Re: Ages

Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Sun, 25 Oct 1998 13:44:13 -0500 

At 4:42 PM -0400 on 10/24/98, you wrote:

> It's funny some of you should connect being a teenager to understanding
> Catcher better. Myself, as a teenager (14), feel that it's not like that at
> all. I feel I can relate to Holden not because of the lingo or that we are
> around the same age and going through similar things, but because of the
> loneliness and detachment from others. Incidentally from my fellow
>teenagers.

I know that everyone has a different point at which (and from which) they
jumped into reading Salinger.  I've said this here before (I hate repeating
myself, but of course not everyone here now was here then), but I was never
exposed to Salinger in school, not once.

I happened on a bruised copy of Nine Stories at my aunt's weekend house,
where I was an uncomfortable, alienated, unhappy guest who was about 14
years old, I think.  Maybe a bit older; I don't remember.  The first story
I read was "The Laughing Man" in the car ride home.  We rode down the
Hudson River.  I realized, as I was reading, that as we approached the
city, I could look across the river and see the Palisades and see the
general terrain the Chief used when he took his kids out.  That was a
little jolt of electricity for me, and made it even more animated than the
story itself was.

After that I got a copy of Catcher, which (until then) I had thought was
one of those teenage sports books, the generic kind aimed at boys of a
certain age, and that it was literally about a baseball catcher, and in my
imagination, "in the Rye" was some kind of sports term that meant "in deep
doo-doo" or "behind the eight ball" or some such.

So, alienated and lonely and isolated as I was, I read it, and as so many
people have said in this thread, I instantly felt a kindred spirit.  I've
read the book again more times than I can count -- a hundred? possibly more
-- and the sad part of me, the outsider part, the alienated part, still
responds the same way, in identification.  I mean, all this time later, I
*still* walk those same streets, I still find myself in Grand Central
Station, and walking down Broadway unnerved by all the people, and every
day I see things and wonder how Holden as a character might see them.

I think probably the only thing I didn't do, or identify with, was the
"phony" part.  I never indulged in that because it seemed to me that it
would be to put myself on some higher plain of being above "phoniness," and
I felt that I was just as flawed as, possibly MORE flawed than, the people
I saw.

I felt I had found a friend for life.

(I love the Glass stories, and the other stories in "Nine Stories," but my
reaction is not as emotional; it's cooler and more sophisticated, I think,
because these people are operating, as Bob Dylan said, "on a whole other
level."  I'm not part of their social, financial, or cultural worlds.)

But the older part of me -- the part that knows you get through bad times,
and that bad times are as inevitable as bad weather and bad news, don't
mean the end of the world -- sees Holden as an old friend who is coming
'round to tell me about his misadventure, and I want to be sympathetic.
(In fact, it helps me feel for Mr. Antolini a bit of understanding about
the way he touches Holden -- it's something unsexual and purely comforting
-- and it physically expresses the kind of comfort I would have welcomed
emotionally when I was Holden's age.  In my case, I would have been helped
much by being told, essentially, "It's all right, everything's going to be
OK.")

Will, I think you are a tremendously supportive teacher, and that some of
your students will probably hold you in high esteem for the rest of their
lives.

--tim