not like this. He avoided it mainly by spending a lot of his time in England because he didn't want to do interviews. He didn't like public appearances. And he also hated reading reviews. So before we close with, you know, we tie up Salinger's story, let's discuss a little bit how the book was received, because it was quite polarising. Yes, it was an instant

• 16:42Speaker 00

  commercial hit, and it was adored by general readers. It made it onto the New York Times bestseller list for 30 weeks. And it was selected Book of the Month. It hit an immediate chord with many. It was reprinted eight times within two months of publication. But as I say, you know, it's Marmite. Instantly, it's Marmite. Either kind of adoring, you've changed my life, sort of a reaction, or it's ruthlessly lambasted.

• 17:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  You can find loads of people who say The Catcher in the Rye changed my life. It's the first book I read. It's almost the book I read that led me into the adult world, or led me into a new way of writing. So this is Elizabeth Frank. She said Holden Caulfield was a champion of bad words and cutting school and pointing out the dreariness and the hypocrisy of that era. I remain grateful to Holden Caulfield and The Catcher in the Rye for helping us put a name to all those intuitions we had that something was terribly wrong with civilisation in America at that time. There's definitely a mood, a cultural mood in the 1950s, and then of course in the 60s, which is very critical of kind of conservative America, of the nuclear family, of what is seen as the repressive, stuffy,

• 17:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  conformist, suffocating world of kind of, you know, the sort of mad men world, I suppose, which youngsters reject. So much of the reaction to The Catcher in the Rye though is bound up with Holden Caulfield. Of course, he tells us the story. But I think when people tell us they love the book, what they really mean is they love him and his persona. And lots of people would say, you know, it's, I believe that he really exists. He speaks to me. I mean, some of the people who like the book, completely expected. So Marlon Brando, obviously, he's playing a rebel. Jack Nicholson, obviously, you know, he's a sort of, again, perceived as a sort of rebellious figure, as someone who plays rebellious, interesting figures.

• 18:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  But President George H W Bush, who's like the ultimate establishment person. But on the other hand, Holden does go to an elite boarding school.

• 18:42Speaker 00

  Oh, that blew my mind because he said something like it was his Bible. I was like, what's it?

• 18:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, but even people who seem very boring and very stuffy, you know, they've had a period of teenage rebellion. Or, I mean, everyone's been a teenager, Tabby.

• 18:55Speaker 00

  Were you?

• 18:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  I know you find this, you find this inconceivable.

• 19:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  On the other hand, there are people who don't like it. So as you already said, the New Yorker, where Salinger often published, they dismissed it as exhibitionistic. There were critics who said it was, it felt amateurish, that it didn't feel, you know, professionally put together. There are a lot of people who were shocked by it, who said, you know, the swearing, Holden is a teenage drinker and smoker and all of this, the stuff with the prostitute, his obsession with sex, all of these things are inappropriate in a book for younger readers. Of course, actually, it was meant to be a book for adults. But by and large, this is a book that you read between the ages of 13 and 25, let's say. I mean, you wouldn't see somebody reading this book at the age of 52, would you, by

• 19:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  and large?

• 19:46Speaker 00

  No, no.

• 19:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  So lots of libraries, particularly within sort of more conservative areas, didn't like it. It was the most censored book in high schools in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. And yet, the paradox, it becomes a staple of school reading lists. You know, so if you're, if you have a sort of slightly more progressively minded English teacher and you're, you know, the year is 1983 and you're 16 years old, your English teacher gives you this book to read because they think it will speak to you. And the controversy actually has never quite gone away. So even in the 2000s, still one of the most challenged books on kind of school curriculums in America. And of course, there is this issue about whether

• 20:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  it's any good. So Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post critic in 2004, "Why do English teachers whose responsibility is to teach good writing repeatedly and reflexively require students to read a book as badly written as this one?" I mean, that's pretty damning.

• 20:48Speaker 00

  He compared it to drinking castor oil, which I think is a bit harsh, to be honest.

• 20:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's harsh.

• 20:52Speaker 00

  Either way, good or bad, there's a lot of public attention around this book. It's a bit of a Ferrari. And as we've already said, J.D. Salinger hated this. As his notoriety and popularity grew, he retreated more and more from the public eye.

• 21:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Meanwhile, his, I mean, just his, his personal life is a bit bonkers. So he married again. He married a 19 year old Harvard graduate called Claire Douglas. They had two children. He's all in on his macropratic diets and his eastern religions.

• 21:20Speaker 00

  And he's quite dogmatic about it.

• 21:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Very dogmatic. He's very reclusive by the 1960s. He basically is not giving any interviews. He and Claire get divorced in 1967. She's on the verge of a breakdown. He then has a series of relationships with women who are quite a bit younger. So one of them was 18. She was Joyce Maynard.

• 21:41Speaker 00

  She wrote a very controversial memoir about him and about their time together in 1999.

• 21:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  And she sort of portrayed him, didn't she, as controlling and abusive?

• 21:49Speaker 00

  Bit of a monster, yeah.

• 21:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Finally, it's capital. His daughter Margaret, so this is from his second marriage, she wrote a memoir, didn't she, in 2000, which was very, again, very controversial.

• 22:00Speaker 00

  It really paints him as a bit of a villain. You know, she says her upbringing was very difficult. She said her father was paranoid, controlling, again, emotionally abusive. She goes into detail about his straight, you know, strange spiritual medical habits, said it was like growing up in a cult, said he drank his own urine and would sometimes kind of try to speak in tongues when he went into a particular state.

• 22:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  The more I hear about him, Tabby, the more I think he sounds like quite hard work.

• 22:26Speaker 00

  Wait till you find out about his diet even later in life. But I mean, understandably, I think, I still think this is sad, no matter, no matter what, you know. By the end of his life, he's basically living in almost complete isolation. He's living on frozen peas and uncooked lamb patties. But Salinger eventually died on the 27th of January 2010 at the age of 91.

• 22:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  To go back to The Catcher in the Rye, it's a more literary book than people think, no question about that. The title comes from the Robert Burns poem Coming Through the Rye. It's actually quite a bawdy poem. It's, it's a poem about basically sex in a, love or sex in a meadow. Holden has misinterpreted the poem because he thinks it's meant to be about two people meeting. And Holden thinks it's about one person catching another person. And in the second half, we'll get into what he thinks the implications of catching somebody else are, what he's trying to prevent them from. Because, you know, growing up, sexuality, adulthood, whatever. There's also, it clearly is in some way modeled on Huckleberry Finn, I think.

• 23:32Speaker 00

  People always, always draw the connection between these two novels. First person narrator.

• 23:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. The first line of Huckleberry Finn.

• 23:41Speaker 00

  Very, very similar opening lines. So Huckleberry Finn says, "You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of..." Sounds like the first line of The Catcher in the Rye. But there's no, I mean, there's no evidence of intentional, but I mean, surely. He loved books, writers, but he was always very reluctant to talk about influences and inspirations. I wonder if because he was quite a proud man, maybe. For instance, in 1951, William Maxwell asked him, "What are your..."

• 24:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Who are your influences?

• 24:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. And he was like, "Well, does that, what are you asking me? You ask me which books I love? Well, I love Kafka, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Keats, Bronte, like, so all, you know, all the classics." He's not giving loads away. But actually, in private letters, he has a particular penchant for F. Scott Fitzgerald.

• 24:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  I concede, how the Great Gatsby.

• 24:24Speaker 00

  Oh, my God. I saw so many similarities, like, in many ways, I mean, Holden references the Great Gatsby in the book. And in many ways, similar themes, you know, disenchanted, youngish people who don't really fit into their societies, Gatsby and Nick, a loathing for fakeness.

• 24:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. And of course, Hemingway. I mean, you're a massive Hemingway devotee. Do you see a bit of Hemingway in the prose, would you say?

• 24:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I do, I do. That kind of colloquial, slangy, very American style of prose. But the big difference is that Holden Caulfield is the opposite of the ultra masculine leading men that Hemingway usually writes about. You know, he totally, totally takes that away from him. And I think he did that intentionally in Holden, because Holden would not be a sympathetic character if he was this much more James Deeny teen rebel. Let's go to a break. And then afterwards, we will discuss Holden Caulfield himself. And if that's not excitement enough, we will explain why Leonardo DiCaprio never managed to get the film made.

• 25:30Speaker 00

  But also, we'll be answering the question, did The Catcher in the Rye actually inspire an assassination attempt on an American president? And how was it connected to the death of John Lennon?

• 25:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  See you after the break.

• 25:50Speaker 03

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• 26:21Speaker 04

  I put out Stonefire naan with dips at every dinner party.

• 26:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  I make naan grilled cheese when my daughter has friends over. I use Stonefire naan to reward the humans who do my bidding.

• 26:31Speaker 04

  Right. It's perfect for camping trips.

• 26:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Dance for it, feeble mortal.

• 26:36Speaker 04

  Sorry, is he talking to me or?

• 26:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Dance, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. From our tradition to yours, Stonefire. Together be naan.

• 26:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  If you're building AI agents, you should check out Strands Agents. It's an open source SDK for Python and TypeScript. The idea is simple. Give a model some tools, let it decide what to call and when, and loop until it's done. No chain configs, no graph orchestration, and works with any model provider. It's also open source and built and tested for production agents. Get started at strandsagents.com.

• 27:18Speaker 00

  Welcome back to the book club, everyone. Now, before we get back to the show, a reminder to join our own community, our own gang of disillusioned, outcast rebels, and sign up to Book Club Notes. And if you do, I promise you, you'll never feel like a depressed, misanthropic teenager ever again. You'll feel great.

• 27:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Why would you feel so great?

• 27:37Speaker 00

  Well, because it's a, it's a weekly newsletter of talking points. So that's something to live for. Book recommendations. Now you're just high on life. And a whole bevy of insights from you, our listeners, because we are not like, you know, the institutions. We want to hear from you, you know, the people. And it's delivered into your inbox every Saturday morning, free. And how, Dominic, do you, do you find this, this lifeline to a more glorious life?

• 28:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  So I signed up at thebookclubhq.com. And genuinely, every Saturday, I feel like my weekend is empty until it lands in my inbox, and then my weekend is sorted.

• 28:13Speaker 00

  Before I explode with excitement, let's get back to The Catcher in the Rye. So as we've already said, it's a book with an extraordinary reputation afterlife, I think, probably in part due to the mystique of its author. But it has also, I think it genuinely in its own right, does mean a lot, or has come to mean a lot to a lot of people, or has done in its life cycle, for many reasons. You know, it's the idea of an ordinary young man going through this journey of alienation. But also, I think, because its style is so famous and so discussed.

• 28:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Holden is telling us the story in this confessional vein. And he, he speaks to the reader directly. We've had a few examples of this. So Humbert Humbert did it in Lolita. And of course, Jane Eyre does it in Charlotte Bronte's book in 1840, back in 1847. So there's a sense in which, as with those books, this is a sort of an unfettered, if you can fetter a stream, you can't fetter a stream, but you know what I mean, an unfettered stream of consciousness in an informal style. So much more informal than those two examples, Lolita or, or Jane Eyre. And Holden will say to you at times, quite colloquially, "You may have heard of my pal so and so. You may be thinking this. Yeah, I expect you want me

• 29:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  to tell you about X, Y, or Z," or whatever. The opening line is the classic example. So we mentioned the opening line of Huckleberry Finn before the break. This is, I mean, you can sense the influence of Huckleberry Finn in this line. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like. Now, I have to say, that, whatever you think of Catcher, The Catcher in the Rye, that's an excellent first line.

• 29:53Speaker 00

  Oh, it's so good. It's so good.

• 29:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  It creates an immediate connection between the reader and the narrator and the central character. You know, if you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know. It's, it's, it's very confident. It immediately establishes a bond, but it also establishes Holden's personality and tone. And the key word is obviously lousy. My lousy childhood, the sort of slight world weariness, the contempt for his own childhood, the mockery about the form. You know, usually, when people are telling you about their childhood, let's say it is a pip in Great Expectations, or it's David Copperfield or something.

• 30:30Speaker 00

  Who's referenced in the first paragraph of the book.

• 30:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  He is David Copperfield, absolutely. So if you take that as an example, David Copperfield or Pip in Great Expectations would never describe their childhood as lousy. They would never be dismissive about the story they're telling. The fact that Holden is dismissive... Immediately, I think, establishes that this is something completely different and a new kind of relationship, I guess, between the narrator and his material.

• 30:59Speaker 00

  But also, there's that reluctance, which is so interesting. It's not often that you find a book where you're like, where you're like, oh, should, you know, you're almost pulling it out of him. Obviously, you're not. But it's the opposite of the Moby Dick's or, I don't know why I'm going with the nautical theme here, rhyme with the ancient mariner or something, where the whole point of the novel is that he wants to tell you, he's unraveling the story for you. Holden's like, eh, all right, then, fine. And I, and I do think he genuinely does sound, he genuinely does, it does, it's not shocking for us now, but it would have been then. He genuinely does sound like a teenager. And he's very complex. He's sometimes extremely unnecessarily judgmental. Sometimes he's self-knowing. He sounds lost. And his

• 31:39Speaker 00

  voice moves as thoughts would, fast-paced, compulsive, inconsistent, much more so than even, say, Hemingway. And, and, and random streams of thought will be inspired by little things, a chair or whatever.

• 31:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  What's interesting is that quite often when people are telling a story like this, there are some removed from the story that, that they've changed, they've developed over the, so.

• 32:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're looking back. Rebecca, for instance.

• 32:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, they're looking back. Holden is still very much himself. If we assume he's telling us this story from a sanatorium, as actually Humba Humba is in Lolita, he is, he is, he hasn't grown up since then. The Holden who tells us the story is the same Holden as the Holden who's experiencing all of these things, I would say. He's got the same slightly contempt, you know, contemptuous, tired, cynical view of the world. Yeah.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and so, as you say, the Holden who's telling the story is still the Holden who would use this slang. He's not saying, oh, God, you know, in my, he's not Nick Buchanan, he's not Nick, you know, Nick from the Great Bats, in my younger, carefree youth or whatever. He's still using words, and the slang is such a famous part of this. So, for instance, things like, don't be so goddamn sore, old Phoebe, actly kid, phony, crummy, swell, all make the voice intriguingly immature.

• 32:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  And also the fact that it's overused, I think, as a child. So, you know, I said, he says, and all, this and all, that and all, that, you know, or old Phoebe, old stradler, old, that's how, that is how teenagers speak. They use the tick again and again and again.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  I mean, it's how so many of us speak today, to be honest, myself included.

• 33:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  When they listen to these podcasts, they say, have you noticed that Dominic always says this, or Tabby always says that? That's how Holden Caulfield speaks.

• 33:25Speaker 00

  And yet, he has this wonderfully endearing quality of sounding like a young person who's trying to sound old beyond their years. I think that's quite a tough thing to pull off. He always speaks in hyperbole and exaggeration. And.

• 33:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, as teenagers do, actually.

• 33:39Speaker 00

  As teenagers do. And all of this, you know, for instance, we go back to that opening line, my lousy childhood. He's an extremely, I mean, you are, this is just Dominic Sambo, bingo. He's an extremely unreliable narrator for all of this.

• 33:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  But the funny thing is, I was thinking about this, is he an unreliable narrator? Because an unreliable narrator requires us.

• 33:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, you have to read between the lines, I guess.

• 34:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  You have to read between the lines. But I don't feel you ever have to do that with Holden Caulfield.

• 34:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a lot that he doesn't tell us, though, that we have to interpret through, through what he doesn't say. But I guess that in itself is honest. But for instance, he says at one point, I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life.

• 34:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, he does. Or he says that he's illiterate. I'm quite illiterate, at the end says, but I read a lot. He's obviously very well read. He's obviously a very smart boy. The fact that his English teacher has taken such a shine to him, and the fact his teachers generally, even though he's been kicked out for not doing any work and being just a massive pain, his teachers clearly are quite fond of Holden and take him seriously.

• 34:35Speaker 00

  And he reads extensively. I mean, his, his literary references are, are tip top.

• 34:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  David Copperfield.

• 34:41Speaker 00

  David Copperfield. He mentions Emily Dickinson. He mentions out of Africa. I don't know, it is so broad. But also, but then, but then just that lousy childhood thing, everything that we learn about him and his life, and those things are only gradually revealed to us during the course of the book. It doesn't sound like it was that lousy a childhood. We find out he's from quite a wealthy family. His parents, you know, don't seem unsympathetic. He's got a nice home.

• 35:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, of course.

• 35:08Speaker 00

  So was it lousy? You know, that's kind of what I mean by, you know, can we entirely trust him? It's not that he's lying to us, I don't think. I think it's just that he has the prejudices of a teenager who feels hard done by.

• 35:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Completely. And that's what I think, if you're a cynical reader or a more, if you yourself are a more well-weary reader, then you might read this and you say, he is an entitled, privileged, whiny, actually, you know, I don't find him unlikable, but I can see there's a lot of readers might, that they would say, God, massive first world problems, like you don't like, you're a very expensive boarding school.

• 35:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I mean, this is a good point. And we, let's talk about Holden, you know, what he's like. I, I think he's a very interesting character. And I love, and I think he's a very eccentric character, and I'm drawn to that in him.

• 35:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  The hat.

• 35:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's just wearing a hat back to front, and you're automatically just zany. I think to just, to, to declare him or to read him as simply a rebellious teenager is actually to do him a disservice. He is, as we've, as I said, he's made up of so many contradictions, and he's quite mercurial. He's an old soul, and yet he is irritatingly childish, just randomly jumps on people, or, or, you know, teases them, or, I mean, he would be irritating to hang around, I think. Sometimes he's very compassionate, but selectively, because he's also extremely judgmental at various points, and actually can be, can be brutally scathing. You know, for instance, when he, he meets these three young girls in a bar one night.

• 36:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, they're, they're young to, they might be into us, but to him, they're older, aren't they?

• 36:41Speaker 00

  To him, they're older. Yeah, exactly. And there's sort of a very pretty one who he danced with for a bit. And he, and he's also constantly, almost desperately trying to make conversation with people. But then one of them is perhaps less blessed in the looks department. And he says, I danced with them all, the whole three of them, one at a time, the one, the one ugly one. Laverne wasn't too bad a dancer, but the other one, old Marty was murder. Old Marty was like dragging the Statue of Liberty around the floor.

• 37:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's funny.

• 37:10Speaker 00

  He's, yeah, he's untethered in the things that he says.

• 37:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, to be honest, I think that's exactly how teenage boys talk about girls.

• 37:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is. Teenage boys are brutal. And for instance, the critic, Louis Menand, describes him as a demon of verbal incision, which I think is absolutely true, because he, he's very perceptive. He sees people's weaknesses, and he just hones in on them.

• 37:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Which is actually quite, I think, a young person. I mean, not just teenagers, but children. Children will see, they'll say, what, the fat person, the stupid person, that person who always does this, because they don't have the filter.

• 37:43Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 37:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  And they see things sometimes more clearly than adults do. And of course, children can, are sometimes not terribly compassionate about adults' weaknesses.

• 37:52Speaker 00

  But also, teenagers tend to be slightly less self-knowing. So obviously, Holden is desperate for companionship. But he's always alienating himself from other people and coming down hard on them. And equally, he comes down hard on everyone, and actually the world in general, because he sees it all as phony. But he's an enormous hypocrite himself, because he, he is phony. He's called himself a terrific liar, and he's changeable.

• 38:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  And he is scathing about other people for trying to be something they're not, trying to affect a persona. So particularly the boys at his school, he, he's, as Louis Menand absolutely says, he sees right to the core of them, and he mocks them for their pretensions or their affectations. But Holden himself is extremely affected. I mean, the whole thing of wearing that ridiculous hat backwards, that's such a teenage thing that teenagers do to make themselves look different or draw attention to themselves.

• 38:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, all his kind of obsessive smoking or.

• 38:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, he's mannered, but in a very recognizable adolescent way, I think. Now, you love all this, don't you, Tabby? And in fact, I have to say, you've written in the notes in capital letters the words, he is me, of yourself, haven't you? What is this? Now, is this relation to being a massive hypocrite, to being affected and mannered, or is it something else?

• 39:11Speaker 00

  All of the above. It's all of, it's all of the above. No, I, I like that he is a character made up of many things. I'm, so I think it makes him, all his eccentricities make him seem more vulnerable, his mood swings. I like the way that he's tickled by odd things. And he says, oh, God, I just, you know, I love that. I got high on that, or whatever it is. I like his always clumsy efforts to seem older. This scene where he dances with his younger sister because he sees it as kind of authentic and, and open and.

• 39:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, that's very sweet. I agree with you. And he also, he's a reader. That's what, I mean, I'm being harsh on you, because that's actually the bit of him that you like most.

• 39:50Speaker 00

  That is the bit I like about him. Almost reluctantly, he throws these references out there. And I think also, you, you see that he's actually very, very vulnerable and kind of on the verge of a nervous breakdown, despite his glibness and his cynicism and apparent confidence. He's totally erratic.

• 40:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's difficult, and he is willful, and he is often rude, and, you know, he is iconoclastic and all of this. And he has this sort of glibness, and he has this very heavily worn cynicism. But actually, beneath it all, as the book goes on, we begin to, well, quite early on, actually, I think we see that Holden is actually a sad boy, that he's unhappy, and that he is lonely, actually. He, he's, he doesn't have a friend that he can really confide in. I mean, it's so telling that the person he does ultimately confide in, the person with whom he's got the strongest connection, is his little sister, who, who

• 40:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  clearly does understand him and sees, she sees the child in him, like herself, doesn't she? We were talking, weren't we, before we recorded, about the, the thing when he, he has a thick game that he plays, where he pretends that he's been shot in the stomach, and he's like a child playing. I mean, that's a really good example of playing a part of the thing that he does so often.

• 41:08Speaker 00

  I think there's something deeper behind it, though.

• 41:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  So you think this is basically. He is wounded in a way, and that's actually what this is, that is what it's alluding to.

• 41:17Speaker 00

  He's, he's horsing around in this bar in New York, playing the game, pretending he's been shot. But he says, I didn't want anybody to know I was even wounded. I was concealing the fact that I was a wounded son of a bitch. And obviously he's not actually physically wounded, but I, I think he, I mean, he obviously is deeply wounded, deep down. He's, he's, he's grieving, as we will see. And he doesn't want anyone to know, you know, he, he, he doesn't want anyone around him to know that he is a wounded son of a bitch. And he behaves like an idiot to hide it. And it also, I think, alienates him. He feels that he's the only one experiencing this pain.

• 41:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 41:50Speaker 00

  So he says, uh, he is the only guy with a bullet in his guts.

• 41:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  And the bullet in his guts, it actually relates to the fact that he, his younger brother, Ali, before the beginning of the book, has died of leukemia. And that actually what Holden is, you know, Holden running away from school is perhaps not really so much about Holden's disaffection with school. But the fact that he doesn't know how to cope with his grief and his loneliness now that his brother has died.

• 42:18Speaker 00

  He's kind of running away from it and he believes that the world around him just wouldn't get it. You know, that's also a very teen thing to, to think that your, your sadness, your suffering, your depression is, is yours. No one else could ever be experiencing what you're experiencing. Um, so he never says, you know, I'm grieving my brother, Ali. But there are breadcrumbs that, you know, allow us to know it. So, I mean, there's endless sarcasm. There's the fact that he lets slip in a very casual way that just after Ali died, he broke the window of the family garage with his fist. You know, and he, he removes himself from that, you know, extreme action.

• 43:00Speaker 00

  He says, I pocketed my hand just for the hell of it, but my hand was a bastard. I hardly didn't even know I was doing it. And I didn't even know I had the goddamn windows broken until it was all over. So he's making it seem like it wasn't him. That was some other guy, you know? He's separating himself from the, this wounded, damaged person who's so broken that they break things.

• 43:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  And so telling, the one thing he carries with him is, um, Ali's old baseball glove, isn't it? Which Ali wrote poems on, Holden clings on. I mean, that's his great memory of Ali. And it's a very, that's, I think that's a lovely detail, actually, a really touching detail.

• 43:37Speaker 00

  And he sees it as a symptom of Ali's authenticity, because Ali would, would, when he was bored in the field, playing baseball, he'd read the poems on it, you know? Rather than being, you know, a gung ho boy who really gets into the game, he's kind of standing on the side dreamily, reading poems. And that's the first real giveaway is, um, Holden starts writing a piece of creative writing for his roommate. And he just ends up writing it all about this glove. So clearly it's pouring out of him. It's like the blood of those wounds is just gushing out of him.

• 44:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  And he doesn't see Ali as someone who belongs in the past. I think this is so telling. He always talks about him in the present tense, doesn't he?

• 44:14Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 44:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  So Phoebe says to him at one point, Ali is dead. And he says, I know he's dead. Do you think I, don't you think I know that I can still like him though, can't I? Just because somebody's dead, you don't just stop liking them for God's sake, especially if they were about a thousand times nicer than the people you know that are alive and all. And that, that is, I mean, that's one of the most, I think the moments in the book where the real Holden Caulfield, as it were, is speaking most clearly.

• 44:41Speaker 00

  Also, I mean, not to overdo that theme, but children also do that. For instance, if they have one parent that tends to be quite absent. They idealize and immortalize that parent rather than the parent that's with them.

• 44:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 44:53Speaker 00

  Holden's reality is an unhappy one. So he believes that the only good thing could be the guy that's not part of it, that's gone.

• 45:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, that's, that's very true. Ali is a presence for him, an imaginary friend, an imaginary companion. He's very lonely Holden, walking the streets of New York. And he would say, every time I'd get to the end of a block, I'd make believe I was talking to my brother, Ali. I would say to him, Ali, don't let me disappear. Ali, don't let me disappear. Ali, don't let me disappear. Please, Ali. And then when I'd reach the other side of the street without disappearing, I would thank him. I mean, that's a very telling line, the fear that he has of disappearing himself, I guess, of following his brother into oblivion. And he's asking his brother for help.

• 45:33Speaker 00

  God, I think that's tragic.

• 45:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Now, this is, I think, a key part of the book. I, I know you, we agree about this, that actually it's, Ali is a child. And Ali is now frozen as a child in Holden's imagination. He is pure, unsullied by compromise, untainted by adolescence or adulthood. And so much of what is driving Holden is his grief, not just for Ali, but for the impending disappearance of his own childhood and his innocence.

• 46:03Speaker 00

  I would say probably the main theme of this book is Holden's fear of growing up. It's a very popular theme in fiction. It long, it has always been Peter Pan, Little Women, Narnia, The Bell Jar. But, uh, I think that The Catcher in the Rye brilliantly and quite unusually captures, charters that very painful, hazy, strange, contradictory transitional period between childhood and adulthood. And it shows that, you know, it's something fearful. And the feeling, you know, the, the, the vision of children becoming grownups is generally that they're reaching for it. They're hungry for it.

• 46:45Speaker 00

  They're like, I wanna go out, drink, I hate people belittling me, you know, whatever it may be though.

• 46:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's so funny how Tabby's, that's just all the listeners, how Tabby's definition of adulthood is drinking.

• 46:56Speaker 00

  But you know, when you're a teenager and you're like, stop calling me a child, I'm an adult, you're dying for independence.

• 47:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, of course.

• 47:02Speaker 00

  Holden's the opposite. He's clinging to, to the past, like Gatsby. You know, he, it's, it's a reluctant thing for him. It frightens him.

• 47:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  But you know what I think that I find that psychologically very plausible. And, uh, I hate to use the word relatable. Because I think there is a point in your teenage life when you do mourn, you know, that you are, you are losing your innocence. I mean, there's a sort of interesting point, um, um, not to shed too much light into the Sandbrook household, that we have a bit ourselves. About at what point does like your child's, a child's bedroom, for example, change from a child's bedroom to a teenager's bedroom? And there's a point when the kind of, you're the parents sort of slightly sadly have to put away the teddy bears or the old books or whatever. And I think there are, I, I, I bet you, I bet there are loads of people listening to this who would say, yeah, actually that is a sad moment for the child too.

• 47:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  I remember being sad when I, because I felt like I'd lost something, that a chapter that had been so lovely and whatever, it was closed.

• 47:59Speaker 00

  I remember, I remember, I mean, admittedly being quite a lot younger than Holden, thank God, but I remember thinking to myself, how much longer is it actually permissible for me to run around the garden in a cape? Like pretending to be, I don't know, Frodo Baggins or whatever. Like at one point, at some point, this is gonna have to end because they'll put me away. And that was, I remember thinking that was a very sad realization.

• 48:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think that is a sad, the, the, the loss of your childhood is, if it's been a nice childhood, is always tinged with sadness. Of course, there's excitement and anticipation about the next step, but that can be scary.

• 48:36Speaker 00

  And so, I mean, that's why Holden spent so much of the book, his time in New York, it's like a pilgrimage to his youth, you know? And he's always banging on about the ducks in the park, because obviously he visited them as, as a child and he goes and tries to find them. But, you know, it's winter and there are no ducks. It's part of the reason he's so close to Phoebe.

• 48:53Speaker 00

  And it's also, this theme explains the title of the novel.

• 48:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. So we already said, um, in the Robert Burns poem, it's if your body meet a body coming through the rye. But Holden has completely misinterpreted that. He imagines himself standing in the field of rye. And he imagines himself watching children playing near the edge of a cliff. And they're free and they're carefree and they're going to fall off the cliff. And he is going to catch them if they fall off the edge. And, and, and most people read this as Holden wants to stop them growing up, to stop them losing their innocence and losing the sort of beautiful naivety that you have when you're a child. And to protect them from the process that he's going through, because he sees the adult world as fundamentally inauthentic.

• 49:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  He can see how much adults themselves are playing parts and how much, what hypocrites and, you know, they are and what compromises they make and so on. And he, I mean, this word phony, that's the worst insult, if somebody is phony. And he uses it again and again when somebody is being dishonest or corrupt, or in fact, if they're involved in some way with, with sex or sexuality. So it's telling that almost all the adults we meet in the book, he regards as phony in one way or another. His, his, they, he contrasts them with Ali, who is not phony, who is authentic. And of course, Phoebe, his younger sister, Phoebe is the one, you know, it's so, it's very nicely observed, I think. That he, he would never say a word in the book against Phoebe. Phoebe is perfect.

• 50:22Speaker 00

  Their relationship is also totally believable, I think, that of an older brother and a younger sister who are still kind of the kids.

• 50:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. I mean, he said, he watches her sleeping. I think this is a nice scene. He watches her sleeping, her face is on the pillow. She had her mouth way open. It's funny, you take adults, they look lousy when they're asleep and they have their mouths way open, but kids don't. Kids look all right. I mean, there you have it. There's the sort of message of the book to some degree.

• 50:46Speaker 00

  And he hates his contemporaries, say at Penci, because he feels like their phoniness is born of the fact that they are trying too hard to become adults. Or rather, they're just, they are becoming adults. They're leaning into growing up and Holden despises that because he tries, he's very contented. He's still trying to be a child. It's why he's very playful. It's why he randomly attacks, you know, and tries to fight with his friends or his, his peers or whatever it may be. For instance, he says, I can't explain it. I just didn't like anything that was happening at Penci. I can't explain what's happening. And what he doesn't like is that, A, they're growing up and a big part of this growing up is a lot of them are dating girls and potentially having sex. And sex is a big part of Holden's reluctance to grow up and his fear of adulthood.

• 51:31Speaker 00

  Because more than anything, sex represents that boundary line between childhood innocence and adult experience.

• 51:39Speaker 00

  And there's this slightly odd, ambiguous scene, for instance, that kind of epitomizes all of Holden's worst fears about the dishonesty and distrustfulness of adults, which is when he goes to see his old English teacher, Mr. Antolini. And he liked him and he trusts him. He thinks that Mr. Antolini gets it. One of Holden's schoolmates killed himself and Mr. Antolini is the one who goes and picks up the body. He trusts him. And then at one point Holden falls asleep there and he wakes up and Mr. Antolini is touching his head. Holden in Tarpist is potentially sexually sinister. It's never made clear whether or not it actually is.

• 52:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I like the fact that the book is so ambiguous on this point. I think.

• 52:21Speaker 00

  It's not lazy, it's not obvious, it's not cheap.

• 52:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's perfectly, yeah, there is, there is no point us, in a way, as readers, trying to speculate whether Mr. Anselini is actually incredibly creepy and dodgy, or whether actually Mr. Anselini has just been kind. We have no way of knowing.

• 52:38Speaker 00

  More importantly, it tells us something about Holden's state of mind, which is like seeing sexuality everywhere and being on his guard against it, being paranoid about it. But then it's, it's more complex than that though, isn't it? Because he doesn't just, he doesn't just hate and fear and dread sex, he's also really curious about it.

• 52:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's so, do you not think that is so teenage, that is so kind of a 15, 16 year old boy, simultaneously extremely curious about this thing that you've heard so much about? And you can, you know, it is stirring within you, as it were, but also anxious about it, nervous, what does it actually mean? You know, how will I measure up?

• 53:17Speaker 00

  Anxious about not having it as well, a bit like Esther in, in, in the bell jar.

• 53:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of course. Nothing worse than the teenager, for the teenager who is, who is not in a relationship, to be thinking, gosh, I'm, you know, I'm missing out and everybody else is having such fun.

• 53:32Speaker 00

  But then he also does that classic teenage boy thing where, where he, he kind of lies about it. Like he's, he calls himself at one point a sex maniac.

• 53:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  I'm a sex maniac, I'm having so much sex.

• 53:41Speaker 00

  I'm a, I'm a sex maniac. But actually.

• 53:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly.

• 53:44Speaker 00

  You know, he's got great anxiety about the whole thing.

• 53:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  But the thing about him, you know, almost having sexual experiences but never following through with it.

• 53:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, that runs through the book. And the classic example of this is when he hires this prostitute called Sunny and she comes up to his room. It's an absolutely excruciating scene, but very well observed, I think. She comes upstairs and he basically is desperate not to go through with this. And he ends up trying to have a conversation with her and the whole thing ends disastrously because the bloke comes up and asks him for more money and it's just also awkward and.

• 54:15Speaker 00

  He, he pretends to have a serious injury to get out of it.

• 54:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, there is one girl who, um, he is very, very fond of.

• 54:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  And this is Jane Gallagher. And she's his sort of childhood crush. She was a neighbour, wasn't she? And, um, he says of his, he, he idolises her. He's not a misogynist, because actually he criticises his, his schoolfellows because he says they, they force themselves on girls. The girls ask them to stop and the boys don't.

• 54:47Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, it's quite a sort of sinister rape undertones. But also he hates the idea that these boys would have sex without a human connection, without an emotional connection. He finds that, you know, the most overused word of any episode ever, but phony.

• 55:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  He does indeed. And what really drives him mad, and actually drives him to physical violence, is there a boy, there's this boy called Stradlator at the school, who is going out with Jane, and started dating Jane, Holden's old crush. Holden is maddened by this. It's partly jealousy, because he has a little bit of a crush on Jane, but it is more than that, isn't it? He thinks that Stradlator is corrupting her innocence. Jane to him is a paragon of childhood virtue, of, of a sort of innocent, you know, fun that they had and their friendship playing board games. He describes how Jane, actually, when they played checkers kind of drafts, she would keep her kings at the back.

• 55:40Speaker 00

  I like that detail.

• 55:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, that's a security measure, that's being cautious and, and she's herself being protective of her pieces. And that makes him protective of her, because he, he's anxious that Stradlator is forcing himself on Jane.

• 55:53Speaker 00

  Especially if she had quite a dodgy relationship with her stepfather, so he's even more protective. That said, he's not a total, you know, feminist paragon or whatever.

• 56:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, of course not.

• 56:04Speaker 00

  Like any teen boy. I mean, he does objectify women at times and, you know, he does deal in cliches, but you feel like those cliches are half-hearted. You feel like he's almost saying it because he suddenly remembers himself and he's like, you know, I almost want to impress the reader, you know, because he says things like, that's the thing about girls, every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall in love with them. And then you never know where the hell you are. Girls, Jesus Christ, they can drive you crazy, they really can. So there's something very kind of Marlon Brando or whatever about that, you know, it's not, it doesn't feel authentic. And that goes hand in hand with the contradictions that are just, you know, woven throughout Holden's nature.

• 56:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  So the fact that he wants to sort of freeze his childhood and he idolises his childhood.

• 56:50Speaker 00

  But is also curious about sex and is on some kind of a journey.

• 56:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  But, but is he on a journey? Because you described it at the beginning as a coming of age novel. That's exactly how it's often described.

• 57:01Speaker 00

  Sold as well.

• 57:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's sold as a coming of age novel. But the thing is, does Holden go on a journey? Does he develop a coming of age? So if I, to be critical of the book, when we're in like chapter three or something, you might think, well, we're going to, um, that we will unravel more complexities of Holden's character. Or Holden himself will go on a journey. I mean, that's the standard thing. It's what Huckleberry Finn did, it's what David Copperfield did, it's what all of these.

• 57:25Speaker 00

  Joe March, you know?

• 57:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, they go on a journey. The standard thing in a coming of age novel, I mean, we talked about this with Little Women, a series of trials and tests that you overcome, you discover things about yourself that you didn't know you, your strengths that you didn't know you had, you become more virtuous, you overcome your, you know, various sort of hurdles, and you're a different person at the end of the book. And a more grown up, more rounded, better person. That's not true of Holden. Holden is still the same. Holden has not overcome anything necessarily. He's actually walked away from a series of trials, you could say. And actually, his development, as it were, is still incomplete. He's still the same conflicted Holden at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. In fact,

• 58:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  the end of the book is him, you know, with Phoebe, he's watching her doing a childish thing, going on this sort of merry-go-round or whatever it is. And he's run away completely from the adult world at that point psychologically. Do you not think?

• 58:21Speaker 00

  It basically depends, I think, on whether or not you see the ending of the book as optimistic or pessimistic. I think that there is an ambiguous hopefulness to the ending that means that it is, it is, um, there is a partial coming of age element to it. It's a bit like The Bell Jar. So both books are too rooted in reality to deal in cheap, one dimensional endings. Yeah, Holden is in a facility, his future is uncertain, we don't know if he'll find peace, we don't know if he'll fit in, we don't know if he'll overcome his grief. But you get the sense from the implications surrounding the fact that he meets his parents and goes to the facility and is potentially going to go back to school, that he's maybe no longer running and that he has softened. And he actually admits to

• 59:04Speaker 00

  missing some of the people that he claimed to loathe before, so Stradlator or whatever.

• 59:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 59:10Speaker 00

  And he also is, he also now lives nearer his older brother, DB. And DB has had quite a hard time in Holden's mouth, whatever, from his pen throughout the book, because, you know, DB's older, Ali is the paragon, because he's younger, whereas he's kind of potentially, you know, accepting his brother as the model, his older brother as the model, rather than the younger. And that's like an acceptance of growing up. The scene, as you say, where he sees Phoebe, he's actually happy to watch her because she, and, and there's this symbolic resonance, the fact that she reaches for this gold ring, and he doesn't try to protect her or, or catch her. It's, it's like an acceptance that she'll grow up. He's letting go of this fantasy of The Catcher in the Rye. But then that

• 59:52Speaker 00

  said, the final line of the book is devastating, I think. Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody. So that, I would say, is quite pessimistic.

• 1:00:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:03Speaker 00

  So I would say it's above all ambiguous.

• 1:00:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  A sense of distrust.

• 1:00:06Speaker 00

  Don't let yourself be vulnerable.

• 1:00:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Don't let, exactly. Don't let your guard down because you'll be hurt.

• 1:00:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  You, you'll start missing everybody. That sense of loss and grief implicit in those, in those words.

• 1:00:18Speaker 00

  So that's not total acceptance.

• 1:00:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, I guess it's an ambiguous ending. I mean, let's compromise on that. What about the afterlife of Catcher in the Rye? A colourful afterlife, and not in a good way.

• 1:00:29Speaker 00

  No, I mean, it's obviously been immortalised for all sorts of different reasons, but there is a slightly unsavoury element to it. Yeah, we discuss how it's been banned in many, many schools and libraries, but there are two incidents in particular with which the book is associated that are quite dark. So Mark David Chapman was famously carrying a copy of The Catcher in the Rye when he murdered John Lennon in 1980. And he later cited Holden Caulfield as an influence.

• 1:00:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, he did.

• 1:00:58Speaker 00

  And then John Hinckley Jr. also had a copy of the book when he attempted to assassinate President Reagan in 1981.

• 1:01:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  What appeals to perhaps a sort of more slightly, you know, to loners or to people who feel marginal or whatever, is Holden's persona and his own feeling of loneliness and marginalisation. But in absolutely no way whatsoever could this be seen as a book that in any way associated with violence or whatever.

• 1:01:27Speaker 00

  I would say that's a big misreading from those two individuals.

• 1:01:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  But it captures the way in which the book has become an emblem of teenage angst in a way that no book had really done before. So this, you know, we've done The Bell Jar when we were doing our book's mini-series on The Rest Is History, we did La Trange by Camus, The Stranger, The Outsider. The psychoanalyst, Anna Freud, who was absolutely pioneering in child psychology, the daughter of Sigmund Freud, she said of this book, "My analytic patients used to speak of Holden Caulfield sometimes as if they'd actually met him. They used his words, his way of speaking. I began to realise they'd taken him into their minds and hugged him." So there is something about Holden's vulnerability. And I think it's, it's because.

• 1:02:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's not ju- it's not just that he's a teenager. I think what he is, is a slightly self-hating teenager who is frightened of letting go of his childhood. And that is an experience that happens, it's quite a short period of time. I think that that happens in your life. What is it? A year, 18 months, two years maybe? And then it's gone because you're fully a teenager and then you're an adult.

• 1:02:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  But it's, but it's a very particular moment, quite a destabilising moment for some people.

• 1:02:40Speaker 00

  And he's a literary hero who's also a fish out of water, you know, there's something relatable in that. There's also just the fact that it's had a big influence on other books that came subsequently. As Robert McCrum says, "Part of its hypnotic grip on the American imagination comes from the way that it's been written and rewritten." It has been replicated a million different ways. Like, again, Louis Menard, he calls it "a literary genre of its own", and I think he's right. You can see its imprint on The Belja, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I'm not even talking about the themes necessarily, the style as well as the themes. Even Jacqueline Wilson.

• 1:03:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Jacqueline Wilson, wow, I didn't expect she was going to appear.

• 1:03:17Speaker 00

  There you go.

• 1:03:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay.

• 1:03:18Speaker 00

  You know, it's like, it's the godfather of what it's like to be a teenager, told from a teenage perspective. But it's also, I think, the fact that Salinger has a bit of a mythos of his own.

• 1:03:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, he does.

• 1:03:29Speaker 00

  And people buy into that. The question then is though, is it, does it still have this hold on young people's imaginations? Does it still mean so much to people? Yeah, I don't think it does strike the same chord anymore. I think young people of today have probably evolved past the, the catcher and the ride. That the idea that to feel alienated or dissatisfied with the world is in some way shocking or revolutionary is so banal now, even.

• 1:03:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, almost to become a cliche.

• 1:03:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, or to feel out of sea emotionally and different from other people, ditto. So widely accepted. It's well trodden ground as well. You know, literature, I think, has gone much deeper and gone much, and, and, and it's much more willing to shock. You know, Secret History is a book about young people, even like A Little Life, you know, those are the kind of books that are sort of shattering people's, you know, minds these days. So, and, and also the slang is quite outdated, I think.

• 1:04:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Slang is outdated, but of course slang is always outdated. If you'd read a book from the 1980s, the slang would be outdated in some ways.

• 1:04:33Speaker 00

  But, but that meant so much for a particular generation of American teens.

• 1:04:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I guess so. I guess so. I think Holden is still a very, uh, well-drawn and memorable character. I don't, he's not always likeable, but I think there was something quite touching about Holden.

• 1:04:49Speaker 00

  Couldn't agree more.

• 1:04:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  All right. So Tabby, we're going to mark this out of 10. As always, Holden would despise this as phony, but we're going to do it anyway. What do you want to, what's your index?

• 1:04:57Speaker 00

  So we could do it in phony, crummy, hotshot max out of 10?

• 1:05:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay. Or back-to-front red hunting hats?

• 1:05:06Speaker 00

  That's probably the more iconic.

• 1:05:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  I feel the hat. I think we've got to go with the hat.

• 1:05:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's got to be the hat. Okay, you go first.

• 1:05:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  I was tempted to revise my mark, actually, because I really enjoyed the episode.

• 1:05:18Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 1:05:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I enjoyed your, your amazing insights. Um, but actually, but actually, no, I'm not going to, I'm going to stick with my original mark.

• 1:05:29Speaker 00

  That is so crummy and phony and all the bad words.

• 1:05:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I'm actually going to give it a six. Now, that seems, wow, I mean, that seems so harsh, but I sort of felt like the point had been made. I didn't feel, um, I mean, this has happened a few times with books. I, I like a book where I feel like I'm on an intellectual journey as I'm reading it.

• 1:05:51Speaker 00

  That's so deep.

• 1:05:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Thanks. And I didn't really feel that with this.

• 1:05:55Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:05:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  I, yeah, it just didn't speak to me. And I don't think that's just because I'm no longer a teenager. I think there is, I think it is slightly one-note. I don't think it's badly written. I think that is, that Jonathan Yardley verdict is unfair. I think, I think it captures Holden's voice very well. And I think there is, there is much more to Holden than merely alienation and stuff, as we've talked about.

• 1:06:15Speaker 00

  So true.

• 1:06:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  There is this grief and whatnot. However, ultimately, I found it quite slight. Um, and I would, yeah, if somebody said to me, can you recommend your favourite books in the book club? This would not be one of them. So there you go. What about you?

• 1:06:29Speaker 00

  I'm going to give it a 7.5.

• 1:06:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  7.5, I mean, the fractions.

• 1:06:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. I love the tone and the style. I, I love Holden as a character. I find him genuinely endearing and, and an oddly comforting presence in my mind. And I find him funny. I find the book actually quite funny at moments and I have a lot of sympathy for him. But that said, I also agree, it could, it is a tiny bit one-note maybe. And I'd also cut out a little bit of the middle section. I think it's too much wandering around New York.

• 1:06:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Agreed. I think it's too long, oddly, for quite a short book. I think it's definitely too long.

• 1:07:02Speaker 00

  I agree. You know, actually, we never discussed this. Did you know that some of the people that have absolutely killed or tried to make a movie out of this and been turned down flat?

• 1:07:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  So you said Leonardo DiCaprio wants to make a film of it?

• 1:07:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean.

• 1:07:13Speaker 00

  He wanted, he wanted to make a film of it with, I think, Tobey Maguire playing Holden.

• 1:07:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, Tobey Maguire, in his, despite Peter Parker incarnation, would have been excellent as Holden, I think.

• 1:07:24Speaker 00

  And Spielberg also was dying to make a film about it. And Keanu Reeves, I think, said he wanted to play Holden as someone else. But part of the reason Salinger was so anti the idea of this becoming a film is because he said that you would never be able to transfer Holden's, you know, confessional inner monologue into the film, into a film. And I actually agree with that.

• 1:07:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  It would have to be done either with a voiceover, which is sometimes a bit annoying.

• 1:07:46Speaker 00

  A bit annoying.

• 1:07:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Or Holden talking directly to the camera, I would have thought. Um, and both of those. Well, he could.

• 1:07:52Speaker 00

  Could be a bit boring as a film, to be honest.

• 1:07:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, this is an issue with the book. It's episodic. It's one thing after another. And you know, you were saying in the genesis of the book, how Salinger had written these short stories and sketches. It absolutely does feel like that in the middle of the book, like this is a lot of vignettes stitched together.

• 1:08:12Speaker 00

  Then we go to the docks. Then we go to a bar. Then we go to the theatre. Yeah, I agree with that.

• 1:08:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  All right. So, um, Tabby, do you have one last admonition for the listeners? I think you do. You have an instruction or a quest, do you not?

• 1:08:25Speaker 00

  Well, I would never instruct because that would be, you know, behaving like the man. I would encourage everyone to sign up to our own gang of depressed rebels and join Book Club Notes. So you can let us know what you would give this book out of 10. You can send in your recommendations. You also get a free back-to-front red deer hunting cap. So that's exciting.

• 1:08:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  That was, that was phony from Tabby. That's actually, there's no such cap.

• 1:08:54Speaker 00

  But I would encourage people to get it because it is genuinely brilliant.

• 1:08:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay. So thebookclubhq.com. And coming up, we have Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brien, It's a Killer Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Money by Martin Amis, Tinker Sailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carre.

• 1:09:06Speaker 00

  Tinker Sailor.

• 1:09:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  What? You're just babbling?

• 1:09:10Speaker 00

  No, you said Tinker Sailor.

• 1:09:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  I didn't. I said Tinker Taylor.

• 1:09:13Speaker 00

  You said Tinker Sailor.

• 1:09:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  I absolutely, well, listeners can make up their own minds. Uh, Test of the Durbavils by Thomas Hardy and Dune by Frank Herbert. God, I'm actually not looking forward to read Dune. But anyway, goodbye, everybody.

• 1:09:27Speaker 00

  Bye-bye.

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