NARRATOR:
Set in the 1950s, the book is narrated by 17-year-old Holden Caulfield as he recounts the days following his expulsion from Pencey Prep, a private school. After a fight with his roommate, Holden heads for New York, where he encounters old teachers, old girlfriends, his kid sister Phoebe, prostitutes and nuns. In a haze of drunkenness, loneliness and rage, Holden endures an intense struggle with the stupidity of the world around him, and the inevitability of growing up.
JENNIFER BYRNE:
OK, Brendan, this book that made the critics rejoice.
BRENDAN COWELL:
Yes, it's quite arrogant to choose this book cos there's been so much said about it, but I think it's important just to look at it as a book, really. I first read this book at university, when I was 20 years old, and it absolutely was the life-changing book. It just opened my mind up to a way of looking at the world, and his character. I think, interestingly enough, since Catcher In The Rye, that style of character - the angsty kid against the world, who can't find his place - has become very familiar. But I think at that time, it was a relatively new character in a lot of ways. I guess after reading that book in 1996... Holden Caulfield talks about characters that are phoney. He doesn't believe in most of the people he meets. He calls them phoney, and he goes on to explain...
JENNIFER BYRNE:
Or crummy.
BRENDAN COWELL:
Or crummy. The thing I loved most about it when I was writing my book, why I studied it, was because I just love the first-person narrative. He talks direct to the reader about his experiences, and often says, you know, I wish you were there. You know, you wouldn't believe it, it was unbelievable, I wish you were there. He kind of just involves you in his experience, so when it does become quite dark or he becomes quite bleak or cynical against humanity, you're kind of with him because of the way he's addressing you.
JENNIFER BYRNE:
We'll come back because I know you could go on for the next 15 minutes.
BRENDAN COWELL:
I just want to make one more point. After reading about all this phoniness, after that day, pretty much all the work I have made or all the behaviours in my life, I've wondered whether Holden Caulfield would think I'm phoney. You know, I've kind of lived by that rule.
JASON STEGER:
He's on your shoulder while you're writing or something.
BRENDAN COWELL:
That's why it changed my life, cos I've always thought, I'm about to do this. I wonder what Holden Caulfield would think. Probably a psychological disorder. Caulfieldism.
JENNIFER BYRNE:
Caulfieldism. Let's talk about old Holden, as he calls anyone he likes. Old Phoebe, Old Holden.
BRENDAN COWELL:
Yeah, yeah.
JENNIFER BYRNE:
Let's talk about Holden Caulfield.
MARIEKE HARDY:
I mean, I still fall in love with men like Holden Caulfield. You know, he's just this eccentric, self-absorbed misanthropic, questioning the world. I love his voice. I've loved him as a teenager and I'm a little bit old for him now. He's sort of jailbait now.
JASON STEGER:
He could be your Joyce Maynard.
MARIEKE HARDY:
Hmmm. I read it a lot when I was a teenager and again in my early 20s, and probably haven't picked it up since then.
JENNIFER BYRNE:
Did you still love him?
MARIEKE HARDY:
Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's word-perfect, I think, but a lot more of the sadness came through. I really felt...my heart broke for him a lot more than it ever had.
JASON STEGER:
I hadn't read it for a very long time, and I tired a little bit of his voice, actually, and because the style is so strong, and the language, he goes over using all those terms. What does he say? Phoney, old, goddamn, and all...
JENNIFER BYRNE:
It killed me. I gotta tell you. This really, really is like this. You've gotta believe me.
JASON STEGER:
If you want to know the truth.
JENNIFER BYRNE:
If you wanna know the truth.
JASON STEGER:
That's the sort of key, isn't it? If you wanna know the truth, we're getting it from Holden. We're getting Holden's truth. I found the style eventually started to grate a little bit, and I got a bit tired of it.
JENNIFER BYRNE:
Drove me nuts.
MARIEKE HARDY:
You're both wrong. You're both wrong.
JENNIFER BYRNE:
Doesn't mean it's not a great book, it's just it wears you down after a while.
MARIEKE HARDY:
I think the mark of that sort of writing is that you instantly want to write and talk like that. You leave that book wanting to write.
JENNIFER BYRNE:
I went back and read the crits of the time, and it was astonishing how many of them - thinking they were original until it all came out - all wrote in this style.
MARIEKE HARDY:
It's absolutely intoxicating. Immediately, they picked it up and everyone wrote their reviews in this kind of hipster, ultra-honest but sort of, yeah, personal, intimate.
JASON STEGER:
Because the first time you read it, it does have that huge impact, doesn't it? And I think, inevitably, when you read it again it doesn't, unfortunately. As I say, I sort of tired of the style, but that doesn't mean I don't admire the book.
JENNIFER BYRNE:
But you got sick of old Holden, you said?
JASON STEGER:
I got a little bit sick of him, yeah.
MARY DELAHUNTY:
Well, I first met Holden when I was studying the canon, and so you came out of Shakespeare and Dickens - and thee, tho and thou - and suddenly you ran into goddamn ole, and I loved it because suddenly, there was this sense of stream of consciousness. Re-reading it, I now think of Steve Toltz, actually. I think of how much it changed literature, but I also see the poignancy in it, and I now understand what Catcher In The Rye was about. I simply didn't understand it when I first read it. What was the metaphor about Catcher In The Rye? Here's this 16-, 17-year-old kid, so full of pain and not able to find someone who can actually love him, that he wants to love all these other lost kids. And that little sequence, where he talks about, I want to look after all these kids in the rye.
JENNIFER BYRNE:
Stop them falling over the cliff.
MARY DELAHUNTY:
I want to stop them falling over the cliff. Now, I missed that completely when I read it, so it's the mark of a classic, isn't it? That you can return to a book and, yes, say, OK, that's style now is a bit old-hat and it's a bit well used, and it can be effective, but there is something much deeper.
JENNIFER BYRNE:
Also, I thought you think not much is happening, because basically, he has a bad time at Pencey Prep - and then he has two days wandering around New York - but that style you're talking about, where it was so direct, it doesn't come across as like, flashbacks as it would in a third person. It's just him chatting to you. Well, this reminds of when...
BRENDAN COWELL:
He tells you a story about when he saw a movie and what the actors were like.
JENNIFER BYRNE:
Like how when he goes to the natural history museum, and what he loves is that the Eskimo is still there, catching the fish, and the deer is still there at the lake.
MARIEKE HARDY:
And you change. That never changes, you change. Yep.
JENNIFER BYRNE:
And you feel that yearning. I want to be safe. I want to be secure. I want things not to slip from me.
BRENDAN COWELL:
Absolutely. You know, we were talking about how it can be abrasive, the voice. I found a new tenderness in the book. That lovely conversation he keeps wanting to have with people. He has it with the cab driver. Does anyone know where the ducks go in winter, when the lake freezes over? And he keeps just asking random people. Whether it's an intentional metaphor or not, he is in a cold world and he is trying to find somewhere to go, but it was a beautiful conversation, and if anything, that's all he was trying to do. He was trying to connect with people. Look, he's a wild and acute observer, almost painfully and almost to his own demise, because he pushes people away, but there's tenderness in observation. I think, with his wisdom and his genius, it's kind of crippled him. He can't really be in the world, which inevitably, Salinger couldn't be in the world after the book became so big. The truth is he continued to write every day, and there are many unpublished manuscripts, but he just didn't like the publishing business. He didn't like what happened to his family and friends. Not only the critics. The thing he hated most was how people criticise your characters. He didn't mind saying whether it was a good book or not.
MARY DELAHUNTY:
Like we've just done with Fiona's.
BRENDAN COWELL:
Yeah. He said, how dare you murder my characters? He hated that, and he said publishing was the worst business, he'd rather spend two hours at the dentist than a minute in the publishing business.
MARY DELAHUNTY:
So, where are all these scripts? That's what I'm excited about. And who's going to have copyright of them? And who's going to fight over them? Is going to be like Kafka, over there in Berlin? Of course, Israel wants all his old manuscripts. Who's going to fight over Salinger's? We haven't even seen them.
JENNIFER BYRNE:
Anyone with the remotest chance of getting them, I suspect.
BRENDAN COWELL:
I would be very sure he burned them all.
MARY DELAHUNTY:
Why would you think he'd burn them?
BRENDAN COWELL:
He wrote to write, by the end.
MARY DELAHUNTY:
You sure?
JASON STEGER:
I read one interview that he gave in the '70s or something, and he said he didn't know whether they would be published posthumously. In a way, you'd hope that he stuck to his guns and burned the whole, bloody lot.
JENNIFER BYRNE:
He did write Franny And Zooey. There were other books. It was just this one totally overshadowed. And that's the club for another month. A big thanks to tonight's Book Clubbers. Thank you so much, Brendan, Marieke, Jason and Mary. Thank you.
