flunking+anything+else+except+english+anyway+shivani+patel


 * "'Flunking Everything Else Except English Anyway': Holden Caulfield, Author"**
 * Critic:** A. Robert Lee **Source:** //Critical Essays on Salinger's// The Catcher in the Rye, edited by Joel Salzberg, pp. 185-97. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1990.

[(essay date 1990) //In the following essay, Lee views// The Catcher in the Rye //as Holden Caulfield's quest for an authorial voice, and offers examples of his literary preferences.//]

I
Few self-accounts, whether **autobiography** or novel, display quite so take-it-or-leave-it a bravura as **//The Catcher in the Rye.//** From Holden's opening disparagement of his early childhood as "all that David Copperfield kind of crap"1 through to his last, peremptory "That's all I'm going to tell about" (213), J. D. Salinger has his narrator sound the very model of skepticism about whether indeed we do "really want to hear about it" (1). Yet given the book's spectacular popularity since its publication in 1951, clearly only the most obdurate of readers have proved resistant to "hearing about it" and to Holden's different virtuoso flights of scorn or dismay or selective approval. For however we have come to think of Holden Caulfield--as one of the classic isolates of modern times, as the savvy but endlessly vulnerable witness to crassness and bad faith, as postwar American adolescence itself even--still another figure presses out deep from within. At virtually every turn Holden gives notice of his endemic and unremitting will to a style of his own, to writerliness, to showing himself, knowingly or not, as nothing less than the very author in waiting of **//The Catcher in the Rye.//**2 In part, this identity inevitably has something to do with Salinger's originality in conceiving as his narrator the seventeen-year-old who hovers dauntingly at "six foot two and a half," whose hair has turned its celebrated and premature gray on the right side of his head, and who writes of Pencey Prep and his all but Lost Weekend in New York from a West Coast psychiatric ward in the wake of his nervous breakdown. But, to use a key term from the novel, the "composition" Holden puts before us offers anything but the merely offbeat recollections of a put-upon and precocious teenager. This "composition" is the latest in a career that time upon time has seen Holden "composing" other themes, other selves, and other identities. Each, however, has hitherto been of the moment, a spontaneous if never other than highly particular creation conjured into being to meet a required part, or to win or deflect attention, or to fill up the spaces of his loneliness, or, often enough, simply to make good on his sheer creative overdrive. Whatever the occasion, these made-up identities are for the most part extraordinarily affecting and often wickedly funny, a kind of inspired ventriloquy on Holden's part, and at the same time a set of rehearsals, a repertoire, to be called back into play by the eventual author-**autobiographer**. In this connection, too, it does not surprise that nearly all the values and people Holden most prizes possess a humanity marked out by style, by an authenticity not only of the heart and senses, but also of art. Indeed, these people are like Holden himself--the Holden who can be wilful, contrary, often impossible, yet in a manner insistently of his own making and at odds with whatever he deems dull or conformist. Each "phony," "and all," and "crumby" is reiterated as often as needed to install his own special signature as writer or monologist, a signature that would be impossible to think anybody's but his alone. Analogies have been much proposed for **//Catcher//** [**//The Catcher in the Rye//**], particularly Dickens's //David Copperfield,// Twain's //Huckleberry Finn// and Joyce's //Portrait.//3 Each novel, as a life, rite of passage, or journey, offers clear similarities in terms of type and situation. But Salinger's novel belongs still more precisely to the company of those fictional **autobiographies** which show their protagonists discovering their truest being in the call to authorship and in the "self" they see themselves shaping as the words precariously, yet inevitably, take sequence upon the page. Memorable as each is, Copperfield, Huck, and Dedalus tell their stories from positions of retrospect (even Copperfield with his teasing "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life ... these pages must show"). Holden is altogether more extemporaneous, his account more volatile and rapid, or so Salinger persuades us to feel. Holden's essential styling of things--his every transition, dissolve, off-the-cuff commentary, and wisecrack--could hardly fail to implicate us from first to last in the heady business whereby as for the first time and in the mirror of his own "composition" he sees himself whole and clear. In no way can he ever disappear again, even if he does "sort of //miss// everybody I told about" (214). To some extent an experiment like Gertrude Stein's //The **Autobiography** of Alice B. Toklas,// Stein's invention of herself through the persona of her Paris companion and memoirist, bears a resemblance to **//The Catcher in the Rye.//**4 Yet Stein's modus operandi never wholly frees itself of the suspicion of staginess or formula. Two other American first-person classics, Ralph Ellison's //Invisible Man// and //The **Autobiography** of Malcolm X,// however, unlikely as they might at first perhaps be thought, come closer.5 Both, in an overall sense, obviously tell a more consequential story than Holden's, that of the black American odyssey as against the turnings of white bourgeois New York and its satellite outposts in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. But they do so in a manner and with an improvisational daring greatly of a kind. Each depicts a self, in the face of historic denial, discovering itself as it goes along, a self that, as it moves from blank to identity, marginality to center, does so as though exhilarated and even astonished at its own formulation in writing. No one would suggest Holden to be some exact fellow traveller of Ellison's black underground "spook" or the oratorical whirlwind who becomes Malcolm X. But the story he offers in **//The Catcher in the Rye//** delineates a figure who equally, and equally powerfully, draws the energies of self-discovery into his own narrative. This drama of self-inscription, if we can call it so, in and of itself thereby becomes the parallel of all Holden's other doings at Pencey and in Manhattan. Not the least part of it, furthermore, is that whatever Holden's protestations to the contrary, his is a finished **autobiography**, a story posing as a fragment as may be but wholly complete in its beginning, middle, and end. It would do less than justice to who he is, or at least to who and what he has become, and to Salinger behind him, to think otherwise. Holden, then, takes to the writer's life out of several kinds of necessity. Despite the contrariness of his signing-off--"I'm sorry I told so many people about it" (214)--his "composition" represents nothing less than a path to psychological health. He has, so to speak, remade himself. Moreover, the privileges of authorship, in addition, have given him his occasion as for the first time to elicit pattern, order, from what throughout his troubled young life has overwhelmingly been flux and loss. Writing, too, has ended his isolation by giving him access to a community that will read and respond to him. Above all, he has achieved his apotheosis, that of an artist writing from the fullest wellsprings of his being and so "unprostituted"--the jokily risqué term he uses about his Hollywood screenwriter brother, D. B.6 He has made one world into another, one prior self or circle of selves into another. Acknowledging the "author" in Holden thus becomes a critical necessity if we are to get anything like the full measure both of the tale he tells and of himself as teller.
 * //The Catcher in the Rye,//** as often enough noted, does indeed thereby yield a portrait of the artist, but one that, more than other comparable narratives, operates within its own rules. For a start it makes Holden's every authorial tic and habit as much an equal part of the narration as all the supposedly actual events being unfolded. One thinks not only of his use of "phony" and the like but also of the jibes at his own expense: "I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw. It's awful" (16). He automatically assumes that he has the reader's ear: "She's all right. You'd like her" (67), he says, notably, of Phoebe, and in almost the same phrase, of Allie. And in his off-hand way he makes frequent and meanly well-targeted judgments: "Pencey was full of crooks" (4) or "That guy Morrow was about as sensitive as a goddam toilet seat" (55). Holden seems, ostensibly to tell the one story that bears on "this madman stuff" only to reveal himself, fugitively, in the margins as it were, also telling another, that in which he writes himself imaginatively into being. Both stories are told by the ultimately larger self of Holden as author, the Holden who can editorialize gloriously, fire off opinions, imitate screen celebrities or his fellow preppies, and even, as it appears, brazenly flaunt his resentment at all the unlooked-to burdens of writing **autobiography**. But if any one overwhelming clue can be said to indicate his essential vocation, it has to do with his strongest and most symptomatic fear, that of disappearing, be it in crossing Route 202 to see "old Spencer" or Manhattan's Fifth Avenue as he talks to the dead Allie. At the very moment of making that fear articulate, transposing it from life into narrative, it is actually being dissolved and conquered.

II
From start to finish Holden qualifies as a "performing self," in Richard Poirier's phrase, "authorly" to a degree in how he sets up terms and conditions for his story.7 Nowhere does he do so more cannily than in the opening of **//Catcher,//** where his mock brusqueness in saying what he //won't// do--"I'm not going to tell you my whole goddam **autobiography** or anything" (1)--and his equally mock doubts about any readerly good faith we might be assumed to possess--"If you really want to hear about it" (1)--combine not so much to put us off as positively to commandeer our attention. "Where I was born," "my lousy childhood," and "anything pretty personal" about his absentee parents are to be withheld, though not, apparently, the happenings behind this "madman stuff" and his being "pretty run down." How better, it could be asked, to stir curiosity or lay down guidelines as to what is to follow? His every denial and insistence betrays the "authorly" Holden, a narrator about his duties with all the animus of one who can do nothing to stop the storytelling impulses within him. D. B., the brother who "used to be just a regular writer" but who on Holden's estimate is "being a prostitute" in Hollywood, similarly helps to position Holden as author. D. B. has forfeited this "regularity" for the movies, for the Jaguar, and, we learn at the end, for "this English babe" who comes with him to visit Holden. But he once wrote "this terrific book of short stories" (1) whose title piece, "The Secret Goldfish," Holden has taken to because it delineates a body of private feeling strongly held--that of "this little kid that wouldn't let anybody look at his goldfish because he'd bought it with his own money" (2). As narcissistic as the "kid" may be, he has made of the goldfish a thing of his own, an icon or even artwork. D. B. also points ahead to remind us that Holden comes from a family of writers, not only himself as the Hollywood "prostitute" but Allie who wrote poems on his baseball mitt and Phoebe who composes her "Old Hazle Weatherfield" detective stories. All the Caulfield siblings, in fact, are compulsive fabulists, imaginers. A number of selective highlightings, first from the Pencey scenes and then those in New York, will help unravel the rest of the pattern. The interview with "old Spencer" has rightly been admired as a comic tour de force, from the "ratty old bathrobe" worn by Spencer and the Vicks Nose Drops through to "the terrific lecture" about "Life is a game" and the dazzlingly awful nose-picking. As a parody of dead rhetoric and set-piece counseling, the episode works to perfection. But in addition to the comedy, it also serves to open up another round of perspectives on Holden as author. Whatever else Holden has failed, he has "passed English," or, as he says in his note added to the exam answer written for Spencer on the Egyptians, "It is all right if you flunk me though as I am flunking everything else except English anyway" (12). A boy who can wonder where the ducks in Central Park go in the winter or see through received cliché--"Game, my ass. Some game"--might well "pass English." In the first instance he is about the search for some kind of benign spiritual principle and in the second about the quest for a language untrammeled by inertness or mere hand-me-down phrasing. He seeks an "English" that expresses him, his situation, not that of "phony" institutionalism. Little wonder, then, that Holden also shows himself as a virtually insatiable reader. If he can "act out" his contrition for Spencer, assuage the history teacher's need to play the stentorian, he has books in plenty to draw upon. Not only has he been exposed to "all that Beowulf and Lord Randal My Son stuff," but to a literary syllabus as extensive as it is various. //David Copperfield// he brings into play in his first sentence. Clad in his red hunting hat while rooming with Stradlater he reads Isak Dinesen's //Out of Africa//--"I wouldn't mind calling this Isak Dinesen up" (18). Within a trice he adds to the roster Ring Lardner, Somerset Maugham, and Thomas Hardy--"I like that Eustacia Vye" (19). On the train to New York he delivers himself of his thoughts on "those dumb stories in a magazine," obviously no fan of tabloid popular culture. The sex book he has read at Whooton, "lousy" as he thinks it with its view "that a woman's body is like a violin and all" (93), comes pressingly to mind as he waits for his prostitute at the Edmont Hotel. He delivers himself about his views of the Bible--"I like Jesus and all ..." but the Disciples "... were about as much use to Him as a hole in the head" (99). With the nuns Thomas Hardy again comes into his mind: "you can't help wondering what a nun thinks about when she reads about old Eustacia" (110), and //Romeo and Juliet// and //Julius Caesar.// He remembers a discussion of //Oliver Twist// in a film seen with Allie, a novel obviously familiar to him. His meeting with Carl Luce has him invoking Rupert Brooke and Emily Dickinson as, incongruously, a pair of "war" poets, and in turn Hemingway's //A Farewell to Arms// ("a phony book") and Fitzgerald's //The Great Gatsby// ("Old Gatsby, Old sport. That killed me," as his eye for style causes him to remark). For good measure, given the novel's title, he throws in Robert Burns, the writer from whose ditty he has conjured up his fantasy of himself being a catcher in the rye. All of these allusions he contrives to wear lightly, passing stopovers as might be in the passage of his own gathering imagination. In fact, they speak to him from within the community he will shortly join, that of authors and artists who have also and at every risk made over the world on their own creative terms. A key moment in the process manifests itself in "the big favor" solicited of him by Stradlater, namely a "composition" that can be about anything "just as long as it's descriptive as hell." More than a little revealingly, Stradlater instructs him not "to stick all the commas and stuff in the right place." In part, this advice is to cover up Holden's authorship, but as Holden himself realizes only too well, it typifies how neither Stradlater nor much of the rest of Pencey has the faintest appreciation of what "English" means. The date with Jane Gallagher, who for Holden is the girl individualized by keeping her kings at the back at checkers but for Stradlater is no more than another sexual scalp, stirs in him the memory of Allie, live or dead his one dependable imaginative ally alongside Phoebe. Unsurprisingly he chooses to write about the mitt, the poems in green ink "written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere" (38). Holden writes, too, in his "pajamas and bathrobe and my old hunting hat" (37), as if he were kitted out for the job like some updated Victorian man of letters. Everything he pours into his "description," predictably, is wasted on Stradlater, flush as the athlete is with sexual conquest and with concerns a universe away from whatever Holden may have encoded about Allie's death--his traumatized night in the garage and the near self-mutilation of putting his writing hand through "all the goddam windows." "I sort of like writing" (39), he confides, almost shyly, as though dimly aware that we have caught him about his most intimate and essential business. Authorship, whether he likes it or not, pursues him. Literal authorship, however, is one thing. Holden also revels in "authoring" himself in other ways--as the student penitent for Spencer, as the scholar-prince and then canasta player for an uncomprehending Ackley, as the "goddam Governor's son" who prefers tap-dancing to government and then the no-holds-barred pugilist for Stradlater, and as "Rudolf Schmidt," the name he borrows from the dorm janitor to discuss Ernest Morrow with Mrs. Morrow when they part share a compartment on the train journey between Trenton and Newark. This latter impersonation again helps establish Holden's drive to invention, his relentless and high-speed fabulation. His version of Morrow as "adaptable," "one of the most popular boys at Pencey," "original," and "shy and modest," not only plays to a fond mother's heart, but also shows Holden on a great improvisational jag, one invention barely put forward before another follows suit. His lie, too, about leaving Pencey early on account of needing an operation for a "tumor on the brain" smacks of a matching versatility of invention, alibi-ing as an art--as in turn does his excuse for not visiting the Morrows in Gloucester, Massachusetts, on account of a promise to see his grandmother in South America. He even starts reading the timetable to stop inventing or lying--"Once I get started, I can go on for hours if I feel like it. No kidding. //Hours//" (58). He cannot resist, too, trying on the role of "club car" roué, a man who knows his cocktails and has the chutzepah to ask Mrs. Morrow to join him. This is wit, style, ventriloquy, all to symptomatic good purpose. More "authoring," literary and otherwise, however, lies directly ahead as Holden alights at Penn Station and embarks upon his weekend tryst with New York.

III
"I'm traveling incognito" (60) Holden tells the cab driver who takes him to the Edmont Hotel and who has to field the questions about where the ducks go when the Central Park lagoon freezes over in winter.8 Much as Holden gamely affects to apologize for the B-movie implications of the phrase--"When I'm with somebody that's corny, I always act corny too" (60)--it again emphasizes his uninhibited and ever-burgeoning passion for invention. Doubtless the "loneliness" that tears at him always, together with his fear of disappearance and sheer nervous fidget, propel him more and more into these impersonations. Yet whatever their cause, they mark him as a peerless and habitual fantasist. And are they not, also, instance for instance, the contrivances of a self that as yet is truly "incognito," that of Holden as yet again the author? Each con-man routine and verbal sleight-of-hand virtually bespeaks authorship, an inventing self as well as invented selves. Is there not, even, a hint of the embryonic author in Holden's subsequent query to the cabbie about which band might be playing at the Taft or New Yorker and about joining him for a cocktail--"On me. I'm loaded"? For this is Holden as returnee Manhattanite, back for a good time, a glad-hander, knowing in the city's ways and willing to say the hell with expense. That he is also under-age to be drinking merely points up the masquerade. But who Holden truly is, here as elsewhere, indeed does lie "incognito." Yet even //his// role-playing risks eclipse when he witnesses the routines being acted out at the Edmont. One window reveals the transvestite recomposing himself as a woman and then "looking at himself in the mirror." Holden does not fail to note that he is "all alone too." A second window exposes him to the "hysterics" of the couple squirting water in each other's mouth, with a possible third party just out of view. "Lousy with perverts" is Holden's reaction, much as he concedes that this "kind of junk is sort of fascinating to watch" (62). But mere voyeur Holden is not. He wants, indeed needs, to be in the action, the absolute participant observer. To watch this urban cabaret relegates him to consumer not maker. Within a trice he is back to his own efforts, the would-be suitor to Faith Cavendish, burlesque stripper and Eddie Birdsell's "ex." Much as he fails to talk her round--"I should've at least made it for cocktails or something" (66)--it leads him on to the person he knows to have a truly creative center, none other than his fellow writer and infant sister, Phoebe. "Old Phoebe," Holden muses, "You never saw a little kid so pretty and smart in your whole life" (67). But no sooner has he made an inventory of all that makes Phoebe an object of passionate fondness for him--the straight A's, the short red hair stuck behind her ears, her "roller-skate skinny" body, her ability to speak Robert Donat's lines in //The 39 Steps// and stick up a finger with part of the middle joint missing--than he also adds a detail as close as could be to his own impulses. Alongside D. B. and Allie, "a wizard," Phoebe is a writer. Holden gives the information as follows: Something else she does, she writes books all the time. Only, she doesn't finish them. They're all about this kid named Hazel Weatherfield--only old Phoebe spells it "Hazle." Old Hazle Weatherfield is a girl detective. She's supposed to be an orphan, but her old man keeps showing up. Her old man's always a "tall attractive gentleman about 20 years of age." That kills me. Old Phoebe. I swear to God you'd like her. ... She's ten now, and not such a tiny kid any more, but she still kills everybody--everybody with any sense, anyway. (68)

Holden recognizes in Phoebe not just a sister but a figure whose creative quirks amount to perfection. She cannot finish her stories. She gets her proportion all out of joint (the twenty-year-old father). The name "Hazle" is either an inspired abbreviation or a misspelling, not to say an ironic echo of Faith Cavendish's "Cawffle" for Caulfield. And she makes her detective an orphan with a parent. The logic here, of course, is that of a child's imagination, the logic of splendid fantasy more than hard fact or chronology. Holden recognizes in it the same authenticity as in D. B.'s "The Secret Goldfish" or Allie's poems in green ink, a Caulfield energy of imagination by which he, too, is wholly possessed. Nonetheless, his own "compositions" have still supposedly to take written shape, even though they are in fact being realized even as he describes Phoebe and everybody else. His other "authoring" goes on, however, as unstoppable and fertile as ever. He tells "the three witches," Laverne, Old Marty, and Bernice, with whom he drinks and dances in the Lavender Room, that his name is "Jim Steele," that if not Peter Lorre then he has seen Gary Cooper "on the other side of the floor," and that "sometime" he will look them up in Seattle. But when, once more rebuffed, he again calls to mind Jane Gallagher, it is as another literary ally, another fellow traveler in the ways of the imagination. She may well lose eight golf balls, be "muckle-mouthed," keep her kings at the back, be "terrific to hold hands with," and get hold of his neck at the movies, but she also has a redeeming affinity with "composition" and the written word. Once again Holden alights on aspects of someone else that mirror his own writerly alter ego: "She was always reading, and she read very good books. She read a lot of poetry and all. She was the only one, outside my family, that I ever showed Allie's baseball mitt to, with all the poems written on it. She'd never met Allie or anything, because that was her first summer in Maine--but I told her quite a lot about him. She was interested in that kind of stuff" (77). Jane belongs in a companionship of style, and Holden responds accordingly. Like D. B. before the "prostitution," Allie, and Phoebe, she recognizes and opens to the things of the imagination. Others, too, will embody this for Holden: the black piano-player at Ernie's--"He's so good he's almost corny" (80); the two nuns (one of whom teaches English); "this colored girl singer" Estelle Fletcher whose record of "Little Shirley Beans" he buys for Phoebe; Miss Aigletinger who took them to the Museum of Natural History; "Old James Castle" who was bold enough to tell Phil Stabile he was conceited, would not take it back, and was driven to jumping to his death at Elkton Hills school (a boy, significantly, with "wrists about as big as pencils"); and Richard Kinsella, who during "Oral Comp" always gets derided for his "digressions" (of which Holden observes, "I mean it's dirty to keep yelling 'Digression!' at him when he's all nice and excited" [184]). Like all of these, Jane appeals to his need for alliances against the dead hand of //un//creativity and "phoniness." His trip to Ernie's, and the Catch-22 conversation en route in which the cab driver Horwitz tries to find the logic of his question about the Central Park ducks--he unwittingly comes close with "If you was a fish, Mother Nature'd take care of //you,// wouldn't she?" (83)--again call into play Holden's skills as literary impresario. "Old Ernie" he quickly marks down as a "phony," a mere exhibitionist rather than legitimate piano-player who is given to "putting all these dumb, show-offy ripples in the high notes, and a lot of other very tricky stuff that gives me a pain in the ass" (84). He hates the clapping, the instant "mad" applause. He even, teasingly, thinks of himself as "a piano player or actor or something" to the effect that "I wouldn't want them to //clap// for me. ... I'd play in the goddam closet" (84). As if from instinct, Holden knows that good music--good writing or good art in general--needs a right, intimate, true response and not mere noise. But such surrounds him, especially when he runs into Lillian Simmons who asks him about D. B. who "went with" her for a while ("In //Hol//lywood!," she gushes, "How //mar//velous! What's he //do//ing?") Lillian he can just about tolerate, but not the "Navy guy" with her. In a last stab of invention he designates Lillian's date "Commander Blop or something." His experiences with "the elevator guy" Maurice and Sunny might be thought a case of art outrunning life. Holden's virginity, his sex-book good manners as he thinks them when the girl gets to the room--"'How do you do,' I said. Suave as hell, boy" (93)--his parlor-game attempt at conversation in the guise once again of "Jim Steele," and his excuse of having had an operation on his "clavichord" hovers between pathos and French farce. When Maurice returns for the rest of the money, he knows just whom he is dealing with, however--"Want your parents to know you spent the night with a whore?" (102). "A dirty moron" Holden can call him, but he can't "act" his way out of getting slugged. What he can, and does, do, typically, is reinvent himself as a movie hero, a bleeding, tough-guy private eye. He acts out in life what he will go on to act out in his writing: About half way to the bathroom, I sort of started pretending I had a bullet in my guts. Old Maurice had plugged me. Now I was on the way to the bathroom to get a good shot of bourbon or something to steady my nerves and help me //really// get into action. I pictured myself coming out of the goddam bathroom, dressed and all, with my automatic in my pocket, and staggering around a little bit. Then I'd walk downstairs, instead of using the elevator. I'd hold on to the bannister and all, with this blood trickling out at the side of my mouth a little at a time. What I'd do, I'd walk down a few floors--holding on to my guts, blood leaking out all over the place--and then I'd ring the elevator bell. As soon as old Maurice opened the doors, he'd see me with the automatic in my hand and he'd start screaming at me, in this very high-pitched, yellow-belly voice, to leave him alone. But I'd plug him anyway. Six shots right through his fat hairy belly. Then I'd throw my automatic down the elevator shaft--after I'd wiped off all the finger prints and all. Then I'd crawl back to my room and call up Jane and have her come over and bandage up my guts. I pictured her holding a cigarette for me to smoke while I was bleeding and all. The goddam movies. They can ruin you. I'm not kidding. (103-4)

As pastiche Chandler or Hammett or Erle Stanley Gardner this would take some beating--film noir from an expert. But Holden is also "scripting" his own part, an author-director writing himself into his own text. The way ahead has once more been richly indicated. It is so, again, in Holden's meeting with the two nuns as he awaits his link-up with "old Sally Hayes." His mind drifts effortlessly across his life present and past, Sally with her flurry of words like "grand" and "swell" and the recollection of Dick Slagle who pretended Holden's suitcases were his own at Elkton Hills (despite Holden's gesture of putting them out of sight under his bed). Slagle has taken refuge in the word "bourgeois," an intended put-down of Holden, but as tired a form of language as Sally's schoolgirlisms. In encountering the nuns, however, Holden again finds himself recharged by their evident genuineness, the one next to him especially with her "pretty nice smile," her warm thank-you for his contribution, her being an English teacher, and perhaps most of all her enthusiasm on hearing "English was my best subject." As much as he cannot resist two "digressions" of his own--on what a nun thinks about the "sexy stuff" in //The Return of the Native// or //Romeo and Juliet// and on his father's one-time Catholicism--he sees in his listeners a decency that all but humbles him. He also upbraids himself for having even to think of money in connection with them and for blowing smoke in their faces. "They were very polite and nice about it" (113), he reports, as unfeignedly charitable about his rudeness as about not bringing "Catholicism" into the conversation. Holden writes of them as of Jane or Phoebe or the hat-check girl, women for whom one of his wilder "performances" would be wholly wrong. Holden's next foray into a literary arena, or at least something close, arises out of his date with Sally Hayes ("the queen of the phonies") to see Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in the Broadway benefit show //I Know My Love.// No sooner does he buy the tickets than his mind takes off on "acting," the whole nature of "performance" itself. He thinks as a veteran of bad or unauthentic "performances"--those of Spencer, Stradlater, Ackley, Buddy Singer from The Lavender Room, Old Ernie, and "white girl" singers of "Little Shirley Beans," among others. The latter, who lack Estelle Fletcher's "very Dixieland and whorehouse" feel, can also be compared with the "terrific whistler" Harris Macklin and the "swell" kid he hears "singing and humming" Burns's lines "If a body catch a body coming through the rye." The child's obvious unphoniness "made me feel better." Such are his touchstones for his dislike of "acting" ("I hate actors") and his irreverent slaps at Laurence Olivier's Hamlet ("too much like a goddam general, instead of a sad, screwed-up type guy"). Holden's own touch of Hamletism also, no doubt, plays into these judgments, his own need to find out how exactly to "act" for himself. The other touchstone he turns to lies in the exhibits in the museum, "unactorly" "glass case" art that does not "move," is "warm," and is free of all the "dog crap and globs of spit and cigar butts from old men" that deface Central Park. "Performance" as seen in the museum--whether the Indians rubbing sticks or the squaw with the bosom weaving a blanket or the Eskimo fishing or the deer and birds--all strike Holden as things that "should stay the way they are," natural and "forever" as indeed exhibits in a natural history museum might be expected to be. His verdict on the Lunts has exactly to do with their unnaturalness. They overact, or rather "didn't act like people and they didn't act like actors"; theirs are performances whose off-centeredness he rightly thinks "hard to explain." Matchingly hard for him to explain to Sally is his own "performance": his hatred of the "dopey movie actor" type he sees at the intermission and of Sally's Ivy League "buddyroo," of conversation about the Lunts as "angels," and even of Sally herself. On he persists, however, through a risingly frenetic inventory of New York, taxicabs, Madison Avenue buses, "phony guys that call the Lunts angels," and his own experience of boys' prep schools. But when he tries to "author" an alternative, Sally and himself as pastoral homesteaders in Massachusetts and Vermont, he finds himself speaking--writing--in the air, cut down by the unimaginativeness of Sally's response. Their exchange ends in disaster ("I swear to God I'm a madman"), but as he takes stock he also thinks that at the time of "writing" his script for Sally and himself "I //meant// it." Holden, once again, has become most alive and most himself in making an imagined world. Nor does Holden find his direction from the two would-be mentors he seeks out, Carl Luce and Mr. Antolini. Both betray him, or at least fail to grasp the essential human and creative purposes behind Holden's turning to them. Luce he has been drawn to because he knows or pretends to know the mysteries of sexual life. He also has "the largest vocabulary of any boy at Whooton" and "intelligence." But Holden suspects him from the outset of being a "flit" himself, a mere "hot shot" parader of his own ego and vanity. As to Antolini, his betrayal cuts even deeper. Yet another English teacher, he has won Holden's admiration for trying to talk D. B. out of going to Hollywood and for being his "best" teacher. But he also has his not-so-hidden purposes in calling Holden "you little ace composition writer," in welcoming him to the Antolini apartment for the night, and for playing the sage with his citations from William Stekel on "brilliant and //creative// men." The game is revealed in his homosexual pass, that "something perverty" which for Holden is not only sexual but also a sell-out of all the "literary" advice he has had served up to him by Antolini. Only in Holden's //own// will to make good on the artist in himself, Salinger invites us to recognize, can lie his salvation. The pointers in that direction are given in abundance. Holden tellingly casts his mind back to D. B.'s conversation with Allie about war writing and about Rupert Brooke, Emily Dickinson, Ring Lardner, and //The Great Gatsby.// Out in the park again looking for ducks he starts "picturing millions of jerks coming to my funeral and all" (154). At his parents' apartment he goes into his "bad leg" routine for the new elevator boy. In Phoebe's room he experiences a near shock of recognition on reading the entries in her notebooks, one stylist's salute to another. She, in her turn, understands the broken record pieces he is carrying for her; the significance of his "I passed English"; the parable of James Castle and Holden's related "catcher" fantasy; and what they are about in dancing the "four numbers" to her radio. The "something very spooky"--his fear of disappearing on Fifth Avenue--serves to indicate the ebb before the storm, his lowest point. Not only must he erase all the "fuck you"s from the walls in order to make a world worthy of each Allie and Phoebe, he also must write himself back into being and into a health to the other side of the "dizziness" and "crazy stuff" that threatens his very existence. "Mad," euphoric, certainly, though he appears in company with Phoebe on the carrousel (that modern incarnation of a medieval art pageant) as it plays "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" in the rain, Holden can in fact combat his fear of disappearance only through art, authorship. What greater apprenticeship, after all, could anyone have served? "That's all I'm going to tell about" (213) may indeed be his parting shot, but it is an "all" of whose variety, drama, or fascination, we have been left in no doubt. Only an author of his vintage, too, could offer the advice "Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody" (214). For in making text of life, "goddam **autobiography**" of experience, he has separated the observer in himself from the participant. He has become, willingly or not, the person he himself has most sought out from the beginning and who in return has most sought him out, none other than Holden Caulfield, author.