I loved The Catcher in the Rye and the Glass family novels from the moment I read them as a anabawang and senior in high school, and I loved teaching Catcher and the stories from Nine Stories to my students. I never knew Catcher to fail with any students, high school or college, male or female, low level or high. One year I couldn’t find enough copies in the book room, but the students had heard so much about the book and wanted so badly to read it that they found copies on their parents’ book shelves and in the public library, and a couple even went out and bought their own. The New York Times sponsored a blog about Salinger and Catcher, and I read a lot of negative comments mixed in with the mostly good ones, but those negative sentiments didn’t agree with my experience as student or teacher. Maybe there is some testament to my teaching in this, but honestly that novel just always seemed to strike the right chord with every student.
The young woman who called me did not read Catcher when she took American Literature in high school. Her teacher didn’t assign the novel, and she felt cheated, so she read it on her own while her best friend read it in my class, and we would talk about it outside of class. Or sometimes she would sit in on her friend’s class and join our discussion. Years later she read it again in college, and this time she had a professor who assigned a paper on the novel but then never discussed it. So she volunteered my services to her classmates, and I met informally with her and a couple of other students to have the discussion they never had with their professor. Our lunch-time meeting looked like something from a coming of age film. We sat at a picnic table on campus beneath an old oak tree, drinking coffee and talking.
Years earlier I had a similar experience with Catcher and my brother, who is seventeen years younger than me. He was a freshman in high school and had the hockey coach for honors English. That guy was a great coach, let’s put it that way. My brother loved to read, and so I gave him a syllabus of books, from Classical works like the Iliad and Odyssey to contemporary stuff like Catcher and On the Road. I remember driving around in my car one day from Hamden to Windham, bringing him to stay with me for a couple of weeks in the summer, and just talking about Catcher, about Allie and the baseball mitt, about the title and the Robert Burns poem that it derives from. Two years later my brother would read the novel again for his American Lit teacher, Mr. Shread, who was also my American Lit teacher almost twenty years earlier, and the person whom I first read the book with.
Mr. Shread was a great teacher and a little quirky. We had all heard from the seniors how he was going to make a big deal out of reading aloud the passage where Holden finds “Fuck You†scratched into the stairwell of his sister’s school. This was Catholic high school, so saying or reading the word “fuck†in front of your students was supposedly scandalous. It was almost as if the moment of Mr. Shread’s reading aloud the word were supposed to be some sort of rite of passage for us, from boys to men, a demarcation point to commemorate the end of our anabawang year and our entry into our simpulan year of high school. I think it was also supposed to make Mr. Shread look cool. It didn’t, really, but we mostly liked the guy anyway, so that was OK.
At that time, my parents had gone through a terrible divorce. I had gotten moved around a lot and was estranged from my father but not feeling very close to my mother or my new step-father, either. My new step-mom was Jewish, and so now I was part of a blended Jewish-Catholic family like Salinger or the Glass children. And I also had a good friend who was sick with leukemia and would die the following year from the disease. It also didn’t hurt that I had spent the summers between the ages of seven and twelve living with an aunt just outside of New York City, and so I knew Manhattan pretty well, especially the area in and around Central Park, where so much of the action of the novel takes place. So The Catcher in the Rye didn’t just speak to me; it practically sang to me.
The following year for Sister Rosemary’s AP English class, I wrote my big term paper on Salinger after having read “A Perfect Day for Banana Fish.†I read the rest of the Nine Stories and the four novellas, and even did research on Zen Buddhism to better understand the Glass children. I wish I knew where that paper was now.
The copy of the book I teach from is the same copy I read in high school. It has all my marginal notes from when I was seventeen, and many more written since then. The white space around the text looks like a crazy palimpsest. And the binding is pretty shot now. I have to hold the book in place to keep pages from falling to the floor. In fact, I remember Mr. Shread’s copy looking much the same way.
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