Paul Magrs

Salinger’s novel is our Book Club choice for March and I’ve just finished it again. I don’t know how many times that makes it now, that I’ve finished this book. I first read it when I was sixteen. It was a craze we all got into in my A Level German Literature class. It was a very small group, maybe six of us and my friend Nic brought in Catcher one week and it went round all of us in pretty quick succession. I remember our teacher telling us he’d read it one night in a single sitting, and he couldn’t believe that he had never read it before. I had the same feeling, even at sixteen: of wanting to have discovered the book sooner. We should have been talking more about Schiller and Kant and other German stuff, but we spent class after class talking about Salinger.

Our German lit teacher was great. I think it was his first job. He was funny and talked with a broad Geordie accent. He had a word processor at home. It was the first time anyone I knew ever had a word processor and he had to explain the very point of it: that it let you keep files of your words and so you could change things around. He even read what turned out to be my first completed novel and liked it. He took it home and typed it up for me, even.

Anyway: that was me at school at 16. These past few days I’ve been revisiting Holden Caulfield and those nights before Christmas when he absconds from his old school. The book is nothing more, really, than a series of inconsequential encounters with a gallery of characters who look at him with a range of reactions from concern to outright scorn. Holden is by turns desperate, charming, loud-mouthed, show-offy, despairing and needy. He rackets about the streets of midtown Manhattan for a couple of out-of-control days and nights, slouching about chainsmoking and wearing his red hunting cap back to front. He’s desperate for company: he rings up old girlfriends, dances with bored strangers, meets up with ex-schoolmates, visits ex-teachers and wakes up his younger sister, Phoebe, in the book’s most touching moments – when he finds himself a stranger in his parents’ own appartment.

This time what was different for me in reading ‘Catcher’ was that since my last reread – back three years ago – I’ve actually been to New York. I’ve wandered all those streets and across Central Park and I’ve been just about everywhere Salinger mentions in the book. Not in some programatic way, as a kind of literary tour: just because you can’t help it. His footsteps are all over the place and within the human-scaled confines of those canyons and neatly-plotted acres, you can’t help crossing his path again and again.

Something else that stood out on this read was how often he becomes aware of the loudness of his own voice – often when he’s drunk and ranting about something that his fellow interlocuter would rather not be hearing about. I love the way he rails against the phoniness of the world – usually quite justifiably – and then sinks down in embarrassment as much as he does despair. He’s a well-brought up kid. A very mild rebel, really, who just wants to do good things. But even the record he buys his sister is something he smashes into smithereens clumsily on his way to see her.

When I reread all four published Salinger books in 2007 it was Catcher that retained its charm the most. The stories and the novellas that revolve around the various members of the Glass family had far less interest for me than they used to. But still part of me hankers over those books that I’ve imagined Salinger writing for years in his seclusion. Wasn’t it that ex-girlfriend who wrote a memoir about their time together, who said he was keeping all these unpublished manuscripts in a safe? I would still love a whole load of new books to come out posthumously. It’s a fan completist gene thing, I guess. I feel about Salinger and Salinger’s secret writing like I do about the Loch Ness Monster or the Yeti. Yes, it might ruin the mystique and the novelty, but I’d still love to see them some day, too.