The guy in the bar he met, where he was talking about how “flitty” the place was, felt ambiguously gay to me, and Holden finds himself talking in crude ways about sex with him.
And there is the “20 times” comment.
The whole thing felt very autobiographical, with the most important elements more or less hidden in open view.
Here is Salinger on it: “My boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the book … [I]t was a great relief telling people about it.”
Note, that the “relief” came many years after the fact.
I will note also, simply because it was interesting, that Salinger was with an infantry unit in WW2, where he saw action, possibly, on D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, and the Battle of Hurtgen Forest. He got PTSD and was hospitalized for it for a few weeks. They called it “Combat Stress Reaction” back then.
But of course you don’t really get over true PTSD, although I think the community support for ex-soldiers was much better back then, not least because so many went.
But that the guy was, to use the term used then, “neurotic”, seems obvious. And unwanted premature sexual experience seems like the obvious candidate for cause. That book was in some senses a “cri de coeur” for someone to hear him, but I doubt anyone really did.
The maladjustment, alienation, confusion: THAT they got. But that respected and well known men were doing awful things at times to boys: not so much.
It’s like with Freud. Freud GOT what the women were telling him. He simply convinced himself to lie about it. He made a career and became famous for his lies.
And in that context, through that prism, one can easily see how Caulfield would view everyone reflexively as phony, find himself unable to trust anyone but his sister, and be so charged with nervous energy that he couldn’t function.
This book, in important ways, is really a tragedy. It is about a boy destroyed by a system which lied about it.
I don’t see how Holden will ever have a truly healthy relationship with a woman. As apparently others have commented, it would not have been surprising if he wound up a homosexual. It would not surprise me, as a reader, if he was headed towards becoming a pedophile himself.
As far as Mr. Antolini (I think it is): I could spin that both ways. He was drunk and feeling affection for Holden like a son. I could see it that way. He could also have been drunk and having fantasies about Holden. I could also see it that way. Either way, it was utterly and completely inappropriate, and Holden’s confusion understandable.
It seems obvious something in that neighborhood must have happened to Salinger himself. And as he got older, he famously retired from the world, much like his deaf mute gas station attendant.
Some things are just too much to bear.
This triggered a few things for me. I was not molested, but I was–as I think most boys are–subjected to queer and inappropriate energies on a number of occasions.
I’m sure this whole thing will continue to unfold in me in interesting and I hope useful ways.