Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger

I assigned Nine Stories as the summer reading for my upcoming AP English course. Students respond well to Catcher in the Rye, I reasoned, and might respond well to Salinger's other work, and a set of short stories, as easily portioned as it is, might take some of the burden of summer reading away. Whether or not those things are true--well, I'll tell you that in a few days when I find out how many of them completed the assignment.

Nine Stories remains as I remembered it: a collection of plain-spoken, yet acutely detailed, accounts of human interactions. I am still mostly baffled at "Just Before the War with the Eskimos" (What is it about Ginnie's interaction with Selena's brother that makes her go back on her demand to be paid for the cab fare?), mostly bored by "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes," and heartbroken by "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" and "The Laughing Man," which probably are the best offerings here.

I was less absorbed in "Teddy" than I was the first time around--when you know for sure what's coming, that Teddy accurately predicts his own death, his long, plodding conversation about the nature of reincarnation saps the story of its dramatic thrust. The most rewarding to re-read--that is, the one that seemed richer for offering things I had missed the first time around--was "De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period," about a young artist who fakes his way into teaching at an art correspondence school.

The narrator--a nineteen-boy who is decidedly not the Parisienne De Daumier-Smith, friend of Picasso--takes the job out of boredom, or listlessness, or maybe is simply trying to get away from the stepfather he has to bum around with now that his mother has died. His students are irredeemably bad--not necessarily without talent, but puerile, or pornographic, or both. But one, a Catholic nun in Toronto, piques his interest, and he writes her a very personal letter asking her if he could mentor her as a painter.

What the narrator finds, perhaps without looking, is a kind of religious epiphany. Sister Irma's painting is a scene of Christ's crucifixion, and he experiences it as a secular vision. There is something unmistakably modern in his awe; it is the reaction of a world for whom artistic revelation has usurped religious revelation, who cherishes the symbol because it is more palpable than the murky truth to which it refers. It is easy to point out the tone-deafness of his letter to Irma--he asks, credulously, if being a nun is "satisfactory, in a spiritual way," and privately imagines that she is a young girl he might rescue from her vows--but it is also achingly sincere. This quasi-spirituality is so powerful that it gives Salinger a chance to try out some rare poetic flourishes:

Just before I feel asleep, the moaning sound came again through the wall from the Yoshotos' bedroom. I pictured both Yoshotos coming to me in the morning and asking me, begging me, to hear their secret problem out, to the last, terrible detail. I saw exactly how it would be. I would sit down between them at the kitchen table and listen to each of them. I would listen, listen, listen, and with my head in my hands--till finally, unable to stand it any longer, I would reach down into Mme. Yoshoto's throat, take up her heart in my hand and warm it as I would a bird. Then, when all was put right, I would show Sister Irma's work to the Yoshotos, and they would share my joy.

But it is Sister Irma's parish priest that writes back, withdrawing her from the school. The worldly nature of the narrator's epiphany has not enabled him to make a real connection or a real communication, as is often the case with more religious epiphanies. An agnostic, he fashions the nun into a goddess-figure, who then acts, like a goddess, inscrutably.

But the moment that elevates the story happens at the end, and is something I do not think I totally understood when I read it a couple years ago. The narrator, having dressed up in a tuxedo for dinner and then having changed his mind, watches a girl undress a mannequin in a store window:

She was changing the truss on the wooden dummy. As I came up to the show window, she had evidently just taken off the old truss; it was under her left arm (her right "profile" was toward me), and she was lacing up the new one on the dummy. I stood watching her, fascinated, till suddenly she sensed, then saw that she was being watched. I quickly smiled--to show her that this was a non-hostile figure in the tuxedo in the twilight on the other side of the glass--but it did no good. The girl's confusion was out of all normal proportion. She blushed, she dropped the removed truss, she stepped back on a stack of irrigation basins--and her feet went from under her.

The narrator calls this his "Experience," and has to steady himself against the glass. Clearly, this epiphanic moment has usurped the last one--but why? I think it is because he senses the girl's great bafflement at seeing him, tuxdedoed, outside her shop window, and that in some way she is experiencing an epiphany of her own, an inscrutable spiritual vision. For him, it is not the experience of the vision, but the embodiment of it, that truly satisfies, being the god-figure instead of the saint.

He writes in his diary, "I am giving Sister Irma her freedom to follow her own destiny. Everyone is a nun." This is not quite right; one must be a god to grant freedom to a nun, and though everyone is in some respect a nun, I think Salinger is suggesting that everyone is a little bit more than that. Or, rather, that nuns and the god for whom the toil are not entities as separate as one might have thought.

Nine Stories by JD Salinger

I love love love these stories. I expected to like them--after all, Catcher in the Rye is one of the world's best books--but I don't think I expected them to be as memorable as they are. Though, I suppose, if you produce as little as Salinger, you really ought to make the best of what you publish, right?

What impresses me about Salinger is that, while these prose in these stories isn't necessarily my favorite--especially because Salinger is keen on using judgement words like "memorable" and "unprettiness," which sort of ruin for me the experience of discovering things about characters and situations organically--but the dialogue and the realness of characters' interaction is so true and well-wrought that each story becomes very convincing. Too many authors deprive their characters of personality by making their characters say things that could be uttered by the average man, but the dialogue of Salinger's characters shapes and defines them because it's so fresh and not dumbed down. Here's an exchange between Seymour Glass and a small girl in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish":

Sibyl released her foot. "Did you read 'Little Black Sambo'?" she asked.

"It's very funny that you should ask me that," he said. "It so happens I just finished reading it last night." He reached down and took back Sybil's hand. "What did you think of it?" he asked her.

"Did the tigers run all around that tree?"

"I thought they'd never stop. I never saw so many tigers."

"There were only six," Sybil said.

"Only six!" said the young man. "Do you call that only?"

"Do you like wax?" Sybil asked.

"Do I like what?" asked the young man.

"Wax."

"Very much. Do you?"

Sybil nodded. "Do you like olives?" she asked.

"Olives--yes. Olives and wax. I never go anyplace without 'em."

To me, this sounds like many conversations I've had with small children. There's an element of absurdity to it that you think would be easy to capture, but I suspect if you or I tried it we wouldn't come nearly as close as Salinger at making it sound natural.

I did have one reservation, which was that Salinger seems fixated on two types of characters: the precocious child and the witty, cynical 20-30something. After finishing the collection, however, I decided that this was not necessarily the limits of Salinger's abilities, but that these stories really do work with a few central themes in common, whereas I had been expecting sort of a hodgepodge, unconnected collection. I think somewhere in these nine stories Salinger is suggesting that precociousness in a child--like Sibyl, or Esme in "For Esme--with Love and Squalor," or the Comanches in "The Laughing Man"--becomes in young adulthood a sort of unsatisfied and restless cleverness that manifests itself in depression and ennui. Most particularly it can be seen in the first-person narratives of "For Esme--with Love and Squalor," in which the narrator is a disillusioned soldier who is always cracking jokes, and "De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period," about a young art student who pretends to be an accomplished Parisian artist in order to work at a correspondence art school with an older Japanese couple. Of course, in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," these qualities combined with what seems to be Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder form a recipe for suicide. The narrator of "Blue Period" (De Daumier-Smith is his psuedonym; his real one is never given, though surely he overlaps somewhat with Salinger himself) uses his mendacity as a guard against his own disillusionment and cynicism, and he struggles through his corrections to his students' work--which is mediocre at best--until he stumbles across the paintings of a nun which are, to him, an unexpected and fleeting moment of sheer beauty. It is almost as if Salinger's young characters, marked by their cleverness but never their happiness, are constantly seeking the sense of wonder that they grew out of in childhood.

This idea comes across particularly strong in my favorite story of the nine, "The Laughing Man," about a boyscout leader who is constantly telling his troop a serialized story about the title character, an absurd amalgmation of crime noir, Bond novels, and comic books who "subsists on eagles' blood and rice." It is told through the eyes of one of the scouts, who doesn't understand completely what is at hand when the scoutmaster's girlfriend keeps showing up and then, suddenly, doesn't--but when the scoutmaster pulls over the troop bus and tells the final chapter of "The Laughing Man," brutally killing off the boys' beloved hero, we know what has happened: his heart has been broken.

The last story, "Teddy," brings the theme of precociousness to a strange extreme. The titular character is a young boy aboard a ship returning to America from Britain where, we learn very gradually (Salinger is a master of delayed exposition), he has been undergoing psychological "tests." As he bickers with his parents and scribbles in his diary, he seems just another gifted little boy until he reveals something to a passenger coincidentally familiar with the boy's "tests"--in former lives he has sought to obtain Nirvana but a spiritual stumble has caused him to be reincarnated once again as Teddy, to try one more time. He has an acute awareness of his spiritual life and could tell you, if you wished, the exact date and circumstances of your death. This is strange territory for Salinger, but the story's power and effectiveness is undeniable.

Of course, these themes surface again in Catcher in the Rye, and I feel that having read them gives me a fresher understanding of that book, especially the relationship between Holden and his precocious little sister, Phoebe. How much more potent is Holden's preoccupation with the vulgarities scratched on the walls of Phoebe's school when the possibility that Phoebe will grow into someone like Holden emerges? Something to think about.