Here's to YOU, Mr. Salinger (Part Two)

The synthesis of 'Catcher', its spiritual parentage, predates even Fitzgerald. Holden Caulfield's misadventure through New York on his way home from Pencey Prep parallels the odyssey of Stephen Dedalus as he walks the jaded, idealistic artist through the streets of Dublin in James Joyce's Ulysses.

Stephen, much like Holden also finds himself estranged from his parents, especially his father, a well to do gentleman. He has trouble keeping a "real" job, much the same way Holden has trouble staying in school.

Stephen converses, or is coerced into social interaction with schoolmasters and newspaper editors, authoritative figures with whom he is deeply resentful and whose shallow worldview disgusts him. He shares, at least at the start of his journey, a living space with a boisterous ignorant slob. Over the course of a day Stephen too finds himself stumbling drunk into the street, in an embarrassing failed attempt at soliciting a prostitute, and in literal tears later on.

Stephen has Leopold Bloom, (technically the titular 'Ulysses' of Joyce's epic) an older, more experienced and perhaps more practical man who has also dealt with the low ways of the world to catch him when he is at his lowest emotional ebb.

Though their encounter ends a bit abruptly, Holden in turn has Mr. Antolini, a teacher, whom he turns to for a much needed ear, and sound wisdom.

When the 16 year old Holden states that he'd like to use all of his 'dough' and move someplace far away to get away from the ignorance of people and their inane conversations, that he may for once be given the chance to be true to himself and see himself in that strange context he finds so personally fitting, it echoes, though maybe less eloquently, Stephen Dedalus's famous proclamation at the end of Joyce's 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man':

"I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning."

Dedalus is a paragon of artistic integrity then? Lauded as the young man who refuses to accept his birthright, and instead makes his own way according to his own set of values.

And Holden is just a whiny, spoiled brat

...

Flashing forward this time, about sixty years...

Jay McInerney's 1984 novel "Bright Lights, Big City" follows an unnamed character (a WRITER, go figure, who yearns to see his work grace the pages of the NEW YORKER, for whom he is employed as a stressed out fact-checker) seeking escape in the vapid excess of New York's 1980's party scene. He, like Holden Caulfield, possesses a cynical worldview and partial detachment from reality, all the right ingredients for an unreliable narrative. The young man's wife has left him, a reality he is unable to cope with. His nocturnal exodus leads him around Manhattan to all the places she would go, believing she will return to him. As he suffers severe burn-out, the young man then struggles to liberate himself from this hedonistic undercurrent before he suffocates.

Tack on about 5-10 years, subtract his youthful naivety and squeamishness, and lose him in gaudy nightclubs, the cocaine mist of upper west-side bathrooms, larger quantities of booze, sex and other such inherent yuppie vices, and McInerney's novel very well could be a continuation for Holden.

What these characters, and in the end Salinger himself have in common is that they are all "new money", each one marking the stages of the birth and evolution of the middle and upper-middle class (of which is slowly disappearing), and no place better is it played than the avenues and neighborhoods of America's foremost metropolitan epicenter. They are each distrustful of something; institutions that set dogmatic artistic standards, and paper-thin societal norms. Though part of an (ever-changing) infrastructure and lifestyle that kept them financially safe, secure They are sickened by artifice, and have felt the effects of materialism and egotism on their life and work. They all possess a chronic allergy to bullshit, and to have stayed where they were risked a fatal case of anaphylactic shock.

An effect JD Salinger knew was just life in the big city.