Is Catcher a dangerous book? When interviewed by us, John Guare, the author of Six Degrees of Separation, said, “If one person used something I had written as the justification for killing somebody, I’d say, ‘God, people are crazy,’ but if three people used something I had written as justification, I would really be very, very troubled by it. It’s not the one; it’s the series of three.” The complicating factor in Salinger’s case—the deepening factor—is the extraordinary intimacy he creates between narrator and reader, and this intimacy is mixed with sublimated violence. He’s so good at creating a voice that seems to be practically caressing your inner ear.
It’s as if the assassins and would-be assassins who read The Catcher in the Rye are reading the book too literally. Everywhere Holden goes—Pencey, Manhattan, his parents’ apartment—he’s an utterly powerless individual. What the book shows you is how Holden comes to accept and even embrace the weakness—the brokenness—within himself, within Phoebe, within everybody. If you’re reading the book through an especially distorted lens, you feel so acutely Holden’s powerlessness that you say, “Yeah, I feel powerless, too,” and you don’t make the crucial leap that Holden finally does and Salinger always does at the end of every book and what the imaginative reader is asked to do—which is to come to see the Fat Lady as Jesus Christ himself, buddy.
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SHANE SALERNO: In John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation, the protagonist, Paul, talks at length about Catcher.
JOHN GUARE: PAUL: A substitute teacher out on Long Island was dropped from his job for fighting with a student. A few weeks later, the teacher returned to the classroom, shot the student unsuccessfully, held the class hostage and then shot himself. Successfully. This fact caught my eye: last sentence. Times. A neighbor described him as a nice boy. Always reading Catcher in the Rye.
The nitwit—Chapman—who shot John Lennon said he did it because he wanted to draw the attention of the world to The Catcher in the Rye and the reading of that book would be his defense. And young Hinckley, the whiz kid who shot Reagan and his press secretary, said if you want my defense all you have to do is read Catcher in the Rye. It seemed to be time to read it again. . . .
Mark David Chapman.
I borrowed a copy from a young friend of mine because I wanted to see what she had underlined and I read this book to find out why this touching, beautiful, sensitive story published in July of 1951 had turned into this manifesto of hate. I started reading. It’s exactly as I remembered. Everybody’s a phony. Page two: “My brother’s in Hollywood being a prostitute.” Page three: “What a phony slob his father was.” Page nine: “People never notice anything.”
Then on page twenty-two my hair stood up. Remember Holden Caulfield—the definitive sensitive youth—wearing his red hunter’s cap. “A deer hunter hat? Like hell it is. I sort of closed one eye like I was taking aim at it. This is a people-shooting hat. I shoot people in this hat.”
Hmmmm, I said. This book is preparing people for bigger moments in their lives than I ever dreamed of. Then on page eight-nine: “I’d rather push a guy out of the window or chop his head off with an ax than sock him in the jaw. I hate fist fights . . . what scares me most is the other guy’s face. . . .”
I finished the book. It’s a touching story, comic because the boy wants to do so much and can’t do anything. Hates all phoniness and only lies to others. Wants everyone to like him, is only hateful, and is completely self-involved. In other words, a pretty accurate picture of a male adolescent.
And what alarms me about the book—not the book so much as the aura about it—is this: The book is primarily about paralysis. The boy can’t function. And at the end, before he can run away and start a new life, it starts to rain and he folds.
Now there’s nothing wrong in writing about emotional and intellectual paralysis. It may indeed, thanks to Chekhov and Samuel Beckett, be the great modern theme. The extraordinary last lines of Waiting for Godot—“Let’s go.” “Yes, let’s go.” Stage directions: They do not move.
But the aura around this book of Salinger’s—which perhaps should be read by everyone but young men—is this: It mirrors like a fun-house mirror and amplifies like a distorted speaker one of the great tragedies of our times—the death of the imagination.
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JAMES YUENGER: Chapman was graduated from high school in 1973. His yearbook photo shows an apple-cheeked young man with dark hair combed over his forehead in [a] Beatle cut. For some time he had been a YMCA counselor and was well-liked. He was especially effective with young people with drug habits. He stayed on at the “Y” while he attended classes for 18 months at the local DeKalb County Junior College.
TONY ADAMS: [I remember] a guy down on one knee, helping out a little kid, or with kids just hanging around his neck and following him everywhere he went. I’ve never seen anybody who was as conscientious about his job and as close to children as he was. The kids always called him Captain Nemo. That’s what he wanted everybody to call him.
JAMES YUENGER: Too unsettled to continue in college—he was twenty and itching to wander—Chapman enlisted Adams’s help in getting a job with a YMCA student work program in Beirut, Lebanon. That, too, did not work out.
“Once he got there, he stepped into the middle of a civil war,” Adams said. “He had to stay in a shelter and he was just never able to do what he wanted to do there—work with kids.”
JACK JONES: Chapman and another young volunteer spent their days huddled under furniture while bombs, rockets, and gunfire erupted in the streets outside. The YMCA volunteers were among the first evacuated from the country. Frightened and disappointed, he returned home to Decatur where his friends recall that he spoke fearfully of the experience and played cassette tapes he had recorded of gunfire and bombs exploding in the streets outside his hotel.
JAMES YUENGER: Chapman returned from Lebanon so depressed that YMCA officials arranged for him to work in a resettlement program for Vietnamese refugees at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas.
MARK DAVID CHAPMAN: I had come off the important experience of a trip to Lebanon—the first foreign trip I’d had—and surviving in a war zone, to the success of Fort Chaffee. Then, all of a sudden, there I was at Covenant College [a Presbyterian college in Tennessee], studying hard, not knowing what on earth hit me and not knowing until this day, this morning, why I was depressed. The true reason was that I felt like a nobody. . . . I wasn’t in charge of anything. I wasn’t in a foreign country taping bomb sounds down on the avenue. . . . I was just like everybody else—a nobody.
PAUL L. MONTGOMERY: Paul Tharp, community relations director of Castle Memorial Hospital on Oahu [Hawaii], said the young man had worked at the hospital’s print shop from August 1977 to November 1979. . . . He said Mr. Chapman had left to seek work as a security guard.
Gloria H. Abe . . . was married to Mr. Chapman on June 2, 1979. . . . She worked in a travel agency in Honolulu. Mr. Chapman’s mother also lives in Hawaii and was said to have lent him money for his New York trips.
JON WIENER: Mark David Chapman was going downhill. He had a job as a security guard [in Hawaii] where he’d been seen putting Lennon’s name on a piece of tape over his own name on his uniform. He was becoming obsessed with John Lennon.
PAUL L. MONTGOMERY: On Oct. 27, Mr. Chapman paid $169 in cash for a five-shot Charter Arms revolver with a two-inch barrel at J&S Enterprises-Guns, Honolulu. The revolver is of a style that is easily concealed.
JON WIENER: He wrote to a friend, saying, “I’m going nuts.” He was clearly aware that something bad was happening to him. He quit his job and decided to let his wife support him. That didn’t make him feel any better. He was a guy who was increasingly having delusions, hearing voices, being troubled, and disturbed by the whole world around him.
J. REID MELOY: In the case of Mark David Chapman, we have an individual who had a variety of psychiatric and mental disorders. This was an individual who had a blighted life, whose father abused his mother, whose mother h
ad a highly eroticized relationship with her son. Chapman himself did not have any whole, healthy sense of who he was.
JON WIENER: Then, in November 1980, he read Laurence Shames’s article in Esquire about John Lennon, who had been one of his heroes. As the plane lifted from the ground and banked north toward New York City, Chapman was absorbed in the magazine’s cover story, a critical and scathing commentary on the opulent life-style of sixties peacenik John Lennon.
LAURENCE SHAMES: On February 3, the Los Angeles Times let out that [Lennon] forked over $700,000 for a beachfront home in Palm Beach, Florida. In May, the New York Daily News reported that Lennon had picked up a sixty-three-foot sailboat and was mooring it on Long Island, where he also happened to own a home—this one a $450,000 gabled job in Cold Spring Harbor.
JON WIENER: Lennon was a man who represented all the hopes and dreams and utopias of the sixties. He had said, “Imagine no possessions; it isn’t hard to do.” The Esquire article was an exposé of Lennon as an over-the-hill capitalist, a rich person who had abandoned his ideals and who owned four mansions, a yacht, swimming pools, and many real estate holdings. He had tax lawyers finding loopholes for him. The theme of the article was: John Lennon is a sellout. He is a phony. This had special meaning to Chapman because he was one of the tens of millions who had read The Catcher in the Rye, and one of the things that meant the most to him in the novel was the idea of the phony, the person who isn’t what he pretends to be. That was the source of the problems in the world, as Mark David Chapman came to see it.
Part of Chapman’s mental illness was that he was very preoccupied with the evil forces in the world that were fighting the good forces. He heard voices he thought were the voices of the devil’s minions. He said he heard them inside himself—the classic paranoid schizophrenic delusion. He had tried to kill himself several years earlier. Now he read the Esquire article and conceived a new mission. Lennon was a phony, and he decided he was going to do something about it.
JAY MARTIN: Having failed to kill himself, Chapman’s identification with Lennon became more and more sinister. He projected his own suicidal wishes onto the object of his identification. Then, to kill the bad things in himself, he had to kill his double, Lennon. Once he had come to consider Lennon a phony, a betrayer of his generation’s ideals, an impostor, he decided that to kill him would be to kill his own bad side. Apparently, Chapman came to see his task as a purification of his fictions. If he could kill the phony, bad Lennon, a forty-year-old businessman who watched a lot of television and who had $150 million, a son whom he doted on, and a wife who intercepted his phone calls—that’s a description from Chapman himself—then Satan’s demons would be defeated, and as a result the world and Chapman himself would be cleansed. One last time, he called his cabinet [the delusional steering committee over which he presided] of his internal world into session and submitted to [these] little people the proposal that he kill the John Lennon impostor.
JON WIENER: John Lennon kind of withdrew from the world for four years. I see this as a time of recovery and healing from all of the turmoil and misery of this two- or three-year immigration battle. He wanted to raise his young son, Sean. And then in 1980 he went back to making music, which was something his fans had missed for a long time. The last Lennon record had come out in 1975, so it had been five years of no music. In December 1980 Lennon was back in the studio. He was recording. He released a single, “Starting Over,” that was going to be part of an album. After a period of withdrawal, Lennon was coming back.
The theme of the Esquire article was John Lennon is a sellout. John Lennon is a phony.
LAWRENCE GROBEL: And look at this guy, you know, he’s a big rock star and he comes in a limousine. Phony stuff, Chapman says.
MARK DAVID CHAPMAN: Well, he, he’s a phony.
J. REID MELOY: The word “phony” is used over thirty times in The Catcher in the Rye. . . . The word “kill” is used a lot in the book.
LAWRENCE GROBEL: You want me to teach you what reality is. . . . BANG!
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JACK JONES: Returning to Reeves’s apartment [childhood friend Dana Reeves, a sheriff’s deputy in Henry County, Georgia], Chapman confided that he had brought a gun with him from Honolulu to New York City. He brought the gun for personal protection, he said, because he was carrying a large amount of cash and he feared being attacked and robbed on the violent sidewalks of New York. He told Reeves he had brought no ammunition from Hawaii, and explained that he had been unable to get bullets in New York. He asked Dana if he could spare a few extra shells for the gun that was still in a suitcase under the bed at his hotel . . .
Chapman refused to accept the standard, round-nosed, jacketed shells that Reeves initially offered him. He wanted something “with real stopping power,” he said, “just in case.” He selected five hollow-point Smith & Wesson Plus P cartridges designed to explode with the deadly effect of tiny hand grenades inside the soft tissue of anticipated human targets . . . just in case.
STEPHAN LYNN: Hollow-point bullets are made to explode and expand [after impact]. Chapman knew that. He knew what these bullets could do.
JON WIENER: In the future, Chapman would say he had wanted to be Holden Caulfield. That was a healthy wish. Caulfield was lonely and troubled, but he was wonderfully sane. Chapman had a moment like that when he returned to New York from going to Atlanta at the end of November. He called his wife and told her, “I’ve won a great victory. I’m coming home.” He made an appointment at the Honolulu Mental Health Clinic for November 26. He was right: that decision was a great victory, a victory of sanity over the internal forces that tormented him. But it was only temporary. He never went back to the clinic, and a week later he started hanging around in the front of the Dakota. Mark David Chapman had lost his struggle.
Chapman was staying in a place not far from the Dakota. He was reading The Catcher in the Rye. In early December 1980 he acted out the key scenes in Catcher. On the morning of December 8, he joined a group of fans waiting outside the Dakota for autographs. Everybody knew where John Lennon lived in New York City. It was known he was recording now, so it wasn’t unusual for there to be a half dozen fans waiting for him.
MARK DAVID CHAPMAN: On December 8, 1980, Mark David Chapman was a very confused person. He was literally living inside of a paperback novel, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. He was vacillating between suicide, between catching the first taxi home, back to Hawaii, between killing, as you [Larry King] said, an icon. . . . Mark David Chapman at that point was a walking shell who didn’t ever learn how to let out his feelings of anger, of rage, of disappointment. Mark David Chapman was a failure in his own mind. He wanted to become somebody important, Larry. He didn’t know how to handle being a nobody. He tried to be a somebody through his years, but as he progressively got worse—and I believe I was schizophrenic at the time, nobody can tell me I wasn’t, although I was responsible—Mark David Chapman struck out at something he perceived to be phony, something he was angry at, to become something he wasn’t, to become somebody.
J. REID MELOY: For Chapman, The Catcher in the Rye became the instrument of the murder he would carry out. The Catcher in the Rye is a sweet book. Holden’s fantasy is to save those children. It’s not a dark fantasy; it’s not a killing fantasy. The perversion in cases [like Chapman’s] is that you pull out passages to use to give you a rationale to carry out murder. It’s important to recognize that with any narrative, if you are intent on homicide you can extract from the pages the rationale that allows you to go and kill.
Chapman traveled to New York City. He engaged in behaviors like Holden did in the book. He hired a prostitute. He met with that prostitute. But then the aggression came into play and he began to plan and carry out the act that brought him to New York City in the first place. He coveted what John Lennon had. He wanted to take that from him.
PAUL ALEXANDER: In the late morning [of December 8], Chapman greeted Lennon’s housekeeper when she took Sean for a walk, even go
ing so far as to pat the five-year-old on the head. Double Fantasy, Lennon’s new album on which he had collaborated with Yoko Ono, had been released three weeks earlier by Geffen Records.
MARK DAVID CHAPMAN: The adult and the child got up that morning and laid out all the important things to the child: The Bible. The photo with the Vietnamese kids. The music [The Ballad of Todd Rundgren, an album by Lennon rival Todd Rundgren]. The pictures of The Wizard of Oz. The passport and the letters of commendation for my work with the Vietnamese kids. This was the child’s message, the tableau that said: This is what I was. These are the things that I was. I’m about to go into another dimension.
PAUL L. MONTGOMERY: About 5 p.m. . . . Mr. Lennon and Miss Ono left the Dakota for a recording studio. Mr. Chapman approached Mr. Lennon for an autograph . . . and he scribbled on the cover of his new album, Double Fantasy, recorded with Miss Ono and released two weeks ago.
MARK DAVID CHAPMAN: I left the hotel room, bought a copy of The Catcher in the Rye, signed it to Holden Caulfield from Holden Caulfield, and wrote underneath that “This is my statement,” underlining the word “this,” the emphasis on the word this. I had planned not to say anything after the shooting. Walked briskly up Central Park West to 72nd Street and began milling around there with fans that were there, Jude and Jerry, and later a photographer that came there. . . .
[Lennon] was doing an RKO radio special, and he came out of the building and the photographer . . . Paul Gores, he kind of pushed me forward and said, here’s your chance. You know, you’ve been waiting all day. You’ve come from Hawaii to have him sign your album. Go, go.
And I was very nervous and I was right in front of John Lennon instantly and I had a black, Bic pen and I said, John, would you sign my album. And he said sure. Yoko went and got into the car, and he pushed the button on the pen and started to get to it write. It was a little hard to get it to write at first. Then he wrote his name, John Lennon, and underneath that, 1980.
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