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Sunday, February 3, 2019

Holden

"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."
--Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger

It suddenly occurred to me this night to wonder whether my son has ever suffered from my choice of a name for him. Holden, after Holden Caulfield, the troubled young protagonist in J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. Who knew in 1977, when he was born, that several nutcases would later choose out the novel as some sort of instructional manual on killing another person? 

I was reading the novel in late 1976 and I simply liked the sound of the name. To me, it sounded dignified somehow, and of course different. I didn't want a Jim or a Bill or a Tommy. Nor did his mother. As I recall, she had chosen as a possibility the name Bayard, after a character in a Faulkner novel, Flags in the Dust, I think. Quentin was another of her suggestions. I didn't like that either, and so the name Holden won out. 

Then someone with a fixation on Catcher in the Rye, as well as a fantastic inability to rightly read a novel or understand what he has read, went out and killed John Lennon. Subsequently, there have been several more wackos, carrying Catcher in their back pocket and a gun in their front. 

Curiously, no one is murdered in  Catcher in the Rye. No one even talks about murdering anyone, although I do seem to vaguely remember a scene wherein Holden imagines himself being shot while talking in a phone booth--a sort of dramatic, teen sort of imagination. What struck me about Catcher in the Rye was the central question posed: Where does the trouble really lie, with Caulfield, or with the world itself? It's the same question asked, really, in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Is it the individual man who is disturbed, or is he disturbed because of the disturbing priorities of the society he lives in? 

What's wrong with trying to keep children safe in a field of rye?

In my mind, I was reading about an earnest, introspective young man, a boy with a special fondness for innocence and purity even as he had begun to experience the complex tugging of a tantalizing yet often corrupt world--a world largely peopled by unfortunate children that had fallen from the field of rye. 

"The mark of the immature man," Salinger writes, "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." 

That's what I liked about Holden. The desire, despite destructive influences, despite the human hunger for worthless things, despite all the harsh, so-called adult realities, to live humbly for a cause. 

It is, again, unfortunate that a few have attached their own mental illness to this book and thrown shade on a great work of fiction, as well as on its reclusive author, who must, I think, be very hurt indeed by these events. Sadly, the more time that passes, and the more generally illiterate people become, the more readily the title becomes associated with psychotic killers rather than with the meaningful narrative that Salinger gave us. 

And so Holden, if you're out there reading, I apologize if the name I chose has ever caused you any discomfort or trouble. Maybe you would have been better off as Bayard or Quentin (though I doubt it). I made the choice with the best of intentions, and, as I have said, before the name was associated with anything other than its own sound. I'll not have the opportunity to have a second son; but if I did have, I think I'd play it safe and just call him Bob! 

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