If Memory Serves by John Moriarty

Our first nonfiction piece for the new blog - writer John Moriarty tackles Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, and takes his own walk down memory lane.

If Memory Serves

JOHN MORIARTY

If Memory Serves

I.

Even as I’m recording, I can tell that this voice note will be barely intelligible over the London traffic. Good thing I’m only sending it to myself. I’m speaking aloud in an effort to put a shape around a thought I’ve been having all day, but I’m mumbling because I don’t want any of it to be heard by passers-by.

I’m on my way to see someone I’ve not seen for a long time. He’s a renowned painter and we’re meeting at his studio in Kensington. If asked to introduce you in person, I’d first tell you he was a school friend. When we met in secondary school, he was two years ahead of me, and the idea that we could form a friendship from either side of the chasm separating the ages fourteen and sixteen was counter-cultural in the extreme. In our Jesuit-run, suburban Dublin school, boys in years one through three wore grey uniforms before transitioning to a deep maroon for senior cycle. ‘School friend’ sounds unremarkable, but at the time, many remarks were passed about this ickle grey-jumpered snot socialising above his station.

But friends we were, and socialise we did. We bonded over shared musical passions, with me assuming an apprentice role; CDs slipped to me by my locker, to be copied onto cassette, and appreciated. He was already working hard at his craft: his paintings were on prominent display in the art room and were brought out onto the corridors for the approval of parents on sports day. I mentioned I’d been writing some songs, and it was on his prompting that I worked them up to the point that I could share some recordings. And I promptly wrote another batch on the back of that rush of creativity. Never having had any aptitude for drawing, I struggled to see myself as artistic in the way he clearly was. But on returning my demo tape, he was full of praise, encouraging me to think of songwriting as my art form.

At a certain point, our conversations kept hitting a speedbump: I hadn’t read Catcher in the Rye, one of his favourite books. So, I cleared my reading schedule and accepted a loan of his cherished copy. It was the classic red, black, and off-white Penguin edition, and had several sentences underlined throughout. On the back sleeve, he’d written the words, ‘Fan-bloody-tastic!’

If I close my eyes, I can see those words, and the little exclamation point.

That’s what I’m mumbling into my phone about as I pick my way on foot from Victoria Station to South Kensington.

Friends and family often praise me for my recall of events. I can tell you the first band my friend and I went to see together in the year 2000, and which songs they opened and closed with. When I introduced him to my new girlfriend four years later, just after I’d started university and as he was nearing graduation from art college, it so happened that she and I were going to see the same band. I can tell you the date without assistance from the Internet, as well as where he met us for food and the joke he told.

As with anything one is praised for, I’ve leaned into the reputation a bit. Sometimes, if I’m in a group and someone is struggling to remember the name of a play, or a former child star, or a town on the east coast, I’ll appeal to everyone not to Google it, insist that we can work it out.

‘It’s in here somewhere guys, in our collective mind.’

I’ll then instigate some word association, try out sounds, describe the object in an effort to dislodge the words. What I really want in these scenarios is for me to be the person who can retrieve the illusive information and enjoy the satisfaction of others clicking their fingers and sighing as they repeat, ‘Ah yes, The Crucible/ Donny Osmond/ Enniscorthy, of course.’

But having a detailed memory has its tough moments.

‘Wow, I don’t remember any of that.’

‘Oh. Okay.’

There’s a slightly alienating feeling to being the custodian of a moment in the past, and, in the same instant, a concern about fidelity when nobody can corroborate your recollection, like a suspect without an alibi. Chief among my concerns is around the intrusion of excessive nostalgia into the present moment. Specifically, I worry whether my relationship with who my friends have been in the past is so strong that I’m unable to fully see them in the present moment. I worry that my recall renders me a threat, an incriminating artifact from a bygone, less perfected version of them.

I worry all this aloud as I pass the V&A Design Museum and ready myself to text my friend, to say that I, the spectre of the past, am roughly five minutes away.

II.

I read Catcher in the Rye twice in my teenage years, at age fourteen and eighteen. Narrator-protagonist, Holden Caufield,is sixteen when the story takes place, and I remember noticing a change in my perception of him on the second reading.

As a fourteen-year-old ensconced with my friend’s sporadically underlined copy, Holden read to me as an aspirational figure. He has the physical and financial freedom to roam New York City unsupervised, and the freedom of thought to resist a world fashioned by his elders. The book is often funny, and because the reader is restricted to his point of view, I found him funny, too.

Second time round, as a first-year university student who already knew the ending, it read much more as tragedy than heroic comedy. I was taking a class in Contemporary Fiction, and Catcher was paired alongside Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy on the required reading list. By then, my friend was at art college, charting the course that would lead, one day, to a studio of his own in Kensington.

Our meet-up went well. We caught up over tea in the studio, exchanged updates about life, marriage, family and work. I told him about the Creative Writing classes I was taking, though it felt odd talking about it to someone already so at one with his craft, in his studio, resplendent with colour and life, surrounded paintings and prints at various stages of completion, stacks of periodicals and art magazines. He had followed his creative path, and it had led him here. And he was happy.

Over drinks later, some enquiries after mutual friends brought us from the present to the past. To my mind, my friend was always someone of status in his class, which made his generosity towards me all the more mystifying and flattering. He had lots of friends, was well thought-of, and eventually was elected prefect in final year. He even set up his own online proto-social network, dial-up internet notwithstanding, using a little-known feature within the MSN Messenger family, simply called ‘Groups.’ I was the youngest member of said Group.

But as the conversation moved to names from school, I was surprised to hear him say that he wasn’t in touch with many of his class, and that actually school didn’t hold particularly pleasant memories for him. In his telling, his strongest memories were formed before we met. I’d always struggled to imagine my friend in a grey uniform. Now here he was, referring offhandedly to how he’d been bullied in those early years by many of those latter-day admirers. This he expressed, not in a revelatory way, but in a way that made me feel that this was something I was meant to know, something I’d been told early on, part of the canon of his life and our friendship.

This, I realise later, scribbling into a notebook, is another risk to being a self-proclaimed remember-er, particularly if you’re also a committed optimist, one for whom the glass is not merely half-full, but still filling up. What I remember is, by necessity, constrained by my own point of view, by whatever naiveties I was encumbered with at that moment. They say hindsight is twenty-twenty. Well, what if it’s just twenty on the one side, mature reflection fighting with the treasured feeling of the bygone moment, combining to make a picture that isn’t actually real for anyone?

Perhaps the fact is that having been among the lucky ones for whom secondary school was, in the main, a time of positivity and growth, spared from any concerted torment, that anyone’s recollection of those same hallways and changing rooms which is at odds with mine doesn’t fully compute? Did I, in that moment, sipping my cocktail and listening, feel at once sympathetic yet also somehow more correct, possessing more facts than my friend, whose memories didn’t tally with mine?

An aspirational figure.

My return route to Belfast goes via Dublin, where two family members are celebrating adjacent birthdays. The retrospective vibe is intensified by sleeping in my childhood bedroom, in the same bed where I listened to those copied cassettes and recorded those songs. Across from the bed is a bookcase, a collection of varying vintage copies. I scan along the spines, until I come to one which is red, white, and black. My copy of Catcher, the one I bought in the university bookshop.

I’m between books, having finished the one I brought with me to London. Could this be a worthwhile experiment, I wonder? A test of this memory of mine.

I guess I know who’s coming with me on the northbound train.

III.

Before I start reading, I want to write down my firmest memories of Catcher, as encoded by my teenage brain.

The scene I remember most clearly is the one towards the end, which gives the book its title. Holden is talking to his little sister, explaining what it is that he wants his life to be. He reminds her of the song Coming Through the Rye, and the line, ‘see a brother catch another, coming through the rye.’ This is what he wants. In his mind, there’s a cliff, and people unwittingly walking towards it, unable to see it over all this rye. So that’s what he wants to do. Catch them before they fall.

Only he’s misremembered the song. It’s ‘meet another,’ not ‘catch another.’ For a young man in an already delicate state, this news hits him pretty hard, and moves the story towards its resolution, with Holden attending psychiatric treatment. At least that’s how I remember it.

There’s a much earlier scene about playing checkers, with the main image being of his female opponent and her Kings all lined up on the back row, a suboptimal strategy, but chosen because she liked how they looked. Is this same girl meant to be going on a date with his school friend? I can’t summon her name.

What I remember is the giant hall in the centre of my university where we went to sign up for English Literature tutorials. The tutor’s name was Andy, and his energy proved impervious to the darkest, coldest, and wettest mornings. I was hardly in the door when a five-foot-six ball of energy engulfed me.

'Bright and early on a Thursday. Nine bells. We’ll do a few laps of the lawn to warm up. You’ll have it out of the way and you can start your weekend early.'

I was on my own journey. I’d left Dublin, moved out of home, branched out from the school set. I also became a more avid keeper of journals and writer of emails, and found uses for my writing about campus, in the student newspaper and in society magazines. Still at art college, my painter friend was starting to exhibit his work regularly, usually in classmates’ apartments. Those exhibitions became a focal point for my return visits, a way to stay in touch. He was always glad to see me, though our conversations were brief. I don’t recall sharing how I now had my own Catcher copy, and my own set of ideas about Holden, and about what good writing was.

‘To give her the time,' Andy said, referring to Holden’s fears about his childhood friend’s date with his roommate. ‘It’s an odd euphemism for sex, isn’t it? Is it something about innocence? Like, if he gives her the time, he adds years to her life, pulls her away from childhood.' Innocence: recall Holden’s desperation to preserve the innocence of his little sister and their generation.

Those are my strongest memories, along with The Onion’s headline on the occasion of the author’s death in 2010: “Bunch of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger”. I know that I’m about to start reading about many, many so-called phonies. And suddenly, I can feel the distinctive first-person narrative voice start to play in my head.

Many phonies await, that’s for goddam sure.

IV.

Not far in and already I’m having a strong reaction. Can there be a more bracing opening eight words than, ‘If you really want to hear about it'? Being addressed this directly, this personally, makes me an active participant in the exchange from the outset. From the get-go, that distinct voice and style come at me hard and fast, hitting home no less viscerally after all these years. It’s almost as if Salinger is saying, I don’t care how many times you’ve read this already, you’re choosing to read it again, so strap in.

My supposition has always been that the book is framed as a sort of plea from Holden to the reader. Trust my reading of events, he says implicitly. Where he becomes unreliable isn’t in his sequencing and detailing of events, but in his confident appraisal of other people’s motivations, immediately undermined by the manifest naivety of his judgements and actions. That youthful naivety is rendered ever-present by the distinctive texture of the narrative voice. Holden bigs himself up all the time. And he loves short sentences. Boy, does he love those, and saying ‘boy' and calling everyone ‘old’ such-and-such. Not to big myself up, but I reckon I could do an okay impersonation of old Salinger if I really wanted to. A written impersonation, that is. You just need to coin a few little habits of speech, like repetition. Boy, does he love repetition. Generalisation too – that’s another of his habits of speech. You take a writer like old Salinger and it’s really no trouble at all to impersonate him, so long as you remember to keep on repeating a few recognisable habits of speech and big yourself up. Some of those habits of speech are pretty goddam lousy. They kill me.

Joking aside though, the near-immediate moment of shock is the realisation that I’ve been unconsciously ripping off Salinger’s techniques for years in my own writing. There are pages I revisited recently which, I now realise, are thinly-veiled cover versions of passages from Catcher. The trope I’ve most keenly co-opted is that of talking oneself up, especially to an imagined audience of adults, as a way of encapsulating both youthful confidence as well as carefully hidden insecurities and trauma. Sprinkling in clever-sounding words enhances that effect. With any luck, I might even owe the Salinger estate some royalties someday.

V.

Jane Gallagher! There she is. The one big failing in my own memory is the one area that’s arguably of most day-to-day use: retention of names and faces. I struggle particularly to hold on to names which are unusual or new to me, or which I learned at the same point in childhood and have mixed up ever since. The two most likely things for me to have forgotten are where I know you from and your first name. Sorry. Unless of course we were in school together, in which case I’ll probably still know your face when we’re both seventy, and instead I’ll have to apologise for being a random lunatic coming up to you on a train platform and saying, ‘Tom, how’s things?’

Reading the opening chapters in which we meet Holden and, through his telling, Jane, more scenes which lie ahead dislodge from memory. A description of a house, a scene with an older couple. A humorous description of their house and how they always seem to be in different rooms, so you’re ‘always yelling,’ which Holden finds ‘sort of funny.’ I know Holden will waken with the man’s hand on his face, and mention offhand that this sort of thing has happened a lot. With this passage in mind, the spectre of childhood abuse hangs over much of the text.

I find myself searching for a memory of what exactly my friend loved about the book. Was it the craft of the narrative, or something about the narrator that he found so important? While I don’t recall which sentences were underlined in his copy, I do recall that it tended to be single lines, and I feel like it was Holden’s more worldly declarations which got my friend reaching for his pencil.

Though I am still finding Holden sympathetic, it is hard, at this point in my life and in the 21st Century, for his flaws not to dominate proceedings. He’s narcissistic and harshly judgemental of others. The ‘phony’ label is a constant refrain, imbuing him with authenticity, though his actions are often utterly disingenuous. Take this sequence of lines, during a scene in a taxi:

(H)e was such a touchy guy it wasn’t any pleasure discussing anything with him. ‘Would you care to stop off and have a drink with me somewhere?’ I said.

His mean-spirited judgements of women based on skin-deep attractiveness, distasteful on their own terms, also read as hypocritical after he has tried to distinguish himself from Stradlater and other sex-mad jocks of his ilk. While this was certainly discussed in university, I sense that, as a first year student fresh from fourteen years of all-male schooling, the misogyny flew over my head. Looking back from this vantage point, it’s doubly uncomfortable.

My mind keeps returning to those corridors, to the different coloured uniforms. Maybe my friend was more alert than I to some of what Salinger was attempting between the lines. I can only speak for myself and feel sheepish about my fourteen-year-old self, aspiring to being more like this self-proclaimed ‘sexy bastard.’

Also apparent to me on this reading is the class hierarchy baked deeply into the world Salinger builds. Old money surnames, private schools, a protagonist who starts out by misplacing the fencing team’s kit on the subway and proceeds to mismanage his fairly substantial budget.

And now, barrelling from nowhere, a remembered scene from my own secondary school. This is another cross for the remember-ers to bear: when those moments you most regret come knocking on the door of your mind, they present themselves in high-definition technicolour.

My school was exclusive: both fee-paying and demanding high academic standards. In addition to fees, there was a rolling programme of fundraising, expansion and modernisation of the estate, though all without increasing student numbers and class sizes. There were five classrooms which each had windows facing out onto a little open-air garden with exotic plants. It was in one of these rooms, at a desk adjacent to the window, that I had an outburst in Religion class.

Normally, speaking one’s mind in class, particularly English and Religion, was heavily encouraged, though not all students took that encouragement to heart. On this occasion, our teacher was asking a general question about what issues worried us most. When my turn came, I argued that we weren’t being encouraged to question, or to combat, the levels of privilege which led us to attend a school such as this. It wasn’t an original point, rather something another friend of mine had pointed out to me. And I didn’t say it very well. Also, I was also blind to the fact that I shared a classroom with boys on scholarships, whose attendance at the school was a major achievement for them and their parents. I shouldn’t have been so hurt or surprised that my outburst failed to spark a rebellious chorus of agreement.

Privilege. Yeah. There’s a reason they say to check it.

VI.

What prompted me to embark on this re-read was the idea of memory as inherently imperfect, even when it’s something one excels at. What I didn’t anticipate was the discovery that this is essentially the entire theme of the novel. If you’re asked at a trivia night where Catcher is set, New York is the best answer, but in truth, it is set inside a young man’s mind. And, in this setting, there lives a sprawling cast of characters.

Every chapter moves us multiple times from the present moment to another piece of information about the past. We learn about his deceased younger brother through a story about a baseball mitt covered in poems. A brief encounter with some nuns leads him down a tangent about an ex-classmate who played tennis with him and tried to find out if he was Catholic. We hear a traumatic recounting of a boy jumping from a school window, and a teacher taking off his coat to lay it over the poor boy’s remains.

Holden tells us at the outset that he doesn’t ‘feel like getting into it’ – it being the past. But it turns out, he wants to tell you everything he can think of there is to tell. Almost. This man who lay his coat over the boy’s remains turns out to be the man I could remember inviting Holden to his house, then touching him in his sleep. But this is as much as he is willing to tell us, or to face down. And this deliberate and ostentatious omission ends up speaking more loudly to us than all the bombastic prose combined.

Forgetting isn’t always the failure to retrieve. It’s often a conscious act. A former teacher of ours took his own life several years after we graduated. In the wake of his death, it emerged that he’d been due to stand trial over allegations of abuse made by an ex-pupil from a previous school. I remember lots about the teacher, and could, if I wished, do a re-evaluation of those memories, re-interpretation of words and actions seemingly benign or quirky at the time. But I wonder. If someone ever came to me and asked me to corroborate something they were confronting from the past, to lend them my recollections, what would I do? The very request reframes and augments my recall, makes it less reliable. If I’ve learned nothing else lately, it’s that my memory is as limited as it is detailed.

Re-reading my preparatory notes, I see much that I misremembered, including when I described Holden’s misremembering of the song, Coming Through the Rye. I had thought this was a bigger moment, or that it happened later on, when he and his sister Phoebe are arguing. Actually, it happens when they are first reunited while she’s alone in their parents’ apartment. Phoebe is so excited to see Holden that she almost flies by his idea about becoming the ‘Catcher in the Rye.’

Furthermore, I actually had the wrong lyrics in my mind for Coming Through the Rye, both Holden’s and the correct ones. I thought it was, ‘See a brother catch/meet another,’ when in fact it was, ‘If a body catch/meet a body comin’ through the rye.’ I’ve no excuse either, since I had this song on cassette tape as a child, in a collection of standards. (The writing on the cassette was purple, since you asked, and the song I rewound and sang incessantly was The Bonny Bonny Banks of Loch Lomond.)

So, tell me this. Say you’re old Salinger, and you’ve come up with this great device of a misremembered lyric giving rise to an idea in Holden’s mind, himself as ‘Catcher in the Rye,’ protecting the kids from the ‘crazy cliff,’ and you decide that’s going to be your title. Why not have Phoebe respond, making more of the misremembered words as a moment in the story? How is the title pointing us to the importance of this scene?

Here’s my theory, for what it’s worth. Phoebe’s challenging of his memory of the song plants a seed of doubt in Holden’s mind, and piles on more doubt in the mind of the reader as to the accuracy of his recall. If he gets song lyrics wrong, and in this particularly fantastical way which conjures a field of rye in which he can be the Catcher, well what else might he have gotten wrong, for similarly self-serving reasons? It seems the very title, The Catcher in the Rye, knits into the fabric of the novel the proposition that memory is inherently contestable territory.

VII.

Here I am again. Back at the ending. Being told, for a third time by Holden Caulfield, that I shouldn’t ‘ever tell anybody anything.’ Admittedly, I am flagrantly ignoring him.

There’s something particular about childhood friendships. Listening back to that Kensington voice note, I hear myself mumble something about the metaphors psychologists use to describe adolescence. A period of metamorphosis, akin to tectonic plates moving within a young person’s being. Volcanic eruptions inevitable. What unites friendships which survive childhood into adulthood is just that: survival. They have withstood the eruptions, the changes which happen and which both parties have witnessed in the other, often in horror.

Of course, we don’t stop changing in adulthood. I would suggest though, that many of us have our ‘act together.’ We’ve worked out how to be in company. The role we’re playing. We find compatible players, often very quickly. Ages stop mattering quite so much. Shared interests lead us to chosen tribes, distinct from the semi-random assemblies of school year cohorts in which those early groups are formed.

That girlfriend I was keen to introduce to my friend back in the early days of university? She and I since married, and at time of writing, our meeting divides my life evenly in two. In many ways, she is my adult life. In our early twenties, we moved to Belfast, a city where remembering and forgetting are conscious acts, and those acts form a contested space. Having lived here over a decade, the friends we see the most are the ones we’ve each made, individually and together, in our adult years. And there’s magic to that: finding new people, discovering the lives that led them here, sharing the lives that led us here.

Holden tries constantly to impress his elders, while inwardly marinating in grief for his own childhood. Revisiting the past, fantasising over ways to halt time. He hasn’t figured himself out yet. He hasn’t had the reassurance that time’s job is to bring us forward. Into adulthood, yes, if you want to label it as such. But, most fundamentally, into a new moment.

Listening back, the concern I was trying to articulate was that my detailed memory of childhood might be a tether, holding me in a simulacrum of a youth, keeping me from fully embracing adulthood. Now, I wonder if perhaps, on some level, nobody ever fully feels like an adult, in the way they saw their parents, their elders. I think of Holden and wonder whether, rather that ever truly ‘saving’ a single child in the rye field, it is he who is saved from the cliff edge? Saved from distancing himself so far from reality that he falls into endless denial of life and all its mucky contradictions. Saved, by his younger sister, who refuses to let him leave New York City on a bus to nowhere. Is baby sister Phoebe the true Catcher?

I refuse to Google it.

I’ll ask the next friend I bump into. That good enough for you?

AUTHOR ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Warm thanks are owed to two people especially: The Belfast Review’s founding editor, Hanna Nielson, for her patient and careful guidance through multiple drafts, and for the wealth of knowledge she shared regarding The Catcher in the Rye, which will greatly enrich my fourth reading someday (in the meantime, all errors and misinterpretations remain my own); and to my anonymous ‘Painter Friend’, who generously consented to the sharing of this story, and offered detailed and supportive feedback on the very first draft. Keep making beauty, a chara dhílis.

AUTHOR BIO

John Moriarty is a writer of fiction, non-fiction and drama. His stories have appeared in The Honest Ulsterman, Profiles, and Humour Me, and he is a regular contributor of essays to Slugger O’Toole. He is currently working on a debut collection of stories and essays, themed around encountering the past in the present day, and on his first novel. Originally from Dublin, he has lived in Belfast for fifteen years. www.johnmoriarty.net ; @SayWhatNowJohn