| Chapter 1: | The Catcher in the Rye |
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of a plot nor the development of a character” (1959, 84). Mizener found Holden to be “an essentially static character” (84), as did John Aldridge, who noted the following: “He remains at the end what he was at the beginning—cynical, defiant, and blind” (1956, 131). Carl Strauch found the novel to be “thoroughly pessimistic,” with “a distinctly unsatisfactory conclusion…it lacks intellectual substance and a valid universality” (1961, 6, 29). “The book as a whole,” stated Ernest Jones, “is predictable and boring” (1951, 176). Ihab Hassan believed that the novel was completely lacking any “gesture in the direction of Symbolism” (1957, 259), another remarkable oversight, as will also be seen later. “The real achievement of The Catcher in the Rye,” according to Maxwell Geismar, “is that it manages so gracefully to evade just those central questions which it raises…within the scope of its own dubious literary form” (1958, 199). Salinger, concluded Brian Way, “has failed to order his material, and has left in an unrealised form what he is really writing about—evidence not of profundity, but of a collapse of artistic control” (1962, 82).
Among the sketchy information that has been gathered thus far regarding Salinger's reclusive life, one clear and unquestioned fact emerges from a variety of sources: that at a very early time in his life, Salinger, having decided to become a writer, committed himself to a personally designed course of study—a reading program encompassing the world's best authors, including, as we will see, both Shakespeare and Melville—to prepare himself as he pursued his goal in the ensuing years. During his time at the Valley Forge Military Academy, as Ian Hamilton informed us in his book In Search of J. D. Salinger, “All his colleagues viewed him as ‘the writer’” (1988, 29). Later, Hamilton told us, “When Salinger's friend William Maxwell interviewed him in 1951, he came away with the information that after Valley Forge,