BY ELMER A. ORDOÑEZ



The novel Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951 but I don’t remember having read J.D. Salinger’s popular classic at the time. Perhaps I was absorbed in the work of standard authors taught in literature classes. There were as well the novels in the USIS Library in Escolta including Cold War accounts of disaffected left intellectuals.

Since we as students were short of money to buy books, we exchanged whatever titles we had—including US armed forces paper editions sold on the sidewalks of rubbled post-war Manila. The Popular Bookstore in Doroteo Jose was the mecca of book lovers, academicians, and writers at the time for it carried (it still does in Morato) progressive books as well as the latest US editions. The bookstore then was also surveilled by military agents. During the 1950 round-up of the politburo in Manila, a good number of the store’s habitués were “invited” by the MIS for questioning. The store owner was among them. The agents alleged the Popular was used as a message center by “subversives.”

While an actual rebellion was going on at the time, students were emulating James Dean in films like The Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden. This was the extent of many students’ involvement. Some UP students in the late 40s did volunteer to fight on the side of the Indonesian merdeka fighters, and were already in the freighter docked in Manila bay, but the authorities intervened and jailed the students for a few days to cool off. There was also a UP student rally to Malacañang in 1951 to protest President Quirino’s firing of Bienvenido Gonzalez as UP president. Otherwise college student leaders attended CONDA (Conference Delegates Association) meetings in Baguio as junketeers. In the 1953 election they were co-opted by two presidential candidates for propaganda work.

In the US students worshipped James Dean who died young and became a cult figure; they also read Catcher in the Rye whose 17-year-old character/narrator Holden Caulfield they could identify with. Books like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Albert Camus’ The Rebel were also popular on campus but not as widely read as Catcher. It was in the late 50s at the University of Wisconsin that Salinger’s novel really came to my attention. Also vying for readership were the “Angries, ” the post-war group of young English writers including John Osborne and Harold Pinter, and Jack Kerouac whose novel On the Road popularized the beat generation.

In a college in Potsdam, New York, where I taught in 1961-62, I was introduced to the music of Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, and the more popular Bob Dylan particularly his song “Blowin’ in the Wind” which became an anthem of Ban the Bomb movement and the civil rights marches along with “We Shall Overcome.” The Vietnam War was also heating up toward an explosion of student demonstrations and takeovers of campuses protesting the war. Here the national democratic movement was building up to the First Quarter Storm of 1970 even as students took to the Beatles who had themselves undergone transformation. Not too far away was martial law.

It was fun to teach Catcher in the Rye in a course Literature for Young Adults along with William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Nevil Shute’s On the Beach. The Catcher’s plot was simple, involving the journey of Holden Caulfield, a 17-year-old drop-out, to New York and his descent into the underworld of vice and prostitution in Manhattan. He sobered up when his younger sister Phoebe wanted to join him in running away. The students were no strangers to Holden’s rebellious character and coarse language—a far cry from the urbane speech rendered in the fiction of Henry James and Joseph Conrad, which I also tried to teach them. 

I wondered why I hadn’t read Catcher in the Rye earlier. At times, in forays to Manhattan for research in the libraries, I allowed myself to meander to places—not unlike what Holden Caulfield did or what young Stephen Dedalus did exploring the side streets and alleys of Dublin in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Luckily I didn’t get mugged in 42nd or Central Park or a deserted subway station.
Discretion of course always took over from adventure.

In 1986 after a 12-year exile in Montreal, I taught again English/comparative literature in Diliman. One was Thesis Writing and my students included Jessica Zafra. While I preferred topics on Filipino authors, Jessica proposed a study of J.D. Salinger. At the Philippine PEN conference in 2008, Jessica as panelist recalled that I let her write her thesis on Salinger. With the iconic author’s passing, her comprehensive work on him deserves refurbishing for publication. Several generations should be interested in it.

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