“Theobald claimed to own several manuscripts of an original play [Cardenio] by Shakespeare… And what of the documents Theobald claims to have found that led back to whatever it was that Shakespeare and Fletcher had written? In 1770 a newspaper states that ‘the original manuscript’ was treasured up in the Museum of ‘Covent Garden Playhouse’; fire destroyed the theater, including its library, in 1808.”
- Introduction to the lost Shakespeare play, Cardenio, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt
--
J.D. Salinger is one of the great writers of the 20th century. For some, this opinion takes a great deal of convincing. I’m not so interested in trying to convince anyone of the reality of Salinger’s influence and importance, but suffice to say that Catcher in the Rye is perhaps the most poorly read novel in popular culture bar 1984. If 1984 is a book about Soviet authoritarianism and nothing more, then Catcher in the Rye is about a pissed-off angsty teen and nothing more. In reality, Catcher in the Rye is a grand novel of comedic and tragic happenings, a bildungsroman and a picaresque of the highest American order.
Part of what makes Catcher in the Rye work so well is its iconic narration through the voice of Holden Caulfield, which is by turns crass, clever, and conscientiously self-loathing—yet somehow totally naive and unaware. I open to any page and find something to laugh at: “After a while I sat down in a chair and smoked a couple of cigarettes. I was feeling pretty horny. I have to admit it.”
“I’m not saying I blame Catholics. I don’t. I’d be the same way, probably, if I was a Catholic.”
“The part that got me was, there was a lady sitting next to me that cried all through the goddam picture. The phonier it got the more she cried. You’d have thought she did it because she was kindhearted as hell, but I was sitting right next to her, and she wasn’t. She had this little kid with her that was bored as hell and had to go to the bathroom but she wouldn’t take him. She kept telling him to sit still and behave himself. She was about as kindhearted as a goddam wolf.”
It also works because it is such a concise narrative. A fairly short book, it tells a beginning, middle, and end. I can’t imagine a more tight-knit coming-of-age story; and yet, there is more.
--
J.D. Salinger seems like a shitty person, despite the fact he’s written some great books. His shittiness is primarily evidenced by an obsession with writing letters to teenage girls, and, despite his reclusiveness and refusal to write or publish new works after 1965, he decided to carry out relationships with said women. While in his 50s he courted 18-year-olds, inviting them to his reclusive residence in New Hampshire, hiding behind the veneer of a tortured genius coupled with phony Eastern spirituality.
And yet, according to an equally shitty documentary about J.D. Salinger, called, stupidly enough, Salinger, I learned there is an official sequel to Catcher in the Rye, already written and waiting in the vaults until the Salinger estate figures out how to make the most money out of it. As an aside, I didn’t believe the book exists, partly because, as I said, I think Salinger is a bit of a hack and didn’t write anything after 1965, opting instead to milk his fame and abuse his tortured genius sob story. Also, as I said, the documentary which claims the book exists is a terrible work of literary propaganda.
What could a sequel to a great novel like Catcher in the Rye look like? Before I could speculate at all, I came across a fan-fiction sequel called 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye. This work caught the attention of the Salinger estate, who successively banned the book in the United States for copyright infringement. This book is not written by Salinger, however, and so its status as a sequel is moot. This fan-fiction sequel appears to take place, as the title suggests, 60 years in the future of the original book, when Holden Caulfield is in his seventies. Presumably, he also promenades around New York again. All in all, this is, even from the title, a ridiculously simple-minded and uncreative imagining of what Salinger might have done, or indeed has done, with his most iconic creation.
--
It so happens that there is a true sequel to Catcher in the Rye that I managed to get my hands on through one of my close associates in the publishing world, who also works, in a roundabout way, for the Salinger Estate. Of course, to name this individual or give any more details would be a death sentence, for the Salinger estate guards the life and works of their namesake with a violent reverence reminiscent of the CIA or FBI. Clearly, there are things they do not want anybody to ever see or know about Salinger (we can guess and speculate about these some other time—though I think it’s fairly obvious).
And so I found myself in possession of a typewritten manuscript titled, Catcher in the Rye 2: Electric Boogaloo. The title is likely a working title that Salinger, in an odd moment of uncynical humor, used as a placeholder. I’ve documented my findings based on extensive notes and scans I made, alongside a general outline of the book below.
--
Salinger wrote a few stories about older people, but he excelled with the youth. Thankfully, the sequel to The Catcher in the Rye is not about a significantly older Holden Caulfield but is instead about Holden nearing the end of his 20s. This would put the story at about 1960 when Holden is 28 or 29. It opens thus:
You thought you knew all about me, and I suppose I said all that I could, but there’s always more. Until we’re dead there’s always more.
Thankfully this is not a Go Set a Watchmen/To Kill a Mockingbird situation. Holden is not retconned into a different human. After the events of the original novel, Holden moves in and out of different colleges, never graduating, and moving in and out of psychiatric hospitals, sometimes getting better, but never truly stable. He himself is confounded as to whether or not he is mentally unstable or just needs to grow up.
The original book hints that Holden writes the narrative while in a mental hospital. With the passage of time, however, Holden is less rebellious against the notion that he is insane, but more depressed by it.
If the main criteria for being crazy for getting pissed off at other people’s stupidity, then I guess I’m crazy as crazy can get. But it seems unfair that some others, who are equally spiteful towards people’s stupidities, manage just fine just because they are famous or rich or attractive. My anger is just a nuisance, I guess. But if I were fucking Eisenhower talking shit about the people I hate, some would call me a visionary.
The plot of Catcher in the Rye 2: Electric Boogaloo, centers on Holden going to visit his sister Phoebe, who is now in her sophomore year at Barnard University in New York City. The original novel makes it abundantly clear that Phoebe is a picture of total innocence, one which Holden fears will eventually grow up and enter the world of cynical adulthood. Or worse, that she may, like Holden himself, become a victim of sexual abuse. The trouble in the original is that Holden does not want to tell his sister how horrible the world is, but nonetheless wants to prevent her from experiencing the hardships life will throw at her. Hence Holden dreams of being the titular “Catcher in the Rye,” preventing kids, especially his sister, from falling off the cliff of innocence into the realm of phony adulthood.
But Phoebe grows up, of course. Not only that, she herself is suffering from a nervous breakdown when Holden visits after receiving a letter from her.
When I saw her she looked a goddam mess. Her eyes looked dead, like she’d been asleep for a year. Her hair looked awful—like it did when she was ten and didn’t give a damn about her looks. When she saw me she smiled and said, “Hi, Holden!” But her eyes still looked droopy and sad.
While the breakdown is never fully explained in detail, a few characteristically Salingerian descriptions hint at the cause:
When I asked her how school was going she said, “Pretty good,” and then told me about her favorite professors and classes. The one class she loved the most was called British Romanticism. Personally I never could get too into that nature nonsense, but I liked listening to her light up about the topic so I kept my mouth shut. She told me about the Keats and Shelleys who I remember from high school, but she also mentioned some new names I hadn’t heard before. Ann something and Charlotte Smith. Apparently they were somewhat famous in their time but fell out of favor, but now some scholars are bringing them back into the limelight. Forgotten feminine visionaries. She showed me a print from an art book she cut out. There was this lady sitting in front of a tree next to a dog. She looked beautiful but she also looked like a man. “That’s Mary Robinson,” she told me, “also a poet. And an actress.”
She started quoting some poems. One was by that Charlotte Smith lady, and it was about not going to the beach because of some crazy person who was hanging out there and bothering people. She says,
I see him more with envy than with fear;
He has no nice felicities that shrink
From giant horrors; wildly wandering here,
He seems (uncursed with reason) not to know
The depth or the duration of his woe.
“I’m also jealous of the truly crazy people,” Phoebe said.
“Don’t say shit like that,” I said.
“I wasn’t talking about you.”
“What’s the difference between me and the ‘truly crazy?’”
“The truly crazy aren’t aware that they’re crazy.”
I turned this over in my head for a moment and wanted to say something along the lines of, “Well, I wish I were truly crazy.” But instead I said, “Your hair looks like shit. I’m stepping out for a cigarette.”
--
As Holden and Phoebe spend more time together in her apartment, they begin to see that they know less about each other’s experiences in life than they formerly thought. And yet simultaneously they see that they share more in personality than they previously believed. Both are victims of, like most Salinger characters, over-intellectualism. They are too smart and too self-aware for their own good. This is one of the principle ironies of the original Catcher in the Rye: any decent psychotherapist would know that telling Holden to write out his story would not bring catharsis, but only more self-knowledge, and that this self-knowledge is not helpful, but more crippling egotism that stacks the fictions of his selfhood one on top of the other until, eventually, it collapses.
But in Catcher in the Rye 2, Holden’s self-awareness reaches a point of apathy:
When I walked down the streets of Manhattan I kept wondering to myself if all these people I passed thought about life as much as I did. Not life in general. Not those big questions that make your head hurt about time and space and all that shit. Just life. Like, my life, or their own lives. All I do each day is think about life, and think about who I am and why I am the way I am and why I got to be so goddam sensitive. So I start to wonder about nuns and monks and I wonder if they are truly themselves and one-hundred percent serious or if they are actually just the best actors alive.
I go back and forth like the waves: everyone’s thinking, nobody’s thinking, everybody trying their best to live, everybody’s selling out. How could so many people be so goddam stupid? And I kept thinking about that poem Phoebe mentioned. And I kept wondering how people who aren’t ok can act ok all the damn time. It’s exhausting.
--
These scenes of self-reflection begin to reflect Salinger’s later interest in Eastern mysticism (which is also evident, in infancy, throughout his other great work Franny and Zooey); clearly Holden has an ego issue.
In another scene, Salinger-through-Holden gives his long-awaited opinions on the Beat Generation. A movement that, despite their protestations, inherited many of the stereotypical attitudes exemplified by Holden Caulfield.
“I went to this poetry reading, and I saw him.”
“Him?” She spoke about this guy as if he were important as Jesus Christ.
“Allen Ginsberg! I saw him! He speaks like a prophet.”
“Christ,” I said.
“What?” Phoebe asked, clearly upset, “What do you have against Allen Ginsberg?”
“He rubs me the wrong way.”
“Is it because he’s gay?”
At this I got really mad and yelled, “No!”
“Then what is it?”
I looked at her and said, as plainly as I could but I know I did a shitty job, “Look, he’s a fine poet, he’s got some nice turns of phrase or whatever and I appreciate the, uh, gravity of some of what he says but like… he’s so serious about himself.”
“I think he knows he can be a bit silly.”
“No, that’s not what I mean…” I was struggling for words, “What I mean to say is, you know how everyone thinks he’s some kind of menace to society?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Well, he’s not.”
“What does what others think about him have to do with his talents as a poet?”
My brain felt stuck and I wanted to drop the whole thing but I kept talking like a dumbass.
“I think he knows he’s great at upsetting people, but also he knows that upsetting people is not a great way to go down as a great poet. So he pretends like he doesn’t know he upsets people, and yet he goes on upsetting people.”
“I still don’t see what that has to do with him being or not being a great poet.”
“What is the goal of a great poet?”
“How should I know?”
“I think,” and here I don’t even know what I was saying anymore, “a great poet is someone who is completely and utterly free, disconnected from the ideas and opinions and morals of others.”
“Well, I think Ginsberg does exactly that.”
“I don’t.”
I thought for a second but the thoughts weren’t coming so I said, “Well, enough of that, want to catch a movie or something?”
--
While perusing the manuscript, I came across an odd margin note that must have been written by Salinger himself. After a scene wherein Holden runs into an old high school friend in a bar and Holden does a great job acting like a normal human being, Salinger writes in the margins, “This scene needs a punchline. Holden cannot act so nice and polite. But then again, he’s gotten older, he knows how to interact with others and not just act like an asshat.”
It’s a small testament to Salinger’s own trouble with evolving a character like Holden Caulfield. It also suggests that Holden is not an imitation of a real human, but is rather a stock character of sorts; this may seem like an obvious fact, but one of the markers of a great novel’s protagonist is their mutability, their freedom, their ability to speak out against the author who writes them—and yet it is revealed that Holden is perhaps nothing more than the vessel of Salinger’s pubescent rage, which he carried all the way to the end of his life. Or perhaps Holden only rejects Salinger because Salinger decided to write a sequel.
--
The novel takes a form less picaresque than the original, reading more like the dialogue-heavy Zooey. Indeed, at points, the novel could work better as a play. The dialogue-heavy story sticks with Holden’s perspective the entire time and there are moments when his faultiness as a narrator becomes overt.
Phoebe poured me a drink. By the time I finished my first she’d finished three. I told her to slow down and went to grab her drink and for the first time since she was a little kid she yelped, “Stop!” as if I’d tried to snatch away her doll. We just sort of drank in silence until she said she hated Mom and Dad. She was drunk but I couldn’t tell if this was a case of her telling the truth because she was drunk or just talking shit because she was drunk. It’s not always easy to tell.
I felt a little out of it from the whiskey and wasn’t in the mood for a family discussion so I said, “They aren’t too bad. Just old.”
“They’re pricks! Bourgeois pricks! And they never stood up for you or me. In fact—“
And then she started rambling and rambling and I could barely follow a word she said it felt so goddam incoherent. For a moment the world shut out, and only her face remained in light, and she was talking and her lips were moving but I couldn’t hear a thing. She looked so goddam pitiful, with her sallow eyes and curly unkempt hair and her unmade-up face with its blotches and I felt sick. I shook my head and the lights came back around her, and she looked whole again, and she got madder and madder but I still couldn’t figure out what she was saying. Finally, I heard, “Are you even listening?!”
“Yeah, of course.”
“And that’s why Mom told me, right before I came to college that—“
And everything shut out again and I started to cry looking at her, and she must have noticed because I could see her crying too.
What good does crying even do? It’s goddam embarrassing.
--
The plot of the novel, though it is mostly plotless, picks up in the final third. Holden’s weekend stay is coming to a close and he decides to go back to LA, where he’s been living with some friends. However, he is worried about Phoebe’s health; she’s clearly an adolescent alcoholic, dealing with some unspoken trauma that Holden can relate to, and is in the throes of alternating mania and depression. At one critical point near the end, Phoebe reveals that she flunked out of the Spring semester but she doesn’t want to tell their parents. She can return in the Winter but until then she’s looking at five months of idleness. Holden recommends she get a job and she begins to cry. She’s already been fired from three jobs for not showing up.
When Holden asks her why she’s so upset and why she can’t keep a job and why she flunked out, Phoebe can only say, “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“I want to lose myself. I’m tired of being myself. I’m tired of being. I don’t want to die, but I don’t want to be. I’m tired of thinking, I’m so goddam tired of thinking.”
“I know,” I said.
“I don’t want to die.”
“I know.”
“I really, really, don’t want to die.”
“I know.”
“But I don’t want to be me, and I don’t want to think.”
I lied and said, “You’ll get through this, you’ll figure it out.”
She saw right through me and said, “You know that’s a lie. You haven’t figured anything out. And how many years have you been in and out of those hospitals?”
Somehow, against my feelings, I kept my composure and asked, “What would make you happy?”
“I told you, I want to not think, but I want to be. I want to be myself not know who I am. I want to exist like a cat, just moving around and eating and sleeping and getting petted and never once thinking to myself, ‘Jesus I gotta pay the rent,’ or ‘Jesus I better finish that essay about Charlotte Smith and her sex drive.’”
“So you want to be dead and alive at the same time.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“What would make you happy, right now?”
She was silent and started to cry.
“I’d like,” she said through the tears, “to watch the animals in the zoo.”
“Then let’s go to the zoo.”
--
And they go to the zoo. And eat ice cream. They are still very sad and depressed and generally hopeless, but Holden remarks at the end of the day:
Maybe every great moment is nothing but a distraction from who we are. That’s a dismal way of thinking about it. But maybe it’s true. That whole day at the zoo I kept seeing her smile, and I smiled, and those animals despite being locked up in cages were smiling, too. And the zookeepers were smiling and the children were smiling and their parents were smiling. And even when I saw a kid cry because a monkey scared him he was still smiling.
For a moment it felt like the whole world sat still and serene, smiling and smiling and smiling.
--
The manuscript ends here. It’s obvious that the book is unfinished given the amount of marginal notes from Salinger. It’s not exactly an uplifting ending, but against all odds it feels true to the original.
--
While in the process of getting ready to upload scans of the manuscript online, a fire broke out in my apartment. In a moment of unthinking panic, I grabbed my Playstation, a dozen or so books, and my two cats before running outside. Inside the apartment the manuscript and the scans I made burned up into the void. The question of responsibility still bothers me—am I at fault for the loss of this exceedingly rare document? I remember the librarians of Alexandria, who, though they kept the books in the Library, could obviously never be blamed for its destruction. I wipe the blood off my hands and get on with my life. My translation of the Tao te Ching is making great strides, though I cringe to remember it was perhaps Salinger’s favorite book.
