“Seymour, an Introduction” (1959)

[2010 write-up here]

This long piece by J.D. Salinger is generally considered among the least of what he published in book form. Its companion story, “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” gets most of the accolades for the #3 bestselling book in 1963. Fair enough. The complaints about self-indulgence and such are warranted. This is a writer drunk on his own talent and abilities. Formally it is Buddy Glass, oldest surviving boy in the Glass family, but arguably it may be J.D. Salinger perhaps working through his war experience, represented by Seymour’s suicide. When Buddy talks about his published fiction here, it can sound a lot like Salinger’s story “Teddy” and his novel The Catcher in the Rye. But for me, “Seymour, an Introduction” is the point where I fell for Salinger for the second time, after Catcher four or five years earlier when I was 15. At the time I read “Seymour” for the first time I was working nights full-time in a nursing home. On nights off I had to decide whether to readjust to a daytime schedule or just stay up all night and sleep through the days, maintaining continuity. Reading “Seymour” was on the latter schedule, reading all night, and there I was in step with Buddy, who was writing this chronicle at night, sometimes all night, for several nights. I felt right in step with him and loved his surges of energy. But this last time reading it I felt more the sadness that was giving Buddy such headwinds. He’s trying to keep up the brave front, but he’s writing less every night. He’s stuck on giving a physical description of Seymour, which is ultimately so shattered I still have only the vaguest idea of what Seymour looks like—or looks like, as Buddy would put it. It’s sadder and sadder and finally this “introduction” disappears into itself and walks away. I was left thinking the self-indulgence is all Buddy, and none Salinger himself, orchestrating a wallop that sneaks up on you sideways. It’s heartbreaking. It’s more than 10 years since Seymour’s death and Buddy still misses him so keenly he can’t stand it. And neither can I, in sympathy. I really think this may be the best Glass family story we have. UNLESS WE GET TO SEE SOME MORE. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.

J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour, an Introduction
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“Zooey” (1957)

As I say, it’s possible to take Franny and Zooey, published in 1961, as a kind of novel in the eccentric manner of say William Faulknew, e.g., If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem or Go Down, Moses. Maybe Salinger even intended it that way. “Franny,” a longish short story too short to be a novella, and “Zooey,” a shortish novel too long to be a novella, are obviously related. Franny and Zooey are brother and sister, Glasses, and both narratives are about the same thing, Franny’s nervous breakdown and/or spiritual crisis. Together they remain one of the cornerstones of the Glass family saga as we’ve known it since the 1950s. Franny and Zooey are the youngest of seven children born between 1917 and 1934, all of whom were regulars at one point or another on a radio show called It’s a Wise Child. A lot of the bulk of “Zooey” is Glass family backstory. In fact, it’s notably remote from the main players as we have them so far, Seymour and Buddy, the two oldest. Buddy is the chronicler of these tales and happy to insert and sneak in credit for himself at will, but he’s not there with Franny and Zooey, and Seymour is years dead. We get a spirited comical dialogue between Zooey and their mother Bessie (Zooey is in the bath, reading a long letter from Buddy). And then we get a much longer speechy dialogue between Zooey and Franny on the complications of life etc. We are still getting backstory in the Glass family stories. That’s a large part of “Zooey.” It still feels like preamble to something much larger. In the legend so far, Buddy and especially Seymour are spiritual seekers well-versed on many world religions and sects and their ways. Franny’s crisis, obviously connected in some way to Seymour, is based on an anonymous mystic Christian 19th-century Russian peasant’s book with ideas of how to live (a real tome, The Way of a Pilgrim). Salinger’s voice is clarion and charming as always—a natural New Yorker writer and pleasure to read. He was on his own spiritual quest, increasingly seen in the last four pieces he published in book form. I want to take this opportunity to say that, if there is more to the Glass family story, as persistent rumors say, then let’s have it, please. What we’ve got has never felt complete.

J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
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“Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” (1955)

This long story by J.D. Salinger was packaged in 1963 with another long piece, “Seymour, an Introduction,” for the last book he published. With Franny and Zooey, from 1961, they were all Glass family stories, all as written by Buddy Glass. “Raise High” goes lighter on the spiritual / religious extracurricular activities and is essentially a very good wedding-day story. The groom, Seymour Glass, and his bride Muriel are entirely offstage. The wedding has been delayed or called off because of some crisis for Seymour. It’s 1942 and everyone is suddenly in the military. Buddy barely gets a pass to come home to New York City. When he arrives, it’s a sweltering day and wedding attendees are chaotically leaving for the reception. Buddy ends up in a full taxicab that includes the Matron of Honor. Then they are caught in traffic (a passing parade) but they are near Buddy’s and Seymour’s New York apartment, which is air-conditioned. Buddy invites them there, where they can cool off, make phone calls, and sort things out. The story is pleasantly random, full of the energy, strange ways, and grace of special days. It’s interesting to me how, across “Franny,” “Zooey,” and especially “Raise High,” Seymour is more and more manifestly unfit to survive, seemingly a simple soul in some ways. He is also, as a matter of the Glass family saga, given as a wise or even holy man. But a lot of the details here, Seymour’s gross naivete about love and relationships and practical matters, make him out at best as a holy fool. We also know what’s looming in the “Bananafish” story so there is also sadness at the bottom of this great jumble of joy and confusion and peevishness, with let’s call it an epiphany about the meaningfulness of this special day. The title comes from the sister Boo Boo, about whom we don’t know much from the extant Glass stories. It is a typically exuberant Glass / Salinger message written in soap on the bathroom mirror. Boo Boo had been staying there but recently shipped out, forced to miss the wedding. It is this absolute rapturous cheer that I may like most about Salinger in general. He is entirely up to special days—it’s the quotidian ones that tend to give him problems. Writes Boo Boo: “Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Like Ares comes the bridegroom, taller far than a tall man. Love, Irving Sappho, formerly under contract to Elysium Studios Ltd. Please be happy happy happy with your beautiful Muriel. This is an order. I outrank everybody on this block.” So sweet I get a cavity—in the clinch, YMMV.

J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour, an Introduction
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“Franny” (1955)

It’s fair enough, I suppose, to call J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, published in 1961, a novel. Certainly the two narratives are related. But they were originally published two years apart. “Franny” is more like a short story, albeit a longish one at 40 pages. “Zooey” is four times that length, which makes it more like a short novel. “Franny” is an example of how good Salinger was getting, almost exponentially by the year. All his subtleties, however, worked against him a little this time. He is showing Franny Glass—yes, this is core to the Glass family tale—in the midst of a spiritual crisis of meaninglessness. She is meeting her shallow frat-boy boyfriend in some college town for a football game and party weekend. He is a Holden Caulfield version but one who can keep it together for college antics. Most readers, apparently, and there were a great many of them for the 1961 bestselling book, took the crisis to be one of pregnancy. I don’t know if I have ever read it that way, but now that you mention it I can see how people would. I never thought of pregnancy because as a teen I read the Raise High the Roof Beam book first (notably with “Seymour, an Introduction”), and knew all about the Eastern woo-woo it is marinated in. And/or that Salinger was. In many ways Franny is a stand-in for him, quivering in the face of meaninglessness and flailing for help. It’s sad, in a way, when you see Franny’s crisis as Salinger’s own. Franny has recently read a 19th-century Russian Christian devotional text (Eastern Orthodox the primary frame?) called The Way of the Pilgrim, which speaks of a technique called ceaseless prayer. At story’s end we see that Franny seems to be practicing it. It doesn’t exactly fit with the pregnancy idea, but doesn’t entirely undermine it either. Anyway, most of Salinger’s primary religious preoccupations, as I recall, are much further east—Buddhism and Taoism. The Way of the Pilgrim suggests much wider reading and implies, with the rest of the Glasses (chiefly Seymour and Buddy), a spiritual crisis of Salinger’s own, which in the most likely if pedestrian way is related to PTSD. The Glass family is decidedly middle-class with all the usual middle-class privileges. It’s unknown where Franny will go next, but she will always have a place to go. On to “Zooey.”

J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
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“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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“De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” (1952)

In this story by J.D. Salinger we see him carry off—insofar as he does carry it off—a farcical, mostly empty tale, riffing at a hundred miles an hour and nothing to work with. I see on Wikipedia that it was originally published in World Review (London), after the New Yorker rejected it because “the piece was judged too short to adequately address the complex religious concepts.” Complex religious concepts was news to me. It doesn’t strike me as a very serious story. It’s written when the first-person narrator, John Smith, is an adult, looking back on episodes in his youth, particularly involving his stepfather. The family of three departs for Paris after the stock market crash of 1929. They stay in Paris 10 years, during which the mother/wife dies. Back in New York City in 1939 they are trying to make ends meet. Smith is a painter, though not convincing when he talks about it. He did take some art classes in Paris, maybe even got a degree. He sees an ad for a position in Montreal at a correspondence art school. He drops Pablo Picasso’s name all over the place and gets the job. But it’s an absurd job, just part of a fraud operation. One of the students he critiques is a nun and he’s very impressed with her work. He sends her a note of encouragement but, shortly after, the convent withdraws her from the class. This is a kind of blow to him, a crisis. Apparently this is one place where religion is read as an element of the story. But the context is all so absurd and comical I didn’t really recognize it as any kind of religious crisis of faith or whatever. Then, per Wikipedia, Smith has an official Epiphany one night as he is “looking into a display window of an orthopedic appliances store.” This also barely registered on me, I must admit. Because the narrator dedicates the story to his stepfather in the first paragraph, I assumed things were all good between them and that aspect was one of my favorite parts of the story. Wikipedia seems to think otherwise and now I’m not so sure. The classic Salinger voice is wisecracking and perhaps deceptively lighthearted. I know he would get increasingly into profundities about life and religion, not always well-suited but it’s arguable he got better at it, notably as he developed his Glass family. I think this is more of an awkward early attempt and does not work well.

J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
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“Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes” (1951)

This story by J.D. Salinger is skillfully done, a kind of tawdry sex farce that takes a hard turn toward pathos at the end. A gray-haired man is in his bedroom with a woman when the phone rings. He asks if she has any reason for him not to answer it. “God,” she says in perfect Salinger diction. “I don’t know. I mean what do you think?” He answers the call. All clues point to it being the husband of the woman. The gray-haired man is a colleague of the husband (they are lawyers). The husband is looking for his wife. She isn’t home yet. He’s distraught. The gray-haired man tries to soothe him, says she probably went off somewhere with mutual friends. All of them were at a party that night. It’s late now, the wee hours. The husband is also worried about a case he lost. The gray-haired man finally calms him—at one point the husband says he wants to come over for a drink—and gets him to go to bed and rest, assures him his wife will show up eventually, it’s just one of those nights. A few minutes later the phone rings again and it’s the husband, calling to say no worries, his wife just got home. It’s a searing, poignant moment. We know it’s a lie—she’s still there with the gray-haired man. But the husband obviously doesn’t want him to worry. Office politics is mixed up in this too. The husband is worried about his job and doesn’t want to alienate the gray-haired man. He may need allies. Yes, it’s another midcentury New Yorker story about white men philandering, but Salinger pulls it off well. As always he is a master of dialogue, with the italicized syllables and everything, and the story is mostly dialogue. It zeros in on the loser in this triangle, the hurt one, however incidental he may ultimately be to either or both the wife and the gray-haired man. The husband is generally annoying and whiny, but the story makes us feel for him. The setup may or may not have been original in 1951 but it’s not new now. We’ve seen countless scenes like it. But like Bob Newhart, Salinger makes the most of a one-sided phone conversation. It’s not presented to the reader that way, we get both sides, but we’re mindful the wife is getting the one-sided version, which adds another dimension. Solid story—more evidence Salinger was one of the best at the form.

J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
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“For Esme – With Love and Squalor” (1950)

[spoilers?] I’m not sure I have ever realized before what a nearly perfect short story this is by J.D. Salinger. Strike that “nearly.” Salinger takes his faith in children as the best of humanity and combines it with war experience for a powerful evocation of trauma and how it works. As a World War II soldier Salinger participated in the D-Day Normandy invasion, storming the beach. If the Utah Beach sector looked like what we saw in the opening of the movie Saving Private Ryan, it’s useful to keep in mind. This story is told as the before and after of that event, Salinger coming to terms with his own experience, or trying. In the first part of the story the first-person narrator, the soldier, is in England on a rainy day, finishing up training for the invasion. He has some time for himself and gets out of the rain in a tearoom. There he sees a girl he had seen moments earlier in a church, at a choir practice. She stood out to him. She’s 13, with her 5-year-old brother in tow. They are orphans. This is Esme, a serious girl absorbing the hard lessons of life. They strike up a conversation. He tells her he is a short-story writer. The bravery of it, even to a 13-year-old, is bracing. She asks him to write a story for her sometime. This part of the story is often funny. “I prefer stories about squalor,” she tells him. She is wearing a chronographic watch her father gave her. He died in the war. The scene in the tearoom is warm and charming. In the second half of the story, after Normandy, the narrator switches to third-person. “This is the squalid, or moving, part of the story,” he writes, “and the scene changes. The people change, too.... I’ve disguised myself so cunningly that even the cleverest reader will fail to recognize me.” Of course, that’s not true at all. We see him coping to hold himself together emotionally and failing. He has a stack of unopened letters he’s not looking at, but a package from Esme catches his eye. She has sent him her father’s chronographic watch and a letter. The watch has been smashed in transit, which I believe may be the saddest things I’ve ever read. But her letter is very cheering—the kind of cheering that makes you cry. It’s all a sudden rush of a roller coaster right at the end and it left me wrung out in all the best ways.

J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
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“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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“Down at the Dinghy” (1949)

I like this story by J.D. Salinger pretty well, but it seems slight compared to some of his others. It features a somewhat gratuitous appearance of Boo Boo Glass Tannenbaum, a member of the Glass family but a more obscure one. Her status as a member of that family is incidental to the story. But it’s no doubt of interest to Glass family completists. The story involves Boo Boo, her son, and her two servants. The son, Lionel, overhears one of the servants saying his father is a “kike,” which he hears and understands as “kite.” He doesn’t know the slur, but he gets the hostile intent and runs away from home. He’s only 4 but already has a habit of running away. I think this family unit is vacationing at a summer resort kind of place (which they may own). Boo Boo tracks Lionel down to a boat, a dinghy. She has to talk to him from the dock because he refuses to get out of the boat. A conversation between them follows that is reminiscent of the conversation Seymour Glass has with a young girl in the story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Jocular, gentle bantering from the adult, who is at ease communicating with kids, as if it lifts away any misgivings by the kid’s own unself-conscious innocence, or something like that. It has a false edge, some sense of desperation. This is more so with Seymour and less so with Boo Boo, who we have not seen much of in the Glass family saga. In some ways, the story turns on the antisemitic remark that has upset Lionel. It seems to be no particular thing for Boo Boo, though she might be putting that on for Lionel’s sake. I had no strong sense she was going to fire the servants or indeed felt anything stronger than mild disappointment with them. Lionel only understood the intent of the remark, not the word used. So antisemitism ultimately feels more like a side issue. The main point seems to be the banter between mother and son, and more generally the positive vibe that kids put into the world. It’s a story where the charge against Salinger that he’s too glib does seem to have a point. Lionel has never been heard from again (at least not yet!) and Boo Boo never got much play either. That’s how I get to this story being more slight than anything, though Salinger as always hits a certain level of breezy fun to read and this story is no exception.

J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
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“Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” (1948)

[2017 write-up here]

When I first encountered J.D. Salinger’s work as an adolescent, I was most impressed and often identified with the privileged voice of middle-class dread—all of the accoutrements and none of the shows of happiness. Later, Salinger’s uncanny abilities as a writer came to impress me most. He is amazingly skillful at making his narratives dense with layers of meaning. This one, for example, works fine at its most obvious level (almost too obvious!), a caustic lampoon of empty suburban ways of life. But there is much more going on here, and the details tell. Two 30something women are getting together for a catch-up. They drink the afternoon away, bemoaning their present lives and reminiscing about college days when they first met. Both were dropouts within the year. Eloise gripes about her husband and waxes nostalgic about a boyfriend named Walt. In what may be a retcon, which I don’t think is exactly Salinger’s style, Salinger later said it’s Walt Glass—another member of the Glass family, yes. To me Walt is the most important part of this story, not because he is a Glass but because he died in the war. I am starting to sense, for the first time, how significantly Salinger’s experience in the war as a combat soldier affected him and reverberates out in his work. War experience is also a main point in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (he does favor some long and silly titles, doesn’t he?). Seymour was plainly overwhelmed by the war. Walt died of it. Eloise loved him and misses him keenly, but there’s little room in her upscale life now for grief, especially not all these years later married to another man. Her friend, Mary Jane, is not much better off—divorced, a career woman in 1948—too late for the war years, too early for women’s liberation, her life is just as narrow and constricted as Eloise’s. “Uncle Wiggily” is a nickname Walt had for Eloise after she sprained her ankle. Now she lives in Connecticut, miserable and drinking herself into stupors regularly. She’s also awful to everyone around her, including her husband, daughter, and maid. Eloise and Mary Jane are not close friends. It’s not even clear they like each other much. They close the visit as evening comes down, passed out. Mary Jane was over two hours late, claiming she got lost. In fairness, I often get lost in the suburbs myself. But that’s partly because I have a seething resentment of the suburbs that distracts me. That’s the kind of dynamics on display between these two, profound and unprocessed disappointment and regrets, all surmised from dialogue and the scene-setting.

J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
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“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (1948)

(spoilers) J.D. Salinger’s story shares some interesting points with Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” Both were published in the New Yorker, both in 1948, both with shocking twist endings, and both in many ways made their careers as breakthrough stories. I also remember both being taught in my 10th-grade English class. “Bananafish” is basically the start of the Glass family saga. The twist ending is out of the O. Henry school of hit ‘em with never-saw-it-coming wry irony aka the temptations of fickle fate. Here the very ordinariness of the day described—the story feels aimless for much of its length—is what sets up the shock of the ending (content warning: suicide). Interestingly, it is better understood now that a suicidal person may appear cheerful and upbeat shortly before committing the deed, having finally made the decision. Not sure Salinger knew that, which might make it an impressive feat of intuition. There is ultimately a lot of psychological veracity here. Future trademarks of Salinger’s writing are apparent too, such as italicizing individual syllables to better mimic actual speech. One of the most seductive aspects of reading him is the sense that a real person is speaking directly to you. It may no longer be as effective, going on a hundred years later—speech patterns change. But, call it nostalgia if you must, but rereading these stories has often felt like something akin to going home. That’s not to say it’s entirely a pleasure. Rereading “Bananafish,” we know what’s coming. Seymour’s scenes with the young girl, Sybil, often struck me as cringy and forced. He is represented as ostentatiously “good with children” but I’m not convinced, partly because I know what is about to happen. And we know now—we learn elsewhere in the still fragmented cycle of stories—that Seymour’s worshipful brother Buddy is the author (or “author”) of this story. The jovial chatter and stream-of-consciousness bantering and joking—bananafish? bananafish?—feel empty and weird. Is Buddy trying to burnish the reputation of a suicide? Likewise the scene with the woman on the elevator, when Seymour accuses her of staring at his feet. It departs from the narrative of the suicide at peace, as now he is suddenly peevish. I think more of these miscues are Salinger, though some are also Buddy’s. But “Bananafish” is nonetheless an auspicious start, there’s no getting around that—to a singular and vastly influential writing career, to the Glass family tales to come, even just to the Nine Stories collection itself. This story is a good place to start in all kinds of ways.

J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
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“Just Before the War With the Eskimos” (1948)

This story by J.D. Salinger, published first in the New Yorker in 1948 and later in his essential Nine Stories collection, seems likely to typify much that people don’t like about him. It involves a bunch of semi-miserable adolescents crabbing about things from the center of their vastly comfortable lives. Their circumstances vary—certainly in their self-consciousness they calibrate themselves on different levels in terms of wealth and class. But the high-school girls, squabbling over cab fare, attend a private school in Manhattan, and the two guys are college educated. I think? I see that some on the internet take one guy, Franklin, older brother of one of the girls, as a Jesus figure. That never occurred to me. He struck me more as an early version of Holden Caulfield (and let’s please not get into any Jesus implications thereof). He complains a lot and he’s quick to dismiss or judge people as snobs and phonies. Selena is Franklin’s sister and Ginnie is her friend, or anyway her nemesis on the cab fare issue. While Selena is in another part of the house very slowly getting Ginnie’s money, Franklin enters with a bleeding finger (just like Jesus!) and goes off on a monologue. Franklin is a few years older than Ginnie and I take the arc of this story to be Ginnie developing a crush on him. The recent war has a presence here. Franklin says he couldn’t get into the army because of a heart problem. He has been working at an airplane factory for three years. So I guess he’s not college educated? He comes across like he is, meaning, I guess, that he’s obviously intelligent and informed and a little neurotic. This story is basically very slight. Salinger makes it work with his voice and all the great dialogue. They are the two features that rarely failed him and always make him a pleasure to read. No, I don’t have much use for spoiled rich kids. But I know, with Salinger, with movie director Whit Stillman, and with a good many others, that they can be thoroughly entertaining in their pretensions to being wearied seen-it-all adults. For that matter, Salinger’s adolescents usually have profound undertones that are felt as much as read in the text.

J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
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"Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" (1948)

Story by J.D. Salinger not available online.

Technically, this story by J.D. Salinger belongs with his Glass family stories, though it's a bit of a stretch. The Glass family member making an appearance is Walt, who is dead during the action of this story, and the Glass family name never appears. Instead, it's a type of story we're more used to seeing from John Cheever or John Updike, exploring midcentury Eastern seaboard suburban malaise. For that matter, the word "Connecticut" never appears either, except in the title. So the insights seem a little paltry—you know, like, suburban life and values are so lame, man. Well, at least the insights have the virtue of being mostly true. As for the rest, it's great. It sparkles with Salinger's usual insanely engaging language. I understand that might be a generational, class, or otherwise narrow view, but it does work for me. The story is about one college friend visiting another. They are grown now and in their 30s and this seems to be a recurring if infrequent event. Mary Jane gets lost trying to fine Eloise's place and then they spend the afternoon getting drunk, while the maid minds Eloise's girl, who makes an appearance to charm Mary Jane and we the readers. Salinger might be at his best with children—real children, not adolescents and adults who won't grow up, though he's pretty good with them too. He just seems to understand what makes kids tick, and how we spend the rest of our lives failing to live up to that. It also means, for better or worse, that he goes to some cloying places as well. Their charms may be too precious, and certainly the idealization of them as perfect innocents is overdone. Yet it's also exactly this sense of innocence that he's especially good at—the naturally occurring and amazing kind in real children. It's also a somewhat trite war story. These days the lethal factor would probably be more like an auto accident for the same effect, but in 1948 it was still easiest just to resort to the war. The picture of ennui at the center of plenty may or may not have been radical then, but certainly the view is now mainstream, so there's some tedium to the story in that regard. But it's also Salinger in his prime, so I'm not about to steer anyone away from it.

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

It's a strange feeling to go back to something so adolescent, by definition, at a time when adolescence is far more memory than reality. It's easy enough to see why I fell in love with this book when I was 15. The language is a torrential force in its own right, that cocky, wheedling, judgmental, insecure fine whine of the teenager in living angst—the invisible, the unheard, yearning to be seen and heard. Holden Caulfield is no one I would like to know anymore (if I ever did—more like I felt I was him) (there's a telling parenthetical). When I see him in public now I go in the other direction as soon as possible. And yet it's impossible not to have at least some affection for the poor guy. Details I never noticed before: how big he is, over six foot two. How often he uses the word "really," like a tic. The book is known for its use of the word "phony" but I'd bet "really" is in there even more. I really would. That singing narrative voice was J.D. Salinger's great gift, I think, and his most famous novel is one of the best examples. I'm almost, not quite, as well-read as Holden Caulfield now, so I caught more of the literary references. The Catcher in the Rye is narrow, in a way, with its Manhattan and East Coast preoccupations. It's a novel about an upper-middle-class prep school kid who's a little high-strung. If I had only his problems I'd be doing a lot better already—it's open to that kind of class-based derision, I can see that better now. Yet it transcends prep school and Manhattan and class. Holden Caulfield gets inside your head as much as any other first-person fictional character, and he's on a profound quest too, looking for significance in a world of phony surface. He reminds us of that adolescent idealism whose momentum, if we are lucky, carries us through middle age, when all the hard realities strike. It's easy to snort over his small problems, particularly the ones he creates himself in his own fatuous stupidity, such as an encounter with a prostitute, or picking a hopeless fight with his dormitory roommate. He is on a hard downward spiral and he's taking us with him. That's the trajectory here. According to Wikipedia, The Catcher in the Rye has sold 65 million copies since its publication in 1951, and is still moving 250,000 a year. Amazing. So it is off its peaks but still widely read. I'm surprised by that, honestly, because it's often dated, especially in its treatment of women and girls. But Holden Caulfield remained compelling on a recent visit, if more cringeworthy more often than I remembered, and it's still attracting new readers too, so it must be doing something right. P.S. When are we going to see the posthumous Salinger manuscripts? Come on lawyers, we're counting on you.

In case it's not at the library.

Seymour: An Introduction (1959)

J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye was among the first novels that opened the world of literature to me. This was unexpected not least because I encountered it nearly 20 years after it was first published, long past its troubled-youth use-by date (S.E. Hinton or maybe Easy Rider were more the fashionable choices of my time). The strong sales across multiple generations is, in fact, one of the elements that make it so unique. For those of us so affected, the three additional slight volumes of Salinger's work available all these years were never enough. Now, with news of his death, speculation is rife that finally there may be more to come, though the rumored 15+ manuscripts could as well be incinerated, or may not exist at all. So we'll have to wait a little longer to see about that. In the meanwhile, I paid a visit to my favorite piece of his, which was actually the last of his I encountered and usually the most frequently derided, the second half of the one with the unwieldy title, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. It's another Glass family entry, about which, honestly, I am mostly indifferent (although if that's what all 15 of those manuscripts contain, and they get out, I'm still going to check into them). The knock is that it's a self-indulgent rant. I don't think so. It's certainly a blast of language, long sentences, long paragraphs, footnotes, asides, digressions, intellectual name-dropping, stuttering and jabbering through to its points, complete with an offering of "this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: (((())))." That's what first appealed to me about it, back when I adored all things gonzo in writing (Hunter Thompson, Lester Bangs, Kerouac's The Subterraneans, so on and so forth, bleeding across the mediums with Bob Dylan). Now it reads to me like a shrewd portrait of a writer whose only weapon against the world and all its agonies is words and keyboards and cigarettes deep into the night, madly flailing to make the pain stop, grasping blindly for the sense of it all. In the end, it doesn't end, it only stops—"Quickly. Quickly and slowly"—which, sadly, is how Salinger's life, and perhaps even life itself, feels to me in so many ways at this particular moment.

In case it's not at the library.