By Stuart Mitchner

I was crazy about The Great Gatsby, Old Gatsby. Old sport. That killed me.

—from The Catcher in the Rye

I woke up from a nap five minutes before midnight, turned on the TV, and there was Times Square packed with Happy 2025-top-hatted, rainwear-cloaked revelers under a delirium of color that swarmed into futuristic formations every time I blinked my eyes. At first the signs were meaningless, nameless, wordless, New Year’s Eve on Mars, like a vision of the place I loved as a 14-year-old seen through the eyes of old Rip Van Winkle emerging from a showing of A Star Is Born on a rainy night in 1954. What does it mean, all this dazzling stuff? Where’s a familiar face? Where’s Judy Garland? Where’s any legible meaningful remnant of lost New York? Then, wonder of wonders, a floodlit sign for The Great Gatsby comes into view on the first day of the novel’s 100th year, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece is in lights, and Broadway makes 20th-century sense again….

Now it’s as if Times Square is being submerged in Francis Cugat’s hallucinatory cover art for the first edition of Gatsby, that deep all-consuming blueness descending on the rainy chaos of celebration, two narrow witchy eyes with golden neon pupils peering above an emerald teardrop and the red lips of a siren, luring us between the covers to one of Gatsby’s epic parties where “men and girls” are coming and going “like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars” while “the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors and hair bobbed in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile.”

Gatsby’s Contribution

On New Year’s day, six years before the publication of The Great Gatsby, J.D. Salinger was born, as is noted on Britannica’s “This Day in History: January 1,” the entry accompanied by a close-up photo Salinger asked Little Brown to remove from the jacket of The Catcher in the Rye (1951). The link between Salinger’s novel and Fitzgerald’s is not only signified by Holden Caulfield’s admiration (“Old Gatsby. Old sport. That killed me”). Dominant among the habits of speech that bring Holden to life is his fondness for the term “old,” which he uses liberally, whether for a teacher (“old Spencer”), his sister (“old Phoebe”), a bellhop who beats him up (“old Maurice”), a “pain the ass” (“old Luce”) and places like “old Pencey,” the prep school he’s left in the dust.

Salinger tactfully puts off his oblique nod to Gatsby’s contribution until late in the book when Holden is thinking about war and war movies and his brother D.B., who, like Salinger himself, “landed on D-Day.” The chapter ends as Holden abruptly shifts from “Old Gatsby. Old sport. That killed me” to “Anyway, I’m sort of glad they’ve got the atomic bomb invented. If there’s ever another war, I’m going to sit the hell on top of it. I’ll volunteer for it. I swear to God I will.” The impact of this chapter-ending stunner escaped me when I first read the book. I didn’t know then that Holden’s character, whose favorite term of approval is “it killed me,” had been developed during Sgt. Salinger’s progress from D-Day to the Battle of the Bulge to the Nazi death camps.

War Novels

Published in mid-July 1951, The Catcher in the Rye was an immediate bestseller. Two months later, the novel on top of the New York Times list for the first week of September was James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, followed by Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny, Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea, and Salinger’s Catcher, which would qualify as a war novel if only because it was partly composed on a portable typewriter in numerous combat situations like the one in Salinger’s unpublished story of foxhole life, “A Boy in France.”

I was Holden’s age when I discovered The Catcher in the Rye, barely registering that sudden intrusion about the bomb because I was too busy having fun. In fact, I was still laughing at Holden’s description of the terrible film he saw at Radio City (“I could’ve puked”). At 17, Salinger’s novel was, per the film review cliché, “a laugh riot.” It took later readings to appreciate what was really going on. One thing I realize now is how rarely you sense anything like real laughter from Holden. His favorite indicators are “it knocked me out” or “it killed me.”

Early Reading

My favorite book before Catcher was a fat paperback of From Here to Eternity, wherein James Jones brought the casual, naked, fully spelled out f-word to American readers. About 15 pages from the end of Catcher, published the same year, Holden is leaving a note for “old Phoebe” at her school. On his way up the stairs he notices that someone had written “F— you” on the wall, and he wants “to kill whoever’d written it.” Imagining “some perverty bum,” he “kept picturing … how I’d smash his head on the stone steps until he was good and goddam dead and bloody.”

Around the time I discovered The Catcher, I was swept away by The Great Gatsby (no one was teaching Gatsby, or, least of all, Catcher in those days). I was actually more shocked by the shooting of Gatsby in his swimming pool than I was by the violence in From Here to Eternity. I still wonder how the producers of the Broadway musical deal with Gatsby’s death scene.

Times Square Again

The year my parents and I lived in New York, I was so besotted by Times Square that I walked around taking photos of the giant movie billboards. My dream book would be a vast compendium of Times Square movie billboards through the years, night and day. The first movie my wife and I saw in 2025 was Frank Borzage’s Desire, which was made in 1936 and played at the Paramount, the theatre with the biggest, most elegant marquee on Times Square (now home to the Hard Rock Cafe).

Available on the Criterion channel, Desire stars Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich, who remembers it as “the only film I need not be ashamed of.” In his New Statesman review, after observing that “Miss Dietrich has been so tidied groomed, perfected that one cannot believe that she exists at all,” Graham Greene says “there are moments in this fim when Absolute Beauty very near wavers into the relative, the human, the desirable.”

Six Foot Three

Writing this on Monday, January 6, four years after the Capitol was attacked by a violent mob, I have to mention one of the finest moments in Gary Cooper’s career. Toward the end of Desire, in a tense, seemingly casual dinner table discussion about whether or not America should become involved in another war, the subtext is Cooper’s intrusion in the jewel plot masterminded by a suave “prince” named Carlos, who has a gun in his pocket. Carlos hopes there’s not going to be a war, but “with nobody minding his own business, you never can tell what may happen. If America is wise, it won’t ever mix in European affairs.” Says Cooper, “But sometimes we get dragged in” and we “have to go through with it.” Looking wary, ready to pull his gun, Carlos admits it would be foolish to underestimate America: “It’s a big country.” At which Cooper stands up, leans over the table, and says, measuring his words, pure Gary Cooper: “Six foot three.”

New Year’s Music

As much as I enjoy the traditional music played after the ball descends and the clock strikes 12 — John Lennon’s “Imagine,” Louis Armstrong’s “Wonderful World,” Frank Sinatra’s New York “New York,” I’d like to recommend adding two songs that could match the overflow of the crowd’s enthusiasm: Steve Winwood’s exuberant hit from 1980, “While You See a Chance,” and from 1985, “All I Need Is a Miracle” by Mike + the Mechanics.