“The Laughing Man” (1949)

Here’s a fun fact about this story by J.D. Salinger: in the movie The Last Days of Disco, director and writer Whit Stillman has someone ask Alice, an ambitious book editor (played by Chloe Sevigny), what her dream book to publish would be. Her answer is a book of new J.D. Salinger stories “more in the direction of ‘The Laughing Man,’ or ‘Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters’” (per Wikipedia). I think I know what Alice means, at least about this story. It’s sweet and nostalgic but has a bitter edge too. These elements work together very well. The narrator unnamed is remembering an episode from when he was 9. He was enrolled in a program with two dozen other boys called the Comanche Club. They were picked up after school for various activities led by “the Chief,” a 22-year-old law student who took them to Central Park and directed baseball, football, and soccer play, depending on the season. Afterwards he told them stories about the Laughing Man in serial form like the radio shows or the pulps. “The only son of a wealthy missionary couple,” he starts, “the Laughing Man was kidnapped as an infant by Chinese bandits,” and proceeds from there in all extravagant directions, depending on how much time he had to kill, such as on rainy days. The arc of this story is about a relationship the Chief starts with a young woman who becomes part of the afternoon crew until they suddenly break up in one or two scenes that make only dim sense to a 9-year-old. Then she is gone. And the Chief is sad. It’s all incorporated into his Laughing Man narratives, which take some especially wrenching turns at the time of the breakup, with the schoolyear’s end looming. In his grief, perhaps, or maybe for some other reason, the Chief is leaving his job and these kids. He weaves it dramatically into his last installment of the story of the Laughing Man—obviously the last and final. The Chief reminds me of Vincent D’Onofrio’s performance as Robert E. Howard in the movie The Whole Wide World. The Chief is a young man still finding his way. You hope he’ll make it through law school. But he also has a gift for storytelling and spinning yarns, specifically in the pulp and radio show modes of his immediate times—1949—and all the pulps and radio shows that preceded it. He is obviously a voracious consumer of the stuff, with a knack for spitting it back out. That could be his future too, with all the exuberance of D’Onofrio as Robert E. Howard (and perhaps the same sad ending too).

J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
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