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"Catcher" in and out of History

Carol and Richard Ohmann, in "Reviewers, Critics, and The Catcher in the Rye" (Critical Inquiry, Autumn 1976), remind us that J. D. Salinger's youthful novel is a quarter century old. The reminder comes as a shock to me personally, inasmuch as I find myself given some prominence among those "Critics" of the title: as the co-author, with Arthur Heiserman, of one of the first critical essays on Catcher ("J. D. Salinger: Some Crazy Cliff," 1956) and as the author of the 1965 Minnesota pamphlet on Salinger. The Ohmanns treat both the article and the booklet with great tact and tenderness, while at the same time using them as focal points for their considerable disagreements. I do not want to come to the defense of these aging critical works, although I am tempted to identify in the early essay the flashes of genius in the passages written by the late Arthur Heiserman when he was young and energetic and we both were afire with ideas and plans. Both of us were bemused as we watched our essay become enshrined in a succession of Salinger casebooks: it had the distinction of being singled out as a target by George Steiner in a blast against the university critical enterprise in a piece entitled "The Salinger Industry." As the Salinger mania faded, Arthur and I sighed to ourselves that at least the anti-academic critics would not have our article to