By Stuart Mitchner
I was too depressed to care whether I had a good view or not.
—Holden Caulfield
Poor dear bad bold beauty; there must indeed be something about her —!”
—“The Voice of the Air”
It’s 1905 and James is responding to the “strident, battered, questionable beauty” of that “terrible town,” that “bold bad charmer” New York City. Writing in The American Scene (Penguin Classics 1994), he’s so excitedly conflicted about his feelings for the city he grew up in that he imagines he’s listening to a “voice of the air” seemingly saying “You can’t escape from it, and don’t you see that this, precisely, is what makes an adventure for you… You care for the terrible town … as I have overheard you call it…”
Still letting “the voice of the air” speak for him, James has it confess that when he called the “monster ‘shameless,’” the admission was “wrung” from him “by the worst of the winter conditions, when circulation, in any fashion consistent with personal decency or dignity, was merely mocked at, when the stony-hearted ‘trolleys,’ cars of Juggernaut in their power to squash, triumphed all along the line, when the February blasts became as cyclones in the darkened gorges of masonry (which down-town, in particular, put on, at their mouths, the semblance of black rat-holes, holes of gigantic rats, inhabited by whirlwinds) …. The fury of sound took the form of derision of the rest of your woe, and thus it might, I admit, have struck you as brazen that the horrible place should, in such confessed collapse, still be swaggering and shouting.”
Surely this is James Unplugged, as the MTV generation might have termed it. And all it took was a visit to the city of his birth five years into the 20th century.
July 16
Only two writers are noted on this date in Wikipedia’s list of notable events from 1901 to the present. In 1915 Henry James becomes a British citizen “to highlight his commitment to Britain” during the First World War. In 1951 J.D. Salinger publishes his “popular yet controversial” novel, The Catcher in the Rye — which is why Holden Caulfield was reading over my shoulder as I quoted from James’s losing battle with an earlier incarnation of the same city Holden spent a lonely Christmas weekend in after being expelled from Pencey Prep. At the moment, I’m imagining Holden reading The American Scene in a California clinic where he’s recovering from “the madman stuff” that happened in New York before he got “pretty run-down” and “had to come out here and take it easy.” My guess is he’d be wishing he could call “old Henry James” to let him know how much he enjoyed the idea of New York as the “bad bold beauty” (“That killed me”), the “creature” whose most “blatant” pretension “is that she is one of those to whom everything is always forgiven.”
Two Characters
It’s “strangely touchy” — as a blurb writer in India once said of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey — to see these two wildly different characters responding to the city where they were born, James in 1843, Caulfield in 1951, midwifed by Salinger, who was born in New York in 1919. It’s as if Henry and Holden are fictional characters while Salinger sits it out on the afterlife sidelines waiting for his heirs to liberate the four decades of work he intended for posthumous publication. Holden first got to me (and no doubt millions of others) in the early chapter where he talks about calling writers up: “What really knocks me out is a book, that when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.” Even if I knew the number, I wouldn’t call up the writer of the Wikipedia entry that says a novel that spoke to generations is “popular but controversial.”
Calling People Up
As soon as Holden gets to Penn Station after leaving Pencey Prep, he sits down in a phone booth to “give somebody a buzz.” But after spending 20 minutes going through and rejecting half a dozen possibilities, he gives up and gets a cab, and unable to engage the driver in a conversation about where the ducks go when the lake in Central Park freezes over, he invites the man to join him for a “cocktail” (“Can’t do it, Mac. Sorry”). The hotel he checks into is “full of perverts and morons. Screwballs all over the place,” and the “crumby” room he’s given looks out on nothing except the other side of the hotel, but he’s “too depressed to care,” and the 65-year-old “bell boy” is even more depressing than the room. And all he sees when he looks out the window is a “very distinguished looking guy” dressing up in women’s clothes and a young couple “squirting water out of their mouths at each other.”
Feeling horny, he ends by calling a woman (“who didn’t mind doing it once in a while”) whose address “a guy who went to Princeton” gave him. “She used to be a burlesque stripper or something” and when the guy took her to a dance at Princeon “they nearly kicked him out for bringing her.” Her name is Faith Cavendish; she’s asleep when he calls and wants to know who’s calling her up at this crazy hour. After telling her the guy’s name, Eddie, someone he met once at party, they talk about Eddie as if they both knew him; when he asks her out for cocktails, she says maybe tomorrow, and he says he can’t make it. It’s a truly pathetic excuse for a conversation (“I’ll say hello to Eddie for you”) that ends with her saying “I hope you enjoy your stay in New York. It’s a grand place.”
He ends up thinking “I should’ve at least made it for cocktails or something.” And if you’ve just been reading about James’s struggles with New York, it’s as if Salinger has given Holden his own “bad bold beauty” in Faith Cavendish.
Being Holden
My enjoyment of James unplugged dates back to a college paper on The Ambassadors, an in-class assignment, written Holden-style to express my impatience with the author’s smarmy mannerisms, elite affectations, and self-satisfied view of the world. I wisely resisted calling James the “king of the phonies,” and in the end the professor gave me credit for a “spirited” paper.
If you look up Henry James on the Literature Network in July 2025, you’ll find a rotating series of ads, for toilet bowl cleansers (“Shiny White Toilet Trick,” with before and after shots), “Smart Way To Eliminate Bed Bugs,” “I’m a Virgin” t-shirts, and an Ebay “Complete Your Collection” box filled with images of busty women. There’s something pointlessly to the point about finding James — and the rest of us — in that company.
The Voice Again
I had to put the university behind me and see the world before discovering and appreciating James’s work and even more the endearing human being recalled by friends and various others in Simon Nowell-Smith’s compilation, The Legend of the Master (Constable 1947). After reading James and the “voice of the air” on the travails and excitements of New York, I was struck by what his friend Edith Wharton reported by way of Lady Prothero (a name he could have written a story around), when she saw him after he had his first stroke in December 1915, that in the “act of falling (he was dressing at the time), he heard in the room a voice which was distinctly, it seemed, not his own, saying: “So here it is at last, the distinguished thing!”
You have to think James might have scribbled that line years before in a notebook. You also have to think how conveniently Holden Caulfield serves as Salinger’s equivalent to James’s “voice in the wind.”
James at War
The writer of the wikipedia entry for this date says James formally became a British citizen to “highlight his commitment” to Britain during the First World War. Unstated is James’s impatience with America for not joining in. According to one account in The Legend, after “a bitter attack on the attitude of President Wilson,” James sprang up in his seat shouting, “And by Heaven if you want war with America you can have it tomorrow!”
Just as the dynamic of New York brought forth the passionately unplugged James, the war inspired a reckless eloquence, but in his own voice, in a letter to a friend: “Black and hideous to me is the tragedy that gathers, and I’m sick beyond cure to have lived on to see the tide that bore us along was then all the while moving to this as its grand Niagara — yet what a blessing we didn’t know it. It seems to me to undo everything, everything that was ours, in the most horrible retroactive way — but I avert my face from the monstrous scene! — you can hate it and blush for it without my help; we can each do enough of that by ourselves.”
Salinger In War
What would James and his “wind” say today? For that matter, what would Salinger’s Holden say? About 15 pages from the end of the novel, Holden is leaving a note for his beloved little sister Phoebe at her school. On his way up the stairs he notices that someone had defaced the wall with what has since become the most familiar of American obscenities, 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.”
Earlier in The Catcher, Holden says, “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.” When I first read the book, I didn’t know 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 liberation of Nazi death camps.