long ago...
Scottie Bowman (bowman@mail.indigo.ie)
Mon, 12 Jan 1998 07:40:12 +0000
My response to the suggestion about the Billy Joel song
is much the same as Bethany's. (The Bethany who uses
upper case as the Lord God intended.)
I read the Catcher in the mid-fifties. As a youngish Englishman
my contemporaries in America at that time seemed much less
politicised than they were to become later.
Holden's world is surely that of an America triumphant in
the immediate aftermath of the war, enjoying a boom & not
yet gripped by the nightmare of a Russian bomb coming in
through the sky. His dismay is with the values of the adults
he sees around him - the materialism & phoniness that
eventually corrupts all humanity, not just the body politic.
Of the items listed, only Sugar Ray Robinson & `The King & I'
could have had any meaning since (in 1946-49) the others had
not yet really engaged public awareness - & I'm not even sure
about Robinson. My knowledge of boxing is even less than
Bethany's but I'm told Sugar Ray had the kind of grace & style
that might have endeared him to Holden as much as the saccharine
Mr Hammerstein would certainly have revolted him.
Scottie Bowman