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.