Holden Caulfield Goes to War

If The Catcher in the Rye resonates with people in dark places like Mark David Chapman, then it may be because the novel, and its author, passed through hell itself on the way to publication.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Why Uzzy Media Productions. John Lennon is dead. Police have
a suspect in custody whom they describe only as a
local screwball. He is Mark David Chapman, who came to
New York a week ago. I left the hotel room,
I brought a copy of The Catcher in the Rye.

(00:21):
Signed it to Holding Caulfield. From Holding Caufield, I'm not
going to tell you my whole goddamn autobiography or anything.
I'll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened
to me around last Christmas, just before I got pretty
run down and had to come out here and take
it easy. That was the holiday season for soldiers. The

(00:49):
Catcher in the Rye. They have influenced Mark David Chapman
when he killed John Lennon, But the novel had a
very different purpose for the man who wrote it. It
was a means of survival for J. D. Salinge. On
the surface, the Catcher in the Rise of story about
a teenage protagonist, Holden Caulfield, who spends a few days
in New York City after getting kicked out of boarding school.

(01:10):
Take a little deeper, and the story behind Catcher in
the rye, and you'll find it's darker and more complex
than people realize. This is the day for which three
people long have waited. This is D Day. Salinger wrote
that when he stormed the beach of Normandy on D Day,

(01:32):
he had with him on his person six chapters of
The Catcher on the Rock. No one else had copies. Kinselinski,
author of J. D. Salinger A Life. In other words,
if something were to happen to Salinger, holding Calfield would die,
Salinger would survive, but only after witnessing and enduring unimaginable suffering.

(01:58):
Why Lord, why must I learn to testify when all
alone to bees do is to Catcher and the Rock.
I'm Sean Braswell And This is the Thread a podcast
from Assi Media where we examine the interlocking lives and

(02:19):
events of history. We turned back the clock, one story
at a time to reveal how various strands are woven
together to create a historic figure, big idea, or an
unthinkable tragedy. This season, we start with the death of
rock star John Lennon and over the course of five episodes,
actually connected back to communist leader Vladimir Lenin. Along the way,

(02:41):
we meet some of the twentieth centuries greatest artists and writers.
We explore how each of their stories hinge on the
past and influence the future. If you are listening for
the first time, please go to episode one to start
our interconnected story from the beginning in The Catcher in

(03:03):
the Eye exploded into American bookstores, the funny rye iconoclastic
figure of Holden Caulfield would influence generations of young people.
On the fiftieth anniversary of its publication, Louis Manand wrote
in The New Yorker, Salinger is imagined to have given
voice to what every adolescent thinks but is too inhibited

(03:24):
to say. The whole emotional burden of adolescence is that
you don't know why you feel unhappy, or angry or
out of it. The appeal of The Catcher in the Rye,
what makes it addictive, is that it provides you with
a reason. It gives content to chemistry. Catcher has now
sold more than sixty five million copies, and even more

(03:44):
than half a century after its publication, it still sells
around a quarter of a million books each year, and
while it never reached number one on the best seller
lists at the time of its release, Catcher caught Fire,
thrusting the lanky, handsome and dark haired Salinger, still only
thirty two, into the public spotlight. It was something of

(04:05):
a cult novel almost immediately, and the attention of the press,
the attention of the media, the attention of fans was
something that Salinger could not deal with, and so he retreated.
He retreated to someplace where he could write in solitude

(04:26):
and keep to himself and for the most part, keep
the world at bay. Salingers withdrawal from society made Holden's
fictional protestations against modern life and phonies seem all the
more real, and catapulted Catcher to even higher levels of popularity.
Salinger would go on to publish many stories in the
decade or so after Catcher, building worlds of damaged characters

(04:49):
and families, including the highly precocious children of the Glass family,
But all the while he retreated further and further from
society until he sides he's never going to publish again,
and he doesn't. He publishes his last story in nineteen,
but he never stopped writing. The mysterious genius crafting unknown

(05:12):
masterpieces was just too much for the public to resist.
Salinger was stalked by media and fans throughout his time
and seclusion. Those who ventured after him in the ensuing
decades would encounter wall upon wall around the literary giant,
from no trespassing signs to a phalanx of lawyers ready
to challenge any unauthorized use of his works or stories.

(05:33):
For more than half a century, he declined interviews and
shunned photographers. This evening, one of the world's great entertainers
and musicians, John Lennon of the Beatles, were shot outside
his New York home. Slwinski says it's likely that Lennon's
murder at the hands of Mark David Chapman only made
Salinger's paranoia worse. I think he had to have been

(05:55):
aware that if one crazy fan of mine committed this
murder and killed this very famous person, I could be next.
Sounder's withdrawal from the world was all the more striking
given his tremendous ambition as a young man, his dreams
of becoming exactly what he became, a world famous writer.
How could a man turn his back on fame, How

(06:18):
could he turn his back on fortune? How could he
stop publishing? If you have a talent, are you not
obligated to share it with the world. So why did
he turn his back on the world just as he
was achieving his dreams. Sounder's retreat began well before Lennon's
death and even before Catcher made him famous. It wasn't

(06:42):
just to avoid the media or his fans. Like many
war veterans, Salinger was retreating from his own past and
the devastating trauma of combat. The Second World War is,
without a doubt, the pivotal event of Salinger's life. Whereas

(07:03):
before the war all he wanted was his fame and
fortune and recognition. After the war, he's very leary of people.
He's very leary of crowds. He's sort of cowering from
the world. Salinger didn't write much about World War Two,
but one of the unpublished short stories he wrote about it,

(07:25):
The Magic Foxhole, is mesmerizing. In it, Salinger describes the
scene he must have encountered on D Day. There wasn't
nothing on the beach but the dead boys of A
and B company, and some dead sailor boys and a
chaplain that was cooling around looking for his glasses in
the sand. He was the only thing that was moving,

(07:49):
and shows were breaking all around him, and there he
was cooling around on his hands and knees, looking for
his glasses. He got knocked off. That's what the beach
was like when I came in. Sunder was drafted after
Pearl Harbor and assigned to the fourth Infantry Division. In
January nine, he left for England, where he joined tens

(08:12):
of thousands of American soldiers preparing for the Allied invasion
of Europe. When D Day came, Sergeant Salander crowded into
a landing craft with thirty men and launched with the
second wave for Utah Beach just after six thirty a m.
On June six. Within an hour of landing, his division
was moving inland, and from that point on Salinger found

(08:35):
himself in near continuous battle for the next eleven months.
All the while Sounder carried those first six chapters of
the Catcher in the Rye. And he carried these six
chapters throughout the war as if, I think, as if
there were sort of talus, as if he a derived

(08:55):
strength from them. For months at a time. Salinger had
no breaks, no rest, He did not bay their change clothes.
The twenty five year old regiment suffered more casualties than
any other American regiment in the war, and the young
writer witnessed the deaths of countless friends and fellow soldiers.
Salinger's division was also one of the first to enter Germany,

(09:18):
where he ended up in the middle of the bloodiest
fighting of the war, including the infamous Battle of Hitkin Forest.
Hrdkin entailed perhaps the most senseless carnage of the whole war,
historians considered a big strategic blunder and waste of human life.
Men fought from tree line to tree line in the
dark forest and froze to death in the bitter cold

(09:38):
foxhols they slept in. Most of the soldiers the challenge
served with died, and most of them died not from
battle wounds, but from disease and from the elements, and
from frostbite and cold. And he was very nearly one
of those numbers. There were more than three thousand soldiers

(10:01):
and Sunder's regiment that went to Hoodkin. Just over five
hundred survived. Sunder was one of the lucky ones, but
his fighting was not over. Next came the Battle of
the Bulge, the costliest engagement in US Army history, where
over one hundred thousand American soldiers were killed, more fighting
in the forest, more sleeping in frigid conditions. The high

(10:25):
tide of this German attack was reached two days after Christmas.
That was the holiday's season for soldiers ninety four. In April,
the winter thought and Sounder's division sighed with relief. It
appeared the worst was behind them. Then they came upon

(10:46):
the concentration camps at Dachau. Salinger in his division flung
open the gates and prisoners emerged, wearing black and white
striped suits and caps like skeletons and rags. You could
live a lifetime salon your later, told his daughter, and
never really get the smell of burning flesh out of
your nose. To see that level of depravity, that level

(11:09):
of evil in the world has got to rock you,
has got to change you. He used writing throughout the
war as a sort of self therapy, as the way
of dealing with the horrors that he he was witnessing
and what he was going through. It was almost as
if he was clinging to writing as if it were normalcy.

(11:32):
It was something normal to him in a world that's
gone insane. Souder wrote a handful of unpublished war stories,
but he promised himself that he would not write about
the war if he escaped alive. It was a vow
he kept, but the war still infused his work. Take
this well known line from the final chapter of The
Catcher in the Rye about all I know is I

(11:54):
sort of missed everybody I told about. It's funny. Don't
ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.
The angst of Catcher, which would influence millions of readers,
including Mark David Chapman, may not have been the words
of a troubled young man trying to make his way
in the world so much as a grown man trying

(12:16):
to hold his together. Like everything that Salinger wrote after
World War Two, the war simmers just beneath the surface.
World War Two might have destroyed point of Salinger, but
it made him a writer. There would be no catch
on the right were not for the certain World War.
The character of Holding Caulfield might have matured in the

(12:38):
bloody battlefields of Europe, but he was born before the
war in a Manhattan hotel room. Up next, Salinger collides
with the world of the Phonies, the upper crust of
New York's elite society and the girl that broke his heart.

(13:05):
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Young Jerry Salinger grew up like Holden Caulfield on the

(13:26):
Upper East Side, easily the postoust area of Manhattan because
it's not no as kid. Plainly put, he had an ego.
Even as a child, he had a great ego. He
was convinced that he was destined for greatness. He bragged
to his friends even as a teenager, that he would
one day write the great American novel. Salinger published his

(13:48):
first short story just after his twenty one birthday in
nineteen He promptly dropped out of Columbia University, convinced that
this was the first step in a dazzling writing career.
For several months afterwards, he couldn't sell another story. Rejection
after rejection piled up. I wondered if I was a
has been at twenty one, He later said, he spent

(14:16):
the summer of nineteen forty one with friends on the
Jersey shore. There he hung out with the privileged young
people that he had made fun of in his stories.
One of them was the dazzling and very famous Una O'Neill.
Salinger was taken with Una almost immediately. She was literary royalty,
the daughter of the Nobel Award winning playwright Eugene O'Neil,

(14:38):
and at sixteen years old, Una was captivating, was stunning
in her beauty. She was absolutely gorgeous, She was vivacious,
she was young, she was witty. But on the other hand,
there was something privilege about Una O'Neill. Salinger was crazy

(14:58):
about her. Here's how he describes when such love struck
encounter and catcher. She knocked me out. I mean it.
I was half in love with her by the time
we sat down. That's that's the thing about girls. Every
time they do something pretty, even if they're not much
to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid,
you fall half in love with them, and then you
never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ,

(15:21):
they can drive you crazy, they really can. Salinger meets
O'Neill and he's just head over heels and he's probably
walking on clouds when he returns home to New York
at the end of the summer. It was a romance
that would impact Salinger for years. He was obsessed with Una.
He bragged about her to all his friends and family.

(15:45):
Problem was he had trouble keeping up. His parents were wealthy,
but he didn't have an allowance. Now, Salezer was a
no one. He's a broke no one too, and he's
dating this this famous woman with a very famous father,
and the paparazzi following them around. And here's Jerry next time.
And he's trying to date this woman and take up

(16:08):
to these places that he can barely afford. Salinger wasn't
the only one in love with Una O'Neill. Many older,
more sophisticated, and much wealthier men wanted Una on their arm. Salinger,
he has this aversion to what famously will become known
as phoniness. And all of these people are about his phonies.

(16:28):
You're going to get So he has the simmering musentment
for all of these people who were surrounding Una, and
she craves that attention. Salder knew he couldn't keep this
up long. He had to be a published author, published
in the likes of The New Yorker if he had
any chance of keeping Una. The New Yorker was the

(16:49):
epitome of success or any writer of short stories, and
Salinger wanted to be published in The New Yorker more
than anything else. So when it comes time to right
at the end of the summer, he doesn't just go home.
He checks into a hotel room in New York and
begins to type out a short story. This story, A
Slight Rebellion off Madison, is the first appearance of Holden Caulfield.

(17:13):
That's where Holding and the Catching the Rye are actually
born out of sallengers, meaning with As the fall of
forty one went on, Salinger felt Una slipping away, which
added to the urgency of getting published. The New Yorker
had rejected seven of Salinger's stories, but finally A Slight

(17:34):
Rebellion was accepted. It was scheduled to run and it's
Christmas issue. And then the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor yesterday
the summus some nineteen, a date which will live in infamation.

(17:59):
The New Yorker put his story on hold, and in
April nineteen two, Salinger received his draft notice and reported
for boot camp at Fort Dix in New Jersey. That
same month, Una received her own designation from New York
Society Debutante of the Year. Just a few months later,
Una left New York City to be a movie star

(18:20):
in Los Angeles. He knew he was losing her affections her,
he was losing her attention, and one day, while Salinger
was still at boot camp, he saw in the news
purpose that Na O'Neil had married Charlie Chaplin. And that's
how we found out that the love of his life,
at least at that time, had left him. Charlie Chaplin,

(18:45):
world famous movie star and more than thirty years her senior.
On June sixte the eighteen year old Una had the
fifty four year old Chaplain at a Justice of the Piece.
She was his fourth wife. Salinger was freshed more than
anything else. He's humiliated because he has bragged to his family,

(19:05):
he has bragged to his friends and Una O'Neill, the
famous Una O'Neill is his girlfriend. A man scorned is
worse than a woman scorned. This is James Scoville, Una
O'Neill biographer. When she married Chaplain, he sent a letter
was awful letter. And it's this vicious, really vicious um

(19:29):
satire of how he imagines Una and Charlie Chaplin's wedding night,
complete with illustrations. It was a notorious, notorious letter. When
lashing out didn't make him feel any better, Salander took
another tax is. He feigns this sort of romantic apnesia. Oh,

(19:50):
I never loved Una, he says, I've forgotten all about Una.
Will Of course that's not the truth, because only weeks
before he told if friend, I would marry Una tomorrow,
if only she would have me. One year after Salinger
found out about UNA's wedding, he was fighting for his
life on the beaches of Normandy. Una was the great

(20:15):
romantic tragedy of Salinger's life. She played a huge role
in the birth of Holding Caulfield and Salinger's tirade against
the phoniness of New York haised society. Without his heartbreak,
without his battle fatigue, could Salinger have written The Catcher
in the Rye without Holding Caullfield to channel with Mark
David Chapman had gone over the edge. In our next episode,

(20:39):
we pick up the thread with Una O'Neil Chaplin. She's
not nearly as well known as some of the men
whose lives she touched, including Truman, Capodi, Orson Wells, Charlie Chaplin,
and of course J. D. Salinger. Soon you'll hear her
whispering in the background of America's greatest masterpieces, from The
Catcher in the Rye to Breakfast at Ephanis, Let's Learn

(21:05):
the Test and by when All I want to be
just a Catcher and the Threat is produced by Meredith
hot Nut, Laby Coleman, and me Sean braswell. Our editors
are Carlos Watson and Samir Rao. Meredith hot Knot engineered
our show with mixing and sound design from James Rowland's

(21:26):
and Chris Hoff. Special thanks to Cindy Carpi and David Boyer,
Tracy Moran, Sean Colligan, Sun, Jeeve Tandon, Jeremy Williams, Cameo, George,
and k A. LW. This episode featured the song Catcher
in the Rye by Sammy Walker. Check us out at
ausy dot com, that's o z y dot com, or
on Twitter and Facebook. To learn more about the thread,

(21:49):
visit ausi dot com. Slash the thread all one word,
and make sure to subscribe to the thread on Apple Podcasts.
If you love surprising, engaging stories from history like this one,
look no further than the flashback section of Ozzie. Thanks
for listening. H