“Teddy” (1953)

When J.D. Salinger was working on this story he knew it would be the last in the Nine Stories collection, and he wrote it deliberately as a kind of symmetrical balance to the first story in the collection, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” It works that way—notably the endings are echoes and reflections of one another. However, this might be a point where I’m thinking of getting off the boat with Salinger. This kid, Teddy, is just too special. He’s 10 and he’s psychically gifted. He wants to make people understand reincarnation, Zen enlightenment, and stuff like that. What are his powers? We see that he can predict the future and/or has extraordinary insight into others. He’s vastly more evolved than his parents. His dad says things like, “I’ll exquisite day you, buddy.” The family of four—dad, mom, Teddy, and sister Booper—are on an ocean cruise of some kind, maybe a transatlantic crossing. Mysterious sidelong intimations suggest scientific and religious groups have interest in studying him. For further elucidation—but not really enough—Salinger inserts some kind of journalist or young man interested party on the boat who buttonholes Teddy and asks a lot of questions for the sake of readers. We see Salinger really going headlong into the mystical stuff of Eastern flavor here. It’s the kind of thing that would specifically get developed with the Glass stories to come. “Bananafish” very much presages the Glass drama. “Teddy” fits them in terms of themes and elements but no one here, as far as I know, has anything to do with the Glasses. I’m not sure what to think of this story. I’ll be looking into that next with Salinger’s late novellas and only other published material, outside of the novel The Catcher in the Rye and some scattered stories. I’ve been checking the internet semiregularly since Salinger’s death in 2010. I understand he left a lot of manuscripts and that they are on the way. I look forward to that if they ever get here. I don’t even need to know more—are they Glass family stories? novels? or both? or something else? “Teddy” suggests I may see more limitations than I did when I read Salinger so avidly as a high school teen.

J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
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