By Stuart Mitchner

This is a people shooting hat … I shoot people in this hat.

—J.D. Salinger,
from The Catcher in the Rye

Call it the Egyptian Connection. I may not have noticed it my first time through Moby Dick (1851) and The Catcher in the Rye (1951), but I’m acutely aware of it now, having just reread both opening chapters on July 16, 2026, the Catcher’s 75th anniversary. I was 17, Holden Caulfield’s age, for my first reading, and was around the same age when I followed Ishmael into Herman Melville’s magnum opus. When the going got heavy shortly after Ishmael disappeared, so did I.

Once I skimmed through all the scholarly cetological documentation at the beginning of Moby Dick — that is, once Ishmael identifies himself and begins expounding on the sea, the “image of the ungraspable phantom of life … the key to it all” — I enjoyed Melville’s pleasure in assembling his crew, including the ship’s cook: “yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls; — though once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in their huge bakehouses the pyramids.”

The Failed Exam Paper

I’d never heard of either the book or the author when I took J.D. Salinger’s short novel off the revolving rack of paperbacks and started reading it, lured by the words on the cover telling me “this unusual book” might shock me, or make me laugh, or break my heart, but I would “never forget it.” Although I’d been smiling ever since the “David Copperfield kind of crap” opening, it wasn’t until I got to the scene where Holden’s history teacher “Old Spencer” read aloud to him his failed exam paper that I laughed out loud: “Modern science would still like to know what the secret ingredients were that the Egyptians used when they wrapped up dead people so that their faces would not rot for innumerable centuries. This interesting riddle is still quite a challenge to modern science in the twentieth century.”

Rereading both passages now, the combination of Holden’s “wrapped up dead people” and Melville’s “idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis” has me laughing again, all the more so when Old Spencer goes on to read aloud Holden’s craven note: “Dear Mr. Spencer … That is all I know about the Egyptians. I can’t seem to get very interested in them although your lectures are very interesting. It is all right with me if you flunk me though as I am flunking everything else but English anyway.”

So what makes those embarrassments laugh-out-loud funny? “If you really want to know,” as Holden would say, it’s the idea that Melville might have laughed just as hard at Holden’s exam paper — I could almost hear him bridging the gap between 1851 and 1951. Topping it off was the thought of Salinger himself joining in, along with the image of two Manhattan-born American authors “laughing their asses off” together, as Holden would put it. Ultimately, it’s knowing the real-life history of the Catcher as a work-in-progress accompanying Salinger, from Normandy to the Battle of the Bulge to the liberation of the death camps, not to mention the sound of his portable typewriter on the battlefield and still more laughter as he read the Old Spencer scene to his buddies.

Behind the Attitude

From Holden’s first “if you really want to know about it” to his last “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody,” his unique voice carries you along, providing the requisite attitude, setting the scene, so thoroughly that it’s possible to pass over moments like the paragraph about “Old Selma Thurmer,” the Pencey Prep headmaster’s daughter. Although she “wasn’t exactly the type that drove you mad with desire,” she “was a pretty nice girl…. I liked her. She had a big nose and her nails were all bitten-down and bleedy-looking and she had on those damn falsies that point all over the place, but you felt sort of sorry for her. What I liked about her, she didn’t give you a lot of horse manure about what a great guy her father was. She probably knew what a phony slob he was.”

Holden’s Hat

One of the most important characters in the book enters in the third chapter — “this red hunting hat with one of those very, very long peaks” that Holden bought in New York: “The way I wore it, I swung the old peak way around to the back — very corny, I’ll admit, but I liked it that way. I looked good in it that way.” The hat plays a key role in the upcoming scene with the nightmare of all obnoxious dorm mates Robert Ackley, who tells Holden he got “robbed” after hearing he paid a buck for the hat. When Ackley obnoxiously observes that it’s “a deer-shooting hat,” Holden comes right back at him: “This is a people shooting hat. I shoot people in it.”

By Heart

How many times have I read this book since the summer before my senior year in high school? There’s no keeping track because so much of it seems so immediate and so unforgettable that you mistakenly assume you got it all the first fifteen times. I have no idea how I could have passed over the “people shooting hat,” but I did, and given the he’s-asking-for-it nature of Ackley’s personality, it’s perfectly placed.

Of all the books I know and love, The Catcher may be the only one I’d ever claim to “know by heart” even though I doubt I could recite a single sentence correctly, including the first one. Only by setting aside Holden’s sudden, almost violent assertion about the people shooting hat, do I feel the aftershock of where it landed and on whom in the wider world of readers, as happened almost 30 years later on December 8, 1980, when a disturbed man armed with Salinger’s novel shot someone dead with it — At least that’s the way the assassin conceived the murder of John Lennon, as if the book did it.

By drawing attention to the impact of that statement in contrast to Holden’s characteristic speech patterns (“This is a people shooting hat. I shoot people in this hat.”), I can see that it undercuts the idea of knowing the book “by heart.”

Salinger and Ishmael

I had no intention of straying onto the issue of disturbed readers using Salinger’s wonderful book for their own devices, except for the clipped clarity of the way Holden spits out those words, as if repeating something from an assassin’s manual. In fact, the playwright John Guare built a key scene around it in Six Degrees of Separation. When Paul, the black hustler posing as Sidney Poitier’s son, makes it the coup at the heart of his monologue for the Manhattan sophisticates he’s duping, the Chekhov moment of the gun going off, I felt a sample of one of the things Salinger might have brooded on during his last 45 years in self-imposed exile. It’s also not hard to think of Ishmael at the end of Moby Dick, the Pequod’s lone survivor, “And I Only Am Escaped To Tell Thee.”