Coming through the Rye

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.

Vor sechzig Jahren ist The Catcher in the Rye erschienen. Sie erinnern sich, dieser Roman mit dem frechen Anfang: If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They're quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They're nice and all - I'm not saying that - but they're also touchy as hell. Besides, I'm not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. 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.

Out here im letzten Satz heißt Kalifornien, und to take it easy heißt, dass er nicht mehr an der Pencey Prep ist sondern in der Psychiatrie. Wegen this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down. Ich kann nicht behaupten, dass es mein Lieblingsroman ist. Ich habe vor genau einem ➱Jahr eigentlich schon mal eine ganze Menge dazu gesagt, aber ich wollte heute das Jubiläum nicht verpassen. Ich habe damals auch gesagt, dass ich eigentlich Edisto von Padgett Powell viel besser finde. Was mir das Lob von mindestens einem Leser eintrug. Ich glaube, ich werde irgendwann mal ein wenig über Padgett Powell schreiben. Wenn ich sein neuestes Buch gelesen habe. The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? heißt es. Also, falls ich überhaupt mal zu Lesen komme, ich schreibe zu viel.

Salinger ist hier schon so häufig erwähnt worden. Seinen Borgward habe ich auch schon erwähnt. Irgend wie mag ich nicht mehr über ihn schreiben. Lesen Sie doch den Post vom 16. Juli 2010. Aber ich hätte doch noch was Nettes für Sie: einen schönen Artikel von Louis Menand aus dem New Yorker:

"The Catcher in the Rye" was turned down by The New Yorker. The magazine had published six of J. D. Salinger's short stories, including two of the most popular, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," in 1948, and "For Esmé —with Love and Squalor," in 1950. But when the editors were shown the novel they declined to run an excerpt. They told Salinger that the precocity of the four Caulfield children was not believable, and that the writing was showoffy—that it seemed designed to display the author's cleverness rather than to present the story. "The Catcher in the Rye" had already been turned down by the publishing house that solicited it, Harcourt Brace, when an executive there named Eugene Reynal achieved immortality the bad way by complaining that he couldn't figure out whether or not Holden Caulfield was supposed to be crazy. Salinger's agent took the book to Little, Brown, where the editor, John Woodburn, was evidently prudent enough not to ask such questions. It was published in July, 1951, and has so far sold more than sixty million copies.


Das fängt doch gut an. Sie können ➱hier weiterlesen.