In Cold Fear: 'The Catcher in the Rye', Censorship, Controversies and Postwar American Character.(Book Review)

In Cold Fear: 'The Catcher in the Rye', Censorship, Controversies and Postwar American Character. By PAMELA HUNT STEINLE. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 2000. x + 238 pp. $45. ISBN 0-8142-0848-7.

Between 1961 and 1982 The Catcher in the Rye 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 start with the language of the 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 ...