I haven’t read him in decades—not since college, if my memory is correct. His name has come up in public several times over the years in connection with some scandalous or creepy story. I don’t know how much I’d like his work now, but I suspect the answer is not very much. But Catcher in the Rye meant a lot to me as an alienated teenager, though it was probably not a good influence. As is probably the case with a lot of things that appeal to unhappy adolescents, the thing that comforted me in my alienation also fed it. I don’t remember it very clearly now.
But the one passage which gives the book its title has stayed with me for the forty-five years or so that have passed since I first read it.
“You know that song ‘If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye’? I’d like—“
“It’s ‘If a body meet a body coming through the rye’!” old Phoebe said. “It’s a poem. By Robert Burns.”
“I know it’s a poem by Robert Burns.”
She was right, though. It is “If a body meet a body coming through the rye.” I didn’t know it then, though.
“I thought it was ‘If a body catch a body,’” I said. “Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.”
There are many far worse ambitions. R.I.P.
Light On Dark Water 
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