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Copyright © 2010 Andrea Langworthy
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Every summer, Barnes & Noble has a table stacked with books local high schools require their students to read during summer vacation. It always tickles me to see The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger on the high schools’ lists. This is the book a nun mailed to my father with a note that said she didn’t feel it was suitable reading material. At the time, I was a sophomore at a Catholic boarding school for girls. Located between Red Wing and Lake City, in the tiny town of Frontenac, the school was as provincial as the sisters who taught us. My father felt sorry for this group of women forced to rein in a bunch of “high-spirited” girls. But when it came to literature, he and Sister were on opposite pages. It didn’t take long for Dad to send back the book saying he didn’t care what I read so long as I read something. In fact, it was Dad who often encouraged us kids to read cereal boxes at the breakfast table and introduced us to the Minneapolis morning newspaper and its afternoon counterpart. I was reminded of this last month when J.D. Salinger passed away at the age of 91. Salinger’s work — he’d also had books of short stories and novellas published — was last seen in print in The New Yorker on June 19, 1965, just weeks after I graduated from high school. By then, I’d read almost everything he’d written. Salinger hated being famous after The Catcher in the Rye put him in the literary limelight but he never stopped writing. Saying he was “in this world but not of it,” he moved from Manhattan to New Hampshire, fenced in his home and, according to a farewell piece in People, wrote for two hours a day. But not for publication. A former girlfriend said he disliked the intimacy of publishing and thought it was like “walking down Madison Avenue with your pants down.” I don’t know what the nuns would think of that but they certainly weren’t keen on Salinger’s story of 17-year-old Holden Caulfield who’d been expelled from an elite boarding school. Which may be just why I liked him. I, too, had been asked to “not come back” to a boarding school near St. Cloud after my freshman year. Which is how I landed on the opposite side of the Twin Cities the next school year with a copy of The Catcher in the Rye in my hands. Like Caulfield, I suffered from the malaise known as teen-aged disenchantment and didn’t have a lot of confidence in adults, either. I found Caulfield’s stream of rough language, something I couldn’t get away with, dangerously intoxicating. Whether Dad knew about the swear words or not, I’m happy he returned the book to Sister with permission for me to read it. Many decades later, when my husband passed by it one summer as it sat on a bookstore table, he picked up a copy and said he’d never read it. “But you must,” I said. “It’s a classic.”