In Cold Fear: 'The Catcher in the Rye', Censorship, Controversies and Postwar American Character by Pamela Hunt Steinle

Abstract

MLR, 98.2, 2003 449 'By emphasizing the ways Cold War logic shuts down diversity of thought,' she fears, 'studies of containment culture can end up reproducing the containment culture.' Her antidote? 'By placing wildly disparate texts together, it becomes possible to see how segregation looks from both sides of the wall?and this to detect movements beyond containment' (p. 267). University of Northern Iowa Jerome Klinkowitz In Cold Fear: 'The Catcher in the Rye'y Censorship, Controversies and Postwar Ameri? can Character. By Pamela Hunt Steinle. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 2000. x + 238pp. $45. ISBN 0-8142-0848-7. Between 1961 and 1982 The Catcher in theRye was the most censored title in US high schools and libraries. This startling statistic was the springboard for Pamela Hunt Steinle's new study of Salinger's famous novel. Partly she gives a critical commentary on the novel; partly she reconstructs some of the local controversies which surrounded it. Thus she argues that Holden Caulfield's self-definition is Adamic in drawing on symbolic associations with the Western wilderness (diminished to objects like his deer-stalking cap), but is then compromised by 'postwar cultural conditions of anonymity and alienation' (p. 26). This compromise affects the novel's language and the stance of the narrator, as we shall see in a moment. From the mid-fifties onwards The Catcher was attacked in the name of 'citizen action' by such bodies as the National Organization for Decent Literature and Citizens for Decent Literature. Drawing on her own interviews with some of the participants, Steinle shows that these controversies, often based on an incomplete knowledge of the novel itself, reflected a certain confusion over the aims of education, local hostility to government centralism, and anxiety over perceived changes for the worse in American society. She takes as sample cases the controversies in California (1960-61), New Mexico (1968), and Alabama (1982-83). A number of features emerge from her analysis. Firstly, the attacks were often led by Protestant ministers. Secondly, they tended to assume that a child's mind was like a tabula rasa, passive to external influences. And finally,the attacks tended to startwith the language ofthe novel, which was variously described as 'unfit', 'smut', and so on. From what appears to have usually been a knee-jerk reaction to the language Salinger's detractors made a leap to attack the 'message' of the novel, and Steinle concludes that there was general agreement at this point that Holden's narration represented a 'purposeful questioning of American values' (p. 133). Potentially this study could have made an important contribution to Salinger criti? cism by situating the novel within the concerns and social tensions of the time. Such studies have been carried out on The Belljar and the fiction of Flannery O'Connor with productive results. Unfortunately this does not happen here and the study be? comes all the more limited and impoverished as a result. To take the case of Holden's much-criticized language, its opponents were almost all adults who seem to have had no idea about the actual speech of adolescents. As a result they were attempting to defend an abstracted and rather absurd image of purity. But apart from the question of decorum, Holden's language is full of references to prescribed norms of behaviour which he can neither accept nor ignore. These norms would have made up part of the novel's social context, but Steinle does not go into that area beyond some brief comments on the fear of the bomb. It is a rather bland conclusion that the very processes of censorship showed a kind of local democracy at work since this oversimplifies a complex issue from the 1950s onwards, namely that of censorship. It is no coincidence that Ray Bradbury's famous novel of book-burning, Fahrenheit 451, should have come out in 1953, in a period when the American Library Association 45 o Reviews was campaigning forthe freedom to read. Then, there is the second contender forthe most-censored novel, Huckleberry Finn. Steinle recognizes the relevance of this novel to her subject but again never pursues it, never mentions, forexample, Nat Hentoff's sardonic 1982...