The Novel of the Rebellious America

WASHINGTON — It was that boy who dreamed of the big fields of rye in the middle of the desert of New York, the young Holden Caulfield, who made us love America — as nobody else had ever managed to do — with the irresistible weapon of truth.

In 1951, when the late Jerome David Salinger, the son of a Jewish seller of kosher delicatessen and of an Irish Catholic, published “The Catcher in the Rye” (renamed “The Young Holden” in Italy because of its untranslatable title), the United States was in the midst of the best years of its life, fresh from military triumphs, industrial muscles and political supremacy.

If there were clouds in the stars and stripes, they were far away — in Korea at war, in Soviet Eastern Europe, in the segregated South and muffled in the silence of the innocent.

For us, on the other side of the ocean, it was the United States of April 18, 1948 that is still fresh in the memory of our fathers — the “choice of field,” red or blue, cross or scythe, revolutions or excommunications, God sees you, Stalin doesn’t. The American Dream. [Editor’s Note: “God sees you, Stalin doesn’t” refers to the Christian Democrat Party’s propaganda slogan against the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the April 1948 democratic elections.]

Everything was going well, everything had to go well: In the big Hollywood musicals and on the stages of Broadway that always had happy endings, in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, and in Detroit, where manufacturers endlessly spewed large-winged tin monsters to satisfy the desire for brazen prosperity and where army tanks were no longer built.

It was the big “Dream” of the first “American kitchens” that would trouble the sleep of the housewives who were still prisoners of tubs and stoves, while the bombshells — Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, Rosalind Russell — would trouble the sleep of their husbands.

Then, in the August of 1951, along came the small book that would open the window to the emptiness on the other side of the wall. Prudish, God-fearing reviewers shuddered from reading truths that could never be painted on the panels of Norman Rockwell.

“The Catcher in the Rye,” as the title suggests, alludes to Holden’s dream of wanting to save children from falling off a cliff by catching them while they run through the rye. The book would not have been the decisive turning point that let most of us fall in love with all of America (and not only with its propaganda) if it hadn’t opened more than a window into American society.

J.D. Salinger, the former foot soldier who had fought on the Western front and suffered from indelible war trauma (unrecognized at the time), opened up a window inside all of the teenagers who read his book, which sold 65 million copies worldwide and was translated into all languages.

We were Holden, or we dreamed of being him, to feel more important. If even the big, omnipotent America carried the same anxieties in the souls of its kids — the same emptiness, the same fear of yourself, and of grown-ups — maybe we were all “all right,” “cool,” “ok,” and none of us were alone.

Today, it could be said that the standout masterpiece of that surly misanthrope, who wrote laboriously every morning between the snow and the birch trees of New Hampshire — not far from where Solzhenitsyn took refuge — and who longed for the pure, desperate joy of writing and hoping not to be published, has become even too “symbolic” (to use a well-worn word). It’s easy to forget the shock that the book represented in the 1950s.

Apparently, what upset the self-righteous bigots of the time were the vulgar words, the squalidly daring situations (like the disastrous encounter between the prostitute and the good family boy who was raised in the best private schools), the sex, the violence and the nihilism that pervades the entire book. But this scandalous brutality was only for show: an appearance, a shell. In a few years, the book would become a banal and reserved reading for high school students, who are now exposed to much more by the entertainment industry. The matter that was most embarrassing for adults, and, therefore, delightful for those who feared, and fear, to grow up, was the vision of rust beneath the gleaming metal — the emptiness in the heart of post-war prosperity.

1951 was the year that saw the explosion of far away mass-produced suburbs, the “Levittown,” named after the first builder who began constructing these houses in Pennsylvania. It was a suffocating monotony of miles and miles of identical small houses, sold in exchange for a $10 security deposit and a $90 deed, with the added bonus of a convenient home loan. The houses were constellated with abandoned bicycles and tricycles in front of garages, with “I-know-everything daddies” who kissed their wives before going to work: Everyone at the same time, everyone in front of the same television, everyone dressed with the same business suit and Borsalino hat, in the desert of a collective, fat and devouring loneliness.

It was the time of Eisenhower, the liberator of Europe, of “I Love Lucy,” broadcast when it was forbidden to show a double bed on television, even for married couples, and when it was unthinkable to utter words like “divorce” or “abortion.” In the Eniwetok Atoll, far in the Pacific, the first thermonuclear bomb exploded. The children watched the spots of “little atom,” the benevolent neutron that would enlighten the nation and protect it from enemies, even if the teachers had to do daily drills to teach the little students to squat down under their desks in case “little atom” exploded nearby.

That America of “little atom” and Levittown could not entirely be true. Salinger explained that to us, perhaps 10 years later — the time it took for an Italian editor to buy and publish the book in Turin. He did not explain this thought with the ideological violence of Michael Moore, or with the impetuous imagery of Oliver Stone. And Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now was still far away. He explained by looking inside of himself, in the dark, in the angst that prosperity stirs in teenagers who don’t know how to face a world that is too beautiful to be true. Teenagers who are abandoned by their parents and don’t know to whom, or how, to express it. An obscure and dangerous abyss, from which Mark David Chapman would be extracted 30 years later. On Dec. 8, 1980, he killed John Lennon in the same Manhattan where Holden Caulfield was shipwrecked. The police caught him after the homicide, while he was reading Salinger.

It was a profound era, the darkness enlightened for a moment by the son of a Jewish shopkeeper and an Irish Catholic, who died at the old age of 91. A boy died at 91.