J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [116]
After purchasing a jazz record, Little Shirley Beans, for his sister, Phoebe, he meets his old girlfriend, Sally Hayes, for a date. This portion of the novel closely resembles “Slight Rebellion off Madison,” with Sally and Holden going to the theater and having an argument at the Rockefeller Center ice-skating rink. Alone and miserable after the quarrel, Holden attends the Christmas Pageant at Radio City Music Hall and meets his former classmate Carl Luce for drinks at the Wicker Bar. After an argument with Luce, who is portrayed as a pretentious braggart, Holden becomes drunk and again calls Sally, offering to help trim her Christmas tree, as he did in the earlier story.
In the dawning hours of Monday morning, Holden is in a drunken stupor and wanders around Central Park. He goes to the lagoon and numbly drops the Little Shirley Beans record, shattering it. Exhausted and despondent, he collects the broken fragments from the ground and decides to sneak home to see Phoebe, who is perhaps the last glimmer of hope left in his life. Creeping into his family’s apartment, he goes directly into D.B.’s room, where Phoebe is sleeping. With him is the shattered record, a common Salinger symbol of the irretrievability of the past. As he did in “I’m Crazy,” Holden briefly watches Phoebe sleep. When he awakens her, she accepts the pieces of the record and they engage in the most genuine conversation of the novel, the only one that Holden has completely without judgment.
Phoebe is only ten (the same age as Allie when he died), but she soon realizes that Holden has been thrown out of school. She challenges him to “name one thing” that he truly likes. All Holden can think of is Allie. Holden then tells Phoebe his fantasy of being the Catcher in the Rye. It is a dreamlike image in which Holden is the only adult in an overgrown field of rye teeming with little children at play. But the rye, grown well above the children’s heads, hides a treacherous cliff. Holden sees himself as responsible for protecting the children from falling off the cliff.
The Catcher in the Rye is a central image and a necessary one for understanding Holden’s frame of mind, but it is not the major point of the scene. That point occurs when Phoebe reminds Holden that Allie is dead and he has misquoted Burns. Only then does something within Holden begin to tumble into place.
In 1974, The Catcher in the Rye was first published in Israel. When the time came for Salinger to approve the contract with the publishing house, Bar David, he was startled to learn that it planned to change the title to I, New York and All the Rest. In defense of its decision, Bar David maintained that the present title made no sense when translated into Hebrew. Naturally, Salinger refused the change. He explained that, by itself, the term “catcher in the rye” had no more meaning in English than it did in any other language. The words, he reminded them, were a misquotation from Robert Burns, the meaning of which was explained in the book.26 While the significance of Holden’s misquotation was emphasized by Salinger, it is often virtually ignored by readers and academics. By replacing “Gin a body meet a body” with “When a body catch a body,” Holden changes the connotation of the poem. To “catch” children from falling into the perils of adulthood is to intervene by rescuing, preventing, or forbidding. But to “meet” is to support and share, which is a connection. In a sweeping sense, Holden’s entire journey is discovering the mistake that he has made when misquoting Burns. His struggle comes to an end only when he recognizes the difference between catching and meeting. When that recognition occurs, it is an epiphany.
In his final attempt to avoid responsibility, Holden decides to run away to Colorado. His plan evolves into a fantasy of living a life pretending to be a deaf-mute. He reveals this to Phoebe and borrows her savings in order to finance his flight. But Holden has neglected