How many times does one pick up a well-read book expecting one thing only to be surprised? It’s less common for me as I get older, but there are surprises. One of the happiest of them came recently, re-reading this notoriously downgraded staple of suburban libraries.
What you get here is a case for the short story as the supreme form of fiction. Each piece is its own jewel of storytelling economy and creative ambiguity. And as thematically linked ruminations on the human condition, they take on added luster in the form of concept album.
His Vedantic philosophy may not be for everyone, but one doesn’t need to be an acolyte to appreciate J. D. Salinger’s finest hour.
The best-known of these stories incorporates several key elements that re-appear in the rest of the tales: the lamentable passage of time, fantasy versus reality, and the precocious innocence of a wise child:
She was about thirteen, with straight ash-blond hair of ear-lobe length, an exquisite forehead, and blasé eyes that, I thought, might very possibly have counted the house. Her voice was distinctly separate from the other children’s voices, and not just because she was seated nearest me. It had the best upper register, the sweetest-sounding, the surest, and it automatically led the way.
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| Esme and her brother Charles are casualties of war, evacuated from their home after the deaths of their parents. "He misses his father very much," she explains about her brother. "He was s-l-a-i-n in North Africa." Above, British children being evacuated early in World War II as German bombing raids begin. Image from https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/nostalgia/gallery/second-world-war-local-evacuees-10512910 |
This is Esmé, title character of “For Esmé – With Love And Squalor.” She approaches a soldier in 1944 passing time waiting for D-Day. Like the other stories here, what you get is not a classic story with a beginning, middle, and end, but rather a kind of pregnant question on the nature of life told in the form of conversational anecdote.
However hard they are to pin down, these stories are quick and engaging reads, one reason they are too easy to take for granted.
The idea of thematic unity may seem a stretch after an initial readthrough, given the many character types and situations encountered. Read them again, and a line of thought emerges, of life weighed down in trivial pursuits and banalities.
In the first story, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” we see a bustling hotel where a young bride who lives on the phone has a rather comical dialogue to her busybody mother. Meanwhile, on a neighboring beach, a young girl named Sibyl chats with a strange man named Seymour Glass. He tells her about these strange and marvelous sea creatures called “bananafish” who swim into the sea from holes in the ocean floor:
“They’re very ordinary-looking fish when they swim in. But once they get in, they behave like pigs. Why, I’ve known some bananafish to swim into a banana hole and eat as many as seventy-eight bananas…. Naturally after that they’re so fat they can’t get out of the hole again. Can’t fit through the door.”
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| While vacationing Seymour chats with Sibyl, his wife Muriel complains about the people they meet at their beachfront hotel. "You should see what sits next to us in the dining room... They look as if they drove down in a truck." Image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/stevenm_61/2706914631 |
What to make of Seymour is hard to say, especially after the story ends on a decidedly less charming note than it began. But a clear parallel is established between the bananafish and people who similarly grasp at things they are better off not having, which colors the other tales.
The idea of materialism as serial dead end comes up big in the next two stories. “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” is a keenly observed running conversation between two no-longer young women, one unhappily ensconced in suburbia and taking it out on her little daughter. In “Just Before the War with the Eskimos,” a pair of high-school girls get into a silly argument over who should pay for cab fare:
“I never in my life would’ve thought you could be so small about anything,” said Celina, who was just angry enough to use the word “small” but not quite brave enough to emphasize it.
Salinger’s dry, observational surface humor keeps the reader interested enough to give deeper emotions and ideas time to emerge.
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| Four years before Nine Stories was published, the movie My Foolish Heart used the plot of "Uncle Wiggily In Connecticut," though with many changes. Salinger was so unhappy with the result that he never consented to another screen adaptation of his work. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Foolish_Heart_(1949_film) |
My longtime favorite in this collection, “The Laughing Man,” is a classic example of this very thing. On the surface, this is a charming, nostalgic reverie of a man who ran a daycare operation out of an old van in 1928, and kept his boy charges entertained and inspired with a running series of adventure stories featuring the title character:
There were twenty-five Comanches in the Club, or twenty-five legitimate living descendants of the Laughing Man – all of us circulating ominously, and incognito, throughout the city, sizing up elevator operators as potential archenemies, whispering side-of-the-mouth but fluent orders into the ears of cocker spaniels, drawing beads, with index fingers, on the foreheads of arithmetic teachers. And always waiting, waiting for a decent chance to strike terror and admiration into the nearest mediocre heart.
Salinger then introduces a cruel twist of life to mark where fantasy ends and reality begins, not so much as to render the story tragic, but enough to establish how and why adulthood falls short of youthful dreams.
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| The Comanches boys club in "The Laughing Man" play baseball in Central Park, dividing themselves into two teams, the Braves and the Warriors. Above, an actual boys' game being played in 1928 at Central Park. Salinger would have been nine that summer. Image from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Al0eyi2IJI |
For a long time, I thought “Down at the Dingy” was the weak link in Nine Stories, not bad but fairly inconsequential. A young boy is hurt when he overhears an ugly comment; his mother shows up to console him. It’s tenderly observed with grace and humor, but that’s it.
Reading it again, in the company of the other stories, I see the connection to Seymour Glass’s observations a few stories before. Seymour saw materialism holding people back; here the story opens with a woman who knows she did something terribly wrong but is more worried about her job than the damage she left on a child.
Another link not called out by the author is that the mother in the story is Seymour’s sister, Boo Boo. The Glasses are linked to at least three of the stories here, but their dominance in Salinger’s fiction would come later.
“For Esmé – With Love And Squalor” is the most perfect of these stories, especially in isolation. Here, Salinger’s aim is more personal, to channel his own wartime experience in the form of a chance encounter with a young girl who greets him with the deathless line: “You seem quite intelligent for an American.”
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| The original UK cover for Nine Stories went under the title of its most famous story. The transformation of Esme into a sultry Sue Lyon type annoyed Salinger so much he blocked such illustrations from appearing on the covers of later books. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Esm%C3%A9%E2%80%94with_Love_and_Squalor |
Each story is unique in its approach. Here, for example, we have a narrative in the form of a letter written to be read at someone’s wedding, though details are kept sparse. The postwar stress of combat soldiers is dealt with in some depth, which connected to readers when it first appeared as it does today. Yet the sense of a planet’s sad state brings us back to the bananafish idea, if obliquely.
Less subtle are the characters we meet in “Pretty Mouth And Green My Eyes,” a man and woman in a bed when the phone rings. Everything is presented discreetly, not only because of the mores of the time it was written, but also to slowly uncover the layers of betrayal on display. The message may not be that original, but the way Salinger plays with shadings of mood and meaning in the dialogue is exquisite and witty:
“I practically have to keep myself from opening every goddam closet door in the apartment – I swear to God. Every night I come home, I half expect to find a bunch of bastards hiding all over the place. Elevator boys. Delivery boys. Cops – ”
If I had to pick one purely comic number in Nine Stories, it would be the zanily narrated “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period,” perhaps the longest story. Salinger’s skepticism about the merits of a classical education shows up here, as does a surfeit of words. The ambiguity here might be boiled down to whether the narrator is a lost cause or a real pilgrim in pursuit of something real.
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| J. D. Salinger in 1952. The reorganization of reality as art is a game played by both children and adults in Nine Stories. In "De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period," the narrator is a fledgling art instructor with no clear idea where invention ends and truth begins. Photo by Antony Di Gesu from https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/who-was-j-d-salinger |
A compulsive fabulist, the narrator is locked in a state of naïveté regarding his place in the world, yet also possesses real wisdom. “The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid,” he says.
The last story is the hardest to enjoy or defend. At the same time, “Teddy” contains the whole point of the book, tying back to key themes of childhood and materialism and connecting it to Salinger’s emerging passion for Eastern religion, specifically Venetic Hinduism. I find it annoying, inert, and preachy, yet at the same time essential.
While Esmé is also a precocious child, Salinger keeps it real for her, with the way she self-consciously uses malaprop expressions like “squalor.” Teddy delivers lectures to professors on world philosophy, telling them as an encore when and where they will die. The setting, an ocean liner, is amusingly rendered with typical Salinger polish, but the story is minimal. All attention is given to the boy’s words:
“All you do is get the heck out of your body when you die. My gosh, everybody’s done it thousands and thousands of times. Just because they don't remember it doesn’t mean they haven’t done it. It's so silly.”
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| Like most of these collected stories, "Teddy" first appeared in the pages of The New Yorker magazine, in this case in its January 31, 1953 issue. Nine Stories came out later that same year. It signaled a change in Salinger's creative direction, in a more spiritual and introverted direction. Image from https://www.maxrambod.com/pages/books/17050/j-d-salinger/j-d-salingers-short-story-teddy-in-it-very-first-original-publication-format |
For all its clumsy earnestness, “Teddy” successfully reintroduces the bananafish concept, this time connecting it to a coherent philosophy of life. Alone, it is a twee tale; employed as a valedictory to the many fractured lives on display in Nine Stories, it connects.
As I said at the outset, re-reading Nine Stories was a surprise: I re-read Catcher In The Rye not long ago and found it dull and off-putting. I still don’t think Salinger is the best author for traveling outside his milieu, that being mid-20th century Manhattan and lower Fairfield County.
But
Nine Stories exists somewhere outside time and space. Not a mystical
realm, no; “Teddy” as transcendental evangelism is not successful. What it does
so well is connect the reader to Salinger’s frame of mind, and offers a sense
of magic at work in the real world, both in what he writes and the way he
writes about it.
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