Hapworth 16, 1924

This book - well, it was never published as a book, rather as a Very Long Short Story in the New Yorker (the whole text is available from the link above) - by J.D. Salinger - is easily and without a doubt the worst thing he ever had properly published. I really wanted this to be good; you see, it's Buddy Glass copying word-for-word a very long letter his elder brother Seymour (who is, from this at least, though reading this has somewhat soured that, one of my favourite characters in all of fiction) sent from a summer camp in 1924, when Seymour was apparently seven years old.

   It already strains belief. The letter is well over sixty A4 pages long if you copy-paste the text from the link above and fart it into a Word document or similar. However clever or eccentric seven-year-old Seymour was, however injured his leg may have been, I simply do not believe that he would have devoted so much time to a single letter to his mother who he would have seen in a week or two anyway. Realism aside, the tone rankles. Seymour as the author of this letter is very obviously not a child and is very obviously Salinger himself attempting to pre-empt some bizarre precocious fantasy. There are extensive passages where this Literal Child at length objectifies the female camp warden's wife and thinks about what it would be like to pleasure her. Then there's the final forty percent of the letter, which is a "request for reading material" - deeply pedantically specific, unquantifiably esoteric, and of course far too much for even a very clever seven-year-old and his very clever five-year-old brother to get through in a handful of weeks at summer camp, where there are other activities, other children, etc. I really don't know what Salinger was trying to say with this piece. It really has forever soured my impression of the Glass family, who I always had prior found fascinating sources of curiosity as quasi-realistic character studies - but this letter and the portrait of the child supposed to be writing it paints, really just makes me sad. It's like J.D. had no clue what real people were like, were supposed to be like, were supposed to like, were supposed to do, say, write - and he just goes off on this nitrous tangent that's so ridiculous it would be comical if it weren't so long and taking itself so seriously. This letter did not make me laugh or even smile once in its fifty/sixty page length (once I'd copy-pasted it from that website and farted it into a .pdf so I could flip through it on my Kindle); and though Salinger is far from what I would consider a comic writer, everything else I've ever read by him has at least had a certain levity and humour to it that gives the impression that it was written by a human about humans. This doesn't. This is just sad. This is like some grand gesture of literary experiment that nobody asked for because everybody knows they wouldn't like it. And I didn't. Sorry, Seymour Glass. I hope your leg got better after all that - but I hope you got your sad arse out of bed and made friends with some other actual children at that summer camp instead of sitting around pretending that you can read French and Italian and German well enough to interpret those historical texts you requested to a degree that satisfies you. You know, Seymour - when I read this, I thought you were one of the most interesting characters I'd ever come across. But having read this letter to your mother, so devotedly re-typed by your brother Buddy, I feel nothing but sorrow for you. And not in the way that I would even want to comfort you. I can see myself watching you blow your brains out in that hotel room and I would feel nothing but relief that at least you weren't bothering the banana-fish anymore.

   That's almost certainly harsh. But he's not real, he's a character - and for Salinger to create a character of such complexity and mystery and depth in a handful of glimpses, only then to give us an extensive diarrhoea of a letter from this very same character that reveals him merely to be nothing but an imagined caricature of who I can only presume the author wished he had been somewhat like as a child so that he may have come closer to some kind of a spiritual fulfilment - I mean (oh man, don't even get started on Salinger and religion, he was Not to be Trusted with it in the slightest instance) - ugh. Jerome David, can you hear me? Nobody can know everything. Not even someone who did know everything could solve every problem just by knowing how. Calm down. Shut up. And in your grave if nothing else regret having made the New Yorker publish this total embarrassment of a "story". I mean - to have written the four books that you have, and then print this mess, is like performing an otherwise perfect decathlon and then halfway through the final 1000m sharting so badly that you slip over in your own excrement. If you enjoy Salinger's books, do not read this. It isn't one of them in the slightest.

The Catcher in the Rye

[Apologies in advance for this - I am writing this post, to the best of my ability, as I imagine Holden Caulfield would, were he taking over my brain for the duration of its composition. Like method-acting for writing a book review. I feel his first-person narrative voice is so integral to the way this novel works that imitating it will help with the largely explanatory and self-justifying aim of this post. Another thing I should apologise in advance for; most of what I'm going to talk about are more like defences of the novel against several of its many major criticisms, which I will argue are unwarranted and unfair, given that this is one of the most beautiful works of fiction ever crafted in the English language. Please excuse me a healthy measure of sentimentality on my rereading it too; it was my gateway Salinger book when I was a miserable confused little fifteen-year-old, and though I revisited it repeatedly in subsequent years and also read (several times) everything else by its author, this was the first time since that I've read it all the way through. Anyway, over to Holden...]

Listen, so I've been roped into telling you all about this book I re-read recently (and was the narrator of, to tell you the truth). It's a novel by this guy called J. D. Salinger, he became sort of a big deal because of it but hid away living in a cabin in the woods by himself for most of his life after he got famous and all. It's one of the best-selling novels of human history too. Something crazy like at least sixty-five million people bought a copy since 1951 when it came out. I think though if you write a kind of sad book and suddenly everyone in the entire goddam world knows who you are and gets to see something of how you think and goes mad about it, especially if they're sorta phony and don't quite get it and a lot of people get angry or critical about it too, then I can see why you might want to go live in the woods and not see anyone or anything. I got quite a bang out of reading it though. Anyone who's not too judgmental, or doesn't demand to be easily or cheaply entertained, would probably enjoy reading it, maybe even grow from it. You really would.

   Instead of going into too much detail about the story and myself and all, since this is a book with so much cultural baggage I kind of want to talk about that. One of the big things is how controversial people think it is. Lots of people who haven't even read it think, oh yeah, that The Catcher in the Rye book, I've heard of that and that it was controversial, be wary. Part of what made it controversial might have been how famous Salinger got for writing it, especially since he then practically became a hermit afterwards. Another thing was people said it was provocative. In the novel I sort of blaspheme and swear quite a bit, and I guess there are a few sexual references, but nothing that bad happens, honestly it doesn't, just horsing around. Post-war American readers were pretty conservative though, so I guess they took it prudishly, and lots of schools and libraries banned it, and lots of public officials spoke out against it being a corrupting influence. If they'd ever actually been someone like me and felt or thought things I felt and thought while all that stuff was happening in the book, they probably would've changed their mind about all that. I mean, once they knew what it was like to be in my shoes, like a lot of people who read it and liked it did, then maybe they would have taken more seriously the problems that I was all upset about throughout instead of just getting riled up and trying to ban the whole goddam book. And that reminds me.

   Blasphemy, well, I can see how lots of religious folks find that offensive. I don't do it on purpose though, like I want to stick it to their beliefs, it's just a natural way I've learnt to use language, and maybe it's not too nice, but even religious people can't say it's all that bad. If anything it's a helpful signal maybe for who they can direct their love to. In my experience people who are wound up enough to be spouting blasphemies all the time just need someone nice to talk to. Maybe even God, who the hell even knows. But pointing a blamey finger just because of that language use doesn't help anybody, especially when it means you end up banning a book that might've helped a lot of people learn how to not be quite so sad.

   I should probably tell you what the book's about - the guy who usually writes these things seems to try to do that a bit - but a lot of people hate this book, or pretend they hate it, because it lacks 'compelling plot'. Christ, what unimaginative unsympathetic phony rubbish. Compelling plot, that kills me, it really does. The book, okay, it's about some crazy stuff that happened to me back when I was a teenager. I don't really feel like going into too much detail but basically I flunked out of this school I was at that was absolutely terrible, and it was only a few days before we were due to break up for holidays anyway, so instead of waiting around or going straight home, I went round New York by myself for a few days and tried to have fun. Mostly I didn't though. People kept messing me around or whatever and I just ended up wasting a load of money and time, and getting made sad. People I knew either didn't want to talk to me that much, or they'd say something phony and ruin our conversations, and sort of the same thing happened with strangers I tried to get to know. There was no intense action or crazy conspiracies or big surprises. A few nice things happened but it was mostly just kinda depressing. I guess if you're looking for compelling plot in a story like mine then you're gonna have to be disappointed, life isn't an adventure or anything, even if you're sixteen and run off alone in an enormous city, most of what happens to you isn't going to be the kind of action worthy of going in the movies. You might just find yourself trying to talk to people or keep yourself distracted, and maybe the worst thing that could happen is that people just don't want to spend time with you or anything. I don't know. That's more or less what happened anyway.

   Let's go back to the whole controversial side of it. Another angle on that is that the book's linked to some shootings. This isn't half as bad as it sounds though. Like, if you tell someone a food is 'linked to some shootings', they might initially be horrified - you know, "oh my god I can't possibly eat this, it might draw me into a similar set of circumstances as that shooting". This is basically just bullcrap. Two of the cases, where Ronald Reagan was shot (he survived) and Rebecca Schaeffer was shot, in both of those cases the only thing connecting the book to the crimes was that the shooters owned a copy. Remember this is one of the highest-selling novels of all time. Saying that these shooters owned a copy is like saying they both preferred a particular brand of bread and then implying that their shootings were linked to this suspicious bread. Yet some people get all concerned about this - some guy even wrote a book about how it could've been a literary conspiracy with J. D. Salinger remotely activating hypnotised assassins.

   The most famous case though, is where this guy called Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon, you know, from The Beatles and all, and not only did he own the book but he explicitly stated that it was 'his manifesto'. He bought a copy on the day that he planned to shoot John Lennon and went and wrote inside it "To Holden Caulfield, this is my statement, from Holden Caulfield", and then after he shot John Lennon five times he just sat by the body and read the book until the police came and arrested him and all. And when they were asking him why he did it, he just kept telling people he wanted to reject what he saw as Lennon's phoniness, the same way I did in the book, but clearly Chapman didn't even get my point or the ending. Poor sad bastard. It makes me feel terrible to think that one of the world's best-loved peace campaigners and musicians could have been done in by such poor literary interpretation. Also, the whole misreading thing was vastly exacerbated by the fact that this Mark Chapman guy was seriously psychotic. Five of his assessors before trial diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia, in such an extreme form that he probably would've responded badly enough to any story to decide that it was telling him to go out and shoot somebody. It makes me really uncomfortable and all but you just can't blame something like this on the novel that a madman uses as an excuse for murder.

   Enough controversy. People try to slate the book not only plot-wise, as I talked about a bit earlier, but because they just don't like me. I actually get that. Most of the people I interact with in the book didn't like me either. I'm a hard person to get to know and even harder to get to like - nigh on impossible when I was sixteen and in distress. But that doesn't mean the book isn't good, or nice, or interesting. I think you have to be the kind of reader that appreciates real human idiosyncrasy to properly enjoy it, you know, taking things like 'sad' and 'funny' not as prescribed nuggets of forced feeling, but as distilled from understanding, or at least seeing, the complexity of things that are going on. It makes me sound like a dick to say so but people who read this novel and finish it and can only think 'well that was boring' are kinda ignorant and lacking in empathy. They really are. I mean it. The same goes for people who say 'I didn't like the narrator's style or tone'. Imagine someone like that, and some spotty awkward kid who's sort of sad and lonely comes up to them and tries to talk to them, and the whole time that they're trying to make conversation, this goddam phony is just thinking furiously to themselves about how much this kid's voice is irritating or their breath stinks, and so they don't bother to extend their listening enough to care or understand. People do that with this book. It makes me sick. They complain about how the dialogue and narration is always full of what seem like random disparate digressions - they're probably itching for some 'compelling plot', ha. To tell you the truth, J. D. Salinger was great at getting to know what I was thinking and feeling while all this stuff was going on, and reconstructing the narrative and dialogue in ways that looks natural (it sounds like me and all) but reveals subtext too, you know, the underlying literary themes and whatnot. I can't say I put much effort into those myself, I was just the protagonist, but my story was similar in some of the core themes to lots of Salinger's other works, and so I guess that's why he asked me if he could write mine too.

   I guess I'll finish by talking about those themes a bit then. The guy who usually writes these blog entries, in a post about one of old Salinger's other books, talks a lot about social and valuative alienation. I can't be all that bothered to explain the whole thing afresh so if you really want to understand what I'm on about read that post about Franny & Zooey too. Anyway, in the novel I display a pretty textbook case of these kinds of alienation - hence both my loneliness throughout and my preoccupation with phoniness. Because these kinds of alienation are complex and hard to pin down to any one thing, a lot of people percieve them as me just being fussy or whiny or entitled. And I guess in some ways my selfish streak does come out through those disillusionments, enabling me to act 'too pure for this world' without a twinge of self-consciousness about it (which is weird, as I get extremely self-conscious about every other damn thing). So people who get all irate at me being a privileged little kid tossing his life away haven't learnt two big things. Firstly, I don't think they understand these kinds of alienation (dammit, if you haven't already, go read that post I linked above), because if they did they sure wouldn't see 'phony' as some illegitimate made-up complaint. Phoniness is a super-powerful shapeshifter that's been around forever, taking over all modern life and culture and community and replacing it with ego, most people don't even realise and some of the only ones who do think it's a good thing.

   The second thing that these phonies (allow me) need to learn though, is that I know now that who I was as a teenager needed to grow up, and I have grown up, largely. Growing up means accepting that the world is full of crap, that people are full of crap, and that in several places in every building full of children in the world the words 'fuck you' are probably written on the walls somewhere. When you're a kid, these things don't make sense to you. You can go on being more or less innocent - without experiencing the full depth of these kinds of alienation. In the novel I talk about lots of kids playing in a rye field on the top of some cliffs, and how that would be perfect if they could just stay there and play in bliss and every time one of them strayed too close to the edge I or someone would have the job of being the 'catcher in the rye' and stop them to keep them safe. But it's a regrettable biological fact that people do grow up, a related sociological fact that people do experience conflict, a related psychological fact that people do get blasted by forms of social and valuative alienation at many points throughout their lives. And these things obviously aren't great, but they're facts. When you become a teenager and start to realise these things, lots of people get all angsty like I did when I was sixteen, lots of people let their lives sort of slide away from them because of it. But just because these things are sad doesn't mean your life once you know about them has to be defined by that sadness. You can step back and decide to just keep going. This doesn't mean ignore them or deny them or even compromise your standards for how much you dislike them - growing up just means you can't let them paralyse you. For example, Seymour Glass, who you may remember from another of Salinger's books and so of these blog posts, was a beautiful character because of how dedicatedly he clung to the ultimate wisdoms at the bottom of his ideals - but in that exact same way he never grew up. Ultimate wisdom without everyday wisdom makes you a sage, a poet, a Seymour Glass, but it doesn't help you forge relationships or do jobs or even enjoy life in any meaningful pragmatic sense. Maybe in part because he was depressive, but whatever the reason for his mental nonconformity, he stayed put-under by the overwhelming tides of these forms of alienation and everything that's bad about the world, and it drove him to suicide (oops, arguably minor spoiler alert).

   But anyway - as a teenager and for most of the events of the novel I was like that, using my sadness under experiencing these sad aspects of normal life to avoid participating in normal life. I was all set on running away, hitch-hiking out west and living by myself in a cabin in the woods. It was my little sister Phoebe who talked me out of it by trying to come with me; I realised that she couldn't come with me because it was important for her to stay, to be in school plays and practice dancing and making friends, even though these were all things tainted to some degree, especially as she'll grow older, by phoniness. But if I thought it was important for her to stay then maybe it was important for me to stay as well. To get over the bad stuff and just get on with life. It's a stoic sorta compromise, one we all have to make at some point when we realise it if we still want a shot at a functional existence, and even though it means sometimes we'll have to do things we don't like or allow other people we care about to do things we don't like, there's a kind of freedom in that, because that's just how reality works, and we can't opt out. That's what I kind of learned from everything that happened anyway, and I think J. D. did a fine job turning my several days in New York into a masterfully-crafted fable about how to grow up. Ol' Salinger himself used to sometimes talk about how when he was the age I was when all this that he wrote about happened to me, he was fairly similar to me like in terms of his personality and whatnot. He felt slightly put out by the world in the same way I did. But just like I learned to make that decision to just put up with the crappy bits, not like them or anything, but don't let them stop you from living your life properly and all - basically to grow up - and that's a helluva painful but good thing to learn.
   Anyway. This is the lengthiest goddam post on this blog now, by a long shot. Whichever phony bibliophile usually runs this crumby thing is gonna have quite a proofreading job on his hands.

     - Holden Caulfield

Franny & Zooey

This book, the third by Jerome David Salinger to grace the pages of this blog and, no less, upon my third reading of it, is comprised of a long short story and a short novella that together explore a messy emotional incident that occurred, and was more or less resolved, between the two youngest siblings of the Glass family. Of Salinger's four books, it is I think the most spiritual in theme and content, if not in tone (though all of his works are somewhat spiritual in tone). In this post I would like to start sheafing through the hundreds of scribbled pages of mental notes that I've accrued over years of loving Salinger's writings, and organise them into a rough explanation of what I think makes his work so special, so unique, and how it can help its reader grow. I'm doing this in this post because I've already done a Salingeresque bleeding-heart post on the other Glass family novella-pair, and a cursory reviewer's overview of his collection of shorts, so I'll take this one to be my punchy, philosophical, hopefully insightful, tremendously precocious attempt at some literary insight, at least of how I've read him. Astute readers will note that I have not yet reread Salinger's most famous work and only novel, The Catcher in the Rye, but rest assured I will do soon (it's currently under my pillow with a bookmark nestled just inside the front cover, waiting). Seeing as his novel is more self-contained than these other three works, I'll here discuss how Franny & Zooey, as well as the other two, help us build up a framework in which to understand the driving motors, the soul, of Salinger's writing, which I feel manifests itself more tangibly in the other works - but understanding which is the key to properly getting any of them, including his novel, which works well as a stand-alone, but seen in the context of the worldview revealed by his others is an almost incomparably brilliant book.

   Note - if you're sketchy on the following point you'll probably have stopped reading already, but please bear in mind that I am not a scholar of literature by any measure. The following analysis is that of a purebred amateur (I haven't even read the Sparknotes for it, though to do so would be thoroughly against the spirit of the Glass family so who cares), and so please, dear reader, take no shame or pride in disagreeing, but I hope you find my thoughts on the matter at least interesting, as I feel that thinking them through has thoroughly deepened my appreciation of Salinger's books, and has thus also built character; and it may also do for others. But before I dive into self-indulgent theory I shall fulfil the chief obligation of this blog: to summarise the book and recommend it.

   There is first a long short story, called Franny, concerning a terrible date that Franny Glass, the youngest of the Glass siblings, has with her boyfriend Lane Coutell on a short return from college. She despairs at his ambitious student-like normalcy, rants against egoism and pretense, shrugs off any proper conversation and neglects to eat throughout their lunch date. The only thing that seems to perk her back into life is talking about a book that she's been obsessively reading, called The Way of a Pilgrim, about a Russian peasant who tries to learn a mystical method of prayer, and then travels, humbly sharing it with others. Lane doesn't pick up on the fact that this is the only thing his clearly damaged girlfriend is currently able to find any genuine interest in at all, and he doesn't listen to her explanation. She has a nervous breakdown in the bathroom and later faints.
   There is secondly a short novella, called Zooey, concerning the attempts of the second-youngest Glass sibling, Zooey, and their mother Bessie, to rouse Franny from some kind of emotional crisis that she's fallen into on the family sofa. He is depicted first bantering at his mother harshly from a bathtub, later neatening up to go to a meeting to discuss a poorish script he's been talked into acting in. Before leaving the apartment, he drops into the lounge, and talks to Franny at length about her predicament, angering and upsetting her considerably with his incisive tactless analysis of why she feels the way she does. After a couple of other fruitless tactics (pretending to be one of her other brothers by disguising his voice over the phone, dredging up many a memory of previous philosophy-induced breakdowns within the enigmatic precocious Glass family, briefly even attempting a vaudeville performance), he finally launches into an inspiring finale about the nature of faith and joy and the objects of these two phenomena, and though he delivers this with a rather blasé academic bent, it does seem to work in fixing his sister's mind.
   Summarising a Salinger text is more or less completely pointless. These are two of the most human, most thought-provoking, most honest, rambling yet blunt, raw yet verbose, sad and hilarious and weirdly engaging, pieces of writing that you will ever read. If you have a brain and a heart and a pair of eyes, please, I urge you, read these, as well as the other books.
   Well, now; what makes Salinger's books special? What is it about these works of literature that so imbues them with unique soul and personality, so able to perfectly bridge the gap between the mundane and the ripely spiritual?
   Disillusionment is the core theme, following two main threads. Firstly, an ideal for human relationships: sincere, mutual, trusting, spontaneous, positive, and fundamentally functional. We see this interpersonal approach embodied in classically Salingeresque characters; who are almost always sentimental and needy. The sad reality of our broken world means that this ideal model of relationships struggles, never quite clicks into place, and so in encounters, dark and mundane, with the egoism and pretense that taints social life with 'phoniness', these characters become alienated and cynical. Children feature heavily in Salinger's writings because they can be presented and understood as of an age whereby they haven't yet outgrown naivety and innocence: they much more naturally emulate this ideal.
   The second thread through which we encounter disillusionment is harder to pin down: an ideal for all value-laden pursuits that comprise a individual human life, seeking truth and beauty, striving for perfection, expressed most commonly through art and religion. Alongside the wounded childlike cynics mentioned above, Salinger's larger characters are often aesthetes or mystics of some kind; striving to capture, or even merely glimpse, absolute values that they know to exist. However, as with those trying to live in social harmony, those trying to acquaint themselves with perfection are far from indefatigable. Pretense and egoism pervade and spoil these spheres too, clouding the purity of the characters' pursuit, leading to further disenchantment.
   Evidence of both these prongs is evident in all of Salinger's notable characters. Holden Caulfield and Buddy Glass, his two most significant narrators, seem to embody a relatively neutral middle-ground between them, Holden veering more toward the former type of disillusionment and Buddy the latter, but ultimately not too burdened by these weights as we rely on them as narrators more to be apt describers of human character, which they are, in ways that do go on anyway to reveal much about these themes. Seymour, as he is presented, seems to me to completely capture the full tragic depth of both prongs. Franny and Zooey, both child-celebrity intellectuals struggling under the weight of their older brothers' ridiculous schemes of philosophical education, have both been dragged by the former into a deep antisociality, and pushed by the latter into a state of angst (which Zooey has come to terms with, and his helping Franny come to terms with it too is the main plot thread of Zooey). Non-Glass family characters bear much of these marks too: just flip through the short stories. Eloise, Selena's brother Franklin, the Chief, Jean de Daumier-Smith, Teddy - in varying states of joy and sorrow, these characters' lives stem from these twin motors that drive Salinger's works.
   His strong spiritual themes are present because of religion's capacity to underpin, justify and obligate these kinds of perfection and value that his characters crave; similarly his occasional sardonic references to psychoanalysis as a 'cure-all' for characters' problems shows a faith that rather than having to scientifically or therapeutically restructure our minds we can overcome these forms of alienation to some extent by collectively deciding to be nicer; his frequent use of unusual but fairly mundane social situations likewise demonstrates the all-invasive lack of these perfections in human life and thought. So his overall tone comes across as cynical; we know of truth and beauty and yet it is never quite here, as in reality, the world often does just suck. This disappointment runs deep and J.D. knows it. This is why his work has such an endearing quality to those who stick with it and listen to it: humans are seekers, we feel our existential absurdity and it stings, and this deep-cutting fact has massive implications for our character, behaviour, the way we converse and conduct relationships; and his unmatched eye for minute quirks enable him to capture and draw out these implications in scenes that come across as real with characters who seem neurotic and insecure enough to be like genuine people, just as self-conflicted, just as happy and sad at the same time. The brilliance of Salinger is that he connects the universal wont of humankind - as sketched out above - into the details of unique personality and circumstance. He does so gently but never open-handedly, in a complex but not obtuse manner, and the result is writing that clicks on a fundamental level with what it's like to be a person.

For Esmé - with Love and Squalor [and other stories]

This book, a collection of nine short stories by the late, lovable and enigmatic recluse of 20th-century American literature, J.D. Salinger, is just as (if not more) rewarding on this, my third reading of it. I decided to reread it because a particular adult cartoon, in its typical straddling of the fine line between genius and madness, decided to feature J. D. Salinger as a 'hahaha-I'm-not-dead-after-all-but-work-in-a-bike-shop-and-aspire-to-make-reality-TV' kind of character, and, with my having reread another of his amazing works earlier this year, the reminder stuck.
   Note - many of my overall reflections on the essense, spirit, and specialness of Salinger's writings are much the same, and I already went over a fair few of them in the post on Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: an Introduction, and also, having now begun to indulge my biblio-nostalgic cravings in this general direction and finding myself halfway through his published works again, so with only another two more to reread I will probably do so in the near future, and thus further extents of my thoughts on what makes Salinger's books so damn beautiful will have plenty opportunity to be aired. In light of this, I'll keep things to a rudimentary description of the stories here and fit my reflections surrounding them in later posts (despite my reasonable intention to keep this post shortish, any familiar reader will know this to be a farce).
   Anyway, these nine short stories. To outline their content as I will vaguely do so here is effectually pointless; for Salinger, style and substance are inseparable, and describing what are the actually-not-that-interesting events comprising these (and most of his) writings absurd, as the whole point of reading them at all is not to observe the events plotwise, like some cheap written-down Hollywood, but to glimpse the insights of human character and transcendent meaning in the way the explanations of these events unfold. Nonetheless, given the format and conventions of this blog, I feel you are owed at least a perfunctory synopsis of each:

• A Perfect Day for Bananafish: a woman reassures her mother over the phone from her hotel suite that the impromptu 'second honeymoon' her husband had taken them on was going well, and that despite her parents' continued concerns as to his mental stability, her husband was indeed functioning well and enjoying life. Meanwhile, on the nearby beach, her husband, none other than Seymour Glass (this is the family's first appearance), has a playful conversation with a child, returns to the suite, and ends the short story in an entirely unexpected manner.
• Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut: two old college roommates reconnect in a haphazard visit that becomes prolonged due to bad weather; amidst pleasant and witty conversation, the host's daughter has a bizarre crisis with imaginary friends, and the host is upset by discussing her light-hearted old flame (Walt Glass) who died in the war.
• Just Before the War with the Eskimos: a teenage girl follows her friend home to conclude a dispute over owed taxi-fares accrued following their tennis lessons. While the debtor goes to find her mother to get the money, the temporary guest is startled by the shambolic emergence of her eccentric elder brother, with whom she is subjected to a rather baffling but horizon-broadening (in the "well that was weird" sense) conversation.
• The Laughing Man: our narrator reminisces on his childhood baseball teacher, 'Chief', particularly stories he used to tell about a super-powerful Chinese criminal called the Laughing Man who could talk to animals. Despite both Chief and Laughing Man being pillars of inspiration to the young boys, circumstances that the listeners don't understand dampen the Chief's spirits, and he ends the stories quite unwholesomely.
• Down at the Dinghy: after a short conversation with her housekeeper and a visiting acquaintance reassuring them of her son's wellbeing and known whereabouts, Boo Boo Tannenbaum (nee Glass) ventures down to a small jetty on a nearby lake, where her young son is trying to escape home (again) in a rubber boat of which he has declared himself captain, and she tries to negotiate his return.
• For Esmé - with Love and Squalor: our narrator, who remains anonymous, wanders into a British town near where he is stationed during the war; he visits a local choir, then retreats to a café, where later one of the choirgirls and her family enter. Recognising him as an American soldier, she approaches, introduces herself as Esmé (and her recalcitrant younger brother as Charles) and tries to make intelligent conversation, including requesting he someday write something about squalor when she learns he's also a writer. They part ways. In the second part of the story, our narrator, in the wake of the war ending around him, struggles with post-traumatic stress and the squalor of victory in Bavaria; he then receives a many-times-lost-in-the-post letter from Esmé, which in its delicate sincerity is enough to propel this broken man back into recovery of all his faculties.
• Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes: late at night, a man is subjected to a lengthy phonecall from a friend who has worked himself into a drunken panic about his wife (who is late home again), whose subtle shades of disrespect for him have prompted suspicions as to her fidelity; in an impeccable work of mollifying, the phonecall-receiver calms down his friend enough for the whole thing to blow over nicely.
• De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period: a pretentious but skilled aspiring artist blags his way into a tutorship at an independent Toronto art academy, where he quickly finds himself growing bored and pessimistic about the point of such a job when all of the students whose art he is to provide critical feedback on seem to be incorrigibly awful - all but for one young nun, whose paintings strike him with a beauty self-evident enough that he seeks to himself contact her and urge her on, though his efforts are hindered and he grows only further dispirited.
• Teddy: the eponymous child, on a cruise liner with his aggressively leisure-oriented family returning from Europe (where he has been meeting with philosophers and professors to discuss religion and truth), wanders briefly around the ship, updates his journal, then is talked to by a young man, who is rightly baffled, as most readers probably are, by Teddy's decisive obfuscations of most clear ideas about life and death and such.

   Each story has an imponderable mysterious character of its own, and yet each have the same indefinable mingled tinges of awestruck sadness, shrewd curiousity, love and loneliness, sarcastic wit. Generally neurotic but pure at heart. I will try to discuss these elements of Salinger's writing in upcoming posts, whenever I get round to rereading Franny & Zooey and The Catcher in the Rye, which will hopefully be soon. In the meantime, I exhort you to follow me in reading these stories, and with them the other three books published by J. D. Salinger in his lifetime.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: an Introduction

This book, a pair of novella-length pieces (the fictitousness of which are just as dubious as their genre) by J.D. Salinger, is, though I am not in the habit of naming favourites, probably close to one of my preferred books of all time. This was the fifth time I've read it. In tribute to Salinger's dedication of the book to [any] "amateur reader still left in the world - or anybody who just reads and runs", and the general soul of the book itself, this post shall be especially lengthy, incoherent, verbose, and almost certainly more meaningful to me than you. How did I come across this book? Well, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a half-intelligent middle-class white male westerner post-1960 will, in the height of his teenage years, read The Catcher in the Rye, and I was no different. Needless to say, it filled me with depressive angst, yet I found Holden Caulfield so compelling a voice that I promptly sought out and read every other book that J.D. Salinger ever wrote (there were only three others, so this only took about a fortnight), and I found that these other books were, though in a similar vein, much more positive, life-affirming, generally excellent. This one most of all.

   Both are written in the voice of Buddy Glass, a quasi-fictional man whose outlooks and present circumstances bear marked similarities to the life of the actual author while he was writing (pronounced resemblances include a deep fascination with oriental philosophy and poetry, a world-weary hunger for sincerity and innocence and a despair in other people's failing to feed that need, and the author's/narrator's living as a recluse in the New York woods), though with familial and background details embellished somewhat so as to provide sufficient texture to write extensively of oneself without betraying many real facts thereof. This background includes the large erratic colourful Glass family, central among which (in these pieces of writing at least) is Buddy's elder brother Seymour, a character whom I am about as much in love with as it is possible for a heterosexual male to be enamoured with a fictional man. Though we do not actually physically meet Seymour in these works, through Buddy we are shown his spirit, we are pulled by the crook of the neck into the intimate incommunicable aspects of their brotherhood and told to drink in every speck of what the words can tell us and still know that those words can never tell us enough. The Glass family may be fictional but these are two of the most arrestingly honest pieces of writing you will ever read; and despite their apparent disparity in topic, style and measure, they complement each other perfectly if you lean into the heart of Buddy's memories of Seymour, as that is what they are both chiefly about. More specifically though? I suppose you deserve rough outlines, given that this blog is about the books I've read and not the non-existent poetic brothers I wish I knew.

   Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters is a novella-length anecdote about Seymour's 1942 wedding to a woman called Muriel Fedder. It being the war and most of Buddy's family being inordinately scattered across various American entertainment-industry professions, he is told by his sister that he must attend, as he is the only immediate Glass relative available to do so. He does so, still hindered by the pleurisy that has left him on medical leave from the Army, reaches New York and sits through a service only to be caught up in the mass irritated confusion of a crowd of well-dressed strangers when it is realised that Seymour has bailed. Buddy and a small motley entourage (including the matron of honour and her husband, an obscure aunt named Helen Silsburn, and a short deaf-mute man in a top-hat who in his indefatigable silly sparkle is one of the story's highlights) are held up in a wedding car by a parade, and he suggests his nearby apartment as a rest-stop. Though mild resentment turns his way upon their learning his blood-relation to Muriel's scarpered almost-spouse, they comply. After reaching the apartment, Buddy finds himself further pressed into defending Seymour's character, and slips away to avoid awkward questions by offering to make drinks, necking accidentally-too-much scotch himself before he does so, and then chancing upon Seymour's diary. Fearing one of the spurned bride's friends finding it, he takes it into the bathroom and reads several of his enigmatic brother's recent entries (these are also a highlight - Seymour's voice is similar to Buddy's in tone but so much wiser, full of good sadness and jilted purity), before, really quite drunk, he finally remembers to make and serve drinks to his guests. The matron of honour has managed to phone ahead to the main party, and discovered that Seymour showed up secretly after all and has eloped with a surprised Muriel. Buddy, past all caring, sees them out and falls inebriatedly asleep on the sofa.

   Seymour: an Introduction is of similar length, but what kind of piece of writing it actually is I find hard to explain. Sort of potted character description (by Buddy of Seymour) though with extreme reluctance; sort of elucidation on what it means to be creative or wise or good; sort of discourse on the connections forged by interpersonal relationships and written words, the value and yet the insufficiency of reading or writing or being or knowing; sort of compilation of anecdotes from the Glass family's unusual past; sort of extended complaint about being an honest writer with a properly attuned aesthetic sense in a culture where literature is increasingly becoming overwhelmed by the simple, the easy, the cheap, the fake; sort of autobiographical truth-mingled-with-untruth (Buddy refers to other stories by J.D. Salinger that "he" has written); sort of sad and sort of joyous; both mournful and delightful in reminiscence and completely committed to lacking full clarity. It weaves and bobs and floats its linguistic form in a way that is conversational, frank, unpretentious; incredibly easy to read and in a way quite unlike anything else by anyone else. It is probably one of the best pieces of writing I know; it is, even on fifth reading, one of the only ones that can so fully flood my mind that no semi-conscious distraction can possibly meander its way into the foreground of my concentration, heart clenched all the while.

   Together these two short diamonds of the English word blur the lines between fact and fiction, between written and spoken, between personhood and characterhood, between memory and story, between anecdote and essay, in ways that would be extraordinarily complex to describe were I a literature student. Fortunately I am not one; the work is thrown lovingly into the arms of those who will take truths and enjoy goodnesses (be they in books or persons) as they come, and from this book I well-received much just so. It is not written to blur lines, that's just a happy fact of what happens when one writes as honestly as Salinger does.

   I will stop myself here. The virtues of this book far surpass what I could encompass in a blog post, much as those of Seymour are untrapped yet glorified by Buddy's efforts. Let me not begin to exorcise angels.
   I love this book immensely, almost too much even to recommend anyone else read it, as the fear that you won't be struck similarly weighs too heavily upon me - but if you do happen to encounter this book, treat it well. Think while you read, not intellectually but interpersonally, this is not a test, it is an introduction. Don't be clever, be friendly - and if that's an attitude you find it hard to muster as a reader, leave this book well alone, as you don't deserve it.