By Stuart Mitchner

“If I live.” These words translated from the Russian can be found at the end of nearly every dated entry in the journal of Leo Tolstoy, who was born on this date, September 9, 1828, and died at 82 on November 20, 1910. On my desk next to Rose Strunsky’s translation of Tolstoy’s Journal 1895-1899 (Knopf 1917) is the Modern Library edition of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, this being the 75th anniversary not only of the book’s arrival in 1951, but of its extraordinary three-month run near the top of the New York Times bestseller list behind big guns like James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, which I read in a massive Signet paperback shortly before being ensnared by the slim Signet Catcher the summer before my senior year in high school.

“Nice”

Online coverage of the New York Public Library’s 2019 Salinger centennial exhibit in ourtownny.com quotes a passage that Salinger eventually deleted: “I think there’s going to be a lot of swearing and sexy stuff in this book. I can’t help it. You’ll probably think I’m a very dirty guy and that I come from a terrible family and all. The trouble is, everybody swears all the time. And everybody’s pretty sexy.”

True enough, this is a character who begins his story (“my whole goddam autobiography”) with language like “lousy childhood” and “David Copperfield kind of crap.” But what surprised me during this reading of the novel is how often and emphatically Holden resorts to the word nice. After rereading the first chapter, I found “nice” already in use in the description of the Pencey Prep headmaster’s “pretty nice” daughter and the two “nice guys” Holden fondly recalls playing catch with when he’s “trying to feel some kind of a good-by…. I don’t care if it’s a sad good-by or a bad good-by, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it.”

“All Nice and Excited.”

It’s when Holden is saying goodbye to the reader that the word “nice” comes prominently into play. In Chapter 24, having just flunked out of Pencey Prep, he tells his former teacher Mr. Antolini that he “almost flunked” Oral Expression because whenever a student making a speech got off the subject, the class was supposed to yell (“as fast as you can”) “Digression!” In the example Holden gives, when the speaker suddenly abandoned the subject of his father’s farm to talk about his uncle’s polio, he was savaged by shouts of “Digression!” Holden admits the speech didn’t have much to do with the farm, “but it was nice. It’s nice when somebody tells you about their uncle…. I mean it’s dirty to yell ‘Digression!’ at him when he’s all nice and excited.”

After Mr. Antolini defends the idea of staying on subject, Holden persists: “But what I mean is, lots of time you don’t know what interests you most till you start talking about something that doesn’t interest you most.…What I think is, you’re supposed to leave somebody alone if he’s … getting all excited about something. I like it when somebody gets excited about something. It’s nice.”

Phoebe

The wonders of The Catcher in the Rye are all too often ignored in favor of buzz words like “alienation.” Besides being the book’s wisest and most engaging character, Phoebe Caulfield illuminates the author’s purpose when, in Chapter 22, she backs her brother into a corner with some questions usually left unasked by readers, myself included. The first time I encountered The Catcher (at 17) the sheer fun of connecting with the colorful language and the instant appeal of Holden’s attitude precluded any true understanding of just how lost he was. William Faulkner once observed that every time Holden “attempted to enter the human race, there was no human race there.” Phoebe, a 4th grader, is afraid he’s giving up the attempt. “You don’t like anything that’s happening,” she tells him after he finishes a long diatribe about the school he’s been expelled from. When he tries to deny it, she keeps at him: “Because you don’t. You don’t like any schools. You don’t like a million things. You don’t.” As he continues stalling, she asks him, “Name one thing,” and he can’t, making feeble excuses to the reader: “The trouble was, I couldn’t concentrate too hot. Sometimes it’s hard to concentrate.”

After some more stalling — does she want to know one thing he likes a lot, or one thing he just likes? — Phoebe’s waiting. He still hasn’t answered her question. “You can’t even think of one thing,” she says, and when he insists, “Yes I can. Yes I can,” she says, “Well, do it, then.” She’s relentless. Even after he finally thinks to mention liking his dead brother Allie, she won’t let him off: “Allie’s dead — You always say that! If somebody’s dead and everything, and in Heaven.” He tries to defend himself (“Just because somebody’s dead, you don’t just stop liking them, for God’s sake”), but she’s not done yet. “All right, name something else,” she says. She’s harder on him than a parent or a teacher; no one but the author himself, speaking through his purest, brightest character, could get away with such an inquisition. “Name something you’d like to be. Like a scientist. Or a lawyer or something.”

A Beautiful Answer

Phoebe’s demand that her brother name something he’d like to be leads to the title-invoking image of Holden standing on the edge of a cliff near a “big field of rye” where “thousands of kids” are playing: “What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff … That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all.”

For a long time, Phoebe has nothing to say to this; she’s absorbing it. Being a catcher in the rye might not make much sense as a profession, but it satisfies her; her persistence has paid off. She’s provoked him to deliver a beautiful answer, an answer worth writing a book around, a book that transcends all the chatter about generational trends and attitudes from sociologists, experts on children’s literature, New York Times feature writers, and well-meaning English teachers like the one who comes into The Catcher after the scene with Phoebe.

The Last Best “Nice”

Although the final paragraph’s opening sentence is pure Holden (“Boy, it began to rain like a bastard”), Phoebe makes it glow. While everyone else ran for cover, including the parents of the other children riding the carousel, Holden “got pretty soaking wet” sitting on the bench watching his sister. “I didn’t care, though. I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don’t know why. It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going around and around, in her blue coat and all. God, I wish you could’ve been there.”

“Everything Flows”

In the September 14, 1896 entry of his journal, Tolstoy lists a series of 15 thoughts, the ninth being that he “found salvation in the thought that there is nothing stationary, that everything flows, changes, that all of this is for a while, and that it is only necessary to suffer the while while we live.”