Dear all,
Welcome to the accompanying blog post for my YouTube video on “The Catcher
in the Rye”.
If you haven’t watched it yet, here is the link:
And you can subscribe to my channel here:
I say in the video that I may be irresponsible for selecting a book
that describes underage teenage drinking and that is because of the concern for
any potential teenager viewers of the video who may be tempted to recreate the
drinks… I guess there is not a huge amount I can do to prevent that but when it
comes to discussing the book who is it actually aimed at and should I be
worried about a teenage audience? Is it not the case that in fact it is an
adult readership Salinger was aiming for and because of its success it has
become a staple diet of all ages?
Page 130.
‘He said he had a date. Then he ordered a dry martini. He told the bartender to make it very dry, and no olive.’
Page 62.
‘I ordered a Scotch and soda, and told him not to mix it – I said it fast as hell, because if you hem and haw, they think you’re under twenty-one and won’t sell you any intoxicating liquor.’
I won’t be mentioning any of the more controversial aspects of the
book’s history and connections or referencing Salinger himself. There is a very
interesting documentary on him you can watch now, simply titled ‘Salinger’, if
you want to learn more about the man. This post and the video series it belongs to is only
concerned with the theme of alcohol.
Booze is mentioned a lot in this book and even though the main
character Holden Caulfield is underage there are several references to his
appearance and the fact he can get away with looking older, although that
doesn’t always help him. That brings me back to my early forays into drinking
alcohol, I looked older and was one of the lads that could convince some shops
to sell me alcohol and I’m sure there are those amongst you that can remember
the nerves as you swung the door open and gave it your best shot. Now of course I am not condoning that, but it is what happened though so I’m not going to lie. A
lot of my friends are parents now and I bet they have their concerns about what
their kids get up to. There was also the pain of being turned away from pubs
and clubs… bad times.
Page 62.
‘...but I called him back. ‘Can’tcha stick a little rum in it or something?’ I asked him. I asked him very nicely and all. ‘I can’t sit in a corny place like this cold sober. Can’tcha stick a little rum in it or something?’
Page 67.
‘The one ugly one, Laverne, kept kidding me because I was only drinking Cokes. She had a sterling sense of humor. She and old Marty were drinking Tom Collinses – in the middle of December, for God’s sake. They didn’t know any better.’
If I cast my mind back to those times then there is definitely that
sense of being totally out of my depth. I thought I knew what I was doing and
most of the time I was a confident young lad who enjoyed new experiences and
the pretend time I stole being in the adult world. There were also scary,
frightening times. Moments when there was violence, lack of money and being stuck in
the middle of nowhere with no idea which way to start walking (pre Google Maps
app on the iPhone) and other situations that I simply did not know how to handle.
Page 75.
‘I let it drop. I was afraid he was going to crack the damn taxi up or something. Besides, he was such a touchy guy, it wasn’t any pleasure discussing anything with him. ‘Would you care to stop off and have a drink with me somewhere?’ I said.’
Page 77.
‘I ordered a Scotch and soda, which is my favorite drink, next to frozen Daiquiris. If you were only around six years old, you could get liquor at Ernie’s, the place was so dark and all, and besides, nobody cared how old you were. You could even be a dope fiend and nobody’d care.’
Perhaps that is why it is interesting to read a character like
Holden. I can associate with some aspects of his drinking. I wonder what it
would have been like to have been me in his situation, in New York, in private
education, with his family and history. How would I have gone about the night?
Would I have visited the same bars and met the same people? Would I have been
more sensible or perhaps braver? Would I have risked more? Would I have run
home?
What is more important is how much did I know about my environment
and the associations and connotations related to drinking in general? Holden
makes a lot of observations about people’s use of alcohol and makes assumptions
about their character and their intelligence from their drinks and their
drinking.
I’m not so sure I was that clever. I don’t think I knew a variety of cocktails at
16 or 17 although maybe that’s just because I can’t remember (all those years
of boozing destroying the brain cells and all that…) and I’m not sure I would
have made the connection between what a person chose to drink and what that
says about them; I think I would have been more basic in my observations.
That is one of the criticisms of the way Holden speaks. Is he too
aware of his surroundings and adult life? There are plenty of occasions (The
duck question being one of the more obvious) in the book when the child Holden
is shown, the naïve and immature Holden; but there are also plenty of times
when he seems to be endowed with many more years worldy-wise experience then a
teenager could have. Saying that, I do not have knowledge of the world he lived
in and there is an argument to be made that his family position has thurst him
very early into adult society.
Page 93.
‘But I’m crazy. I swear to God I am. About halfway to the bathroom I sort of started pretending I had a bullet in my guts. Old Maurice had plugged me. Now I was on the way to the bathroom to get a good shot of bourbon or something to steady my nerves and help me really go into action.’Page 135.
‘Boy I sat at that goddam bar till around one o’clock or so, getting drunk as a bastard. I could hardly see straight. The one thing I did, though, I was careful as hell not to get boisterous or anything. I didn’t want anybody to notice me or anything or ask how old I was. But boy, I could hardly see straight.’
Also, and for me the most important point, we as adults very easily forget how
much we knew back then as children.
Actually one quick point: I am British and writing this from London,
England. Our legal drinking age has an interesting history and it’s worth
reading up on if you have the time but in terms of buying alcohol in licensed
public houses (drinking only, there are differences if you are eating a meal)
the minimum age has been 18 years old for a long time. When I looked up the
licensing laws in New York at the time the story was set in I was surprised to
see it was also 18. I was always under the assumption (and I travelled to the
states once too) that the US minimum age was always 21. So in fact, Holden is
not hugely underage, the difference is just one or two years and he more than
likely would have got away with underage drinking should he have visited London
as well.
Page 163.
‘He had on his bathrobe and slippers, and he had a highball in one hand. He was a pretty sophisticated guy, and he was a pretty heavy drinker.’
Page 167.
‘All old Mr Antonlini had was another highball, though. He makes them very strong, too, you could tell. He may get to be an alcoholic if he doesn’t watch his step.’
Anyway, back to the point about forgetting how much children know.
They hear and see everything and it is silly to think that you can hide
everything from them. They pick up on emotions and situations and learn from
them and one of my hero’s Roald Dahl talked about this a lot. He felt he could
still remember what it was to think like a child and he considered it a great
asset in his writing. I’m not saying that critics are right or wrong when
saying that Salinger wrote a thirty year olds mind into a teenage body but it
is worth considering that teenagers can be wise old souls on occasion.
For all of the mentioning of booze and his desire to have a drink he
is wary of alcoholics and it makes you wonder to what extent he is deliberately
hurting himself or unwittingly doing so. He is so concerned with authenticity
and ‘phonies’ that I could understand the desire to look real and act the part.
If you are in an adults world then you drink, that’s just the way of things
isn’t it? But we see in the significant Chapter 24 when he visits Mr Antonlini
that he doesn’t automatically connect excessive drinking with being bad, as he
initially talks admiringly of Mr Antonlini, he sees him as intelligent and someone
to be looked up to and is in fact worried that he may be drinking too much. So,
to an extent, maybe Holden sees himself in him a little bit… too intelligent to
have a drinking problem.
Page 116.
‘The waiter came up, and I ordered a coke for her – she didn’t drink – and a Scotch and soda for myself, but the sonuvabitch wouldn’t bring me one, so I had a coke, too.’
Page 128.
‘I sat down at the bar – it was pretty crowded – and had a couple of Scotch and sodas before old Luce even showed up. I stood up when I ordered them so they could see how tall I was and all and not think I was a goddam minor. Then I watched the phonies for a while.’
An aspect of Holden’s experience we can all associate with is the
desire to see the world differently when drinking. Now you could argue I
suppose that that is phony in itself, I mean, deliberately altering our state
of perception. For most people it is an entirely pleasurable experience, we
chose to drink alcohol because it calms us down, makes us feel better, breaks
down our inhibitions, brings us to a point where we can laugh and joke and
relax freely and without care. Of course, it can go too far and I am sure we
all have our moments of drunkenness that we wish to forget. The main thing here is authenticity. Drink
makes us change the way we see the world but also the way the world sees us.
I’m not talking about the stupid acts of bravado we may be easily encouraged to
attempt, our loose tongues and other problematic inducements of alcohol but
rather our projected normal appearance. Holden manages to make easy assumptions
based on people’s drinks and we can do that too sometimes, we judge a person if
they drink too much and attach negative connotations to it, we can worry about
a person’s ability to get on in the adult world, drive, go to work, etc. So for
me, I can see a direct relationship between Holden’s drinking, or rather, his
desire to drink in the adult world, and his attempt to be in control of mental
illness, and by that I tend in this case to focus on depression. It’s the
easiest thing in the world to drink away problems and it’s the easiest thing in
the world to hide depression in a hangover. So in a strange way, drinking
alcohol is both an attempt to be in control of your life, and a way to disguise
how out of control you are. That may be something that Holden has the uncanny
ability to see through, adults who are not as in control of their lives as they
think they are. It’s a horrible process growing up and realizing that adults
are not the clever, intelligent, sophisticated and responsible beings you
always think they are. There isn’t a magic line you cross over when you turn 18
or 21 or any age whereby all the virtues you assume people who control your life
growing up suddenly embed themselves into you and you are now a responsible
adult. Perhaps Holden can see that and he is annoyed by the veil of
authenticity we place over ourselves by money, jobs, marriage, having children
and of course, alcohol.
Page 81.
‘The more I thought about my gloves and my yellowness, the more depressed I got, and I decided, while I was walking and all, to stop off and have a drink somewhere. I’d only had three drinks at Ernie’s, and I didn’t even finish the last one. One thing I have, it’s a terrific capacity. I can drink all night and not even show it, if I’m in the mood.’
Anyway, I’m no expert as I’ve already said. I’m simply throwing a
few thoughts your way and seeing if any make sense. You may consider me wrong
on many points or there could be several key issues I’m missing. Feel free to
comment or write to me with your responses. The point of these blogs is to expand just a little on the background as to why I picked the book for the video.
Frozen Daiquiri
- Simple Syrup: 35ml or 1.2 fl oz
- Freshly Squeezed Lemon: 25ml or 0.85 fl oz
- Rum: 50ml or 1.7 fl oz
- Ice & Blend!
Rum Swizzle (Highball)
- Simple Syrup: 20ml or 0.68 fl oz
- Freshly Squeezed Lime: 25ml or 0.85 fl oz
- Velvet Falernum: 10ml or 0.34 fl oz
- Angostura Bitters: Two dashes of
- Rum (Aged): 50ml or 1.7 fl oz
- Ice & Swizzle!
The Catcher in the Rye
The edition I own and used for this video was published by Penguin
Books in 1994. ISBN: 9780140237504
Here are some links for you to further research the book:
Thanks for watching and don’t
forget to let me know if you have any recommendations on what we should recreate
next.
Thanks to Ruairi of The
Bonneville
Enjoy! (Responsibly)
RGR
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