1964: IT'S LIKE THIS, CAT by Emily Neville, with illustrations by Emil Weiss
My father is always talking about how a dog can be very educational for a boy. This is one reason I got a cat.
"Ah I love that book. The way he just [clenches fist] catches all that frickin rye."
-David Hughes on Twitter
[This essay contains a discussion of suicide.]
So I don't know how big, geographically speaking, the Battle of the Bulge actually was. It looks like over 1.1 million soldiers fought: a little north of 700,000 from the Allies and a little north of 400,000 from the Axis (which was mainly Germany as Japan was fighting in another part of the world and everyone had figured out by this point how useful the Italians were going to be). 138 million people lived in the United States in 1944, so if you assume every single Allied soldier was American - and they weren’t - that is still about one-half of one percent of the entire country fighting. Obviously, it wasn’t all Americans, and it was mostly men, and the soldiers were mostly in one age cohort, so all of my math is imperfect here, but we’re talking one very specific battle - albeit a big one - that had three particularly influential twentieth-century writers in American culture, and influential writers to me personally, all fighting at the same time. I don’t believe they ever met each other while in Europe, but how did the three of them end up in the same battle? What the hell would a conversation between the three of them have sounded like? I cannot get past it. Mel Brooks was in the same climactic World War II battle as Kurt Vonnegut, in the same climactic World War II battle as J.D. Salinger. And each of them produced, we’ll say, very different pieces of writing in response to their war experience1.
1964 medalist It’s Like This, Cat is pleasant and forgettable. Good-natured stickball-playing fourteen-year-old Dave Mitchell is growing up in Manhattan, takes in a stray cat, and gets into…I wouldn’t even call them misadventures, that sounds too grand. He goes to visit a friend after hooking him up with a job at a gas station, and he goes on awkward double-dates to the movies with girls he met at the beach, and the book is mostly a pleasant tour through Coney Island and Gramercy Park and the Bronx Zoo and happy teenaged boys running around New York. The Kirkus review, printed on the jacket of my edition, reads “the author knows the language of a New York boy in the same sense that Mark Twain knew the talk of a Mississippi River one”, and the Christian Science Monitor review reads that “the conversation is modern teen-age but never phony.” There’s something to that. Protagonist Dave talks like how I would imagine a teenager in 1960s New York would talk, he says gee and swell and heck and other stupid words that stupid people said before we invented “bussin”. But two of the slang terms that good-natured Dave used stuck out to me. At two different points in the novel, Dave describes things as “phony”, and later as “crumby”, spelled with that “b”. And look, if I’m gonna read a book about a good-natured teen in New York calling things phony and crumby, I’m going to go to my bookshelf after I’m done and pick up the other book about a teen in New York calling things phony and crumby, a teen that we will say is noticeably less good-natured that Dave Mitchell.
I somehow got through high school and college without ever being assigned The Catcher In The Rye, J.D. Salinger’s load-bearing pillar of twentieth-century American maturation literature, which meant I bought it in a Los Angeles Barnes and Noble (lol remember that2) as an adult and read it in my work cafeteria to take extra-long lunches because I hated my job, like a normal non-threatening person would do.
So, do you remember Catcher? Loss of innocence that comes with age, oh crap I want to hold on so bad to my childhood but I can’t because nobody can, ah damn how do I mature and make myself live humbly for something rather than trying to die nobly for it, oh no life gets worse when you’re an adult and that’s the true tragedy that we all have to live with, if only we could stand in the field of rye and catch all these children before they run over the edge of the cliff. Yeah, that’s all great, it’s a good book, whatever, here are two things you should keep in mind if you ever read it again. The first is that Salinger started publishing parts of Catcher serially in 1945. He had fought in the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 and afterwards went about entering and discovering Nazi death camps in Europe. There is no way in hell he just separated himself from that experience to write a cool edgy story about a prep school kid. The second thing to keep in mind is that Holden Caulfield, the mythic-tier foulmouthed chain-smoking cynical pissant narrator and protagonist of Catcher, is quite possibly insane by the time he gets around to telling you his story.
On page one of Catcher, Caulfield tells you that “I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run down and had to come out here and take it easy.” On page 213 of Catcher, which is in the final chapter and the second to last page of the novel overall, Caulfield makes a passing reference to “this one psychoanalyst guy they have here” asking him all sorts of questions about what he’s going to do with his future. You probably remember that Catcher is Caulfield narrating the time he flunked out of his Pennsylvania prep school and decided to spend a long weekend dicking around in Manhattan before having to go home and face up to his parents. But he’s narrating the entire story from southern California, and he indirectly hints, only at the very beginning and very end of the novel, that he’s had a breakdown and is telling his story from a psychiatric hospital. As a reader, what I remember about Caulfield is his snot-nosed dismissal of everything as phony and his superball stream-of-consciousness that keeps driving the overall plot off of a cliff. People read that and go, “ah yes, this is what it’s like being a teen”, but Caulfield is not an archetypal teen, there is additional darkness there that makes this story more than a time capsule of 1960s teenagerdom. Readers remember the story, but forget the frame that colors the entire story; it's similar to remembering that the foreword to Lolita frames the entire narrative as a statement Humbert Humbert wanted to present to the jury at his criminal trial, which makes the narrative asides and linguistic flourishes feel very different.
There are also two pivotal moments in Caulfield’s narrative that hint at this much deeper underlying darkness inside. The first is a big monologue Caulfield delivers when he’s out ice skating with his on-again-off-again squeeze Sally, maybe you remember this one, I did from my first read, this is one of the biggest moments when we get the “LIFE GETS WORSE WHEN YOU ARE AN ADULT” message. On a whim, Caulfield, begs Sally to just up and leave her family behind and move to Vermont with him that day, to just start a new life separated from all of the phonies Caulfield is used to from his prep school and his family. She responds:
“‘We’ll have oodles of time to do those things - all those things, I mean after you go to college and all, and if we should get married and all. There’ll be oodles of marvelous places to go to. You’re just-’
‘No, there wouldn’t be. There wouldn’t be oodles of places to go at all. It’d be entirely different,’ I said. I was getting depressed as hell again.
‘What?’ she said. ‘I can’t hear you. One minute you scream at me, and the next you-’
‘I said no, there wouldn't be marvelous places to go to after I went to college and all. Open your ears. It'd be entirely different. We'd have to go downstairs in elevators with suitcases and stuff. We'd have to phone up everybody and tell 'em good-by and send 'em postcards from hotels and all. And I'd be working in some office, making a lot of dough, and riding to work in cabs and Madison Avenue buses, and reading newspapers, and playing bridge all the time, and going to the movies and seeing a lot of stupid shorts and coming attractions and newsreels. Newsreels. Christ almighty. There's always a dumb horse race, and some dame breaking a bottle over a ship, and some chimpanzee riding a goddam bicycle with pants on. It wouldn't be the same at all. You don't see what I mean at all.’”
It’s a very moving monologue, especially to read at age 36, but Sally commented on Caulfield being hard to hear after he had just been screaming at her. She had told him to stop screaming on the previous page. Caulfield never indicates at any point during this scene whether he is raising or lowering his voice, and in fact, when Sally tells him to stop screaming, Caulfield even directly says to the reader - as the narrator, not to Sally as a character, he stops the dialogue and puts this in - that Sally is being ridiculous and he’s not actually screaming at all. Sally is presented as somewhat ditzy, but obviously capable of processing reality, and Caulfield is the guy who ended up in the psych ward. Do you think he may have been screaming about his sudden impulsive desire to move to Vermont? There’s the big message about the loss of innocence and joy as we leave childhood, that one I caught the first time through. It took me another few tries to get the message about Caulfield being extremely unwell.
The other moment is, of course, when Caulfield describes his dream to be the catcher in the rye, which is what he tells his little sister Phoebe in response to the question “name something you’d like to be”. That’s not actually the first question Phoebe asks him, Phoebe first asks him “name one thing you like”, she wants her brother to stop being a cynical asshole for a second and say one good thing about the world. And she has to narrow her question to Caulfield because he doesn’t answer her the first time, because he gets stuck thinking about James Castle. And maybe your English teacher already underlined James Castle for you in high school, but like I said, I somehow missed this one, and it seems pretty important to me because he’s the guy Caulfield is actually thinking about before he fumbles and says “I guess I’d catch all that frickin’ rye.” As Caulfield tells it, James Castle was a classmate of his who was being brutally bullied by other students for a comment about them being “conceited”: “I won’t even tell you what they did to him - it’s too repulsive”. Eventually, rather than concede to the bullies’ demands and apologize to them, Castle just kills himself in front of them by throwing himself out of the window:
“I was in the shower and all, and even I could hear him land outside. But I just thought something fell out the window, a radio or a desk or something, not a boy or anything…there was old James Castle laying right on the stone steps and all. He was dead, and his teeth, and blood, were all over the place, and nobody would even go near him.”
That’s what Caulfield is stuck thinking about when Phoebe is asking him what’s good about the world. He can’t think of anything good about the world because he’s too busy remembering these acts of tremendous cruelty that led to a boy ending his life in such a stomach-turning way. And that's like the eighth-most upsetting personal anecdote that Caulfield jams into an aside in this novel. But Caulfield saw this happen, and his solution was basically “I hope nobody ever grows up again”.
Near the end of Catcher, Caulfield is told that “you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be frightened and stimulated to know.” Which is true, Caulfield isn't the first person sickened by human behavior, but Salinger kind of was. Salinger liberated Nazi death camps as a GI. Salinger saw horrors that most of humanity had not yet processed. And after seeing those things - like, immediately after - he wrote a famous story about a kid whose only hope was that nobody else would ever grow up and have to see anything like this again. Vonnegut saw horrors, too, and he decided he had to unstick himself in time, to chuckle to himself that it couldn’t be all that horrifying when placed against the grand sweep of the galaxy. Brooks saw horrors, too, and decided it would be pretty funny if he wrote “Springtime for Hitler” (and it was pretty funny). But it was Saligner’s response, especially when placed against a contrasting work like It’s Like This, Cat, the novel about a kid who hasn’t grown up yet, that shows how horrifying growing up can be in contrast to what the kids might be reading about.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1983 medalist, Dicey’s Song by Cynthia Voigt.
Tony Bennett was there too. Also a big influence in my personal taste in art, but he doesn’t fit the theme of the essay. Rest in peace.
Meaning Barnes and Noble, not Los Angeles, which to my knowledge is still around.