by Mil Norman-Risch

My son Christopher was baptized sixteen summers ago in a small chapel in northern Germany.  As part of this particular parish’s baptism rite, each parent was expected to deliver a brief prayer declaring one wish for the baby. I hadn’t prepared for this moment.  At that moment when the pastor signaled for me to say my wish for Christopher, I could have said “May he live a prosperous and happy life,” or “May he be blessed with good health.”  But did I say that?  No. As I stood holding him there in front of that stone baptismal font, my wish was this:  “May he be a boy who – as he becomes a man – continues to claim his right to cry.”

I must have been nuts.  The right to cry?  That’s all he’d been doing for six months, or at least whenever he wasn’t sleeping or eating or playing with his toes.  And even during the baptism ceremony, as I was there sanctifying the idea of crying, he was bawling.

That was sixteen years ago.  After the baptism, I hardly thought about that impulsively formulated wish. And why should I have?  Christopher, a normal, healthy toddler, was quite capable of crying, and of the whole range of emotional gestures and expressions, from giggles of delight to wailing sobs.

The wailing of course gave way to something more controlled.  I remember when he got poked in the eye by another first grader, and I was called to the Lower School.  The secretary gave me this message from Nurse Hall:  “Christopher needs his Mommy.”  When I arrived, Nurse Hall assured me Christopher’s eye was OK, but I couldn’t help but notice the wet streaks on his cheeks.  “Oh, buddy, it must have really hurt.”  “Yes,” he said.  “ I cried.  But only a little bit.”

When he was in eighth grade, he joined the wrestling team as the smallest, skinniest, youngest kid on the squad.  “This sport is only for the toughest athletes,” the coach said when he took me aside.  “It’s not like football.  When a wrestler loses, the loss is painful. It’s existential.  It’s deeply personal.”  One night, midseason, in the car on the way home, I saw him wiping tears from his face. No wonder he hadn’t spoken to  me. No wonder he had slammed the car door.  I knew what to do:  I pretended he wasn’t crying. 

I tell these anecdotes because they relate to some thoughts I want to share about J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.  Reading Catcher with my freshmen this year, I noticed that Holden’s problem – aside from his grief over his parents’ neglect, his loss of his dear brother Allie to leukemia, his failure to find meaning and value in the teachings and one-upmanship of school life --- is that he somehow realizes he has lost his language.  He has lost his words for speaking his grief and joy. 

Unlike young Phoebe and Allie, whose words might be silly or poetic or fully eloquent, Holden has unlearned all of this and is left only with the sounds of anger and cool cynicism, and with the knowledge that no one cares or understands.   As he struggles to narrate a story of adolescent grief and nostalgia, the only tone, the only words that seem available to him, are those which hide the sorrow.  And so, for Salinger, the story of Catcher in the Rye is a powerful story of what happens when a boy’s language “comes of age.”

Turn the pages of the book and what are the words you’ll find?  “Lousy childhood,”  “phony slob,” “stupid moron” and worse. Who would know, by sifting carelessly through the pages of the book, rather than reading it and getting to know his soul, that Holden is a boy whose heart is as large and open as his loss is personal and deep.  It may take patience in order to reach the boy Salinger  understands so well.   “I can’t appreciate the book because I can’t get past this awful language,” some readers will complain. “Why is a book like this in the English curriculum?” some parents will wonder.  “Holden is so negative about everything,” some of my ninth graders have commented. But what if one of the story’s purposes is to show that this may be the only language for sadness that a 16-year-old boy has, once he  “comes of age”?

Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye has been popular for decades, probably because so many readers are touched and surprised to discover that someone understands this special adolescent language of grief.

One of the most moving passages in the book – and there are many – arouses sympathy precisely because we are confronted with Holden’s struggle with words and tone.  As soon as he gets close to saying the thing he means, he has to draw back and assume the voice of the worldly poser. He’s remembering Allie, his younger brother, and he’s telling us about his reactions the night Allie died. 

At first we hear Holden tumble forward candidly, untroubled by the need to project a certain courageous persona.  Then self-awareness intervenes, prompting him to use profanity as a sort of shield as he goes along trying to reveal himself, and at the same time trying to hide:

God, he was a nice kid, though.  He used to laugh so hard at something he thought of at the dinner table that he just about fell off his chair.  I was only thirteen, and they were going to have me psychoanalyzed and all, because I broke all the windows in the garage.  I don’t blame them.  I really don’t.  I slept in the garage the night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it.  I even tried to break all the windows on the station wagon we had that summer, but my hand was already broken and everything by that time, and I couldn’t do it.  It was a very stupid thing to do, I’ll admit, but I hardly didn’t even know I was doing it, and you didn’t know Allie.  My hand still hurts me once in a while, when it rains and all, and I can’t make a real fist anymore – not a tight one, I mean—but outside of that I don’t care much.  I mean, I’m not going to be a goddam surgeon or a violinist or anything anyway.

At some level, Holden is aware of this return to phoniness, this poser-voice.  Expressing neither range nor depth, this voice  seems the only voice an adolescent is free to use.

After his failed conversation with Mr. Antolini, who calls him “ a very strange boy,”  Holden walks out into the cold night.  But we can hear the sadness despite the cursing and detachment.  And we can also hear the sense of helplessness:

I thought what I’d do was I’d pretend I was one of those deaf mutes.  That way I wouldn’t have to have any goddam stupid useless conversations with anybody.  If anyone wanted to tell me something, they’d have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me.  They’d get bored as hell doing that after a while, and then I’d be through with having conversations for the rest of my life  (198-99).

Talking, after all, requires someone who can listen.

So who does understand the sound of a sixteen-year-old boy crying?  Salinger does.  And who helps this boy find a more fitting language for despair?  Salinger doesn’t give this answer, but he makes us think: about the coming of age of language and about its cost.

I end up thinking about my ninth grade students, who by now have learned the rules of acceptable public language. To move from childhood into adolescence and adulthood, one learns not to sound too imaginative or idiosyncratic or passionate.  Generalized, all-purpose idioms replace inventions and discoveries of the particular, fitting word.  In the newly acquired grown-up language, especially for boys, anger is the one acceptable emotion;  ironic detachment is even better.  “It’s all good,” “whatever,” “I guess you had to be there” or just a meaningfully offhanded “ uhmm, Dude” are useful ways of changing the subject and flattening out the emotional textures when things get personal.  Sorrow, if it is expressed at all, is communicated not in speech, in words chosen in a moment of intimacy for a single listener, but in the vandalizing and anonymous word-acts of spray paint or tattoos. “Just for the hell of it,” Holden tells us, he punched his fist through a car window.  Right.  But what else can he say?  This is the sound of a sixteen-year-old crying.

As an English teacher at a private, college preparatory high school, I am astonished by the papers some of my ninth graders write.  In many cases, the language is vivid, idiosyncratic, honest, and even lyrical. In writing, they  find a way to retain the richness and variety in emotion and language which they otherwise learn to repress when projecting the necessary coolness required in daily social interactions.  I realize this is what I can do.  I can encourage breadth and invention in language.  At least their written language, as it comes of age, need not be infused with the phrases and sounds of boredom. And I realize now what it was I really meant to say in that baptism prayer sixteen years ago:  What any boy needs, what any person needs, in those moments when cynicism and posing seem the only sanctioned forms of expression, is the freedom and guidance to rediscover language  -- the language that expresses those very human feelings of loneliness, longing, pity, beauty, hunger, and despair.  A paper written for an English teacher might be the one place such discovery is allowed.  Why Holden consented to write Stradlater’s English paper for him, we realize, has as much to do with freedom as with loneliness and despair.

To comment on this article e-mail comments@independentteacher.org.

Reader Comments:
The article written by Mil Norman-Risch is one I hope everyone happening upon this magazine will read. She addresses a topic at the foundation of our society, at the root of our happiness. Anyone who enjoyed reading her article should surely read a book just published called:

If Holden Caulfield Were in My Classroom: Inspiring Love, Creativity, and Intelligence in Middle School Kids
by Bernie Schein

All the best,
Elizabeth Hearn

The Paideia School
Atlanta GA