39. Catcher In The Rye: JD Salinger’s American Rebel

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2:43Daddy's going to kill you. He's going to kill you, she said.

2:47Dominic Sandbrook: I wasn't listening, though. I was thinking about something else, something crazy. You know what I'd like to be? I mean, if I had my goddamn choice. What? Stop swearing. You know that song, If a body catch a body coming through the rye? It's If a Body Meet a Body Coming Through the Rye. It's a poem by Robert Burns. I know it's a poem by Robert Burns. She was right, though. I thought it was if a body catch a body. Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids and nobody's around. Nobody big, I mean, except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff.

3:28Dominic Sandbrook: What I have to do, I have to catch everybody before they start to go over the cliff. I mean, if they're running and they don't look where they're going, I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's what I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. That was, of course, from The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, published as a novel in 1951. And it's one of the most famous novels about youth, a coming-of-age novel that whether it is or not we'll discuss. It often appears on lists of the best novels of the 20th century.

4:04it's widely considered to be one of the greatest American novels ever written and it's a school classic in England but more particularly America and it describes the alienation and disillusionment and also grief of Holden Caulfield its 16 year old protagonist and narrator and Dominic is a famous teen rebel yourself did you read this when you were young and relate to it or is this your first time reading it?

4:30Dominic Sandbrook: I first read this book actually when I was a teenager it's one of those things I don't know if other listeners have had this when you um you start idly flicking through a book and you get to about page 100 you know you just kind of idly look you start reading and then you end up reading the whole thing but you miss out like I'd actually never read the fact the first 50 or 100 pages no way because I just sort of flicked through it in in the school library have you read this before Tabby yeah so I did it for my GCSEs and I actually remember loving it. I really liked Holden, who I find to be a genuinely interesting character.

5:04You said quite rightly, it is a very powerful window into 1950s America, and more specifically, New York. Most of the book is set in New York. The American writer and essayist Adam Gopnik wrote, no book has ever captured a city better than Catcher in the Rye captured New York in the 50s. Wow. Which is a big statement.

5:26Dominic Sandbrook: Basically, this is the first, I mean, maybe some listeners will be able to think of earlier examples, but this is the first moment in history when teenage alienation is a big kind of cultural theme. And I think that's actually linked to the invention of mass youth culture and the idea of the teenager. So Holden Caulfield becomes a kind of touchstone, doesn't he, in the 1950s? Yeah. certainly by the end of the decade when is this published 1951 so certainly by about by the late 50s Holden Caulfield is kind of a shorthand for teenage rebellion somebody who's disaffected somebody who doesn't accept the expectations of their society their parents their teachers and so on and you know there have always been adolescence in literature and in culture I think what this book absolutely reflects I mean this is actually quite a sort of banal point to make is is the creation the popularization of the idea of the teenager and actually when you look at the teenager the word i think the first uses of the word teenager have been traced back to the 1910s or 1920s in newspapers but really it was taken up in the 30s as a marketing slogan so basically what you had was for the first time in history you had young people aged let's say 16 17 18 with a disposable income that they wanted to spend on things that would mark them mouth is distinctive so they're buying you know chewing gum bicycles motorbikes records records obviously in particular clothes different fashions they're not dressing like their parents yeah they're like a distinctive unit for the first time aren't they i think up up to that point a teenager a 16 or 17 18 year old had been a little adult and people had accepted you know there's a sort of gray area but you became a little adult quite quickly i think this is the first point in history where you have I think they dress differently music is obviously very important but also the way they speak you know the slang and this is obviously one of the defining qualities of the catcher and the rye is Holden's very very distinctive voice it's the beginning of such a big a concept we are so familiar with today the idea of disaffected slightly depressed disenchanted youth that but but that was not the case at this time was it as I say teens often had this, they were kind of jolly as, you know, and then you got this idea of the teen rebel, the James Deans or whatever it would be.

7:45Dominic Sandbrook: I'm really struggling actually to think of examples in Victorian or early 20th century literature of characters aged 17 who are miserable and disaffected and who are not just comical. If they appear at all, they might be kind of comical supporting characters, but by and large, they're on the margins. This is the first time that he has been given a voice himself and the book really leans into his contempt for the phoniness and the inauthenticity and the hollowness of the adult world. I think that is what is groundbreaking about the book. So he's 16 years old. He is immortalized for this very famous hat that he wears.

8:25It's a red deer hunter and he's devoted to it and he likes to wear it back to front. Looks-wise, he's compared at one point to an actor. This woman says, oh, you remind me of some actor, and people think it's probably Freddie Bartholomew, who was a child actor from the 1930s. He runs away from his prep school in Pennsylvania after being expelled just before the Christmas holidays after a couple of scuffles with his roommates. And then he restlessly moves around New York. He drinks, he talks to people, he dances, he smokes his way through a couple of days there. He hires and then sends away a prostitute.

9:00He sneaks into his parents' apartment to get some money and speaks to his younger sister, Phoebe. He breaks down in tears. He goes to see a former English teacher that he admired, and there's a slightly sinister interaction there. He thinks about a lot throughout the book, actually, about his former neighbour and I think crush, Jane Gallagher, and also his younger brother, Ali, who has died before the events of the novel. and then Holden decides to run away again. He meets Phoebe at the Met to say goodbye and then when she tries to run away with him and he won't let her, he takes her to the zoo to kind of make her happy so that she's not too upset about his leaving and he watches her on the carousel in the rain.

9:42And then what happens after that is kind of, it's only really loosely implied. It's not really the point.

9:48Dominic Sandbrook: Our expectation or our assumption is that he has ended up in a sanatorium of some kind, isn't it? Yes. Yeah. But you get the sense that he meets up with his parents. He's potentially going to go back to school. It's not entirely negative. But where did Holden come from? Well, J.D. Salinger himself said that he was loosely based on himself as a boy and that the whole book was sort of autobiographical. so let's meet Jerome David Salinger because he is an intriguing figure and also he's very well known I would say culturally because he is thought of as a recluse he hid himself away for so long and so there's a mystique So he was born in Manhattan in 1919 he's from a Lithuanian family Lithuanian Jews they were upwardly mobile weren't they they were becoming respectable they were an immigrant they were a classic story of a sort of an originally an immigrant family who were on the way up and were trying to turn themselves into Americans.

10:47They started living in kind of waspy parts of New York.

10:51Dominic Sandbrook: Yes. So a good example of Salinger's own life, he starts off going to public schools, then he ends up going to a prestigious private school called Mount Burnie. And this is in the 30s. Salinger doesn't really fit in. He feels sort of slightly disaffected and alienated. He calls himself Jerry so that he will sound like everybody else. He got kicked out after two years for not trying, so all very Holden. He gets sent to a military academy called Valley Forge in Pennsylvania. And there he writes stories under the bedclothes at night. So that's the origins of his life as a writer. But he's not a great academic star by any means.

11:28Dominic Sandbrook: In fact, they said he was, well, not useless, mediocre. They're only slightly above average IQ school. But that school is probably the inspiration for the school in The Catcher and the Ride the Holden leaves, Pensy Prep. Right. So he went to New York University. He only lost a year. He went traveling in Europe to learn about the food trade, the luxury food imports business. He, again, doesn't quite find himself. He doesn't care about much. No. That's the sense you get. Extraordinary to think that he's actually in Europe. You know, he's in Vienna a month before the Anschluss. Yeah. And actually, as somebody with a Jewish background, he would have been vulnerable in that environment.

12:07And he seemed uninterested in all of that. Didn't really bother him.

12:12Dominic Sandbrook: Classic teenager. So he comes back. He has another unhappy term at a different college in Pennsylvania. So he's really living the Holden Caulfield experience. And then he goes to New York and he enrols at Columbia. There's a course there. And he's taught a writing course by a guy called Whit Burnett, who edits a magazine called Story, which specializes in short stories, short fiction. And this guy Burnett, he's a talent spotter. He's very good at discovering up-and-coming writers. He encourages Salinger. And Salinger, basically after a slow start, sort of explodes into life and starts publishing his work in magazines.

12:50Dominic Sandbrook: And one of the things that he's writing about from the very beginning, actually, writers often write about themselves. And he's writing about aimless, slightly alienated young men. Yeah. So by the time he's 21, he'd managed to get stories accepted by Esquire and the New Yorker. And New Yorker was his kind of holy grail. That's what he really wanted to work for. And those stories were about an estranged teenager called Holden Caulfield. So he has the name. But the difference is that in those stories, Holden is nervous about the war. This is his piece for the New Yorker. So Salinger's wartime experiences, he was drafted into the army as a counterintelligence agent.

13:26And at first, he had a fairly easy time until about 1944, actually, moving around US army bases. Then in March 1944, Sanchez shipped to Tiviton in Devon in preparation for the Normandy invasion.

13:39Dominic Sandbrook: I think that's so interesting that he writes this in the build-up to D-Day. And it could not seem more different in tone. I know, but I think I guess he's drawing on a different part of his life and he hasn't yet been that damaged by the war. Right, okay. Yeah, because you think this really damaged him, the war. Do you? I do, yeah, I do. towards the end of the war, he was there when they started liberating the sub-camps of Dachau, the Dachau concentration camp system. And that was obviously totally harrowing. Do you think this finds its way into Catcher in the Rye? I mean, Catcher in the Rye does not seem a book even remotely connected with the Second World War.

14:19Dominic Sandbrook: But do you think some of the anger and alienation reflects Salinger's own experiences in the war? A lot of critics and commentators have made the connection. It would give you a slightly pessimistic view of human nature, wouldn't it? Of the world going through something like that. The concentration camps. I mean, that's surely like dented people's views of the world. Like even now it's shaped the way that we see what humans are capable of. I mean, part of this you can probably see reflected in his spiritual quest. So first of all, he gets into a Zen Buddhism, doesn't he? And when he went on dates, he would give people his date's reading lists about Zen Buddhism.

14:57Oh God, be still my beating loins. I respect that.

15:01Dominic Sandbrook: Wow. You know what? I'm full of respects. He goes to Germany to do a period of denazification, not obviously for himself. And there he meets this woman, Sylvia Velter, and he marries her after only a few weeks. And his second wife, Margaret's mother, Claire, said that according to Salinger, but Sylvia turned out to be an evil woman who genuinely hated Jews, was genuinely anti-Semitic. So the couple moved back to the US in 1946. Unsurprisingly, the marriage collapses. Right. He tries to resume life as a writer. This bloke, Whit Burnett, helps him to put together a collection of short stories, which is going to be called Young Folks.

15:42Dominic Sandbrook: And this is obviously, again, the emphasis on youth. But Salinger can't get a publisher. He says this is all Burnett's fault. They fall out. in 1947 he gets you know back in with the new yorker doesn't he and that's really and then he's off and running really he starts publishing salinger almost exclusively for the new yorker and then he decided to set himself the challenge of developing all these sketches he'd been doing for years these kind of chapters he'd written about this guy holden caulfield into a fully fledged novel his agent took the manuscript little brown and company and they published it as a full novel in 1951.

16:19The publication caused a sensation. Salinger did not like this. He avoided it mainly by spending a lot of his time in England because he didn't want to do interviews. He didn't like public appearances. And he also hated reading reviews. So before we close with, you know, we tie up Salinger's story, let's discuss a little bit how the book was received because it was quite polarizing. Yes, it was an instant commercial hit and it was adored by general readers. It made it onto the New York Times bestseller list for 30 weeks. And it was selected book of the month. It hit an immediate chord with many.

16:54It was reprinted eight times within two months of publication. But as I say, you know, it's Marmite. Instantly, it's Marmite. Either kind of adoring, you've changed my life sort of a reaction, or it's ruthlessly lambasted.

17:09Dominic Sandbrook: You can find loads of people who say The Catcher in the Rye changed my life. It's the first book I read. It's almost the book I read that led me into the adult world or led me into a new way of writing. So this is Elizabeth Frank. She said, Holden Caulfield was a champion of bad words and cutting school and pointing out the dreariness and the hypocrisy of that era. I remain grateful to Holden Caulfield and the Catcher in the Rye for helping us put a name to all those intuitions we had that something was terribly wrong with civilization in America at that time. There's definitely a mood, a cultural mood in the 1950s and then of course in the 60s, which is very critical of kind of conservative America, of the nuclear family, of what is seen as the repressive, stuffy, conformist, suffocating world of kind of, you know, the sort of madmen world, I suppose, which youngsters reject.

18:00Dominic Sandbrook: So much of the reaction to The Catch in the Rye there is bound up with Holden Caulfield. Of course, he tells us the story. But I think when people tell us they love the book what they really mean is they love him and his persona and lots of people would say you know it's it's i believe that he really exists he speaks to me i mean some of the people who like the book completely expected say marlon brando obviously he's playing a rebel jack nicholson obviously you know he's a sort of again a seen perceived as a sort of rebellious figure someone who plays rebellious interesting figures president george hw bush who's like the ultimate establishment person but on the other hand Holden does go to an elite boarding school oh that blew my mind because he said something like it was his bible I was like was it yeah but even people who seem very boring and very stuffy you know they've had a period of teenage rebellion or I mean everyone's been a teenager Tabby were you I know you find this you find this inconceivable yeah on the other hand there are people who don't like it so as you already said the New Yorker where Salinger often published they dismissed it as exhibitionistic there were critics who said it was it felt amateurish that it didn't feel you know professionally put together there are a lot of people who were shocked by it who said you know hold the swearing holden as a teenage drinker and smoker and all of this the stuff with the prostitute his obsession with sex all of these things are inappropriate in a book for younger readers of course actually it was meant to be a book for adults.

19:34Dominic Sandbrook: But by and large, this is a book that you read between the ages of 13 and 25, let's say. I mean, you wouldn't see somebody reading this book at the age of 52, would you by and large? No, no. So lots of libraries, particularly within sort of more conservative areas, didn't like it. It was the most censored book in high schools in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. And yet the paradox, it becomes a staple of school reading lists. So if you have a sort of slightly more progressively minded English teacher and the year is 1983 and you're 16 years old, your English teacher gives you this book to read because they think it will speak to you.

20:20Dominic Sandbrook: And the controversy actually has never quite gone away. So even in the 2000s, still one of the most challenged books on kind of school curriculums in America. and of course there is this issue about whether it's any good so jonathan yardley washington post critic in 2004 why do english teachers whose responsibility is to teach good writing repeatedly and reflexively require students to read a book as badly written as this one i mean that's pretty damning he compared it to drinking castor oil which i think is a bit harsh to be honest that's either way good or bad there's a lot of public attention around this book it's a bit of a And as we've already said, J.D.

20:58Salinger hated this. As his notoriety and popularity grew, he retreated more and more from the public eye.

21:06Dominic Sandbrook: Meanwhile, his, I mean, just his personal life is a bit bonkers. So he married again. He married a 19-year-old Harvard graduate called Claire Douglas. They had two children. He's all in on his macrobiotic diets and his Eastern religions. And he's quite dogmatic about it. Very dogmatic. He's very reclusive by the 1960s. He basically is not giving any interviews. He and Claire get divorced in 1967. She's on the verge of a breakdown. He then has a series of relationships with women who are quite a bit younger. So one of them was 18. She was Joyce Maynard. She wrote a very controversial memoir about him and about their time together in 1999.

21:46Dominic Sandbrook: And she sort of portrayed him, didn't she, as controlling and abusive. Bit of a monster, yeah. Finally, to cap it all, his daughter Margaret, so this is from his second marriage, she wrote a memoir, didn't she, in 2000, which was very, again, very controversial. It really paints him as a bit of a villain. You know, she says her upbringing was very difficult. She said her father was paranoid, controlling, again, emotionally abusive. She goes into detail about his strange spiritual medical habits, said it was like growing up in a cult, said he drank his own urine and would sometimes kind of try to speak in tongues when he went into a particular state the more i hear about him tabby the more i think he sounds like quite hard work wait till you find out about his diet even later in life but i mean understandably i think i still think this is sad no matter no matter what you know by the end of his life he's basically living in almost complete isolation he's living on frozen peas and uncooked lamb patties um but Salinger eventually died on the 27th of January 2010 at the age of 91.

22:49Dominic Sandbrook: To go back to The Catch in the Rye, it's a more literary book than people think. No question about that. The title comes from the Robert Burns poem, Coming Through the Rye. It's actually quite a bawdy poem. It's a poem about basically love or sex in a meadow. Holden has misinterpreted the poem because he thinks it's meant to be about two people meeting and halton thinks it's about one person catching another person and in the second half we'll get into what he thinks the implications of catching somebody else are what he's trying to prevent them from because i you know growing up sexuality whatever adulthood whatever um there's also it clearly is in some way modeled on huckleberry finn i think people always always draw the connection between these two novels first person narrator exactly the first line of huckleberry finn very very similar opening line so huckleberry finn says you don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of sounds like the first line of the catcher in the rye but there's no i mean there's no evidence of potential but i mean surely he loved books writers but he was always very reluctant to talk about influences and inspirations i wonder if because he was quite a proud man maybe for For instance, in 1951, William Maxwell asked him, what are your...

24:08In your infances. Yeah, and he was like, well, what are you asking me? You're asking which books I love. Well, I love Kafka, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Keats, Bronte. So all the classics, he's not giving loads away, but actually in private letters, he has a particular penchant for F. Scott Fitzgerald.

24:22Dominic Sandbrook: I can see how The Great Gatsby. Oh my God, I saw so many similarities. In many ways, I mean, Holden references The Great Gatsby in the book. And in many ways, similar themes, you know, disenchanted youngish people who don't really fit into their societies Gatsby and Nick are loathing for fakeness yeah and of course Hemingway I mean you're a massive Hemingway devotee do you see a bit of Hemingway in the prose would you say yeah I do I do um that kind of colloquial slangy very American style of prose but the big difference is that Holden Caulfield is the opposite of the ultra-masculine leading men that Hemingway usually writes about.

25:07You know, he totally, totally takes that away from him. And I think he did that intentionally in Holden because Holden would not be as sympathetic a character if he was this much more James Dean-y teen rebel. Let's go to a break. And then afterwards, we will discuss Holden Caulfield himself. And if that's not excitement enough, we will explain why Leonardo DiCaprio never managed to get the film made. But also we'll be answering the question, did the catcher in the rye actually inspire an assassination attempt on an American president? And how was it connected to the death of John Lennon?

25:41Dominic Sandbrook: See you after the break.

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27:32Hi, everyone. It's Katty Kay here from The Rest is Politics US. The midterms are almost here. It's the biggest political moment of the year, And Anthony Scaramucci and I will be right there with you making sense of every twist and turn as the results come in.

27:47Dominic Sandbrook: You know, that's right. We're going to be live on YouTube covering the midterms as we get the results. Will Donald Trump be a lame duck for the next two years or walk away with a mandate to do whatever he wants? We're about to find out. So join us from midnight to 3 a.m. Eastern time on November the 4th. We'll be live reacting to all of the results as they come in. So make sure you're subscribed to The Rest is Politics US on YouTube and turn on notifications, please. You won't want to miss this.

28:21Welcome back to The Book Club, everyone. Now, before we get back to the show, a reminder to join our own community, our own gang of disillusioned outcast rebels and sign up to Book Club Notes. And if you do, I promise you, you'll never feel like a depressed, misanthropic teenager ever again. You'll feel great.

28:39Dominic Sandbrook: Why would you feel so great? Well, because it's a weekly newsletter of talking points. So that's something to live for. Book recommendations. Now you're just high on life. And a whole bevy of insights from you, our listeners, because we are not like, you know, the institutions. We want to hear from you, you know, the people. And it's delivered into your inbox every Saturday morning, free. And how, Dominic, do you find this lifeline to a more glorious life? uh so i signed up at the book club hq.com and genuinely every saturday i feel like my weekend is empty until it lands in my inbox and then my weekend is sorted before i explode with excitement let's go as catcher in the rye so as we've already said it's a book with an extraordinary reputation afterlife i think probably in part due to the mystique of its author but it has also i think it just genuinely in its own right does mean a lot or has come to mean a lot to a lot of people or has done in its life cycle for many reasons.

29:37You know, it's the idea of an ordinary young man going through this journey of alienation, but also, I think, because its style is so famous and so discussed.

29:47Dominic Sandbrook: Holden is telling us the story in this confessional vein, and he speaks to the reader directly. We've had a few examples of this. So Humbert did it in Lolita, and of course Jane Eyre does it in Charlotte Bronte's book back in 1847. so there's a sense in which as with those books this is a sort of an unfettered if you can fetter a stream you can't fetter a stream but you know what i mean an unfettered stream of consciousness uh in an informal style so much more informal than those two examples lolita or um or jane and holden will say to you at times quite colloquially you may have heard of my pal so and so you may be thinking this yeah i expect you want me to tell you about x y or z or whatever the opening line is the classic example so we mentioned the opening line of huckleberry finn before the break this is i mean you can sense the influence of huckleberry finn in this line if you really want to hear about it the first thing you'll probably want to know is where i was born and what my lousy childhood was like now i have to say that whatever you think of catch the catcher in the right that's an excellent first line oh it's so good it's so good It creates an immediate connection between the reader and the narrator and the central character.

31:05Dominic Sandbrook: If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know, it's very confident. It immediately establishes a bond, but it also establishes Holden's personality and tone. And the key word is obviously lousy. My lousy childhood. The sort of slight world weariness, the contempt for his own childhood, the mockery about the form. usually when people are telling you about their childhood, let's say it is Pip in Great Expectations or it's David Copperfield or something. Who's referenced in the first paragraph of the book. He is David Copperfield, absolutely. So if you take that as an example, David Copperfield or Pip in Great Expectations would never describe their childhood as lousy.

31:47Dominic Sandbrook: They would never be dismissive about the story they're telling. The fact that Holden is dismissive immediately, I think, establishes that this is something completely different and a new kind of relationship, I guess, between the narrator and his material. But also there's that reluctance, which is so interesting. It's not often that you find a book where you're like, oh, you're almost pulling it out of him, obviously you're not. But it's the opposite of the Moby Dicks or, I don't know why I'm going with an article scene here, Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner or something, where the whole point of the novel is that he wants to tell you.

32:21He's unravelling the story for you. Holden's like, all right, then fine. And I do think he genuinely does sound, he genuinely does, it's not shocking for us now, but it would have been then. He genuinely does sound like a teenager. And he's very complex. He's sometimes extremely unnecessarily judgmental. Sometimes he's self-knowing. He sounds lost and his voice moves as thoughts would, fast paced, compulsive, inconsistent, much more so than even say Hemingway. and random streams of thought will be inspired by little things, a chair or whatever.

32:56Dominic Sandbrook: What's interesting is that quite often when people are telling a story like this, there are some removed from the story that they've changed, they've developed over the... Yeah, they're looking back. Rebecca, for instance. Yeah, they're looking back. Holden is still very much himself. If you assume he's telling us this story from a sanatorium, as actually Humber Humber is in Lolita, he is he is he hasn't grown up since then the holden who tells us the story is the same holden as the holden who's experiencing all of these things i would say he's got the same slightly contempt you know contemptuous tired cynical view of the world yeah yeah and and so as you say the holden who's telling the story is still the holden who would use this slang he's not saying oh god you know in my he's not nick buchanan he's not nick you know nick from the great it's about my younger carefree youth or whatever.

33:49He's still using words, and the slang is such a famous part of this. So, for instance, things like, don't be so goddamn sore, old Phoebe, Ackley kid, phony, crummy, swell, all make the voice intriguingly immature.

34:03Dominic Sandbrook: And also the fact that it's overused, I think, as a child. So, you know, I said he says, and all, this and all, that and all, that, you know, or old Phoebe, old Stradlater, old, that's how, that is how teenagers speak. they use the tick again and again and again. I mean, it's how so many of us speak today, to be honest, myself included. When they listen to these podcasts, they say, have you noticed that Dominic always says this or Tabby always says that? That's how Holden Caulfield speaks. And yet he has this wonderfully endearing quality of sounding like a young person who's trying to sound old beyond their years.

34:35I think that's quite a tough thing to pull off. He always speaks in hyperbole and exaggeration.

34:41Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, as teenagers do, actually. As teenagers do. and all of this, you know, for instance, we go back to that opening line, my lousy childhood. He's an extremely, I mean, you are, this is just Dominic Sambo, bingo. He's an extremely unreliable narrator for all of this. But the funny thing is, I was thinking about this. Is he an unreliable narrator? Because an unreliable narrator requires us. Yeah, you have to read between the lines, I guess. You have to read between the lines. I don't feel you ever have to do that with Holden Corfield. Yeah, there's a lot that he doesn't tell us, though, that we have to interpret through what he doesn't say.

35:12but I guess that in itself is honest. But for instance, he says at one point, I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life.

35:18Dominic Sandbrook: Yes, he does. Or he says that he's illiterate. I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot. He's obviously very well read. He's obviously a very smart boy. The fact that his English teacher has taken such a shine to him and the fact his teachers generally, even though he's been kicked out for not doing any work and being just a massive pain, his teachers clearly are quite fond of Holden and take him seriously. And he reads extensively. I mean, his literary references are tip top. You mentioned David Copperfield. David Copperfield. He mentions Emily Dickinson. He mentions out of Africa. I don't know.

35:51It is so broad. But then just that lousy childhood thing. Everything that we learn about him and his life, and those things only gradually revealed to us during the course of the book. It doesn't sound like it was that lousy a childhood. We find out he's from quite a wealthy family. His parents don't seem unsympathetic.

36:08Dominic Sandbrook: he's got a nice home yeah of course so was it lousy you know that's kind of what i mean by you know can we entirely trust him it's not that he's lying to us i don't think i think it's just that he has the prejudices of a teenager who feels hard done by completely and that's what i think if you're a cynical reader or a more if you yourself are a more well weary reader then you might read this and you say he is an entitled privileged whiny actually on you know i don't find him unlikable but i can see there's a lot of readers might that they would say god massive first world problems that you don't like you're a very expensive boarding school yeah well i mean this is a good point and we let's talk about holden you know what he's like i i think he's a very interesting character and i love and i think he's very eccentric character and i'm drawn to that in him um the hat yeah it's just wearing a hat back to front and you're automatically just zany um i think to just to declare him or to read him as simply a rebellious teenager is actually to do him a disservice he is as we've as i said he's made up of so many contradictions and he's quite mercurial he's an old soul and yet he is irritatingly childish just randomly jumps on people or you know teases them or i mean he would be irritating to hang around i think sometimes he's very compassionate but selectively because he's also extremely judgmental at various points and actually can be can be brutally scathing you know for instance when he meets these uh three young girls in a bar one night well they're young to they might be into us but to him they're older to him they're older yeah exactly um and they're sort of a very pretty one who he danced with for a bit.

37:51And he's also constantly, almost desperately trying to make conversation with people. But then one of them is perhaps less blessed in the looks department. And he says, I danced with them all, the whole three of them, one at a time. The one ugly one. Laverne wasn't too bad a dancer, but the other one, old Marty was murder. Old Marty was like dragging the Statue of Liberty around the floor.

38:13Dominic Sandbrook: That's funny. Yeah, he's untethered in the things that he says. I mean, to be honest, I think that's exactly how teenage boys talk about girls. Yeah, it is. Teenage boys are brutal. And for instance, the critic Louis Menand describes him as a demon of verbal incision, which I think is absolutely true because he's very perceptive. He sees people's weaknesses and he just hones in on them. Which is actually quite, I think, a young person. I mean, not just teenagers, but children. Children will see, they'll say, what? The fat person, the stupid person, that person who always does this, because they don't have the filter.

38:47Dominic Sandbrook: And they see things sometimes more clearly than adults do. And of course, children are sometimes not terribly compassionate about adults' weaknesses. But also, teenagers tend to be slightly less self-knowing. So obviously, Holden is desperate for companionship, but he's always alienating himself from other people and coming down hard on them. And equally, he comes down hard on everyone and actually the world in general because he sees it all as phony. But he's an enormous hypocrite himself because he is phony. He's called himself a terrific liar. and he's changeable. And he is scathing about other people for trying to be something they're not, trying to affect a persona.

39:27Dominic Sandbrook: So particularly the boys at his school, he's, as Louis Mignon absolutely says, he sees right to the core of them and he mocks them for their pretensions or their affectations. But Holden himself is extremely affected. I mean, the whole thing of wearing that ridiculous hat backwards, that's such a teenage thing that teenagers do to make themselves different or draw attention to themselves. Yeah, all his kind of obsessive smoking or... Yeah, he's mannered, but in a very recognisable adolescent way, I think. Now, you love all this, don't you, Tabby? And in fact, I have to say, you've written in the notes, in capital letters, the words, he is me, of yourself, haven't you?

40:07Dominic Sandbrook: What is this? Now, is this relation to being a massive hypocrite, to being affected and mannered, or is it something else? All of the above. It's all of the above. Now, I like that he is a character made up of many things. I think all his eccentricities make him seem more vulnerable. His mood swings. I like the way that he's tickled by odd things. And he says, oh, God, I just, you know, I got high on that or whatever it is. I like his always clumsy efforts to seem older. This scene where he dances with his younger sister because he sees it as kind of authentic and open. and yes that's very sweet i agree with you and he also he's a reader that's what i mean i'm being harsh on you because that's actually the bit of him that you like most that is the bit i like about him almost reluctantly he throws these references out there and i think also you you see that he's actually very very vulnerable and kind of on the verge of a nervous breakdown despite his glibness and his cynicism and apparent confidence he's totally erratic he's difficult and he is willful and he is often rude and you know he is um iconoclastic and all of this and he has this sort of glibness and he has this very heavily worn cynicism but actually beneath it all as the book goes on we begin to well quite early on actually i think we see that holden is actually a sad boy that he's unhappy and that he um is lonely actually he he's he doesn't have a friend that he can really confide in i mean it's so telling that the person he does ultimately confide in the person with whom he's got the strongest connection is his little sister who who clearly does understand him and sees she sees the child in him like herself doesn't she we were talking weren't we before we recorded about the the thing when he um he has a game that he plays where he pretends that he's been shot in the stomach and he's like a child playing i mean that's a really good example of playing a part of the thing that he does so often i think there's something deeper behind it though so you think this is basically he is wounded in a way that's what it's alluding to he's he's horsing around in this bar in new york playing the game pretending he's been shot but he says i didn't want anybody to know i was even wounded i was concealing the fact that i was a wounded son of a bitch and obviously he's not actually physically wounded but i think he i mean he obviously is deeply wounded deep down he's he's he's grieving as we will see and he doesn't want anyone to know you know he he doesn't want anyone around him to know that he is a wounded son of a bitch and he behaves like an idiot to hide it and it also i think alienates him he feels that he's the only one experiencing this pain so he says he is the only guy with a bullet in his guts and the bullet in his guts it actually relates to the fact that he his younger brother ali before the beginning of the book has died of leukemia and that actually what holden is you know holden running away from school is perhaps not really so much about holden's disaffection with school but the fact that he doesn't know how to cope with his grief and his loneliness now that his brother has died he's kind of running away from it and he believes that the world around him just wouldn't get it you know that's also a very teen thing to to think that your sadness your suffering your depression is yours no one else could ever be experiencing what you're experiencing um so he never says you know i'm grieving my brother ali but there are breadcrumbs that you know allow us to know it so i mean there's endless sarcasm there's the fact that he let slip in a very casual way that just after Ali died he broke the window of the family garage with his fist you know and he removes himself from that you know extreme action he says I pocketed my hand just for the hell of it but my hand was a bastard I hardly didn't even know I was doing it and I didn't even know I had the goddamn windows broken until it was all over so he's making it seem like it wasn't him that was some other guy you know he's separating himself from this wounded damaged person who's so broken that they break things and so telling the one thing he carries with him is um ali's old baseball glove isn't it um which ali wrote poems on holden clings on i mean that's his great memory of ali and it's a very that's i think that's a lovely detail actually a really touching detail and he sees it as a symptom of Ali's authenticity because Ali would, when he was bored in the field playing baseball, he'd read the poems on it.

44:49Rather than being a gung-ho boy who really gets into the game, he's kind of standing on the side, dreamily reading poems. And that's the first real giveaway is Holden starts writing a piece of creative writing for his roommate and he just ends up writing it all about this glove. So clearly it's pouring out of him. It's like the blood of those

45:10Dominic Sandbrook: wounds are just gushing out of him and he doesn't see ali as someone who belongs in the past i think this is so telling he always talks about him in the present tense doesn't he totally so phoebe says to him at one point ali is dead and he says i know he's dead do you think i don't you think i know that i can still like him though can't i just because somebody's dead you don't just stop liking them for god's sake especially if they were about a thousand times nicer than the people you know that are alive and all and that that is i mean that's one of the most i think the moments in the book where the real Holden Caulfield, as it were, is speaking most clearly.

45:44Also, I mean, not to overdo that theme, but children also do that. For instance, if they have one parent that tends to be quite absent, they idealise and immortalise that parent rather than the parent that's with them. Holden's reality is an unhappy one. So he believes that the only good thing could be the guy that's not part of it, that's gone.

46:05Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, that's very true. Ali is a presence for him, an imaginary friend. an imaginary companion. He's very lonely, Holden, walking the streets of New York. And he would say, every time I'd get to the end of a block, I'd make believe I was talking to my brother Ali. I would say to him, Ali, don't let me disappear. Ali, don't let me disappear. Ali, don't let me disappear. Please, Ali. And then when I'd reach the other side of the street without disappearing, I would thank him. I mean, that's a very telling line, the fear that he has of disappearing himself, I guess, of following his brother into oblivion.

46:35Dominic Sandbrook: And he's asking his brother for help god i think that's tragic now this is i think a key part of the book i know you we agree about this that actually it's ali is a child and ali is now frozen as a child in holden's imagination he is pure unsullied by compromise untainted by adolescence or adulthood and so much of what is driving holden is his grief not just for ali but for the impending disappearance of his own childhood and his innocence. I would say probably the main theme of this book is Holden's fear of growing up. It's a very popular theme in fiction. It has always been Peter Pan, Little Women, Narnia, The Bell Jar.

47:22But I think that The Catcher in the Rye brilliantly and quite unusually captures, charters that very painful, hazy, strange, contradictory transitional period between childhood and adulthood. And it shows that, you know, it's something fearful and the feeling, you know, the vision of children becoming grownups is generally that they're reaching for it. They're hungry for it. They're like, I want to go out, drink. I hate people belittling me, you know, whatever it may be though.

47:54Dominic Sandbrook: It's so funny how Tabby's, just to all the listeners, how Tabby's definition of adulthood is drinking. But you know when you're a teenager and you're like, stop calling me a child, I'm an adult, you're dying for independence. Yeah, of course. Holden's the opposite. He's clinging to the past like Gatsby. You know, it's a reluctant thing for him. It frightens him. But do you not think that? I find that psychologically very plausible and I hate to use the word relatable because I think there is a point in your teenage life when you do mourn you know that you are you are losing your innocence i mean there's a sort of interesting point um not to shed too much light into the sandbrook household that we have a bit ourselves about at what point does like your child's a child's bedroom for example change from a child's bedroom to a teenager's bedroom and there's a point when the kind of you the parents sort of slightly sadly have to put away the teddy bears or the old books or whatever and i think there are i i bet you that i bet there are loads of people listening to this who would say, yeah, actually that is a sad moment for the child too.

48:56Dominic Sandbrook: I remember being sad because I felt like I'd lost something, that a chapter that had been so lovely and whatever, it was closed. I remember, I mean, admittedly being quite a lot younger than Holden, thank God. But I remember thinking to myself, how much longer is it actually permissible for me to run around the garden in a cape? Like pretending to be, I don't know, Frodo Baggins or whatever. Like at some point, this is going to have to end because they'll put me away. and that was I remember thinking that was a very sad realisation I think that is a sad the loss of your childhood if it's been a nice childhood it's always tinged with sadness of course there's excitement and anticipation about the next step but that can be scary and so I mean that's why Holden spends so much of the book his time in New York it's like a pilgrimage to his youth he's always banging on about the ducks in the park because obviously he visited them as a child and he goes and tries to find them but you know it's winter and there are no ducks it's part of the reason he's so close to phoebe uh and it's also this theme explains the title of the novel yeah so we already said um in the robert burns poem it's if your body meet a body coming through the rye but halton has completely misinterpreted that he imagines himself standing in the field of rye and he imagines himself watching children playing near the edge of a cliff and they're free and they're carefree and they're going to fall off the cliff and he is going to catch them if they fall off the edge and most people read this as holden wants to stop them growing up to stop them losing their innocence and losing the sort of beautiful naivety that you have when you're a child and to protect them from the process that he's going through because he sees the adult world as fundamentally inauthentic he can see how much adults themselves are playing parts and how much hypocrites and you know they are what compromises they make and so on and he i mean this word phony that's the worst insult if somebody is phony and he uses it again and again when somebody is being dishonest or corrupt or in fact if they're involved in some way with sex or sexuality so it's telling that almost all the adults we meet in the book he regards as phony in one way or another um his his they contrast them with ali who is not phony he was authentic and of course phoebe his younger sister phoebe is the one cat you know it's so it's very nicely observed i think that he he would never say a word in the book against phoebe phoebe is perfect their relationship is also a totally believable i think that of a older brother and a younger sister who is still kind of the kids yeah i mean he said he watches her sleeping i think this is a nice scene he watches her sleeping her face is on the pillow she had her mouth way open it's funny you take adults they look lousy when they're asleep and they have their mouths way open but kids don't kids look all right i mean there you have it there's the sort of message of the book to some degree and he hates his contemporaries say at pency because he feels like their phoniness is born of the fact that they are trying too hard to become adults or rather they're just they are becoming adults they're leaning into growing up and holden despises that because he tries he's very contented he's still trying to be a child it's why he's very playful it's why he randomly attacks you know and tries to fight with his friends or his peers or whatever it may be for instance he says i can't explain it i just didn't like anything that was happening at pency i can't explain what's happening and what he doesn't like is that a they're growing up and a big part of this growing up is a lot of them are dating girls and potentially having sex and sex is a big part of holden's reluctance to grow up and his fear of adulthood because more than anything sex represents that boundary line between childhood innocence and adult experience um and there's this slightly odd ambiguous scene for instance that kind of epitomizes all of Holden's worst fears about the dishonesty and distrustfulness of adults which is when he goes to see his old English teacher Mr.

52:58Antolini and he liked him and he trusts him. He thinks that Mr. Antolini gets it. One of Holden's schoolmates killed himself and Mr. Antolini is the one who goes and picks up the body. He trusts him. And then at one point, Holden falls asleep there and he wakes up and Mr. Antolini is touching his head. Holden, in type of process, is potentially sexually sinister. It's never made clear whether or not it actually is.

53:21Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, I like the fact that the book is so ambiguous on this point. I think... It's not lazy. It's not obvious. It's not cheap. It's perfectly... Yeah, there is no point us, in a way, as readers, trying to speculate whether Mr. Antonini is actually incredibly creepy and dodgy or whether actually Mr. Antonini has just been kind. We have no way of knowing. More importantly, it tells us something about Holden's state of mind, which is like seeing sexuality everywhere and being on his guard against it and being paranoid about it. But then it's more complex than that though, isn't it? Because he doesn't just hate and fear and dread sex.

53:57He's also really curious about it.

54:00Dominic Sandbrook: That's so... Do you not think that is so teenage? That is so kind of a 15, 16-year-old boy, simultaneously extremely curious about this thing that you've heard so much about. And it is stirring within you, as it were, but also anxious about it, nervous. What does it actually mean? How will I measure up? Anxious about not having it as well, a bit like Esther in the bell jar. Of course. Nothing worse than the teenager, for the teenager who is not in a relationship, to be thinking, gosh, I'm missing out and everybody else is having such fun. But then he also does that classic teenage boy thing where he kind of lies about it.

54:40He calls himself at one point a sex maniac.

54:42Dominic Sandbrook: I'm a sex maniac. I'm having so much sex. I'm a sex maniac. But actually, he's got great anxiety about the whole thing. but the thing about him you know almost having sexual experiences but never following through with it yeah um i mean that runs through the book and the classic example of this is when he hires this prostitute called sunny and she comes up to his room it's an absolutely excruciating scene but very well observed i think she comes upstairs and he basically is desperate not to go through with it and he ends up trying to have a conversation with her and the whole thing ends disastrously because the bloke comes up and asks him for more money and it's just all so awkward and he pretends to have a serious injury to get out of it yeah and you've written in the notes we've all heard that one i mean no i think what i meant to write is we've all been there okay we've all heard that one wow though i mean the fact who knew that uh britain was littered with people who've been claiming serious internal injuries because oh no she's come back again

55:50okay this chassiness isn't just to try and cock block himself it's also because he's craving connection is that a phrase that's a phrase i've never heard you've never heard cock block no are you serious wow that's a generational thing so it so is well maybe

56:07Dominic Sandbrook: it just happens to some people not others i guess debbie what can i say there is one girl who um he is very very fond of yeah and this is jane gallagher and she's his sort of childhood crush she was a neighbor wasn't she and um he says of his he he idealizes her he's not a misogynist because actually he criticizes his his school fellows because he says they they force themselves on girls the girls ask them to stop and the boys don't oh yeah it's quite sort of sinister rape undertones but also he hates the idea that these boys would have sex without a human connection without an emotional connection he finds that you know the most overused word of any episode ever but phony he does indeed and what really drives him mad and actually drives him to physical violence is that a boy this is a boy called straddle eater at the school who is going out with jane and started dating jane holden's old crush Holden is maddened by this it's partly jealousy because he has a little bit of a crush on Jane but it is more than that isn't it he thinks that Stradleiter is corrupting her innocence Jane to him is a paragon of childhood virtue of a sort of innocent you know fun that they had and their friendship playing board games he describes how Jane actually when they played Chequers kind of drafts she would keep her kings at the back I like that detail I mean, that's a security measure.

57:34Dominic Sandbrook: That's being cautious. And she's herself being protective of her pieces. And that makes him protective of her because he's anxious that Stradlater is forcing himself on Jane. Especially as she had quite a dodgy relationship with her stepfather. So he's even more protective. That said, he's not a total, you know, feminist paragon or whatever. No, of course not. Like any teen boy. I mean, he does objectify women at times. And, you know, he does deal in cliches. but you feel like those cliches are half-hearted. You feel like he's almost saying it because he suddenly remembers himself and he's like, you know, I almost want to impress the reader, you know, because he says things like, that's the thing about girls.

58:14Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall in love with them. And then you never know where the hell you are. Girls, Jesus Christ, they can drive you crazy. They really can. So there's something very kind of Marlon Brando or whatever about that. You know, it's not, it doesn't feel authentic. And that goes hand in hand with the contradictions that are just woven throughout Holden's nature.

58:37Dominic Sandbrook: So the fact that he wants to sort of freeze his childhood and he idealises his childhood. But is also curious about sex and is on some kind of a journey. But is he on a journey? Because you described it at the beginning as a coming-of-age novel. That's exactly how it's often described. It's sold as a coming-of-age novel. But the thing is, does Holden go on a journey? Does he develop a coming-of-age? So to be critical of the book, when we're in like chapter three or something, you might think, well, we're going to, we will unravel more complexities of Holden's character. Holden himself will go on a journey.

59:12Dominic Sandbrook: I mean, that's the standard thing. It's what Huckabee Finn did. It's what David Copperfield did. It's what all these characters, you know. Yeah. They go on a journey. The standard thing in a coming of age novel, I mean, we talked about this with Little Women, a series of trials and tests that you overcome. you discover things about yourself that you didn't know you, your strengths that you didn't know you had. You become more virtuous. You overcome your various sort of hurdles. And you're a different person at the end of the book. And a more grown up, more rounded, better person. That's not true of Holden.

59:42Dominic Sandbrook: Holden is still the same. Holden has not overcome anything necessarily. He's actually walked away from a series of trials, you could say. And actually, his development, as it were, is still incomplete. He's still the same conflicted Holden at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. In fact, the end of the book is him, you know, with Phoebe. He's watching her doing a childish thing going on this sort of merry-go-round or whatever it is. And he's run away completely from the adult world at that point, psychologically. Do you not think? It basically depends, I think, on whether or not you see the ending of the book as optimistic or pessimistic.

1:00:18I think that there is an ambiguous hopefulness to the ending that means that it is a partial coming of age element to it. It's a bit like the bell jar. So both books are too rooted in reality to deal in cheap one dimensional endings. Yeah, Holden is in a facility. His future is uncertain. We don't know if he'll find peace. We don't know if he'll fit in. We don't know if he'll overcome his grief. But you get the sense from the implications surrounding the fact that he meets his parents and goes to a facility and is potentially going to go back to school that he's maybe no longer running and that he has softened and he actually admits to missing some of the people that he claimed to loathe before so stradley or whatever um and he also is a he also now lives nearer his older brother db and db's had quite a hard time in holden's mouth whatever from his pen throughout the book because you know db's older ali is the paragon because he's younger whereas he's kind of potentially you know accepting his brother as the model his older brother as the model rather than the younger and that's like an acceptance of growing up the scene as you say where he sees phoebe he's actually happy to watch her because she and there's a symbolic resonance the fact that she reaches for this gold ring and he doesn't try to protect her or catch her it's it's like an acceptance that she'll grow up he's letting go of this fantasy of a catch on the rye but then that said the final line of the book is devastating i think don't ever tell anybody anything if you do you start missing everybody so that i would say is quite pessimistic yeah i would say it's a bubble ambiguous a sense of distrust don't let yourself

1:01:59Dominic Sandbrook: be vulnerable don't exactly don't let your guard down because you'll be hurt yeah you you'll start missing everybody that sense of loss and grief implicit in those in those words so that's not total acceptance. Well, I guess it's an ambiguous ending. I mean, let's compromise on that. What about the afterlife of Katja and I? Colourful afterlife and not in a good way. No, I mean, it's obviously been immortalised for all sorts of different reasons, but there is a slightly unsavoury element to it. Yeah, we discuss how it's been banned in many, many schools and libraries, but there are two incidents in particular with which the book is associated that are quite dark.

1:02:37So Mark David Chapman was famously carrying a copy of The Catcher in the Right when he murdered John Lennon in 1980. And he later cited Holden Caulfield as an influence.

1:02:48Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, he did. And then John Hinckley Jr. also had a copy of the book when he attempted to assassinate President Reagan in 1981. one what appeals to perhaps a sort of more slightly you know to loners or to people who feel marginal or whatever is holden's persona and his own feeling of loneliness and marginalization but in absolutely no way whatsoever could this be seen as a book that in any way associated with violence or whatever i would say that's a big misreading from those two individuals but it captures the way in which the book has become an emblem of teenage angst in a way that no book had really done before so this you know we've done the bell jar when we were uh doing our books miniseries on the rest is history we did l 'étranger by camu the stranger the outsider the psychoanalyst anna freud who was absolutely pioneering in child psychology the daughter of sigmund freud she said of this book my analytic patients used to speak of Holden Caulfield sometimes as if they'd actually met him they used his words his way of speaking I began to realize they'd taken him into their minds and hugged him so there is something about Holden's vulnerability and I think it's it's because he's not just it's not just that he's a teenager I think what he is is a slightly self-hating teenager who is frightened of letting go of his childhood and that is an experience that happens it's quite a short period of time i think that that happens in your life what is it a year 18 months two years maybe and then it's gone because you're fully a teenager and then you're an adult yeah but it's but it's a very particular moment quite a destabilizing moment for some people and he's a literary hero who's also a fish out of water you know there's something relatable in that there's also just the fact that it's had a big influence on other books that came subsequently as robert mccrum says part of its hypnotic grip on the american imagination comes from the way that it's been written and rewritten it has been replicated a million different ways like again louis menand calls it a literary genre of its own and i think he's right you can see its imprint on the belgium fear and loathing in las vegas i'm not even talking about the themes necessarily the style as well as the themes even jacqueline wilson jacqueline wilson wow i didn't expect she was appearing there you go okay you know it's like it's the godfather of what it's like to be a teenager told from a teenage perspective.

1:05:16But it's also, I think, the fact that Salinger has a bit of a mythos of his own. Yeah, he does have a mythos. And people buy into that. The question then is, though, does it still have this hold on young people's imaginations? Does it still mean so much to people? Yeah, I don't think it does strike the same chord anymore. I think young people of today have probably evolved past the capture and the ride. The idea that to feel alienated or dissatisfied with the world is in some way shocking or revolutionary. It's so banal now, even.

1:05:49Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, almost to become a cliche. Yeah, or to feel out of sea emotionally and different from other people. Ditto. So widely accepted. It's well trodden ground as well. You know, literature, I think, has gone much deeper and it's much more willing to shock. You know, Secret History is a book about young people. even like A Little Life you know those are the kind of books that are sort of shattering people's minds these days so and also the slang is quite outdated I think slang is outdated but of course slang is always outdated if you'd read a book from the 1980s the slang would be outdated in some ways but that meant so much to a particular generation of American teens yeah I guess so I guess so I think Holden is still a very well drawn and memorable character I don't he's not always likeable but I think there was something quite touching about holden i couldn't agree more all right so tabby we're going to mark this out of 10 as always holden would despise this as phony but we're going to do it anyway what do you want to what's your index uh so we could do it in phony crummy hot shot max out of 10 okay or back to front red hunting hats that's probably the more iconic i feel the hat i think we've got to go yeah it's got to be the hat okay you go first i was tempted to uh revise my mark actually because i really enjoyed the episode oh yeah i enjoyed your your amazing insights um but actually but actually no i'm not going to stick with my original mark that is so crummy and phony and all the bad words yeah i'm actually going to give it a six now that seems wow I mean that seems so harsh but I sort of felt like the points had been made I didn't feel um I mean this has happened a few times with books I I like a book where I feel like I'm on an intellectual journey as I'm reading it that's so deep thanks and I didn't really feel that with this I yeah it just didn't speak to me and I don't think that's just because I'm no longer a teenager I think there is I think it is slightly one note I don't think it's badly written i think that is that jonathan yardley verdict is unfair i think i think it captures holden's voice very well and i think there is there is much more to holden than merely alienation and stuff as we've talked about there is there is this grief and whatnot however ultimately i found it quite slight um and i would you know if somebody said to me can you recommend your favorite books in the book club this would not be one of them so there you go what about you I'm going to give it a 7.5.

1:08:22Dominic Sandbrook: 7.5? I mean, I love the tone and the style. I love Holden as a character. I find him genuinely endearing and an oddly comforting presence in my mind. And I find him funny. I find the book actually quite funny at moments and I have a lot of sympathy for him. But that said, I also agree, it is a tiny bit one note maybe and I'd also cut out a little bit of the middle section. I think it's too much wandering around New York. Agreed. I think it's too long, oddly, for quite a short book. I think it's definitely too long. I agree. You know, actually, we never discussed this. Did you know that some of the people that have absolutely killed or tried to make a movie out of this and been turned down flat?

1:09:02Dominic Sandbrook: So you said Leonardo DiCaprio wanted to make a film of it. Yeah. I mean... He wanted to make a film of it with, I think, Tobey Maguire playing Holden. Well, Tobey Maguire, despite Peter Parker incarnation, would have been excellent as Holden, I think. And Spielberg also was dying to make a film about it. and Keanu Reeves, I think, said he wanted to play Holden and someone else. But part of the reason Salinger was so anti the idea of this becoming a film is because he said that you would never be able to transfer Holden's, you know, confessional inner monologue into the film, into a film, and I actually agree with that.

1:09:34Dominic Sandbrook: You would have to be done either with a voiceover, which is sometimes a bit annoying, or Holden talking directly to the camera, I would have thought. And both of those. Well, he could... Could be a bit boring as a film, to be honest. well this is an issue with the book it's episodic it's one thing after another and you know you were saying in the genesis of the book how sanger had written these um short stories and sketches it absolutely does feel like that in the middle of the book like this is a lot of vignettes stitched together then we go to the darks then we go to a bar then we go to the theater yeah i agree yeah all right so um tabby do you have one last admonition for the listeners i think you do you have an instruction or a quest do you not well i would never instruct because that would be you know behaving like the man i would encourage everyone to sign up to our own gang of depressed rebels um and join book club notes so you can let us know what you would give this book out of 10 you can send in your recommendations you also get a free back to front red deer hunting cap so that's exciting that was phony from Tabby that's actually there's no such cap but I would encourage people to get it because it is genuinely brilliant okay so thebookclubhq.com and coming up we have Master and Commander by Patrick O 'Brien To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee Money by Martin Amis Tinker Sailor Soldier Spy by John McCarrey Tinker Tailor Tinker Tailor what?

1:11:00Dominic Sandbrook: you're just babbling no no you said Tinker Tailor I didn't I said Tinker Tailor you said Tinker Tailor I absolutely right listeners can make up their own minds Tessa the Durbovilles by Thomas Hardy and Dune by Frank Herbert God I'm actually not looking forward to with Dune but anyway goodbye everybody bye bye