The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

But while I was sitting down, I saw something that drove me crazy.  Somebody'd written "Fuck you" on the wall.  It drove me damn near crazy.  I thought how Phoebe and all the other little kids would see it, and how they'd wonder what the hell it meant, and then finally some dirty kid would tell them--all cockeyed, naturally--what it meant, and how they'd all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days.  I kept wanting to kill whoever'd written it.  I figured it was some perverty bum that'd sneaked in the school late at night to take a leak or something and then wrote it on the wall.  I kept picturing myself catching him at it, and how I'd smash his head on the stone steps till he was good and goddam dead and bloody.  But I knew, too, I wouldn't have the guts to do it.  I knew that.

Yesterday, millions of young people from all over the world took part in an international climate strike.  They left school, or didn't show up, in order to march and demonstrate, to remind their elders, those with power, who exactly would be left holding the bag when climate change ravages the earth.  It was really something to see.  On Twitter--I'm not going to link it--I saw a guy remark, "They're fortunate I'm not their teacher. Anyone skipping class today without a legitimate doctor's note would get a zero averaged into their grade."  When pressed, he elaborated, saying, "Kids don't HAVE choices.  They're kids."  To which I say, yeah, any kid should count themselves fortunate not to have that guy as a teacher.

Of course, that guy probably doesn't believe in climate change in the first place.  But there are plenty of people, including teachers, who think like this: the process of "getting an education" is so important that there is no valid reason to not be in school ever, as if informed citizenship and activism weren't what education is meant to lead kids toward in the first place.

It made me think of Spencer, Holden Caulfield's history teacher at Pencey Prep in The Catcher in the Rye.  Holden, having been expelled from Pencey, goes to say goodbye to him, which Spencer uses as an occasion to hector Holden about his study habits.  He reminds him of a crappy essay he wrote about Egypt, and agrees with the headmaster, who has told Holden, "Life is a game one plays according to the rules."  Whenever I teach The Catcher in the Rye--which I have every year for a decade, though I rarely reread it all the way through like I did this year--I ask my students to evaluate this idea.  Most of them are in blithe agreement with Spencer: Holden really ought to have studied more and applied himself.  Why wouldn't they agree?  Studying and applying themselves is what got most of the students into the schools where I've taught in the first place.

But for me, and for Holden, this idea is horribly condescending, even fascistic.  In a note appended to his essay, Holden admits that he can't find it in himself to get interested in the ancient Egyptians.  Spencer might respond by offering some reasons why Holden might find the ancient Egyptians relevant or meaningful.  But instead he, like the headmaster before him, gestures toward a set of unspoken "rules" that Holden has violated.  The Egyptians aren't worth studying for their own sake, it's clear, but because Spencer has instructed Holden to study them.  They might as well have been Etruscans or Martians.  The point is not for Holden to learn about Egyptians but for Holden to learn how to conform to the expectations of polite society, for which the promised reward is bourgeois satisfaction.  Holden's absolutely right: life seems like a game if you're a "hotshot," but if you get on the "other side," this way of looking at life begins to seem like a horrible prison.

All that's to say, I have no sympathy for Holden's haters.  Every couple of months on Twitter someone starts a HOT LITERARY TAKE thread and the first six or seven replies are all by people who think Holden Caulfield is "whiny."  One tweet in that thread calls him "a school shooting waiting to happen."  (Mixed in are people who bravely think that Hemingway was a chauvinist and that adults should be allowed to read Young Adult novels.)  This position has always seemed, to me, to be a kind of conformity dressed up as iconoclasm, not least because everyone is saying the same thing.  Holden's hardly a perfect mouthpiece for these ideas--he is, above all else, a teenager, and shares with Huck Finn a kind of half-understanding of his own deep principles--but he correctly diagnoses that there is something rotten at the heart of the modern world, something high school graduates might label with words like "elitism" or "capitalism."  Part of the reluctance to credit Holden's discernment, I think, has to do with his whiteness, his wealth, his maleness.  ("But isn't he a hot-shot?" my students always ask.  "Yes," I say, "but does he pretend not to be?")  I think that fails to deal with his own clear ambivalence about money, for one--look at the way he insists on divesting himself of money to the nuns in the diner, or the guilt he feels when his roommate tries to pass Holden's suitcase off as his own.

But also, I'm just flabbergasted that those folks can't drum up sympathy for a teenager--white and wealthy and male as he may be--who is clearly on the precipice of a nervous breakdown.  Several times throughout the course of the novel, Holden feels as if he is going to disappear while he's crossing the street.  People he speaks with beg him to either lower his voice or speak up, but he's not even able to acknowledge that he's speaking strangely.  My students usually, and correctly, trace Holden's instability back to the death of his brother Allie, which has happened years before the narrative begins.  I had forgotten about this gut-wrenching memory of Allie's grave:

I certainly don't enjoy seeing him in that crazy cemetery.  Surrounded by dead guys and tombstones and all.  It wasn't too bad when the sun was out, but twice--twice--while we were there it started to rain.  It was awful.  It rained on his lousy tombstone, and it rained on the grass on his stomach.  All the visitors that were visiting the cemetery started running like hell over to their cars.  That's what nearly drove me crazy.  All the visitors could get in their cars and turn on their radios and all and then go someplace nice for dinner--everybody except Allie.

Allie's death really is at the root of Holden's instability, but also his wisdom.  What's the point, after all, of following the "rules of the game" and receiving your bourgeois satisfaction in return, if you're going to die, and if, what's worse, children die, too?  The "game" makes promises it can't keep; Allie didn't even get to play it.  Why should anyone give a fuck about the ancient Egyptians when leukemia is killing kids?  In Holden this manifests as a mordant preoccupation with children, an intense need to freeze childhood innocence and ward off the attendant forces of growing up.  As his former teacher, Mr. Antolini, tells him, such a response can only end in his own destruction.  As painful as it is, some kind of bargain has to be made with the phonies, because there is no meaningful life outside of social pressure.  That doesn't make him wrong.

In this whole post, I'm making a categorical error I try to get my students to avoid: I'm talking about Holden as if he's a real person, not a construct invented by Salinger.  It's a testament to Salinger's novel and its pitch-perfect voice that we all want to take Holden seriously as a person, whether we hate him or love him.  There's a long and fraught history of people taking Holden at face value and lionizing him--you know, like Mark David Chapman--but the opposite impulse is just as bad.  I don't think "You're not SUPPOSED to like him" is any more convincing or accurate than the takes about him being whiny.

I like Holden a lot.  It might be because I have been fortunate enough to know a lot of teenagers.  All of them deserve the right to observe, for the first time, that life is not inherently fair and that society as we have made it frequently unjust.  They deserve the right to figure out for themselves how to respond to those facts.  And they deserve more teachers like Mr. Antolini (even if Holden gets freaked out by his physical intimacy) and fewer teachers like Mr. Spencer.