The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [284]
From these nightmarish visions, it may seem a far cry to that novel which enjoyed such cult status among students in the 1950s and 1960s, J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye (1951). The hero Holden Caulfield, in his late teens, is plunged into his other world when, after making a complete mess of his work and human relationships, he is sent home from from yet another smart, East Coast prep school, his fourth expulsion. Not daring to tell his parents what has happened, he heads for New York where he drifts through the city, meeting a succession of strangers, as in his brief embarrassing encounter with a young prostitute, and rather desperately trying to arrange dates with various girls he knows from school holidays. A parallel which emerges between Holden's adventures and the world of Joseph K. is that he never makes real contact with any of the people he meets: the empty-headed girls in a bar; two earnest nuns; the sad little hooker; snobbish Sally Hayes, whom he takes to a Broadway play. Like a psychotic, he is constantly divided between his contempt for almost everyone else in the world as irritating, embarrassing, stupid `phoneys'; and then, as if trying to make up for it, wanting to throw in an extravagant reference to how much he likes them or misses them after all. Beneath his brash, cocky, dismissive persona, Holden becomes increasingly lost and desperate, until the only two people in the world he wants to see are his younger sister Phoebe, who lives with their parents in a smart, high-rise apartment, and Mr Antolini, the only teacher he has ever respected. As he nears the end of his tether, it is a faint evocation of that great archetypal duality, the Wise Old Man and the Anima. Late at night he calls on Antolini, who welcomes him in and, after giving him sage fatherly advice, puts him to bed. But Holden then wakes up to find Antolini stroking his head in an erotic fashion and flees in shocked horror. The next day, he meets young Phoebe, now the only person he loves and trusts in the world, his infantile anima, and after wandering about, they end at a funfair where, in the rain, he watches her going round and round on an old-fashioned carousel:
`I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don't know why but she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going round and round, in her blue coat and all. God, I wish you could've been there.'
It is a chilling final image: the anima, instead of being a central fixed point of light, just revolving in endless neurotic motion. From the brief epilogue, addressed from a psychiatric hospital a few months later, we gather Holden then had a prolonged nervous breakdown. From the moment of his expulsion into the `other world' he had never managed to return to normality. Perhaps, like the novel's reclusive author who, after writing two more books, shut himself away from the world for decades without producing another, he never would.
For a final example in this sequence we look at that curious little story produced by Evelyn Waugh in his middle age, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957). We saw earlier how Waugh was particularly drawn to the Voyage and Return plot. To the outside world, one of the novelist's more obvious characteristics, as someone who had escaped from his original middle-class suburban background onto the fringes of the world of the English upper classes, was the way he hid his personal insecurities behind an armour-plated persona, fabricated out of snobbery and a sentimentalised Roman Catholicism, combined with cantankerous impatience towards anyone who did not fit socially into his very limited world-view. The trouble with the persona is that it is only an outward mask: suppressed behind it, its owner's true personality