Page 20 THE VILLADOM TIMES III • February 10, 2010 away to New York City on a voyage of escape and selfdiscovery, checks into a hotel with money that is not his, meets a “wild” youth from Yale, and discovers that he is homosexual. (Cather never uses the word homosexual, but “wild,” from Oscar Wilde, was widespread literary slang for homosexuality at the time she wrote the story.) Paul cannot cope with his self-discovery, and he walks into a locomotive somewhere outside Newark. This story would have been widely studied in the works Salinger knew as a student, but it was not exactly what he needed. Salinger was straight and evidentially somewhat homophobic. He realized that America circa 1950 was not ready for a gay hero. He had to look beyond “Paul’s Case.” Next stop: the mother lode. Salinger had mentioned the name “Holden Caulfield” before 1947, but Holden Caulfield in those days was a name without a face. In 1947, William Holden and Joan Caulfield appeared in a move called “Dear Ruth,” based on a stage play by Norman Krasna. Holden and Caulfield were together again in another movie called “Dear Wife.” In 1950, Holden appeared without Caulfield – Big Crosby’s mistress -- in “Sunset Boulevard,” one of the darkest films ever produced in Hollywood, and for all that a staggering masterpiece. Holden, who starts the film as an unrecognized corpse in a swimming pool while speaking in the narrative, is the unsuccessful Hollywood screenwriter who dreams of redemption by an innocent young girl while he sells himself to an older woman because he needs her money. The original screenplay was written by Billy Wilder, a gender-bender aficionado. Gloria Swanson, former mistress of Joe Kennedy, JFK’s father, plays the senior love interest. She is twice the male lead’s age and has some residual beauty in a scary way, lots of money, and major sanity issues. The screenplay’s coauthor was Charles Brackett, an Anglo-Saxon golf expert. “Sunset Boulevard” was deplored for its moral squalor by New York Times Film Critic Bosley Crowther, a practicing Catholic, but Crowther could not resist the movie’s power, even if he found the central characters disgusting. Salinger appears to have agreed with him. Check out “Sunset Boulevard” and you’ll find everything missing from “Paul’s Case” that made “The Catcher in the Rye” a staggering hit: mockery of Hollywood, mockery of funeral directors, revulsion against the horrors of old age, the offstage character named Rudy, reflexive use of the word phony (Holden Caulfield’s favorite epithet), the quintessential Romantic belief that a virgin can solve all a young man’s Earthly problems, and the protagonist who turns to an older person in a moment of desperation, only to be betrayed by indecent lust leading to an attempted escape. Holden Caulfield escapes from the covertly gay teacher he turns to for help and advice, only to go nuts and wind up in a mental institution. William Holden, having played ball with the much older woman for money, and perhaps out of pity, tries to clean up his act and get back with the younger girl he really loves, even though they are cheating on his best friend, played by pre-“Dragnet” Jack Webb. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield winds up in a rest home, writing his memoirs. William Holden, “Joe Gillis” in the movie – the real name of the die-hard Depression-era gangster Baby Face Nelson was Lester Gillis -- winds up floating face down in a Hollywood Hills swimming pool, shot full of holes just as the real Lester Gillis was…still stubbornly putting his memoirs on tape even though he is long dead. “Sunset Boulevard” was a bit much for the American public. “The Catcher in the Rye” got it just about perfect. “Sunset Boulevard” is hardball and “The Catcher in the Rye” is softball, but they are both playing in the same ballpark. Consciously or subconsciously, Salinger cribbed large parts of “The Catcher in the Rye” from Cather’s 1906 short story and from Wilder’s 1950 movie. Does that make Salinger a bad person? Not really. No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money, as Samuel Johnson would have it. Does it make him any less of an artist? Not really. Jack London obviously cribbed Wolf Larson from the views of Friedrich Nietzsche and the life of Bully Hayes, yet Wolf Larson is a free-standing entity and remains a fascinating character in a very important American novel. Arthur Conan Doyle used Nietzsche in part for the model of Professor Moriarty. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby was George Remus, a millionaire bootlegger who never attended his own parties and was wronged by a fickle woman. Most critics don’t know this because they read other critics, not history. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield knew that the way some teachers and schools handle education is a joke, and he said so – which is why 60 years after Holden Caulfield popped up on the radar, kids still enjoy “The Catcher in the Rye.” Salinger may have tiptoed around the verges of plagiarism when he wrote “The Catcher in the Rye,” but it is still a great and important book and always will be until the schools learn to teach kids what the kids really need to know or want to know. On that basis, “The Catcher in the Rye” will remain a best seller through the century. “The Catcher in the Rye” (1951) by J.D. Salinger is a litmus test for the change of generations in America. When I was a kid in high school, if the teachers caught you reading “The Catcher in the Rye,” they took the book away from you and locked it in a safe in the school office. If you remembered to ask, they gave it back to you at the end of the school year, but it probably would not look good on your college recommendations to have ever owned a copy. Holden Caulfield, Salinger’s protagonist, knew education in America was a joke. The teachers also knew, but because that might have interfered with their paychecks, they did not want the rest of the world to know. Today, “The Catcher in the Rye” is required reading. A friend of my son’s had to get a waiver to avoid reading it for credit because his family was devout and regarded the book as blasphemous. I do not agree that the book is blasphemous, but the schools gave the kid the waiver. Salinger recently died at the age of 91. I was sorry to hear of his passing, because I enjoyed “The Catcher in the Rye” when I was younger. My own children enjoyed it, and many of my tutorial students still enjoy it today. Salinger’s death, sad as it was, set me free, because now I can explain how “The Catcher in the Rye” came to exist. Crassly put, dead men cannot sue for libel, and people who do not like me will assume there were no other motivations for my holding off on this disclosure. There are other motivations. Salinger, though not a bloodthirsty man, was a capable soldier in World War II, landed on Utah Beach, fought in the Hurtgen Forest, and acquitted himself well until he suffered a nervous breakdown, which can happen to anybody with a triple-digit IQ. He was half-Jewish, and his own beliefs appear to have vectored between Christianity and Buddhism, but he hated anti-Semitism, as evinced by his writings. However, he never hated Christianity, or even those Germans who were not Nazi murderers. The character of Upham in “Saving Private Ryan” is obviously an allusion to Salinger. Both Upham and Salinger were fluent in French and German, and both toted a typewriter wherever they went. Salinger’s lifestyle may have included some foibles, but he was never a vicious man. My only motivation for attacking him would have been seen as sheer vindictive envy of a man who was able to write one single book that enabled him to retire for the rest of his life and write whatever he wanted to. That is every writer’s dream. Envy is a huge factor among writers, and I try to avoid it for the good of my soul. I wrote Salinger a letter some years ago telling him that I know his secret, but would not reveal it while he was alive. He never replied, but I assume he got the letter. I kept my word. Here is the truth. Salinger’s first inspiration for “The Catcher in the Rye” was almost certainly a 1906 short story by Willa Cather called “Paul’s Case.” Paul, the troubled Pittsburgh schoolboy in the story written in the first decade of the 20th century, is a boy who does not fit in. His family extols success in corporate business. However, he is fascinated by art and culture. He dotes on an opera singer twice his age. He runs How Salinger caught the catcher Dadey’s discussion Allendale’s Hillside School recently hosted a visit by children’s author Debbie Dadey through a grant from the Allendale Federation for Educational Excellence. Dadey has written over 145 books including the Bailey School Kids, Key Holders, and Barkley’s School for Dogs series. All students attended assemblies where Dadey discussed her books and how she gets the ideas for her stories. The author also read from one of her books. The children were given the opportunity to ask questions and participate in the discussions.