Notable Salinger Quotes

The Catcher in the Rye:

Holden Caulfield...

 “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”

“Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”

“I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot. ”
“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.”

“I am always saying "Glad to've met you" to somebody I'm not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.”

“That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. They really can.”

“I like it when somebody gets excited about something. It's nice.”

“Mothers are all slightly insane.”

“It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.”

“When you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.”

“And I have one of those very loud, stupid laughs. I mean if I ever sat behind myself in a movie or something, I'd probably lean over and tell myself to please shut up.”



Mr. Antolini...
“Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.”

“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”

“Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.”

“I don't exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it.”

“People are always ruining things for you.”

 “when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "Fuck you" right under your nose.”

“I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy.”

“I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the opera. It's terrible.”

“All morons hate it when you call them a moron.”

“If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late?”

“People never notice anything.”

“People always clap for the wrong reasons.”

 “The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and they're pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody's be different. The only thing that would be different would be you. Not that you'd be so much older or anything. It wouldn't be that, exactly. You'd just be different, that's all. You'd have an overcoat this time. Or the kid that was your partner in line the last time had got scarlet fever and you'd have a new partner. Or you'd have a substitute taking the class, instead of Miss Aigletinger. Or you'd heard your mother and father having a terrific fight in the bathroom. Or you'd just passed by one of those puddles in the street with gasoline rainbows in them. I mean you'd be different in some way—I can't explain what I mean. And even if I could, I'm not sure I'd feel like it.”



Franny and Zooey:
“I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.”

“I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.”

“I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting.”

“And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.”

“An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.”



Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

“I'm a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.”

The Significance of the Bare-breasted Squaw

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/books/review/do-we-read-differently-at-different-ages.html?_r=0

In the above-referenced October 14, 2014, article in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, the article's author Daniel Mendelshon asserts that Holden is resisting adulthood, citing as evidence Holden's comment about a diorama exhibit with a bare-breasted squaw. Holden: “The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. . . . You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, . . . and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.”

Mendelshon says, "The all-too-evident regret in that last sentence is striking — one of the novel’s many markers of Holden’s problem, which is a refusal to grow up."

The above illustrates a common interpretation of Holden that I find hard to support in the actual text. Practically everyone, Youtube star John Green included, parses out this passage about "that squaw with the naked bosom" and Holden's liberal use of the word "phony" as concrete evidence Holden doesn't want to grow up, while overlooking a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

Holden smokes, drinks, lies about his age, critiques theater performances, frequents museums, hires a prostitute, repeatedly seeks out adult conversation with peer-level engagement, acts protectively toward children. How many examples are needed to prove Holden is experimenting with adulthood? Criticizing adults as phony means he's evaluating adult behavior, not resisting. This is engagement, not avoidance.

It shouldn't escape notice that Holden was eagerly embracing the candy of adulthood--sex, smoking, booze, nightclub music, dancing, flirting, dating, critiquing literature and the dramatic arts--while agonizing over the spinach of social hypocrisy and rationalization.

So, how DO we interpret Holden's comment about the bare-breasted Native American?

The key is in that last sentence, underlined above: "The only thing that would be different would be you." Holden is telling us he is aware that he is changing. This level of intuitive self-reflection is adult thinking. It also shows maturity to appreciate that some things don't change and never should, because they are part of our cultural identity.

Nostalgic awareness is mature thinking. Mature people want to protect and preserve cultural icons.

Think of the loss and disorientation after the Twin Towers were destroyed. Icons like the Statue of Liberty are signposts reminding us of who and where we are. Holden was feeling lost. In his agitated state he desperately needed that bare-breasted squaw to be right where she had always been. That's all he was getting at with his comment. Give the kid a break.

Holden pondered and wrote down the Wilhelm Stekel quote Mr. Antollini gave him: "The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one." This is another sign he was putting a lot of serious thought into growing up.

To wax psychological, there are teenagers and even some adults, who resist growing up because their parents don't want to let go. They've been infantalized, encouraging dependency. Holden shows no evidence of having been infantalized. Quite the contrary, ending a kid to a military-style prep school could be evidence that Holden was too independent and possibly hard to control.

The evidence on the page shows that Holden was not resisting adulthood, he was aggressively embracing it.

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Batman, PTSD and Holden Caulfield

7/16/2012:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2012/07/15/156779114/the-id-the-ego-and-the-superhero-what-makes-batman-tick#

Bruce and Holden both suffer obvious symptoms of PTST. Forgetting for the moment that both are fictional characters, what  should be glaringly obvious to a mental health professional such as Robin Rosenberg (see above link), author of What's the Matter With Batman?, is that the childhood trauma Bruce Wayne suffered witnessing his parents' murders, resulted in adult rage, directed in his case against criminals. I disagree with Rosenberg's conclusion: "Rosenberg argues that there's nothing really worng with Batman--or, rather, with the man inside the suit. Her verdict? 'Bruce Wayne is a really clever man who has both high intelligence and high EQ, emotional quotient.'"

What do shrinks know, anyway?

Holden Caulfield had the makings of a future Batman for a similar reason--he witnessed the death of both is brother, Aliee, and a schoolmate, James Castle, who committed suicide wearing the sweater Holden loaned him. Holden's neurotic reaction to these traumatic deathes was a compelling urge to protect innocent children from harm, expressed in his fantasy of catching them before they could fall over a cliff. The book ends before we can find out what kind of an adult he turns into, but the urge to protect is well established in his fantasy.

What Rosenberg fails to confront is the basic and well proven fact that many of our leaders and superstars are merely overcompensating for some childhood deprivation or trauma. Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier in World War II, dropped out of school in the fifth grade to support the family after his father abandoned them. After James Dean's mother died, his father left him for is grandparents to raise and had little to do with him. Tolstoy and William Saroyan were orphans. Hitler, Sadam Husein and Stalin were beaten as children. Ted Turner's been overcompensating for bipolar disorder all his life. The list goes on. Bruce Wayne and Holden are no different from these examples.

What Rosenberg left unanswered is why for some people a rough childhood leads to a life of crime while others use it as a springboard for success. Answer that one and you've got something to write about.

Rosenberg almost gets there, but not quite: "'In essence,' Rosenberg says, 'superheroes are gifted people, so we can probably figure out a lot about them based on what we know from the science of giftedness.'

Perhaps the problem, she suggests, "doesn't lie in the gifted Bruce Wayne, but in the people who assume something has to be wrong with him in the first place. Perhaps we're just not accustomed to his kind of self-sacrifice. 'People who are truly selfless,' she says, 'who have given so much of themselves, are confusing to most of us. And I think some of us, in cynical moments, say, 'There must be something the matter with someone who would do that.'"

I don't think it's that complicated. I think superstars are just overcompensating.



7/20/12: Oddly enough, there's an example in the news just this morning about a shooting by a disturbed you young man, James Holmes, in Colorado at a screening of Batman.

Perhaps if English teachers taught CATCHER from a mental health angle, there would be fewer instances of this:

http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/20/12850048-mass-chaos-as-12-s...

Teaching The Catcher in the Rye

My condolences to the families, friends and acquaintances of children lost in the Sandy Hook, Connecticut, and other school shootings.

Do people think of Holden Caulfield when there's a school shooting? My mind automatically goes to that final scene, with Phoebe going round and round on the carousel and Holden "damn near bawling."

Each one of those kids killed in Connecticut was a delicate, vulnerable human being. As were the adults. In The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger was saying that we should be aware and protective not just of children but of all mankind. He finished the book after returning from war: Utah Beach at Normandy, The Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of a concentration camp and working in military intelligence, where he interrogated battle-scarred and wounded enemy soldiers. He'd been hospitalized from "battle fatigue," militaryspeak of the period for a nervous collapse.batman Bruce Wayne childhood trauma holden caulfied ptsd Robin Rosenberg superhero The Catcher in the Rye

Every year, a few teachers and students grumble that The Catcher in the Rye is outdated and irrelevant, but for most the book will remain forever a warning that we need to be vigilant not just our children from school shootings, but all of mankind, from danger of every source. We need to look out for each other. We're in this together.

We would have fewer cases of teenagers going postal if CATCHER were used to teach about mental illness. Like John Voss in EMPIRE FALLS, and John Bender in the cult film, BREAKFAST CLUB, Holden Caulfield  shines a golden light on the teenager in crisis.

Try and view CATCHER as less about teenage coming-of-age angst and more about a kid struggling against the downward spiral of a mental breakdown. Without professional help Holden was doomed to submerge and did, ending up in a "rest home."

Holden was barely "holdin' on."

Teenage angst is a gross oversimplification of Holden Caufield's erratic behavior. It us Salinger's masterfully rendered array of extreme symptoms that is largely responsible for the success of the book. But it's too complicated or too sensitive for most English teachers to talk about mental illness; so they focus on the simple and obvious.


As an undergraduate in the '60s I could barely get through CATCHER. I didn't care about some crude spoiled preppy kid who couldn't get his act together. In a word, I was clueless. Unguided, a lot of people will react to the book in this way. That's what a teacher is for, to shine a little light now and then.

Holden is a fictional character, but the book is autobiographical, and a careful reading provides valuable insight into the human condition because of it.

Clues into the psyche of J.D. Salinger can be found in the film FINDING FORESTER, whose reclusive main character, played by Sean Connery, is based on Salinger. In a 1953 interview with a high-school newspaper, Salinger said that the novel was "sort of" autobiographical: "My boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the book ...it was a great relief telling people about it."

In rereading the book last fall it appeared to me that Holden was suffering from PTSD stemming from the death of his brother and from witnessing the suicide of a schoolmate who bailed out of a dorm window wearing the sweater Holden had loaned him. I researched and listed the symptoms: depression, poor concentration, attention deficit, crying, uncontrollable rage, lack of motivation, self-isolation, sleeplessness, etc.

(I'm intimately familiar with these symptoms because my own PTSD diagnosis stemming from childhood trauma.I get Holden's struggle. I live with that same feeling that I need to save kids from danger. I had to watch boys get horrific beatings in the orphanage where I spent the last nine years of my childhood. It's this compulsion to protect children that drives my own writing.)

Salinger, when writing CATCHER wouldn't have had a clue about PTSD, as it wasn't even in the diagnostic manual (DSM) for psychologists until decades later. He was just writing what he felt, blasting his feelings onto paper and letting the chips fall.

Still, the story is pretty advanced for the average reader under twenty years of age. In high school, a teacher would need to do a good bit of student preparation. There's too much going on with too little background. For example, the book is sparse in setting description. Someone who hasn't experienced an urban living environment or hasn't lived in a dormitory will have trouble visualizing most of the scenes.

By addressing the mental health aspects of The Catcher in the Rye, teachers have a phenomenal opportunity to reach kids who are in crisis or who know of someone who is.

Mr. Spencer, Holden's Crumby Teacher

We've all had them--the teacher whose class you hated to attend: who talks without saying anything or plays favorites or humiliates or any number of abuses of this exalted role in front of the class.

In The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger burns Mr. Spencer into our memory with one of my favorite quotes. Holden's been summoned by Spencer, his history teacher, to his apartment after Spencer learned Holden was being expelled for poor academic performance. Spencer reads to Holden from one of his exams.:

"Dear Mr. Spencer. That is all I know about the Egyptians. I can’t seem to get very interested in them although your lectures are very interesting. It is all right with me if you flunk me though as I am flunking everything else except English anyway. Respectfully yours, Holden Caulfield."

   He put my goddam paper down then and looked at me like he’d just beaten hell out of me in ping-pong or something. I don’t think I’ll ever forgive him for reading me that crap out loud. I wouldn’t’ve read it out loud to him if he’d written it—I really wouldn’t. In the first place, I’d only written that damn note so that he wouldn’t feel too bad about flunking me.

  “Do you blame me for flunking you, boy?” he said.

  “No, sir! I certainly don’t,’  I said. I wished to hell he’d stop calling me “boy” all the time. 

...

  "What would you have done in my place?" he said. "Tell the truth, boy."

   Well, you could see he really felt pretty lousy about flunking me. So I shot the bull for a while. I told him I was a real moron, and all that stuff. I told him how I would've done exactly the same thing if I'd been in his place, and how most people didn't appreciate how tough it is being a teacher. That kind of stuff. The old bull.

   The funny thing is, though, I was sort of thinking of something else while I shot the bull. I live in New York, and I was thinking about the lagoon in Central Park, down near Central Park Slouth. I was wondering if it would be frozen over when I got home, and if it was, where did the ducks go. I was wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over. I wondererd if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something. Or if they just flew away.

Holden has zoned out. Spencer is clueless about the boy's predicament, the crises he's going through. And all the teacher can think about is covering his ass and soothing his guilt at Holden's expense. He's kicking the boy while he's down instead of trying to understand. Some would call it tough love. I call it stupidity and incompetence.

Maynard vs Salinger: Another Side to the Story

The recent PBS documentary seems to criticize J.D. Salinger for preferring the company of young women. 

These women were of age or were chaperoned, and eagerly sought his companionship. In the documentary Joyce Maynard expressed that she felt she was exploited by Salinger. Her mother even encouraged the relationship, sewing her a "sexy short dress" (her words) to wear to their first meeting. Maynard wrote a kiss-and-tell betrayal memoir and auctioned Salinger's love letters. The evidence suggests she was a highly ambitious, if not vindictive, young writer who expected to profit from a relationship with a well-known older writer. Maynard continues to benefit from her former relationship with Salinger by granting interviews on the topic to promote her writing. You can't Google "Salinger" without her name scrolling to page one.

Maynard portrayed Salinger as a despicable man who preyed on young girls. Her allegations played on public sympathies and cast a shadow over a highly respected writer's reputation. Salinger's silence can be seen not as gentlemanly conduct but a sign of guilt. The shadow has grown over the years as Maynard's repeated version of their relationship went unrebutted by Salinger himself, though not unchallenged by a few third parties. There is always more than one side to a story.

Just as there can be despicable men, there can also be misguided young women who prey on insecure older men and play the victim to avoid scrutiny. Such crimes don't leave many tracks, so the evidence is often circumstantial. You have to do some digging and connect the dots. (More on this below.)

History has shown that the title of Victim doesn't wear well with young women like Monica Lewinsky and Joyce Maynard who of their own volition court relationships with famous older men and cry "foul" when things don't go their way. Joyce received many letters from admiring male fans when her face appeared on that magazine cover; yet it was Salinger she chose to pursue. Who exploited whom?

That Maynard and Lewinsky may have been swept away starry-eyed or encouraged by their mothers may help explain, but not excuse, their behavior. They were past the age of consent and no one twisted their arms.People who at eighteen years of age are adult enough to fight in wars, purchase alcohol and vote, should be  adult  enough to take the consequences of poor relationship choices  without the "poor me" pose.

An eighteen-year-old boy in similar circumstances with a fifty-five year-old Cher Bono would be laughed out of town if he complained, and girls mature more rapidly than boys. Why is Maynard begging for and getting so much sympathy? Welder's goggles are needed against the glare of that double standard. Another glaring example is The Summer of 42, a '70s feature film and novella about a fifteen-year-old boy seduced by a beautiful young war widow played by Jennifer O'Neill. The novel was a best-seller and the film a "blockbuster" success. Harold and Maude is another highly popular mid-'70s film with an older woman opposite a teenage boy. The lack of outrage toward older women having sex with underage boys reflects a societal bias toward young women that Maynard is exploiting.

She talks about an imbalance of power, pointing to their chronological (emotional maturity is addressed below) age difference. Nothing prevented her or her mother from doing that arithmetic when she was eighteen. Maynard put on her sexy dress and made a beeline for Salinger's bed having weighed their age difference against some potential gain from a relationship with a handsome, successful, famous man.

Over the strident objections of her father, eighteen-year-old Oona O'Neill--Salinger's earlier love--married millionaire moviemaker Charlie Chaplin, a man thirty-six years her senior. Despite the odds, it was a marriage that worked. The risks paid off on both sides. Where is the outrage over that imbalanced union?

Maynard wants us to believe that she wrote her tell-all and auctioned Salinger's love letters to pay for her kid's college, and revenge had nothing to do with it. She didn't keep a sex-stained dress; she kept the intimate feelings he poured onto paper on her behalf, let them age like a fine merlot, then sold them to the highest bidder. Whatever you choose to believe, she cashed in on a bet she made when she was eighteen. Some people will respect her for that. Others will not.

Maynard said Salinger summarily dismissed her because she wanted children and he did not. Other sources say she had given out his phone number to agents and editors while marketing her work. Later--as did Martha Gellhorn and James Michener--Maynard adopted children and then handed them off to someone else to raise. There are elements here of half-truth, impulsiveness and ambition. Self-promotion is a messy process and can be embarrassingly self-revealing.

Despite his privileged origins, J.D. Salinger earned his respect the hard way, with talent and hard work and by risking his life with honorable military combat in some of the most difficult battles Americans ever fought. He sidestepped a wartime draft deferment to get into the Army and courageously volunteered to return and hunt Nazis after recovering from a nervous collapse. The blood, sweat and terror of his honorable service surges through his writing like steroids. I wonder if Maynard considered Salinger's record versus hers when she wrote her tell-all.

If anyone in this paring is due sympathy it is Jerry Salinger. Emotional maturity matters in a relationship, and there is ample evidence that he was fragile. He was socially withdrawn. He was born with one testicle, a deformity that made him extremely self-conscious and insecure in intimate settings. An inexperienced woman would be less likely to discover his freakishness and ruin the moment by laughing, or screaming. Salinger spent months in a mental ward recovering from battle fatigue. Could Maynard have sensed his fragility and sought to exploit it? She certainly knew there was no risk of him going public with his embarrassing deformity to defend his predilection toward young women.

On the other hand, where was Maynard on the scale of emotional maturity? She could have been emotionally much younger than her chronological age. Was it then a case of child-on-child mutual exploitation? It's an unanswerable question that must be considered and demands that we not judge too harshly either party.

Some men have a certain gullibility with women. Was not Salinger's demonstrated when Oona married Chaplin without so much as phone call or a "Dear John" letter to the man in uniform she had professed to love? And again later, when Salinger was a Nazi hunter in Army Intelligence and was fooled into marrying a Nazi? Insecure and devious women are drawn to powerful men they sense to be vulnerable, a profile Salinger fits.

Maybe the clincher in this lopsided romantic mystery lies between the covers of The Catcher in the Rye. Maynard wants us to see Salinger as Stradlater, Holden's sexually aggressive roommate. But as we all know, Holden, heroically fought Stradlater to protect Jane. "What a technique that guy [Stradlater] had. ...I damn near puked listening to him. His date kept saying, 'No--please. Please, don't. Please.' But old Stradlater kept snowing her in his Abraham Lincoln, sincere voice, and finally there'd be this silence in the back of the car." Does Holden, J.D.'s doppelganger, sound like a predator or a protector? There are a dozen similar instances in which Salinger, through Holden, displays a fundamentally compassionate nature incongruent with someone prone toward child exploitation.

Maynard, by contrast, has clearly demonstrated exploitation--by giving out Salinger's telephone number, by writing a tell-all memoir and auctioning love letters, by granting interviews and writing articles about their relationship to gain publicity and by playing on public sympathies toward young women to justify her exploitation of a socially withdrawn aging writer. However she tries to camouflage it, Maynard's behavior is like something from the pages of Seventeen, a magazine that to this day features revenge as a tonic for the fragile egos of jilted teenage girls.

Maynard accuses Salinger of being "seductive with words and ideas" yet her own words betray her own intent to manipulate and play to readers' sympathies. In her New York Times Sunday Magazine article, September, 2013, "Was Salinger Too Pure for This World?" she writes:  "...how can a woman say she is fully in charge of her body and her destiny, and then call herself a victim when, having given a man her heart of her own volition, he crushes it?" [emphasis added] So, if a girl ends a relationship she's just moving on, but if a guy does it it's "crushing" a "poor girl's heart." Maynard's gender bias and pandering for sympathy ripples throughout her article.  She accuses, interprets and judges, lulling the unwary reader into nodding in agreement.

Compare Joyce Maynard with the tragic case of Natalie Wood, a true example of childhood exploitation. At age sixteen while filming Rebel Without a Cause, she carried on  concurrent affairs with fellow actor Dennis Hopper and the film's director, Nicholas Ray. Hopper and Ray should have been dragged before a judge and Natalie's parents cited for neglect. Her  tortured life and tragic death can be attributed to childhood exploitation, but for Maynard to cast J.D. Salinger in a similar category with Hopper and Ray is unjust and vicious.

Maynard may have been too emotionally immature at age eighteen to have a relationship with Salinger or anyone else, and maybe it took a few months for him to figure that out. But Salinger should not be scapegoated for the inadequacies of her parents.

J.D. Salinger is gone. We will never know his side of it, but I am inclined to be wary of someone who would publicly disparage a former lover she knew could not or would not stand up for himself, and then, with all the sympathy of a pit viper for a field mouse, auction his love letters without a word of apology. At a minimum, we know there is a lot more to the story than Maynard let on.  And the more she tries to justify her actions, the worse she looks.

Women don't make themselves strong by playing victim. The young Joyce Maynard rolled the relationship dice and came up snake-eyes. We've all done that, and most of us move on and lick our wounds in silence. Choices have consequences.

Victim or viper, Maynard will go down in history as a whiner unless she writes something truly worthy of notice. She has a lot going for her; I hope she does. It takes courage to admit mistakes. What it comes down to is whether she wants to be known as a writer or as a girl dumped by a famous writer a half-century ago.

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Codependent Holden Caulfield

A classic codependent is someone so emotionally entwined with an addict that she cannot extract herself from the chaos of his drug-induced lifestyle. His addictive erratic behavior harms not only himself, but her and others indirectly. Another type of codependent is someone whose life spins out of control because they are drawn irresistibly to the neediness of others, as seems to be the case with The Catcher in the Rye 's Holden Caulfield.

A close reading reveals ten instances in which Holden goes out on a limb for someone. The first is when he takes a swing at his prep school roommate, Stradlater, because he sees him as a sexual predator to Jane Gallagher, a vulnerable girl whom he knows well. Here are Holden's thoughts after he has been knocked flat and had his nose bloodied by the large and stronger athlete: "I just kept laying there on Ely's bed, thinking about Jane and all. It just drove me stark staring mad when I thought about her and Stradlater parked somewhere in that fat-assed Ed Banky's car. Every time I thought about it, I felt like jumping out the window. The thing is, you didn't know Stradlater. I knew him. Most guys at Pency just talked about having sexual intercourse with girls all the time--like Ackley, for instance-- but old Stradlater really did it. I was personally acquainted with at least two girls he gave the time to. That's the truth. ... I kept laying there in the dark anyway, though, trying not to think about old Jane and Stradlater in that goddam Ed Banky's car. But it was almost impossible. The trouble was, I knew that guy Stradlater's technique. ...I damn near puked listening to him. His date kept saying, 'No--please. Please, don't. Please.' But old Stradlater kept snowing her in his Abraham Lincoln, sincere voice, and finally there'd be this silence in the back of the car." 

In the next instance, Holden lies consolingly to Mr. Spencer so this aging History teacher will not feel bad about flunking him: "I told him I was a real Moron, and all that stuff. I told him how I would have done exactly the same thing if I'd been in his place, and how most people didn't appreciate how tough it is being a teacher. That kind of stuff. The old bull. ...'Look, sir. Don't worry about me,' I said. 'I mean it. I'll be all right. I'm just going through a phase right now. Everybody goes through phases and all, don't they?'
'I don't know boy. I don't know.'
I hate it when somebody answers that way. 'Sure. Sure, they do,' I said. 'I mean it, sir. Please don't worry about me.'"

Next, on a night train to the City Holden runs into to classmate Ernest Morrow's mother and concocts an elaborate lie about Ernest's friends wanting him to run for Class President. Holden's intent is to make her feel better about her horse's ass of a son: "'Ernest's father and I sometimes worry about him," she said. ..."He's a very sensitive boy. He's never really been a terribly good mixer with other boys. ...'
Sensitive. That killed me. That guy Morrow was about as sensitive as a goddam toilet seat.
I gave her a good look. She didn't look like any dope to me. She looked like she might have a pretty damn good idea what a bastard  she was the mother of. ...Mothers are all slightly insane. The thing is though, I liked old Morrow's mother. She was all right.
...'Old Ernie,' I said. 'He's one of the most popular boys at Pency. Did you know that?'
'No, I didn't.'
...I had her glued to her seat. You take somebody's mother, all they want to hear about is what a hot-shot their son is.
...'Did he tell you about the elections?" I asked her. 'The class elections?'
She shook her head. I had her in a trance , like. I really did.
'Well, a bunch of us wanted Ernie to be president of the class. I mean, he was the unanimous choice.'"

Holden next tells about playing checkers with Jane Gallagher when she became upset over a confrontation with her stepfather, and Holden overreacted. He describes his actions as almost involuntary: "Then all of a sudden, this tear plopped down on the checkerboard. On one of the red squares--boy, I can still see it. She just rubbed it into the board with her finger. I don't know why, but it bothered hell out of me. So what I did was, I went over and made her move over on the glider so that I could sit down next to her--I practically sat down in her lap, as a matter of fact. Then she really started to cry, and the next thing I knew, I was kissing her all over--anywhere--her eyes, her nose, her forehead, her eyebrows and all, her ears--her whole face except her mouth and all. She sort of wouldn't let me get to her mouth. Anyway, it was the closest we ever got to necking."

In a nightclub later Holden tells a group of tourist women from Seattle that they just missed Gary Cooper. It's a lie he tells so they will have something interesting to report back home. Holden even worries about the welfare of animals, repeatedly expressing concern over how the ducks in Central Park get by during winter. Holden offers some nuns an over-sized donation, which they gracefully turn down. He even changes his mind about having sex with the prostitute, Sunny, whom he sees as too young. They talk instead, even though she had taken off her dress.

The ninth example of Holden's codependent drive to help and protect others is when he confesses to his younger sister Phoebe what he wants to do with his life--to be a "Catcher in the Rye" and protect children from going over an imaginary cliff. Near the end of the book, Holden sits in the rain in his red "people-hunting" cap while he watches Phoebe ride the carousel. "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" is playing in the background. The depth of his emotion shows how strongly he feels about seeing her safe and happy: "My hunting hat gave me quite a lot of protection, in a way, but I got soaked, anyway. I didn't care though. I felt so happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn  happy, if you want to know the truth. ...It was just that she looked so nice, the way she kept going around and around, in her blue coat and all."

It could be said that Holden is just a caring, kind person and these are all just examples of his compassionate nature. But if that were so, it wouldn't have put him in a mental hospital.

On the contrary, a case can be made that Holden became  hypersensitized by the death from leukemia of his little brother, Ailee. The suicide of Holden's classmate James Castle deepened that sensitivity. Holden's unresolved grief sabotages his life, rendering him unable to function normally. He is highly intelligent, but he can't concentrate and repeatedly flunks out  or drops out of school. Everywhere he turns he sees something wrong, making him anxious, confused, lonely. He cries and has feelings of bleeding from the gut. To make sense of his chaotic state of mind, he overreacts to everyday events, like meeting Earnest Morrow's mother on the train and concocting that elaborate lie.

Unresolved grief can be complicated and debilitating as we obsess over our relationship with the loved one who  died. Guilt can arise over something we said or did or failed to apologize for to someone whose dearness we may never have acknowledged.

When we are emotionally intimate with someone over a period of years the shared experiences and feelings become a part of our identity, anchoring us in the swirl of life. The sudden loss of these identity reference points can shake us to our knees, and it can take a long time to recover--years. Codependency can be a coping mechanism whereby we mimic with strangers a ritual cascade of apologies for our imagined inadequacies toward the person we lost. On the outside we seem normal, but inside our skin we writhe in pain from an invisible unnamed source.

Compassion may be the highest human value, but some people get hooked on it like a drug. Codependency is the clinician's label for being too human, so attuned to others' pain that we spin out of orbit as our own needs go unattended.

The measure of Holden's emotional investment in Ailee and James Castle is the level of chaos in his life that surfaced in the wake of their passing. Like a junkie, Holden craved the good feelings that came when he did something that relieved or prevented suffering. It gave him a sense of control over his chaotic life and made his bad feelings go away for a while. But it was never enough. And we are left wondering whether Holden will spend the rest of his life playing God and trying to fix the world instead of taking care of himself.

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