Books: SONNY

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TIME

An Introduction

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I thought what I’d do was, I’d pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn’t have to have any goddam stupid useless conversations with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something, they’d have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. I’d build me a little cabin somewhere with the dough I made. I’d build it right near the woods, but not right in them, because I’d want it to be sunny as hell all the time.

—The Catcher in the Rye

It is sunny at the edge of the woods, but the tall man’s face is drawn, and white. When he came to Cornish, N.H., nine years ago, he was friendly and talkative; now when he jeeps to town, he speaks only the few words necessary to buy food or newspapers. Outsiders trying to reach him are, in fact, reduced to passing notes or letters, to which there is usually no reply. Only a small group of friends has ever been inside his hilltop house. Not long ago, when he and his family were away, a couple of neighbors could stand it no longer, put on dungarees and climbed over the 6½-ft. fence to take a look around.

What they saw behind a cluster of birches was a simple, one-story New England house painted barnred, a modest vegetable garden, and—100 yards and across a stream from the house—a little concrete cell with a skylight. The cell contains a fireplace, a long table with a typewriter, books and a filing cabinet. Here the pale man usually sits, sometimes writing quickly, other times throwing logs into the fire for hours and making long lists of words until he finds the right one. The writer is Jerome David Salinger, and almost all his fictional characters seem more real, more plausible, than he.

In 21 years as a professional writer, he has produced only one novel, one collection entitled Nine Stories, and 20 other stories in magazines. And Salinger’s tempo is slowing: since 1953, he has published only four stories, though three of these are as long as short novels. He promises “some new material soon or Soon.” Despite the meagerness of his output, Salinger, at 42, has spoken with more magic, particularly to the young, than any other U.S. writer since World War II. The appearance this week of his new book, Franny and Zooey (Little, Brown; $4), actually two long, related stories that originally ran in The New Yorker, is not just a literary event but, to countless fans, an epiphany. Weeks before the official publication date, Salinger’s followers queued up, and bookstores sold out their first supplies. To a large extent, the excitement is fueled by memories of Salinger’s most famous work. For of all the characters set to paper by American authors since the war, only Holden Caulfield, the gallant scatologer of The Catcher in the Rye, has taken flesh permanently, as George F. Babbitt, Jay Gatsby, Lieut. Henry and Eugene Gant took flesh in the ’20s and ’30s.

The Good Bad Boys. A generation or two of high school and college students, particularly those who have at least a sneering acquaintance with the Ivy League, still see in Catcher their hymn, their epic, their Treasury of Humor, and their manifesto against the world. A decade after first publication, the book still sells 250,000 copies a year in the U.S. Sociologist David Riesman assigns Catcher in his Harvard course on Character and Social Structure in the U.S., perhaps because every campus has its lonely crowd of imitation Holdens—doomed wearers of raincoats-in-December, who rehearse faithfully their Caulfield hyperbole (“It was the last game of the year, and you were supposed to commit suicide or something if old Pencey didn’t win”).

Holden is not merely a sort of Penrod of the Angst age. He is more nearly a modern and urban Huckleberry Finn.

Both Huck and Holden are in the same lineage of what Critic Leslie Fiedler calls the Good Bad Boys of American literature. Like Huck, Holden longs to be out of civilization and back in innocent nature.

Like Huck, speaking the superbly authentic dialect of his age and his place, Holden is a runaway from respectability, the possessor of a fierce sense of justice, the arbiter of his own morality. If one fact more than any other links Catcher to its generation, it is that for Holden—as presumably for his creator—the ultimate condemnation is summed up in the word phony. A whole, vague system of ethics centers around that word, and Holden Caulfield is its Kant.

But Holden is not a rebel, though he is usually called that. He longs to do good in a dream world. When he broods about dirty words on the walls where little children can see them, or feels compassion for a prostitute, he is not protesting against “the system” or the adult order; he is merely suffering from the way things are, always and everywhere, in a world of insufficient love. He is a self-conscious and sometimes absurd adolescent, but he is also a doomed human being of special sensitivity—not merely special, as Salinger might say, but Special. As such, he sets the theme for almost everything Salinger has written since Catcher. Most men know how to ignore, suppress or outwit the occasional suspicion that the world is really not to be borne—but the young, the mad. and the saints do not know the trick. To varying degrees, most Salinger characters, includinging those in Franny and Zooey, belong in these three categories. Strangely enough, the young, slightly mad saints are also full of laughter.

The characters of Salinger’s most astonishing legend belong to a gaudy and eccentric family named Glass. The chronicle of the clan’s fortunes is far from finished (the Glasses have so far made their appearance only in Franny, Zooey, and five other stories), but it is already one of the indelible family sagas to appear in the U.S. The elder Glasses are Irish-Jewish vaudevillians now retired to a life of comfortable reminiscence. Les Glass and Bessie Gallagher, professionally known as Gallagher & Glass, achieved “more than just passing notability on the old Pantages and Orpheum circuits.” They are descended from “an astonishingly long and motley double-file of professional entertainers”; Les’s grandfather, for instance, was “a quite famous Polish-Jewish carnival clown named Zozo, who had a penchant—right up to the end, one necessarily gathers—for diving from immense heights into small containers of water.” The seven children, too, have been professionals; they were all prodigies, and they all appeared, at one time or another, on a radio kiddy-quiz called, slyly enough, It’s a Wise Child.

Any author who promises board and room to seven fictional child prodigies would seem to be diving into a container of water that is very small indeed. The Glass children, moreover, are brave, clean, reverent, and overwhelmingly lovable. Yet they never become the seven deadly siblings (at least they are never all deadly at the same time). The Irish strain makes them formidably talkative and occasionally fey. The Jewish strain lends family warmth as well as a talent for Talmudic brooding. The vaudeville heritage provides theatricality.

The Prayer. The new book concerns a religious-emotional crisis in the life of Franny Glass, youngest member of the clan, and tells how her brother Zooey argues, browbeats and jollies her out of it. Franny is first seen during a football weekend being met at the station by a young man named Lane Coutell. The train pulls in: “Like so many people who, perhaps, ought to be issued only a very probational pass to meet trains, he tried to empty his face of all expression that might quite simply, perhaps even beautifully, reveal how he felt about the arriving person.” This is the sort of bull’s-eye at which Salinger is unmatched. It is felt by the flesh as much as by the mind; for an instant, the reader’s cheeks sag as he remembers, with ridiculous guilt, the last time he met a train. During lunch (at a French restaurant, naturally; Lane is no steak man), the young man turns out to be insufferable. Salinger destroys him mercilessly as he shows Lane smugly explaining some choice portions of his latest A paper. Gradually it becomes clear what is troubling Franny; she suffers, like Holden Caulfield, from an intense weariness of all that is phony, from an oversensitivity to the world. She is sick of all the egos madly dancing around her—at school, in her summer theater, at the luncheon table at which Lane Coutell is dissecting Flaubert along with his frogs’ legs. To escape, Franny has seized on a religious classic called The Way of a Pilgrim, in which an anonymous Russian peasant tells how he roamed the land first learning, and then teaching, the Jesus Prayer. ” ‘Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me.’ I mean that’s what it is,” Franny explains with careful casualness. “If you keep saying that prayer over and over again—you only have to do it with your lips at first—then eventually what happens, the prayer becomes self-active. Something happens after a while. I don’t know what, but something happens, and the words get synchronized with the person’s heartbeats . . .”

Lane, bored, listens just closely enough to be able to dismiss the whole thing: “I mean I think all those religious experiences have a very obvious psychological background.” He is supposedly talking as a realist, but he obviously knows nothing about reality. Franny, on the contrary—weak, overwrought, muttering mysticism —has about her the luminous common sense and the clear eye for life that mark all the memorable Salinger girls of whatever age, from Phoebe Caulfield on. Eventually Franny faints. When the story first appeared, coed readers, earthy creatures all, ignored Salinger’s mysticism and decided that she was pregnant. (So did their mothers, who telephoned by the dozens to say not on any account to go to Dartmouth the next weekend.) But Franny is not pregnant. When she comes back to consciousness, she stares at the ceiling, then begins to move her lips soundlessly over and over again in the Jesus Prayer.

Family Guru. In Zooey (which appeared two years later, and is as long and discursive as Franny is tightly and conventionally constructed), Franny has come back from the weekend and has taken to the couch in the Glass living room, clutching The Way of a Pilgrim, and petting her cat, Bloomberg. About her hover her actor brother Zooey (Zachary on the TV credits) and her mother Bessie. Zooey is a brilliant, funny and frighteningly eloquent “verbal stunt pilot” who, in the words of another member of the family, looks like “the blue-eyed Jewish-Irish Mohican scout who died in your arms at the roulette table at Monte Carlo.” Bessie, vainly offering restorative cups of chicken soup to her daughter, is a fading Irish rose, looking touchingly marsupial in her blue kimono equipped with huge auxiliary pockets, whose contents Salinger, a master list maker, thoughtfully assays.

Zooey begins as she invades the bathroom occupied by her son to start a 71-page dialogue that leaves broad hints, for those who care to take them, that Salinger has set himself to writing an American Remembrance of Things Past. From this scene of high family comedy—Zooey in the tub with the shower curtain drawn for decency, affectionately insolent and fighting for a little privacy, Bessie philosophical and unbudgeable on the toilet seat, brooding over her family’s fate—the reader learns that these two are not the only characters surrounding Franny in her crisis.

One of the others, the central but still shadowy character of the whole Glass legend, is Seymour, both family ghost and family guru, of whom little is said in the present book beyond the fact that he killed himself almost seven years before, that he was (at least in the eyes of his family) both a genius and a near saint, and that he relentlessly haunts all the surviving Glasses. It was Seymour who forced the other, younger Glass children to swallow an indigestible mass of Eastern mysticism and Western philosophy so that now they somehow give the impression of having collected quotations from Epictetus rather than baseball cards, of having played catch with some West Side reincarnation of Buddha. It is Salinger’s special triumph that the wondrous and weird, the trivial and homey, coexist with complete naturalness—and humor—in the Glass world.*

It is in this atmosphere that Zooey attempts to bring Franny out of her obsession with the Jesus Prayer, mostly by seeking to show her that in her withdrawal from the people around her, by her spurning “cups of consecrated chicken soup” (“which is the only kind anybody offers around this madhouse”), she is being egotistical. He fails, but much later, at the climax of the story, Zooey enters an unused bedroom in the huge apartment. It once belonged to Seymour, and it still contains a private phone listed in Seymour’s name. Zooey sits for nearly an hour in a near trance, a pocket handkerchief on his head—this is the sort of touch that hooks itself permanently in the minds of Salinger readers—and then picks up the phone. A role is played, an identity shuffled (why and how involves complications that defy summary but seem perfectly plausible in the Salinger vaudeville), and finally Zooey talks Franny around by invoking, of course, the dead brother.

When they were child prodigies on radio, Zooey reminds her, Seymour always insisted that they shine their shoes “for the Fat Lady”—for all the lonely, unlovely, unseen but very real people “out there.” Zooey’s monologue soars: “Are” you listening to me? There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. Don’t you know that? Don’t you know that goddam secret yet? And don’t you know—listen to me, now—don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is? . . . Ah, buddy. Ah. buddy. It’s Christ himself. Christ himself, buddy.”

Franny listens, smiles, and peacefully goes to sleep.

Astonishing Life. The reader may almost feel sorry that she has exchanged the mystic’s mad glint for the calm smile of a mere lover of humanity. And the parable of the Fat Lady may seem intellectually underweight. But Zooey’s lyric rant is not a seminarian’s thesis; it is a gift of love received from Seymour and transmitted to a distraught, prayer-drunk, 20-year-old girl. Apart from questioning the depth of this message, critics—notably Alfred Kazin, who apologizes solemnly for having to say it—have suggested that the Glass children are too cute and too possessed by self-love. The charge is unjust. They are too clearly shadowed by death, even in their woolliest, most kittenish moments, to be cute, and they are too seriously worried about the very danger of self-love to be true egotists.

Some readers also object to the book’s italicized talkiness. But the talk, like the book itself, is dazzling, joyous and satisfying. Holden Caulfield was a gentle heart who lacked the strength to survive; Zooey and his sister in the end are harried but whole. Above all, by sheer force of eye and ear—rather than by psychologizing, which he detests—Salinger has given them, like Holden, an astonishing degree of life, a stunning and detailed air of presence. So real are the Glasses in fact (an American student in Venice remembers that some one called him excitedly from a bar one night to say that he had just met Seymour Glass’s brother-in-law) that readers feel sure that the stories must be autobiographical. But Salinger has done his superhuman best to keep that matter dark.

Get Well Soon. As nearly as is possible in an age in which all relations are public, J. D. Salinger lives the life of a recluse. He says that he needs this isolation to keep his creativity intact, that he must not be interrupted “during working years.” But the effort of evading the world must by now be almost more tiring than a certain amount of normal sociability would be. One critic and fellow novelist. Harvey Swados, has in fact suggested, pettishly, that Salinger’s reputation is in part a consequence of his “tantalizing physical inaccessibility.”

He has only once answered a reporter’s questions (she was a 16-year-old Windsor, Vt., high school girl who wrote an article for her school paper in 1953). He will turn and run if addressed on the street by a stranger, and his picture has not appeared on a dust jacket since the first two printings of Catcher (it was yanked off the third edition at his request). He has refused offers from at least three book clubs for Franny and Zooey, and has not sold anything to the movies since Hollywood made a Susan Hayward Kleenex dampener of his Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut in 1949.

Salinger’s family and friends respect his hermitage and protect him like Swiss pikemen. For some of them, the conspiracy of silence is wearying; Author Peter De Vries clams as loyally as anyone, but admits that knowing Salinger makes him feel like a TV gangster: “You go skulking around not talking.”

Salinger fans have filled the resultant vacuum with splendid imagination. The author apparently listens now and then behind his locked door, because in Seymour, an Introduction, his fictional alter ego refers to “poignant get-well-soon notes from old readers of mine who have somewhere picked up the bogus information that I spend six months of the year in a Buddhist monastery and the other six in a mental institution.” One source of bogus information is the author himself; in the jacket blurb for Franny and Zooey, which he wrote himself, he says with coy fraudulence that “I live in Westport with my dog.” The dark facts are that he has not lived in Westport or had a dog for years. But to disprove such rumors and humors involves infiltrating a distant-early-warning system equipped to detect journalists half a continent away.

Searching for Seymour. Some of the Glass legend, of course, parallels fact. All the Glass brothers sometimes sound like Salinger—introspective, sensitive, obsessed with words, hating what seems phony, dabbling in mysticism—and incidents in the author’s life turn up later in his fiction. Like the Glass children, Salinger was born in New York to a Jewish father and a Christian mother (to soothe her in-laws-to-be, Scotch-Irish Marie Jillich changed her name to Miriam when she married Sol Salinger). But Sol was, and is, a prosperous importer of hams and cheeses, and any connection he or Miriam ever had with show business is well hidden by the Salinger counterintelligence apparatus.

Sonny, as he was then called, a solemn, polite child who liked to take long walks by himself, had no brothers and only one sister, Doris, who was eight years older than he. Salinger once said that Seymour and Holden were modeled after a dead school friend, so reporters and Ph.D. candidates are forever searching for him. At least two of the author’s prep school acquaintances died young, one of them a boy of great brilliance. But intensive detective work shows that Salinger, like a lonely child inventing brothers and sisters, has drawn most of his characters out of his own rare imagination.

Unlike Zooey and the rest, Sonny was anything but a Quiz Kid. His grades at public schools in Manhattan’s Upper West Side were mostly Bs, but arithmetic baffled him. His IQ test score was merely average at 104, and his deportment was sometimes poor. The tall, skinny boy had a better time of it at Camp Wigwam in Harrison, Me., where, at eleven, he played a fair game of tennis, made friends readily, and was voted “the most popular actor of 1930.”

Concerned about his studies, Sonny’s parents enrolled him in Manhattan’s highly rated McBurney School when he was 13 (at the enrollment interview, he said he was interested in dramatics and tropical fish). He flunked out a year later. A friend who knew Sonny then recalled that “he wanted to do unconventional things. For hours, no one in the family knew where he was or what he was doing; he just showed up for meals. He was a nice boy, but he was the kind of kid who, if you wanted to have a card game, wouldn’t join in.”

Unhidden Tears. When he was 15, Sonny was banished to Valley Forge Military Academy, a seat of learning heavily fortified with boxwood hedges and Revolutionary War cannon against dangers lurking in the Pennsylvania hills. Although the school is a recognizable model for Pencey Prep, the neurosis farm in Catcher, young Salinger—who talked of grabbing the big loot as a Hollywood writer-producer—was no Holden Caulfield. Classmate Alton McCloskey, first sergeant in Corporal Salinger’s B Company and now a retired milk dealer in Lock Haven, Pa., remembers crawling through the fence with Salinger after lights out to poach local beer taps, but he is sure that Salinger never went AWOL, as Holden did, and practiced only accepted sorts of nonconformism.

In June 1936 Valley Forge gave him his only diploma. As literary editor of the yearbook, Salinger presented to the school a damply magnificent floral arrangement, since set to music and still sung at Last Parade:

Hide not thy tears on this last day

Your sorrow has no shame;

To march no more midst lines of grey;

No longer play the game.

Four years have passed in joyful ways—Wouldst stay these old times dear?

Then cherish now these fleeting days,

The few while you are here . . .

Off to Bydgoszcz. At night, tenting a blanket over his head to hide his flash light beam from the Valley Forge duty officer, Salinger (by now called Jerry) had written his first short stories. But if he told his family that he intended to be an author, he did not convince Papa Sol. In 1937, after Jerry spent a few unproductive weeks at New York University, the two Salingers set out for Vienna. “I was supposed to apprentice myself to the Polish ham business,” Salinger wrote in a 1944 issue of Story Magazine. “They finally dragged me off to Bydgoszcz for a couple of months, where I slaughtered pigs, wagoned through the snow with the big slaughtermaster. Came back to America and tried college for half a semester, but quit like a quitter.”

Salinger’s last brush with institutional wisdom came at Columbia, where he signed up for a short-story course given by Whit Burnett, editor of Story. In 1942 the author was drafted and used his week end passes to hole up in hotel rooms with his typewriter. Typical of his output then was an earnest piece for Story, and a weepy lament in the Saturday Evening Post about a sensitive young man who dies before he has time to finish the world’s greatest novel, but whose brother, in penitence for his sins, abandons his own career as the world’s greatest songwriter to finish the book.

By 1944 the author was stationed in Tiverton, Devonshire, training with a small counterintelligence detachment of the 4th Infantry Division—almost exactly the situation of Sergeant X, the tormented hero of the warmest and best of the Nine Stories, For Esme—With Love and Squalor (the author, like Sergeant X, passed the time by listening to choir practice at a Methodist church in Tiverton). On June 6, five hours after the first assault forces hit Utah Beach, Salinger landed with the 4th in Normandy, stayed with the division through the Battle of the Bulge. He was an aloof, solitary soldier whose job was to discover Gestapo agents by interviewing French civilians and captured Germans. In France, Staff Sergeant Salinger had an audience with War Correspondent Ernest Hemingway, who read Salinger’s work and, possibly in appreciation of it (“Jesus, he has a helluva talent”), took out his Luger and shot the head off a chicken. Salinger used a similar incident in Esmé.

Foxhole Writer. With a swagger, the prospering young author in 1944 sent Burnett a $200 check to help other young writers, and added: “Am still writing whenever I can find the time and an unoccupied foxhole.” He carried a typewriter around in his Jeep, and an Army acquaintance remembers him typing away, crouching under a table, while his area was under attack. Salinger’s stories were improving, although his dialogue still had the kind of workmanlike falsity taught in writing classes. In one of his Post stories, Salinger introduced Sergeant

Vincent Caulfield, who “has a kid brother in the Army who flunked out of a lot of schools” and who is apparently killed in action in the Pacific. The story shows Salinger’s fictional preoccupation with dead brothers, and his bent for starting his legends by killing off his main character. (The Glass legend similarly began with Seymour’s suicide, in A Perfect Day for Banana fish, in 1948.)

Salinger in 1946 was back in New York, rid not only of soldiering but of a brief, unsuccessful marriage to a European woman physician. Though the two were obviously incompatible, he later insisted that they had a telepathic link, were aware of the same events happening at the same time. He lived with his parents on Park Avenue and spent his nights in Greenwich Village. Gentle and humorous, he loved arguing about grammar and augmented his skinny frame with bar bells. Although this was years before Buddhism was peddled in supermarkets, he eagerly studied Zen, gave reading lists on the subject to his dates. He brought an astonishing collection of girls to the Village, bagged with unobtrusive efficiency at a drugstore in Manhattan’s chaste Barbizon Hotel for Women. Friends could almost see him storing up dialogue. The Barrymore of Camp Wigwam fended off two curious Barbizonians with elaborate legpulls; one girl returned to the real world convinced that he was a goalie for the Montreal Canadiens.

Across the River. Soon Salinger was much too absorbed with writing to need the Village, and he began a series of withdrawals. The first took him to a cottage 24 miles away, in Tarrytown. Friends apparently found his address, because he hid out in a sweatbox near the Third Avenue el for his three-week push to finish Catcher. He decided to move again, and in one of the notable failures of Zen archery, hit on Westport. The artsy-ginsy exurb was no place for Salinger. “A writer’s worst enemy is another writer,” he remarked ungraciously and accurately somewhat later.

There were no writers in Cornish, N.H., and no plumbing or furnace in the gambrel-roofed cottage Salinger bought on a 90-acre hillside tract overlooking the Connecticut River. That winter he happily carried water from his stream and cut wood with a chain saw. For company he hiked across the river to Windsor, Vt., and passed the time with teen-agers in a juke joint called Nap’s Lunch. The kids loved him, but mothers worried that the tall, solemn writer fellow from New York would put their children in a book.

The Blue Suitcase. In 1953, at a party in Manchester, Vt., Salinger met Claire Douglas, an English-born Radcliffe student. She was unimpeachably rightlooking, extraordinarily pretty, not too categorically cashmere sweater and flannel skirt. Claire was fascinated by the intense, 34-year-old author, and visited him several times in Cornish. She soothed her family with a story that showed close attention to the master’s style: Salinger lived, she said, with his mother, sister, 15 Buddhist monks, and a yogi who stood on his head. The girl discovered mysticism. “She was hung on the Jesus Prayer.” recalls her brother Gavin, a wandering movie photographer. “Jerry is very good at hanging people on things.”

Abruptly, Claire broke off with Salinger and married a young blue-suit from the Harvard Business School. Just as abruptly, she ended the marriage after several months and returned to Cornish. She and Salinger were married in 1955. His wedding present to his bride was Franny, whose heroine has Claire’s looks, mannerisms, and—the sort of private salute that amuses the author—Claire’s blue suitcase.

Uncharacteristically, Salinger threw a party to celebrate his marriage—it was attended by his mother, his sister (a twice-divorced dress buyer at Bloomingdale’s), and Claire’s first husband. A little later, at the Cornish town meeting, pranksters elected Salinger Town Hargreave—an honorary office unseriously given to the most recently married man; he is supposed to round up pigs whenever they get loose. Salinger was unamused.

Artistic Battle. He had begun another of his withdrawals; he no longer spoke to the teen-agers with whom he had talked for hours in Nap’s Lunch, cut off his widely spaced visits with Cornish neighbors. Occasionally he was seen at work in the nearby Dartmouth library, wearing, as a friend described it at the time, a checked wool shirt and “Genghis Khan beard.” His working habits have not changed: Salinger takes a packed lunch to his cement-block cell, and works from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. He can be reached there by phone—but. says a relative, “the house had damn well better be burning down.” When he is not working, Salinger watches TV as avidly as any Fat Lady.

The author’s most recent withdrawal may mean merely that his social needs are met by a wife and two children (Matthew, 1½, and Peggy, a precociously bright five-year-old). But Salinger is at work on his first really large body of fiction. The Glass family story cycle is already far longer than Catcher, and clearly it is nowhere near completion (a friend reports that Salinger intends to write a Glass trilogy). Since his marriage, the author has exhausted himself, and his supply of sociability, in a protracted effort to give his legend structure and direction, to deal with characters who speak his own most shadowed thoughts, and to solve the snarls caused by piecemeal publication. His face, after six years of struggle, shows the pain of an artistic battle whose outcome still cannot be seen. The battle almost certainly involves the matter of Seymour’s sainthood and suicide.

Into the Essence. Once there was a man (so goes an ancient Taoist legend) who was so expert at judging horses that he ignored such trivialities as color and sex, looking as he did into the very essence of the beasts. Such a man, gifted with the eye for the core of reality, was Seymour—at least in the estimation of his family. His oldest surviving brother, Buddy Glass, remarks: “I haven’t been able to think of anybody whom I’d care to send out to look for horses in his stead.”

The evolution of Seymour into this being of almost supersensory perception is one of the more fascinating parts of J. D. Salinger’s history. Seymour first appeared in the limpid, shattering, 1948 short story, A Perfect Day for Bananafish, in which he goes swimming with a little girl on a Florida beach and, overcome by her innocence, swallows too much sublimity (or, one guesses later, too much despair). He returns to his hotel room, where his wife has been gabbling on the phone to her mother, and shoots himself through the head. Reasons for the cryptic suicide were suggested in a superb story written seven years later, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, in which Seymour’s wedding day is recalled; it shows a sensitive, gentle, somewhat weak man about to tie himself to a mass of hair nets, deodorant bottles and parroted psychiatric untruths.

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