Subject: Re: my very first time
From: Ed Fenning (ed361@yahoo.com)
Date: Fri Feb 11 2000 - 18:00:32 EST
The very first time I picked up Catcher was when
I was twelve or thirteen. It was the Signet paperback
with the original cover, and had been kicking around
my family’s house for awhile. I remember getting to
the David Copperfield kind of crap part and thinking I
had never read anything like *that* before. This was
real speech to me, the way I heard guys talk in the
locker room at gym; and I thought maybe the boy
telling the story was a tough kind of guy, who was
much, much older, and experienced at seventeen years
old. Of course when you’re twelve or thirteen,
seventeen year old guys “own the world,” or just
about.
I only got as far as the bottom of the first
page. I was reading it in the living room; my parents
were over in the dining room and I very naively said,
“Hey listen to this…” I was going to read it aloud and
in doing so I held the book up higher so that my Mom
saw what it was. She took it away from me, probably
saying something like ‘…that’s too old for you to be
reading’. Though I had every intention of reading it
when their backs were turned my Mom either hid it very
well, or I must have forgotten about it by the next
day since I didn’t pursue finding it.
The next time I heard about it was fall semester
junior year in high school. The kids in Advanced
Placement English were reading it a semester ahead of
everyone else, so I heard them reading various parts
aloud at lunch. It was pretty funny. I went right
out and bought it (didn’t tell my parents) and read it
in a weekend. The story, told in the first person,
had an immediacy and excitement. I had the normal
kids’ reaction: this guy Holden is onto something,
everyone is phoney.
When we did read and discuss the book in English
during the next, spring semester, I can only remember
that my first flush of enthusiasm was dimmed somewhat
since, if I remember correctly, the teacher was
talking about Holden’s search for adult role models.
At sixteen and a half, I didn’t want to hear any dry
classroom discussion about his search for role models.
To me he could have been real, like a best buddy. He
was seventeen, told a great story, and he was onto the
secret: everyone is phoney.
And a digession: Some Fishers “of a certain age” (in
the States) may remember Jean Shepherd’s original
nightly radio broadcasts during the ‘60s. If you were
a teenager and a fan of his at the same time you were
reading Catcher, then you could really click into
Holden’s testimony, echoing this adult humorist, who
seemed to have society’s hypocracies all figured out
every evening from 11:15 to midnight.
A year later in senior English, we read Nine Stories.
The only stories I remebered were For Esme which I
liked, and of course APDFBF. The teacher gave us no
background about APDFBF being part of the larger Glass
family saga. As for the remaining stories, I
remember reading them, but I don’t think I had the
complete understanding that would have come with more
mature, adult perspective.
I read Catcher again a couple of years later at
nineteen, the end of my freshman year in college. My
reaction was a little different, I thought it was a
very well written book about a kid in crises.
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