• SYNOPSES
• CRITICAL SUMMARY
• ART IMITATING LIFE
• THE PLACE OF SALINGER’S WORKS IN LITERARY HISTORY
• ADAPTATIONS OF SALINGER’S WORK
• NOTES

SYNOPSES

BOOKS

The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951.

The narrator, seventeen-year-old Holden Caulfield, now recuperating in a psychiatric institution, tells the story of the “madman stuff”¹ that happened to him the preceding Christmas after he flunked out of Pencey Preparatory School in Pennsylvania. Emotionally fragile, Holden has never recovered from the death of his younger brother, Allie, who died from leukemia four years earlier. Holden’s narrative begins at the time of his preparations to leave Pencey. He makes a brief visit to his history teacher, Mr. Spencer. Attempting to justify failing Holden, Spencer reads aloud from the boy’s final exam an essay on the Egyptians, whom Holden admired for their mummification skills. After returning to his dormitory room, Holden fights his roommate, Ward Stradlater, who, he fears, has made sexual advances toward Jane Gallagher, a girl Holden idealizes and whose innocence he wants preserved. He leaves Pencey for New York that same night, wearing his red hunting cap with the bill reversed.

In New York, Holden takes a room at the Edmond Hotel and spends two days dancing, drinking, and going to shows, coping with despair caused by the “phoniness”—the hypocrisy, insincerity, and lack of compassion—of the corrupt adult world. He goes to a club to hear a gifted piano player, but he is disappointed that the musician has sacrificed his spontaneity and authenticity in order to appeal to an audience of “dopes” (110). Back in his hotel, he accepts a bellboy’s offer to send a prostitute to his room, but her arrival is more sad than stimulating for Holden, who sees in the young prostitute innocence lost. Demanding more money, the prostitute’s bellboy pimp punches Holden. The next day, Holden finds comfort when he sees a little boy walking with his parents and singing “in a pretty little voice . . . just for the hell of it. ... ’If a body

catch a body coming through the rye’” (150). Holden thinks of his sister, Phoebe, and, because it is Sunday, he believes he might find her at the Museum of Natural History. He likes the museum because nothing ever changes there; the animals and the people in the glass cases always remain the same. Only people change, he concludes, and that awareness suddenly lessens the museum’s attraction.

Holden goes to the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel, where he waits for a friend, Sally Hayes, with whom he has made a date to see a matinee starring the Lunts (Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, a popular acting couple). Holden finds no spontaneity in the Lunts’ performance; they are good, but “too good” (164). After the play, he and Sally go ice-skating, but their ankles hurt, and they leave the rink for a cocktail table, where he tells her how much he hates school, New York, and the demands that society forces on him. Holden asks Sally to run away with him to New England and live in the woods away from people, but she refuses. He becomes angry and insults her, causing her to leave in anger. Lonely and depressed, Holden goes to a stage show at Radio City Music Hall, where he watches a “Christmas thing” (in which he finds nothing religious), with “thousands” of actors “carrying crucifixes” (178), and a sentimental English movie that causes him to think he “might puke” (180). Holden dislikes actors and throughout the novel expresses his disappointment that his brother D. B., a talented writer, is “out in Hollywood . . . being a prostitute” (4).

Later Holden has a drink with Carl Luce, his former student adviser at Whooten, another school from which Holden was expelled. Finding Luce pretentious and phony, he taunts him, causing Luce to suggest that Holden might benefit from psychoanalysis. Luce leaves abruptly. Holden stays, becomes quite drunk and deeply despondent, and goes to Central Park to see the ducks. He wonders where the ducks go when the pond freezes. Cold and fearing that he might die from pneumonia, Holden thinks again of Phoebe, is regenerated by her memory, and walks to his parents’ apartment. They are out for the evening, but Phoebe is home. When Holden tells her his reasons for not being able to remain at Pencey—the “phonies,” “the mean guys,” (217), and the exclusivity—Phoebe says he does not “like anything that’s happening” (220). Holden wants to be “the catcher in the rye,” to stand “on the edge of some crazy cliff near a field of rye where children play so that he can catch any of them who are in danger of going over the cliff edge (224-225).

After his parents return, Holden leaves and goes to the apartment of a former English teacher, Mr. Antolini, who has invited him to spend the night with him and his wife. Antolini, to whom Holden has looked as a trust worthy adult, also disappoints him. Convinced that Holden is heading for a disastrous fall, Antolini offers advice, but Holden finds it stale and studied, revealing the teacher’s greater concern for presentation and proper words than for his former student’s well-being. Later, while sleeping on the couch, Holden is suddenly awakened by Antolini, who is petting his head and saying that he is “simply . . . admiring” (249). Holden bolts from the apartment and goes to Grand Central Station to spend the night.

Physically ill, Holden leaves the station the next morning to go to Phoebe’s school in order to leave a note, telling her that he has decided to leave New York that day and that she should meet him at a nearby art museum. While walking, he fears that he is going to pass out, to “disappear” (257), and he calls on his dead brother, Allie, whose memory is always with him, to save him. At Phoebe’s school he erases an obscenity from a wall to prevent the children from seeing it, but he finds so many other obscenities that he is forced to admit that “if you had a million years” (262), it would be impossible to erase all of them. At the museum Holden passes out when exiting a rest room. When Phoebe arrives, she has her suitcase with her and declares her determination to go away with Holden. Suddenly, he senses his dangerous influence on and responsibility to his sister and reacts angrily, telling her that he is not leaving. The story of the “madman stuff ends with Holden watching Phoebe riding a carousel at the Central Park Zoo, where he has freed himself from his obsession with being the catcher in the rye. As he looks at Phoebe, he is ecstatic, enlightened, and transformed by the presence of love. In what might be seen as an epilogue, Holden indicates that he prefers not to think about the future and regrets having told his story. “Don’t ever tell anybody anything,” he says. “If you do, you start missing everybody” (277).

Nine Stories. Boston: Little, Brown, 1953. Comprises “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” “Just Before the War with the Eskimos,” “The Laughing Man,” “Down at the Dinghy,” “For Esmé— with Love and Squalor,” “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes,” “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period,” and “Teddy.”

“A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Originally published in The New Yorker, 23 (31 January 1948): 21-25.

Seymour Glass, who was in a military hospital during World War II because of psychiatric problems, is vacationing with his wife, Muriel, at a Florida beach. Shallow and materialistic, Muriel devotes much time to her appearance and the dictates of fashion. A reader of tawdry magazine articles, she has misplaced a special book by a German poet that Seymour has given her, and she is amused that he calls her “Miss Spiritual Tramp of 1948.”² While Seymour is on the beach, he is approached by Sybil Carpenter, the child of a mother who is, like Muriel, sensitive to style and partial to martinis. Already acquainted with Seymour, Sybil engages him in conversation. Her remarks are direct and spontaneous, tactlessly honest. Seymour suggests that they try to catch a bananafish because it is, he says, a perfect day for them. As he guides Sybil and her raft into the ocean, he explains that bananafish swim into banana holes and “behave like pigs” (23), eating and becoming so fat that they die because they cannot escape their holes. When Sybil claims to see a bananafish with six bananas in its mouth, Seymour kisses the arch of her foot and takes her back to shore. He returns to the hotel, where he reacts angrily to a woman on the elevator who, he claims, is staring at his feet. Seymour leaves the elevator on the fifth floor and goes into his hotel room, which smells of “calfskin luggage and nail-lacquer remover” (26). He looks at his wife sleeping on a twin bed, takes a pistol from his luggage, and shoots himself through the right temple.

“Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut.” Originally published in The New Yorker, 24 (20 March 1948): 30-36.

Eloise welcomes her college friend Mary Jane to her suburban house in Connecticut, where they drink highballs and reminisce. Eloise has a small daughter, Ramona, who wears glasses with “thick, counter-myopia lens” (37) and retreats into her private world with her imaginary friend, Jimmy Jimmereeno. As Eloise continues to drink, it is obvious that she has become a hollow and unfulfilled person whose conversation is limited to celebrities she has seen while shopping at the upscale department store Lord & Taylor and old friends. She remembers happier times with a former boyfriend, Walt, whose wit and tenderness are absent from her present life with her husband, Lew. Walt once sympathetically referred to her twisted ankle as “Poor Uncle Wiggily” (42). He was killed in World War II, not by enemy fire but by a Japanese stove that exploded as he and another soldier were packing it up for a colonel to send home. Eloise has acquiesced to the standards of a phony, corrupt world by which she has been changed. Later in the evening the drunken Eloise goes up to Ramona’s room and chides her daughter about sleeping with a new imaginary friend (Jimmy Jimmereeno has been killed). When she picks up Ramona’s thick glasses and presses them to her cheek, she weeps and kisses the child lovingly, seeing in her, perhaps, a glimpse of her former self. Downstairs again, Eloise reminds Mary Jane that there was an earlier time in her life when she was quite different: “I was a nice girl,” she says, “wasn’t I?” (56).

“Just Before the War with the Eskimos.” Originally published in The New Yorker, 24 (5 June 1948): 37-40, 42, 44, 46.

Upset that her tennis friend Selena Graff has not paid her share of their cab fare, Ginny Maddox goes home with Selena to wait until she gets money from her mother to pay her. While Selena is in her sick mother’s bedroom, her physically repulsive brother, Franklin, wearing pajamas and nursing a bleeding finger, comes into the living room thinking that his friend Eric has arrived. Franklin tells Ginny that her sister, whom he met in 1942 and who refused to answer his letters, is the “[q]ueen of the goddam snobs” (64). He also offers Ginny half a chicken sandwich, which she refuses. She learns that Franklin is twenty-four years old; he dropped out of college and then worked in an airplane fac-tory in Ohio for thirty-seven months. His bad heart kept him out of military service; he is lonely, alienated, and angry. Looking out the window at a line of people going to the draft board, Franklin says, “We’re gonna fight the Eskimos, next.” His friend Eric arrives and expresses admiration for Ginny’s coat: “It’s lovely. It’s the first really good camel’s hair I’ve seen since the war” (77). Eric is taking Franklin to see Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (1946) because he wants to improve his friend’s “taste” in movies. Unlike Franklin, Eric does not have a defective heart. Before she leaves, Ginny accepts the half sandwich from Franklin and tells Selena that she does not need the money. On the bus ride home, Ginny plans to discard the sandwich but puts it in her pocket, recalling that it had once taken her three days to dispose of a dead Easter chick.

“The Laughing Man.” Originally published in The New Yorker, 25 (19 March 1949): 27-32.

An adult narrator tells the story of “the Comanche Club” of 1928, of which he was a member when he was nine years old. The “Chief of the club, John Gedsudski, in his early twenties and working his way through law school, picked up the boys in his “reconverted commercial bus” (83) each afternoon from P.S. 165 and drove them to sports activities and museums, a service for which their parents paid him. Although the Chief had been an outstanding athlete, he was small and unattractive, but to the Comanches he was a hero. He would narrate installments of a continuously unfolding story, “The Laughing Man,” for the Comanches as darkness fell. Kidnapped as a child from his missionary parents by Chinese bandits, the laughing man had been disfigured when the bandits squeezed his head in a vice. Consequently, he had to wear a “pale-red gossamer mask made out of poppy petals” (88) to prevent those who looked at him from fainting. Nevertheless, his “love of fair play” earned him “a warm place in the nation’s heart” (89). He also learned to speak with the animals of the forest, and his closest allies were “a glib timber wolf named Black Wing” and “a lovable dwarf named Omba” (91). When the Comanches were suddenly forced to share the Chief’s attention with Mary Hudson, a beautiful former student at Wellesley College whose picture, affixed to the rear-view mirror over the windshield, “clashed with the general men-only decor of the bus” (93), the Comanches were confused, unable to understand the Chief’s and Mary’s relationship or the subsequent tension that led to the couple’s breakup. When Mary left the Chief, the story of the laughing man grew tragic: he was captured and shot by his evil enemies, the Dufarges, and later died. The narrator recalls that at the conclusion of the story of the laughing man, his knees shook, his teeth chattered, and the youngest Comanche, Billy Walsh, cried. As the Chief drove them home, nobody told Billy not to cry.

“Down at the Dinghy.” Originally published in Harper’s, 198 (April 1949): 87-91.

On an October afternoon Boo Boo Glass Tannenbaum’s maid, Sandra, is talking to the cleaning woman, Mrs. Snell, fearful that Boo Boo’s son, four-year-old Lionel, overheard one of her remarks and will tell his parents. Boo Boo enters the kitchen, looking for pickles to use in luring Lionel out of his father’s dinghy, to which the boy has run away. When she approaches the dock, she announces herself as “Vice Admiral Tannenbaum, Nee Glass” (121). Lionel, showing hostility, refuses to accept her nautical role and refutes her claims to navy rank. Blowing into her cupped hand “kazoo style,” Boo Boo offers “a secret bugle call that only admirals are allowed to hear” (123) and tells Lionel that she has missed him in the house. Unmoved, he refuses to let her come into the dinghy and says, “You can talk to Sandra” (126). Ever more defiant, Lionel throws a pair of snorkeling goggles into the water and, minutes later, a key chain Boo Boo gives him. Then he begins to cry. Receptive at last to his mother’s overtures, he welcomes her kisses and reveals the source of his distress: “Sandra—told Mrs. Smell—that Daddy’s a big—sloppy—kike” (129). Understating her feelings, Boo Boo minimizes the anti-Semitic remark as not “too terrible” and asks whether Lionel knows what a “kike” is. “It’s one of those things that go up in the air,” he says, “with string you hold” (129). With his pain now eased, he is able to return to his family and accept his mother’s suggestion that his father take them for a boat ride that evening. He and his mother race back to the house, and Lionel wins.

“For Esmé—with Love and Squalor.” Originally published in The New Yorker, 26 (8 April 1950): 28-36.

The narrator receives a wedding invitation from a young woman in England. He does not go to the wedding, but he tells a story that, he says, will “reveal the bride as I knew her almost six years ago” (132). One of sixty enlisted men undergoing intelligence training in April 1944 in Devon, England, in preparation for the invasion of Normandy, the narrator goes into town one day. He listens to a children’s church choir and visits a tearoom, where a girl named Esmé, “about thirteen” (136), whose voice he admired in the choir, enters with her younger brother, Charles, “about five,” and “presumably” a governess (138). They join the narrator. Esme reveals that her mother is dead and that her father was “s-1-a-i-n”—spelling out the word because Charles is present—in North Africa (146). She wears a large wrist-watch, possibly “a navigator’s chronograph” (140), that belonged to her late father. Esme asks the narrator many questions about himself. When she learns that he is a short-story writer, she requests that he write a story especially for her about “squalor” (151). Esme says that Charles “misses our father very much” and “would like to kiss you goodbye” (155). She asks for the narrator’s forwarding address and hopes that he will return from the war with his “faculties intact” (156). The conversation with Esme, the narrator says, “was a strangely emotional moment for me” (154).

The second part of “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor,” a third-person narrative, is about “squalor.” The setting is “Gaufurt, Bavaria, several weeks after V-E Day” (157), in a civilian home where Staff Sergeant X and nine other soldiers live. Having served in five campaigns since the Normandy invasion and having been recently released from a hospital in Frankfurt, Sergeant X “had not come through the war with all his faculties intact” (157). Before opening his accumulating mail, he looks at a book by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, titled Die Zeit ohne Beispiel (The Unprecedented Era, 1941). It was left behind by the daughter of a former resident of the house. Written on the flyleaf of the book are the words: “Dear God, life is hell” (159). Under these words Sergeant X writes, “Fathers and teachers, I ponder ’What is hell?’ I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love,” a quotation from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880). After discarding uninteresting mail from home, the sergeant finds a small package from Esme containing her father’s watch and a letter explaining that she hopes the watch will bring him good luck. The letter is signed by Esmé, with love and kisses from Charles. The letter brings Sergeant X peace and hope that he will become a man once more “with all his f-a-c-u-1-t-i-e-s intact” (173).

“Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes.” Originally published in The New Yorker, 27 (14 July 1951): 20-24.

Lee, a “gray-haired man,” answers a telephone call while in bed with a “girl” (174) who is not his wife. The caller, a younger law partner in Lee’s firm named Arthur who has been drinking heavily, asks whether Lee saw his wife, Joan, leave a party all three had attended. Lee replies that Joan is probably with another couple and will likely return soon, but Arthur is not reassured, saying that his wife has always flirted and he does not trust her. Lee defends Joan and suggests that Arthur is fortunate to be married to a woman with “good taste—or brains” (181). Incredulous, Arthur says that Joan has no brains at all and only thinks herself an intellectual, affectedly describing every man she sees as “terribly attractive” (183). He has lost a case and is obviously concerned that the principals of the firm will be upset. Despondent, Arthur recalls a poem he once sent Joan: “Rose my color is and white, Pretty mouth and green my eyes.” Embarrassed, he exclaims that Joan’s eyes are not green but like “sea shells” (190). He wants to come to Lee’s house for a drink, but the older man reminds him that he should be home when Joan arrives, and Arthur hangs up. The “girl” with Lee thinks him “wonderful” but adds that she feels “like a dog! “(193). His phone rings. It is Arthur again, saying that Joan was with friends and has returned; he assures Lee that he is not calling back because of concern for his job.

“De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period.” Originally published in World Review, new series 39 (May 1952): 33-48.

Having lived in Paris for nine years, where he won three first prizes in National Junior Art exhibitions, the unnamed nineteen-year-old narrator returns to New York in 1939. He sees an advertisement in a Quebec newspaper for art instructors at a correspondence school and applies, greatly exaggerating his experience and giving himself the pseudonym Jean de Daumier-Smith. “Les Amis Des Vieux Maitres” (205) hires him for its summer session, and he goes to Montreal. The school, located in a poor section of the city, has two other staff members, Monsieur I. Yoshoto, the director, and Yoshoto’s wife. Yoshoto gives de Daumier-Smith submissions from three students. He finds the work of two of them discouraging, even absurd, but he greatly admires a watercolor portrayal of Christ’s burial by Sister Irma, a nun from a parochial school outside Toronto. De Daumier-Smith works all night, making sketches and responding to her submission. His response addresses not only Sister Irma’s talent, to which he will give unlimited time and energy, but also the nun herself, whose sincerity, honesty, and imagined beauty he finds invigorating and exciting. De Daumier-Smith refers to her passion and genius and expresses extreme eagerness to see additional work, as well as a desire to visit her. A reply to his letter comes soon from the mother superior of the parochial school, stating that Father Zimmerman has decided that Sister Irma should not continue her art studies. De Daumier-Smith writes another letter to Sister Irma, never mailed, questioning Father Zimmerman’s rea-sons for denying her lessons and emphasizing her potential as an artist.

At twilight, while walking, de Daumier-Smith stops to look into an “orthopedic appliances shop” window where a young woman changes the truss on a “wooden dummy” (249). Seeing him watching her, she blushes and falls; he reaches, as if to help, pressing his fingers against the glass. As the young woman rises and resumes lacing the truss, de Daumier-Smith has what he calls his “Experience” (250). A blinding light, lasting only a few seconds, appears in the glass, affecting his balance. When he regains his sight, the young woman is gone, leaving behind not the enamel urinals and bedpans he observed earlier but “a shimmering field of exquisite, twice-blessed enamel flowers,” in response to which he notes in his diary some time later: “Everybody is a nun (Tout le monde est une none)” (257).

“Teddy.” Originally published in The New Yorker, 28 (31 January 1953): 26-36, 38.

Ten-year-old Teddy McArdle, clairvoyant and a precocious follower of “the Vedantic theory of reincarnation” (286), is on a transatlantic ocean liner, returning to the United States from Europe, where he has been interviewed by leading universities. He travels with his father, mother, and six-year-old sister, Booper, a child who reveals hostility and a fascination with violence. On the sundeck Teddy writes as his diary entry for 28 October 1952: “It will either happen today or February 14, 1958 when I am sixteen. It is ridiculous to mention even” (276-277). Another passenger, a professor of education named Bob Nicholson, is eager to hear Teddy’s thoughts concerning mystical experiences and foreknowledge of death and asks to join him. Teddy says that in his present incarnation he had a mystical experience one morning and suddenly saw “that everything was God” (288). He speaks also of “finite dimensions,” earthly perspectives that cause one to presume that a thing perceived, in fact, is. In order to escape these “finite dimensions,” Teddy tells Nicholson, one must be free from “[l]ogic.” It is the “[l]ogic and intellectual stuff in the apple Adam and Eve ate in the Garden of Eden that causes people to “see everything stop-ping off all the time” (291). Therefore, they prefer to continue the birth-death cycle, refusing to try to advance spiritually to the point at which they could die and go directly to Brahma or God, denying them-selves the possibility, Teddy says, “of stopping and staying with God, where it’s really nice” (292). Fear of death, he concludes, is “silly” (294), an idea he illustrates by hypothesizing the circumstances of his own death. When he goes to his swimming lesson, as he is about to do, he might arrive on the day when the water is being changed. As he stands at the edge of the empty pool, his sister, who, as he says, “doesn’t like me very much,” might push him in, causing his death from a fractured skull: “I’d just be doing what I was supposed to be doing, that’s all, wouldn’t I?” (295). When Teddy actually leaves for his swimming lesson, Nicholson follows him. Approaching the pool, Nicholson hears “an all-piercing, sustained scream—clearly coming from a small, female child” (302). No explanation is given.

Franny and Zooey. Boston: Little, Brown, 1961. Comprises “Franny” and “Zooey.”

“Franny.” Originally published in The New Yorker, 30 (29 January 1955): 24-32, 35-43.

Lane Coutell waits on the platform of a railway station for a train bringing his date, Franny Glass, to town for “the weekend of the Yale game.”³ After the train arrives, Lane and Franny drop off her luggage at a rooming house and go to a restaurant favored by “the intellectual fringe of the college” (10). They begin lunch with martinis. Lane dominates the conversation immediately, discussing a paper he has written on Gustave Flaubert in which he argued psychological reasons for the author’s being “neurotically attracted to the mot juste,” unlike “the really good boys—Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Shakespeare . . .” (13). Franny interrupts to ask whether Lane wants the olive in his martini. Undeterred from his train of thought, he hands her the olive and ponders aloud the possibilities for publishing his paper. She interrupts again, saying that he sounds like “a section man” (14), someone who substitutes for a professor and pretentiously denigrates the writer the class is studying. Franny is “sick of pedants and conceited little tearer-downers . . .” (17). Despite her periodic self-deprecation, the conversation becomes more tense, and Franny, physically ill, excuses herself to go to the ladies’ room, where she cries “for fully five minutes.” She takes “a small pea-green clothbound book” (22) from her purse and presses it to her breast before returning to the table.

Lane is disappointed that Franny orders a chicken sandwich and a glass of milk. He has ordered snails, frog legs, and a salad. He is also disappointed that she does not remember Wally Campbell, one of his friends, but Franny reminds Lane that his friends “all talk and dress like everybody else” (25). The Wally Campbells of her world are all alike, known for their smugly critical affectations and large egos. Attempting to free herself from the force of her ego, Franny has given up acting because she feels shame when she delivers her lines. Her role as the strong female character Pegeen Mike in John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (1907) could have been “really nice,” but the actor who portrayed the title character, she says, denied her that pleasure by becoming “so lyrical” (28).

When Lane inquires about her little green book, Franny tells him it is The Way of the Pilgrim, written by an anonymous Russian peasant. She says the pilgrim wants to “find out what it means in the Bible when it says you should pray incessantly” and that a “starets— some sort of terribly advanced religious person” (33)—provides the answer by telling the pilgrim that he must first learn the “Jesus Prayer,” the words of which are: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” When one repeats this prayer unceasingly, silently with the lips at first, Franny says, “the prayer becomes self-active,” and “the words get synchronized with the person’s heartbeats ...“ (36). Quantity becomes quality, and “You get to see God,” she says (39). Ill again, Franny leaves the table, faints, and is carried to the couch in the restaurant managers office, where she remains unconscious for several minutes. Concerned and attentive, Lane goes for a cab while Franny lies still, staring at the ceiling as her lips begin to move, “forming soundless words, and they continued to move” (43).

“Zooey.” Originally published in The New Yorker, 33 (4 May 1957): 32-42, 44-139.

The narrator, Buddy Glass, says in “the author’s formal introduction” that the story is “a sort of prose home movie” (47). His younger brother Zooey has warned him that the plot of this family story, which depends on mysticism, might harm Buddy’s writing career. Zooey has also taken issue with his brother’s overuse of the word God in telling the story. Buddy maintains that what follows is not “a mystical story” but “a compound, or multiple, love story, pure and complicated” (49). In November 1955 the twenty-five-year-old Zooey, a handsome, successful television actor, sits in a bathtub in his parents’ house reading a four-year-old letter from Buddy dated 18 March 1951, “three years, to the day” (62), since the oldest Glass brother, Seymour, committed suicide. Buddy explains in the letter that he and Seymour “highhandedly” involved themselves in Zooey’s and their sister Franny’s education and introduced them to much religion and philosophy because they thought a quest for “no-knowledge” should precede a quest for knowledge, that they should know “saints” and “bodhisattvas” before “Blake and Whitman” (65-66).

Suddenly, the mother of the Glass siblings, Bessie, announces that she is coming into the bathroom, and Zooey hides behind the shower curtain. She asks whether he has talked to Franny, who has been lying on a couch since returning from visiting her boyfriend, Lane Cou-tell, and has been repeatedly refusing her mother’s chicken broth. Zooey has talked to Franny but says he does not think his sister wants to talk again. Bessie continues her endless chatter, not only about Franny but also about Zooey’s toothpaste, his acting scripts, and the disorderly state of the bathroom. Her son replies with razor wit and sarcasm. Bessie is convinced that the source of Franny’s trouble is “that little book” (95) that she has been carrying throughout the house. Zooey seems to agree and angrily blames Buddy and Seymour for turning both Franny and him into “freaks” by instilling in them a religious fervor that leads to neurotic behavior. He tells Bessie that Franny actually has two little books: The Way of the Pilgrim and The Pilgrim Continues His Way. The latter, he says, details “the whys and wherefores of the Jesus Prayer” (112).

When Zooey leaves the bathroom, he goes to check on Franny and, during a long and animated discourse, tells her that if she is going to say the Jesus Prayer, she must understand Jesus. “Jesus,” he says, “realized there is no separation from God” (169) and that “we’re carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside” (169-170). This, Zooey says, is “the whole point of the Jesus Prayer,” which has only one aim: “To endow the person who says it with Christ-consciousness,” not to provide a “holier-than-thou trysting place” or to relieve one of world-weariness (170). Zooey leaves Franny distraught and goes into Seymour’s and Buddy’s old room. He reads from long lists of his brothers’ favorite quotations, which underscore his point about the Jesus Prayer.

Making one more attempt to relieve Franny’s anguish and encourage her to proceed with her life and acting career, Zooey picks up his brothers’ old phone on a separate line, kept in service at Buddy’s insistence; he slips a handkerchief over the receiver and dials Bessie’s number. Franny answers the phone, speaking from her parents’ bedroom. Although she soon recognizes Zooey’s voice, she does not hang up. He tells her that he once complained about having to shine his shoes before appearing on The Wise Child, a radio quiz program on which all the Glass children eventually appeared, because none of the listeners would see his shoes. Seymour told him to shine his shoes anyway: “Shine them for the Fat Lady” (199). The secret, Zooey tells Franny, is that “There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady” and that the Fat Lady is “Christ Himself, Christ Himself ...“ (200). Zooey’s words resonate with Franny. She hangs up the phone, climbs into her parents’ bed, lies quiet, and smiles at the ceiling for several minutes before falling into a peaceful sleep.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. Boston: Little, Brown, 1963. Comprises “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” and “Seymour: An Introduction.”

“Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.” Originally published in The New Yorker, 31 (19 November 1955): 51-58, 60-116.

The narrator, twenty-three-year-old Buddy Glass, is being treated for pleurisy at an army hospital at Fort Benning, Georgia. On “May 22nd or 3rd,”⁴ 1942, he receives a letter from his sister Boo Boo, a Navy Wave, informing him that their brother Seymour is to be married on 4 June at the house of the bride’s grandmother in New York. Because Buddy is the only member of the family who could possibly attend the wedding, she writes, he must be there. Buddy arrives at the ceremony on time, but the groom never arrives. The distraught bride, Muriel Fedder, and her “immediate family” (16) load themselves into waiting cars. Buddy climbs into one of the cars with “a hefty” and hos-tile matron of honor, who wants to get her hands on Seymour for “just two minutes” (21); her husband, a first lieutenant in the Signal Corps; Mrs. Silsburn, an aunt of the bride; and a diminutive deaf-mute, the bride’s “father’s uncle” (55), all bound for the bride’s home. Their car stops as a parade arrives, delaying them indefinitely. Furious, the matron of honor continues her attack on Seymour, whom she considers “crazy” and a “latent homosexual” (42), probably with “a really schizoid personality” (43). She adds that he reportedly asked Muriel to postpone the wedding because he was “too happy to get married” (45). The passengers abandon the car, and the matron of honor leads them to a Schrafft’s restaurant, where she can use a telephone and they can have sodas in an air-conditioned space. Buddy admits to being Seymour’s brother. The Schrafft’s is closed, so Buddy takes the group to his nearby apartment, also air-conditioned.

At Buddy’s apartment the matron of honor returns to her attack, quoting Mrs. Fedder’s conviction that former child performers like Seymour, who was once on the radio quiz program It’s a Wise Child, “never learn to relate to normal people” (68). Buddy replies that he does not “give a good God damn what Mrs. Fedder ... or any professional dilettante or amateur bitch had to say” on the subject of his brother, adding that none of “the patronizing, fourth-rate critics and column writers” ever saw him “for what he really was. A poet, for God’s sake” (69). In the bedroom Buddy finds Seymour’s bag and diary, evidence that he has been in the apartment recently. Buddy takes the diary into the bathroom, where Boo Boo has written in soap on the mirror, “Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Like Ares comes the bridegroom, taller far than a tall man” (76). Buddy reads a portion of the diary, in which Seymour points out that he is not bothered by Mrs. Fedder’s presumptions about his psychological condition, that he finds them comforting, and that he considers himself “a kind of paranoiac in reverse.” “1 suspect people of plotting,” Seymour has written, “to make me happy” (88).

Buddy stops reading the diary and returns to the kitchen to prepare cold drinks for his guests. The matron of honor, having spoken to the Fedders on the telephone, announces that “the groom’s no longer indisposed by happiness” (100). Seymour has returned, and he and Muriel have eloped. The guests, with the exception of the bride’s father’s uncle, leave immediately, and Buddy reads from Seymour’s diary again, his last entry. Seymour has written that he asked Muriel to elope with him because he is “too keyed up” to be with people on the day he is “about to be born,” a “sacred, sacred day.” He has written also that a “miscellany of Vedanta” has pointed out that marriage is about serving. Seymour is ready to serve and experience, he says “the joy of responsibility” for the first time in his life (106). Buddy closes the diary and sleeps.

“Seymour: An Introduction.” Originally published in The New Yorker, 35 (6 June 1959): 42-52, 54-111.

“Seymour: An Introduction” is Buddy Glass’s ambitious por-trait of his late brother, who committed suicide six years after the wedding and events portrayed in “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.” Buddy begins with quotations from Franz Kafka and Soren Kierkegaard that illustrate the difficulty of his task and suggest that the greatest obstacles he faces are unintended intrusions of self, born out of love for Seymour, that threaten to compete for control of the narrative. Acknowledging that his readers likewise present a challenge, Buddy seeks to establish a rapport with them, “an entre-nous spirit,” by involving them in the compositional process so that they may perceive what he calls “pure spirit” (113). He wants to overcome impediments to this perception that have been littered about by literary critics and “neo-Freudians” working in their “clinics . . . free of any inherent morbid attrait [attraction] to beauty” (118). Such persons are incapable of comprehending a “true artist-seer” like Seymour, “dazzled to death by his own scruples” (123), a poet who was “all real things” to his family but most of all an “enlightened man, a God-knower” (124).

Buddy abandons the short-story form, which he finds inadequate for an introduction to Seymour; nevertheless, he acknowledges having written two other stories about his brother. Buddy also functions as Seymour’s literary executor and plans to select for publication “about a hundred and fifty” of “one hundred and eighty-four” of Seymour’s short poems. They are about simple subjects, reflecting Seymour’s poetic roots in Chinese and Japanese poetry and his belief that the “true poet has no choice of material” (141), that the material chooses the poet. Their younger brother Waker, a priest, has concluded, Buddy says, that Seymour likely had “memorable existences” in feudal Japan and metropolitan Atlantis (155).

Buddy breaks away from his Seymour narrative briefly in order to present aspects of the Glass family history central to his portrayal of his brother, focusing on the Glasses’ roles as performers over the course of several generations and, in particular, on the nostalgic recollections of Les Glass, their father, about his own career as a stage actor and vaudevillian. Buddy recalls what he regards as an especially revealing moment, when their father asked Seymour whether he remembered the vaudeville comic Joe Jackson’s once giving Seymour a ride on his trick bicycle “all over the stage.” Seymour had answered that “he wasn’t sure he had ever got off Joe Jackson’s beautiful bicycle,” a response, Buddy adds, that had not only “sentimental value” for his father but was “true, true, true” (173-174). Commenting on Buddy’s stories, Seymour once reminded him that writing is the author’s “religion” and that one must always “trust the heart” and write from the heart (186-187).

Buddy provides details about Seymour’s physical description but concludes that he cannot truly describe him. Seymour’s suicide haunts Buddy, and though he must revisit the details of his brother’s death, he will not do so in the present narrative, nor “for several more years” (196). He has attempted many times to write about Seymour, but he has burned “at least a dozen” (212) of his stories since the suicide, discovering that understatement in describing his brother, who cannot be understated, always leads to an artistic lie. Buddy recalls that as a child Seymour “loved sports and games” and that his extraordinary proficiency at playing marbles revealed much about his life. Hoping to improve Buddy’s skill at marbles, Seymour tellingly asked him, “Could you try not aiming so much?” (236). The lessons of Seymour’s approach to marbles, Buddy suggests, involved detachment from pride and the ego. However intrusive his own ego in his portrait of his brother, Buddy acknowledges, it could never prevent him from always being “conscious of the good, the real” (248) in Seymour.

The conclusion of the narrative reveals what for Buddy was probably Seymour’s most important teaching. It is the same lesson their brother Zooey shared with their sister Franny: Seymour’s Fat Lady is not only everyone on earth but also Christ. Feeling Seymour’s powerful presence during the process of composing his narrative, Buddy puts aside his introduction, suddenly eager to return to that “awful Room 307,” where, in the morning, he will teach his class of students at a women’s college; among these young women, he says, there is not one who “is not as much my sister as Boo Boo or Franny.” Finally, remembering that “Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next,” Buddy asks himself as he goes to bed, “is he never wrong?” (248).

UNCOLLECTED STORIES

“The Young Folks.” Story, 16 (March-April 1940): 26-30.

At a party she is giving for her friends, young Lucille Henderson introduces William Jameson Junior, a socially inept nail-biter, to lonely, desperate Edna Phillips. More interested in a small, blond young woman at the party, Jameson remains indifferent to Edna’s attempts to impress him by her affected diction and pretended popularity. When Jameson leaves Edna to continue gazing at the young blond, Lucille asks Edna why he left, and Edna falsely implies that he made a sexual advance. At the conclusion of the story, Edna returns to a big red chair where, sitting queen-like in a big red chair, where she continues feigning the superiority by which she attempts to offset her social alienation.

“Go See Eddie.” University of Kansas City Review, 7 (December 1940): 121-124.

Bobby, a booking agent, visits Helen, his sister, whose sullied reputation he seeks to restore. With her acting career on hold, Helen dates a married man, Phil Stone, one of many men of whom her brother does not approve. Throughout the story Bobby insists that Helen go see Eddie Jackson, who is rehearsing a cast for a new show and could rekindle her career and perhaps restore her self-respect. As Helen flaunts her indifference, Bobby’s anger approaches rage. When he leaves, frustrated and pessimistic, she calls Phil and tells him that she will no longer see him. She shows contempt for the objects in her apartment that remind her of what she has become: a kept woman living in an expensive apartment with a maid. At the conclusion of the story, Helen gives a faint indication that she might reject her corrupt way of life.

“The Hang of It.” Collier’s, 108 (12 July 1941): 22.

A first-person narrator observes that his soldier son, Harry, reminds him of a certain Bobby Pettit, who was in an army training camp in 1917. Unable to perform any command correctly, Pettit drew the wrath of a sergeant named Grogan, whom Pettit attempted to reassure by repeatedly saying he would get “the hang of it.” On a military reviewing stand with his wife, the narrator, remembering Pettit, watches his inept son along with other young soldiers marching on a parade field. As the story ends, the sergeant in charge of the troops approaches the viewing stand, revealing that he is Grogan from 1917. The narrator, it turns out, is Bobby Pettit himself, now a colonel.

“The Heart of a Broken Story.” Esquire, 16 (September 1941): 32, 131-133.

Recounting the process by which he attempted to write a “boy-meets-girl” story for Collier’s, the narrator, in a parody of popular short stories, demonstrates why he was unable to bring his characters, Justin Horgenschlag and Shirley Lester, together. Although Justin could fall in love with Shirley on the Third Avenue bus, the narrator is unable to find a plausible way for the young man to introduce himself. Justin could make a direct but incongruous approach: “I’m a printer’s assistant and I make thirty dollars a week. Gosh, how I love you. Are you busy tonight?” (32) Such an approach, however, would never be acceptable to Collier’s, says the narrator. Neither should his character grab Shirley’s purse to gain attention because, as the narrator hypothesizes, Justin might be sent to jail where, despondent, he might be killed by a guard during an attempted escape, ending all chances for a romance with Shirley. The narrator composes letters to be exchanged while Justin is in prison, but it is too late, because another possible scene prevails. The two potential lovers leave the bus blocks apart, and Justin forgets Shirley. This is the reason, says the narrator, he “never wrote a boy-meets-girl story for Collier’s” (133).

“The Long Debut of Lois Taggett.” Story, 21 (September-October 1942): 28-34.

After Lois Taggett graduates from Miss Hascomb’s School, her parents give her a lavish debutante party. Lois then works briefly for her uncle, leaves suddenly to join friends in Rio de Janeiro, returns to Manhattan, dabbles in courses at Columbia University, and marries Bill Tedderton, a press agent. Initially attracted to Lois’s money, Bill sees her one morning when she “never looked worse” (29) and falls ecstatically in love with her. Inspired by this love, Lois becomes kinder than she has ever been. One evening, after a passionate embrace, Bill does “what he had to do” (30): he inexplicably burns Lois’s hand with a cigarette. A week later, amidst love and laughter, he smashes her foot with a golf club. Convinced that Bill is deranged, Lois leaves him, becomes impulsive, drinks heavily, obtains a divorce in Reno, and returns to Manhattan, where she marries dull Carl Curfman, who, because of foot irritation, wears only white socks. To escape the confines of her boring second marriage, Lois goes regularly to early movies and visits a friend who accommodates her cynicism. With the birth of a child, Tommy, whom she loves uncontrollably, Lois becomes happy and charitable again. After Tommy is accidentally smothered by a blanket, Lois no longer cares about anything. She has attempted earlier to change Carl’s unfashionable behavior, but at the end of the story she tells him, “Put on your white socks. . . . Put them on dear” (34).

“Personal Notes on an Infantryman.” Collier’s, 110 (12 December 1942): 96.

A first-person narrator, a young officer working in an orderly room, informs a civilian named Lawlor, who wishes to enlist, that he is not a recruiting officer. Lawlor, who seems too old to serve in the armed forces, has a son in the army and another in the navy, who lost an arm in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Rejecting the narrator’s attempts to dissuade him from enlisting, Lawlor leaves the orderly room, finds the recruiting officer, and enlists. Soon Lawlor’s wife calls the narrator, who “couldn’t be unkind to that voice . . . never could.” Although Lawlor proves to be an excellent soldier, his battalion commander does not ship him overseas. Hurt and disap-pointed, Lawlor returns to the narrator’s orderly room, accusing him of influencing the battalion commander’s decision. Lawlor says, “I want action. . . . Can’t you understand that?” At this the narrator experiences “a terrific thrill.” Soon Lawlor is transferred to another company and sent overseas, but army regulations prevent the narrator from notifying Mrs. Lawlor until her husband is abroad. When the narrator calls her, he reveals to the reader that the Lawlors are his parents. He tells his mother that he and his brother, a navy ensign, were present when their father’s ship departed.

“The Varioni Brothers.” Saturday Evening Post, 26 (17 July 1943): 12-13, 76-77.

“The Varioni Brothers” is written in the form of a story within a story. In the frame story the narrator, Mr. Westmoreland, guest columnist for a newspaper, asks the question, “Where is Sonny Varioni?” (12). Sonny, a composer, and his lyricist brother, Joe, were a highly successful songwriting team in the 1920s. Westmoreland recalls the night a man mistook Joe for Sonny, who owed a gambling debt, and killed him. The narrator of the embedded narrative, Sarah Daley Smith, replies that Sonny is in Waycross, Illinois, typing the manu-script of Joe’s unfinished novel. She then tells the story of what happened to the Varioni brothers. Joe was a gifted writer teaching English at Waycross College; Sarah was his student when he abandoned his writing to become Sonny’s lyricist. When producer Teddy Barto agreed to publish the Varionis’ songs and to be their agent, he insisted that they move to Chicago. Joe initially refused but later acquiesced, much to the regret of Sarah (who had fallen in love with him) and a professor at the college, Voorhees, who respected Joe’s genius. The Varioni brothers enjoyed extraordinary success, becoming rich and famous while Joe failed to produce a final draft of his novel. Sarah pled unsuccessfully with Sonny to release his brother from their agreement and begged Joe to leave Sonny so that he could resume writing his novel. Joe refused but assured Sarah that he would leave soon. After Joe’s death Sarah married dull Douglas Smith; she now teaches at Waycross. Seventeen years after his brother was killed, Sonny has returned to Waycross, where he stays with Sarah and Douglas while he works day and night typing Joe’s novel. When asked why he wants to assemble it, he replies, “Because I hear the music for the first time in my life when I read his book” (77).

“Both Parties Concerned.” Saturday Evening Post, 216 (26 February 1944): 14, 47-48.

Billy Vullmer, the narrator, and Ruthie Cropper Vullmer married young and have a tense relationship. A former high-school basket-ball player, Billy works in an airplane factory, while Ruthie stays home with their baby. She is resentful that Billy takes her out nearly every night to drink at a place called Jake’s. Ruthie wants Billy to remain home in the evening and assume his proper role as a husband and father. “We are supposed to grow out of certain things” (48), she tells him. He is unable to accept his own responsibilities as an adult, yet he regards Ruthie as a “kid.” Because Billy does not show proper attention to their baby, Ruthie leaves with the child and goes to her parents, leaving a note stating, “If you want to see the baby, please wait a while” (48). Nevertheless, when he calls Ruthie, she returns home, hoping, perhaps, for a change. That night, during a thunderstorm, Billy goes downstairs and finds his wife, “funny kid” (48), sitting at the kitchen table, reading. Convinced that she is afraid of the storm, Billy seeks to comfort her. Having memorized “backwards” Ruthie’s note about the baby, he recites it for her. Ruthie cries and says, “I don’t care about any-thing anymore,” and Billy, thinking he knows his wife “inside and out. Sort of,” says, “Wake me when it thunders, Ruthie. Please. It’s okay. I mean, wake me when it thunders” (48).

“Soft-Boiled Sergeant.” Saturday Evening Post, 216 (15 April 1944): 18, 82, 84-85.

Philly Burns, the narrator, probably speaking to a fellow soldier, says that his wife, Juanita, forces him to go to movies that falsely portray the deaths of men in wartime. Seeking to correct her inaccurate perception, Burns has told her the true story of Sergeant Burke and now tells Burke’s story also to his unidentified auditor. Burns recalls that Burke was a gentle man who befriended him. When Burns, a frightened sixteen-year-old soldier, sat on his bunk crying, Burke tossed a handkerchief filled with medals on his bunk, told him to pin them to his undershirt, and took the boy to dinner and a Charlie Chaplin movie. Burke did not remain for the entire movie because he did not “like funny-looking little guys always getting chased by big guys. Never getting no girl. For keeps like” (85). Burke was also a victim of unrequited love, and his suffering was obvious and unabated. The sergeant was transferred, and Burns later received a letter informing him of Burke’s death. There was nothing romantic about it: the sergeant was killed when he left safe shelter during the attack on Pearl Harbor in order to save three young men. Burns advises anyone considering marriage to get a girl like his Juanita, who cried when she heard about Burke. “Get one that’ll cry for Burke” (85), he says.

“Last Day of the Last Furlough.” Saturday Evening Post, 217 (15 July 1944): 26-27, 61-62, 64.

Twenty-four-year old Technical Sergeant John F. “Babe” Glad-waller is home on furlough in Valdosta, New York, before he is to be sent overseas. While he peruses his books, his mother brings cake and “ice cold” milk and watches him “lovingly” (26). Taking a sled with him, Babe leaves his room and goes to surprise his little sister, Mattie, who is about to be released from school. He and Mattie have a special relation-ship, and when he sees her at school, her youthful innocence and spontaneity make him happier than he has ever been before. As they return home, Mattie agrees, against her better judgment, to get on Babe’s back and sled down a dangerous street, but Babe, sensing her fear, refuses. When they return home, Babe’s witty friend Vincent Caulfield, whom Babe has been expecting, meets them at the door. At one point during Vincent’s joking banter, he abruptly interrupts himself to tell Babe that Holden Caulfield, his nineteen-year-old brother, is missing in action. At dinner Babe’s father talks at length about his recollections of World War I, and Babe responds sharply, pointing out that glorification of war led to Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. That night, after Babe and Vincent have returned from their dates, Babe thinks about the home he will miss and the kind of young woman he would like Mattie to become. It is not enough to be smart; he wants her to be kind to people but not patronizing, to be “a swell girl.” Although Babe has told no one in his family that he is going to war, when he goes to Mattie’s room to tell her goodbye, she awakens, tells him she knows he is going overseas, and asks him not to “get hurt.” Later, Babe’s mother comes to his room, saying that she, too, knows he is going to war. She suggests that he wake Vincent and go down to the kitchen, where “there’s some chicken in the ice box.” Babe responds “happily” to her motherly invitation (64).

“Once a Week Won’t Kill You.” Story, 25 (November-December 1944): 23-27.

A young man about to enter the army during wartime packs and speaks with his self-absorbed wife, Virginia. They are an affluent couple with a cook and, it is implied, one other servant. Virginia, whose speech reflects her mental laziness, cannot see why her husband does not seek the influence of “that man with the thing on his face, The Colonel” (24), whom they met at a party. Perhaps he could ensure that her husband would receive a commission. The husband strongly disapproves of her idea. Concerned about his aunt who lives with them and suffers from dementia, he asks his wife to take her to the movies occasionally while he is away. The title of the story comes from the husband’s remark to his wife: “Once a week won’t kill you” (24). Before he has breakfast, the hus-band checks on his aunt, who lives in a continuous present. She is at work on her stamp book, filled with “cancelled American two-cent stamps” (25). He tells her he must go to war. As he is about to leave her room, the aunt gives him a letter of introduction addressed to a Lieutenant Thomas E. Cleve Jr., who, she says, is “with the 69th” and will “look after you” (26). Cleve’s photograph reveals him to have been a World War I officer. When the husband goes downstairs, he tears up the letter, but, rather than discard it, he puts the pieces in his trouser pocket as he walks into the dining room to a cold breakfast, reminding Virginia again to take his aunt to the movies once a week.

“Elaine.” Story, 26 (March-April 1945): 38-47.

After the death of her father, Elaine Cooney lives with her mother and grandmother. A pretty girl who has won child beauty contests, Elaine is mentally slow and does not graduate from the eighth grade until she is sixteen. The summer after her graduation, she joins her mother “in a Hollywood- and radio-promoted world” (41) of movies and soap operas that provide diversion for them. Just before the beginning of Elaine’s first year in high school, Teddy Schmidt, a movie usher, invites her to go to the beach with him. Another couple goes with them, but the couples separate, and Teddy entices Elaine to go with him under the boardwalk, where “it’s shady” (44). For Elaine the dark, cool place is “retreatful,” and as Teddy talks, she feels distanced from “her own familiar world” (45). A month later Elaine and Teddy are married at the Schmidts’ house, where the reception turns to disaster because of an argument between Mrs. Schmidt and Mrs. Cooney “concerning the virility of a popular male movie star” (46), Mrs. Schmidt defending the star’s virility and Mrs. Cooney challenging it and slapping Mrs. Schmidt. The incident calls further attention to Teddy’s “wavy, effeminate hair,” “white, white hands” (42), and “thin effeminate mouth” (46). As the newlyweds are about to escape the reception, “something strange happened” to Mrs. Cooney. Overcome with “a great tenderness” (46), she kisses Elaine goodbye and then abruptly orders her to come back, exclaiming, “You ain’t goin’ nowhere with that sissy boy” (47). Elaine painlessly bids Teddy goodbye “in a friendly way.” She, her grandmother, and her mother then go to a movie, where Elaine makes an easy transition from her short-lived marriage to the world of the movie theater, toward which she skips “ecstatically” (47).

“This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise.” Esquire, 24 (October 1945): 54-56, 147-149.

Sergeant Vincent Caulfield sits in a truck in the Georgia rain with thirty-four other men, awaiting a lieutenant from Special Services to accompany them to a dance. Vincent faces a dilemma: the lieutenant has authorized only thirty men to attend the dance, the number the hostess can accommodate. The title of the story derives from Vincent’s acknowl-edging the absurdity of the moment by saying that their truck “is a potential poem” that might be called, among other possibilities, “This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise” (55). Much of the story, narrated from Vincent’s first-person point of view, is an interior monologue. Although he talks to the men in the truck, his thoughts constantly return to Holden, his younger brother, who has been reported missing in action. Unable to accept the loss of his brother, Vincent rails in his mind against the government, accusing it of lying about Holden. Vincent recalls a special moment during a day at the fair when Holden asked their little sister, Phoebe, for her autograph and scoffed at the scientific exhibits, saying, “Let’s get out of this educational junk. Let’s go on the rides or something. I can’t stand this stuff. . .” (147). When the lieutenant arrives, he tells Vin-cent that four men must return to their areas. Two leave voluntarily, and two others are ordered to leave. As one of those ordered from the truck, an eighteen-year-old, stands in the downpour, insisting that he was the first in his unit to sign the dance list, Vincent reaches out and flips up the young man’s raincoat collar. The lieutenant sends the eighteen-year-old back to the truck. A local man, the lieutenant calls home to tell his sister to go to the dance. As the truck rolls toward the dance hall, Vincent thinks again of Holden and pleads: “Show up. Show up somewhere. . . . It’s simply because I remember everything. I can’t forget anything that’s good” (148).

“The Stranger.” Collier’s, 116 (1 December 1945): 18, 77.

Babe Gladwaller, home one week from the war, goes to see Helen Polk (nee Beebers), a young woman who was once engaged to his friend Vincent Caulfield, to tell her how Vincent died. Babe’s little sister, Mattie, with whom he plans to have lunch and go to a matinee, is with him. He tells Helen that Vincent was killed in the Hürtgen Forest by a mortar shell that dropped in while Vincent was standing around a fire with four other soldiers warming himself. There was no valor in his death. Having participated in five of the bloodiest campaigns in the war, Babe suffers the effects of battle and finds adjusting to civilian life diffi-cult. He apologizes to Helen “for being a stranger” and says, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me since I’m back” (77). She explains why she and Vincent broke off their engagement: she loved Vincent, but he never cared about anything after his younger brother, Kenneth Caulfield, died. Babe gives Helen a poem that Vincent wrote about her; it disturbs her, not only because it was written by her dead former fiance, but because Vincent referred to her in the poem as “Miss Beebers.” Concerned about Babe’s fragile condition, Helen offers to help him, to get theater tickets or go to lunch with him, but her kindness makes him uncomfortable, and he rejects her offer. He is “just not used to things yet” (77). Outside, Babe notes the contrast between the war and civilian life. He surmises that a doorman walking a dog probably walked it “the whole time of the Battle of the Bulge” (77). Nevertheless, Babe finds comfort in Mattie, whose sincerity and caring provide inexplicable joy. Watching her jump with her feet together “from the curb to the street surface, then back again,” he asks, “Why was it such a beautiful thing to see?” (77).

“A Boy in France.” Saturday Evening Post, 217 (31 March 1945): 21, 92.

Physically and mentally exhausted, “the boy,” an unnamed first-person narrator but clearly Babe Gladwaller, awakens after a brief sleep to look for a foxhole for the night. He is too tired to dig one and prays, “I won’t get hit. Don’t let me get hit.” He finds a foxhole, formerly used by a German soldier, removes a bloody blanket from it, and “lead-enly” digs “out the bad places” (21). Lying in the foxhole, dirty and in pain from having lost a fingernail, he fantasizes that he can magically transport himself home to his apartment, where he is once again clean, well dressed, and listening to his favorite music. There he will read, drink coffee, and receive a visit from “a nice quiet girl,” who will read Emily Dickinson’s and William Blake’s poetry to him. He punctuates each pleasure in the fantasy with the statement “and I’ll bolt the door” (21). Returned to the reality of war, the boy takes some wet newspaper clippings from his shirt pocket and reads a Broadway column about a “starlet” attending the premiere of her “grand” new picture, The Rockets’ Red Glare. She had a date “with an honest-to-goodness G.I.!” (92), a public relations officer. The boy drops this clipping on the “natural ground to the side of the hole” and takes “a soiled, unrecent envelope from his pocket” that he rereads “for the thirty-oddth time.” It is a letter from his little sister, Matilda, lacking in coherence but rich in love and caring. After reading it, he falls “crumbily, bent-leggedly, asleep” (92).

“I’m Crazy.”⁵Collier’s, 116 (22 December 1945): 36, 48, 51.

Holden Caulfield, the first-person narrator, has flunked out of Pentey Preparatory School, the third school from which he has been expelled. He stands in freezing rain by a cannon on Thomsen Hill, which overlooks the gymnasium where Pentey is playing a basketball game against a rival school, and tries “to feel the goodby” he needs before running down the hill and crossing a highway, where he “disappeared into Hessey Avenue” (36). Holden visits his history teacher, Mr. Spencer, who has invited him to come by. “Old Spencer” (36) has flunked Holden in history and wants to explain his reasons for flunking him. He reads aloud from Holden’s final examination an essay about the Egyptians, whose mummification techniques Holden finds interesting. Responding to Spencer’s curiosity about his last visit with the headmaster, Holden says the headmaster talked “about life being a game” that “you should play by the rules” and about “applying” oneself (48). Charitable to his teacher, Holden agrees that Spencer should have flunked him, but he finds talking difficult because his mind wanders to the frozen pond in New York’s Central

Park. He wonders where the ducks go when the pond freezes. Later, at home in his parents’ New York apartment, Holden is happy to be with his younger sisters, Phoebe and Viola, while his parents are out playing bridge. Phoebe, in whom Holden confides, is disturbed that he does not like school or anything else and fears her parents’ reaction to his expulsion. Holden gives the reader details of that reaction but says only, “When they were all done with me, I went back to the kids’ room” (51). In his own room Holden lies awake for a long time, convinced that he will never return to school, that his father will force him to work in an office he will not like, and that he will never be successful. Thinking again about where the ducks in Central Park go when the pond freezes, Holden falls asleep.

“Slight Rebellion Off Madison.”⁶ New Yorker, 22 (21 December 1946): 76-79.

Holden Morrisey Caulfield is on Christmas vacation from Pencey Preparatory School for Boys.⁷ Because his vacation coincides with his friend Sally Hayes’s vacation from the Mary A. Woodruff School for Girls, he asks her for a date. Holden takes Sally dancing, and each professes love for the other while riding home in a taxi, Sally adding that she hopes Holden will let his hair grow because “crew cuts are so corny” (76). Their schedule is full the following day. They see a play, O Mistress Mine, but the intermission proves a disgusting time for Holden, primarily because Sally’s friend George, whom Holden considers a phony, refers to the stars of the play, the Lunts, as “angels.” Following the play, Sally and Holden go ice skating. Because of their weak ankles they retire to a bar, where Holden, lighting matches and letting them burn down as he enumerates all that he hates about his school and New York, asks Sally to run away with him to the Vermont woods. They will stay in “cabin camps” until his money is gone, after which he will get a job, and they will “live by a brook and stuff.” Eventually, they will “get married or something.” Sally suggests that such a plan must be put off until he finishes college. Convinced that she is wrong and that the future will impose further unpleasant obligations on him, Holden grows impatient and tells her, “You give me a royal pain” (77). After Sally leaves in anger, Holden meets Carl Luce, another Pencey student, for drinks at the Wadsworth Bar. At two in the morning Holden, drunk and alone, calls Sally and then baits the bar’s piano player, whom he encounters in the men’s room. Tearfully leaving the men’s room, Holden goes into the street where, cold and with “teeth chattering violently,” he begins “a long wait” (79) for the Madison Avenue bus.

“A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All.” Mademoiselle, 25 (May 1947): 222-223, 292-302.

Twenty-two-year-old Ray Kinsella, a staff member on the entertainment committee of a cruise ship anchored in the Havana harbor, escorts an eighteen-year-old woman named Barbara back to the ship from a jai alai game when she develops a headache. After her headache is quickly cured by aspirin, Barbara consents to go ashore again with Ray. In the tender ferrying them back to Havana, the two accept an invitation from an older couple, Diane and Fielding Woodruff, to join them for drinks on shore. During talk of the impending war, Ray tells Diane that he will be going into the army at the conclusion of the cruise, and she observes that he is fortunate to be with a young woman who “has no waist at all” (292). At “Viva Havana,” a popular tourist club, the older couple’s fun appears to be forced. As the Woodruffs dance, Barbara strikes matches from the table matchbox and reveals to Ray that she is traveling with her future mother-in-law, Mrs. Oldenhearn, who thinks Barbara needs the rest a cruise provides. Mrs. Oldenhearn was “a great athlete when she was young,” and “it’s like being with a girl my own age, almost,” Barbara says (293). Carl, her fiance, is “very nice,” but Barbara does not “understand boys” and never knows “what they’re talking about” (294). Back on the ship near morning, Ray and Barbara kiss frequently, and Ray, sensing that she is ambivalent about her fiance, asks her to marry him. Each time he repeats his request, Barbara says neither “yes” nor “no,” but rather “I don’t know” (297). Confused, she returns to her cabin, where, as she undresses for bed, Mrs. Oldenhearn, “a deadly serious tennis player in her day,” speaks of the morning’s match in which she and Barbara will play against two other women. Suddenly, Barbara tells her future mother-in-law that she does not want to get married, and Mrs. Oldenhearn observes calmly that it is better to correct a mistake in advance of making it (301). After Barbara has returned to the deck alone in her robe, Mrs. Oldenhearn’s reaction is more pronounced: “All right. It’s over,” she says. “I can hardly contain myself. I’m so happy. You’re on your own. . . . Just don’t disgrace or embarrass me.” On deck, in “the fragile hour,” Barbara “is now exclusively susceptible to the counterpoint sounding just past the last minutes of her girlhood” (302).

“The Inverted Forest.” Cosmopolitan, 113 (December 1947): 73-80, 85-86, 88, 90, 95-96, 98, 100, 102, 107, 109.

Corinne von Nordhoffen, whose mother committed suicide in 1915, lives with her father, Baron von Nordhoffen, who hosts a party on 1 January 1917 in honor of his daughter’s eleventh birthday. When Corinne’s special young friend, a poor boy named Raymond Ford, fails to come to the party, her father’s secretary, Mr. Miller, drives her into town to find him. When they reach Raymond’s home, an apartment above a lobster restaurant, he and his coarse, abusive mother are leaving town, and Corinne and Raymond can only say good-bye to each other. The story advances six years. Corinne’s father has died. She enrolls in Wellesley College, graduates, and goes to Europe, where she travels widely. Upon returning to the United States, Corinne calls an old friend, Robert Waner, who has loved her since her college days, and asks for his help in getting her a job with a magazine for which he works. At this point in the story Waner reveals himself to be the narrator but speaks of himself in third person.

Corrine goes to work for the magazine and has a career that is “entirely remarkable,” leading to rapid advancement. Waner gives her a favorite book of poems, “The Cowardly Morning,” the author of which, he says “is Coleridge and Blake and Rilke all in one and more.” The title poem includes the memorable line “Not a Wasteland, but a great inverted forest / with all foliage underground” (80). Enthralled by the poems, Corinne discovers that the author, a Columbia University professor named Ray Ford, is the Raymond Ford she loved as a child. She has lunch with Ford and learns about his difficult childhood, during which he was befriended by an older woman who introduced him to poetry, which he read until he nearly lost his eyesight. Corinne invites Ford to parties with her friends and his literary devotees, but he is uncomfortable at social gatherings. Corrine falls in love with him, and, despite the warnings of Waner that Ford is a “psychotic” (90) who can never love her, she marries Ford.

Soon after the newlyweds return from their honeymoon, a manila envelope arrives addressed to Corinne from Mary Gates Croft, a young woman who wants Ford to read and comment on her poems. Corinne asks her husband to read the poems and invites Mary for tea. Ford shocks Corinne when he bluntly tells Mary that she is not a poet because she invents; poets, he says, “find” their poetry (95). Mary tells Corinne of her troubled childhood, and Corinne befriends her. Mary also attends Ford’s lectures and has dinner with him frequently. Approximately one month after Corinne received Mary’s letter, Ford calls to tell his wife he is leaving town with Mary. Howie Croft, Mary’s husband, arrives at Corinne’s apartment nine days later and reveals that his wife is known as “Bunny,” has a child, and has lied to Corinne about her childhood.

Corinne searches for her husband. A year and a half later Waner discovers that Ford is living in a midwestern city and tells Corinne, who immediately goes to the city. From her hotel room she calls Ford’s number. Bunny answers as if Corinne is an old friend and invites her to their apartment. When Corrine arrives, she discovers squalor. Bunny greets her warmly, fixes her a drink, and encourages her to go into Ford’s study, where Corinne finds him seated at a small card table lighted by a single hanging bulb. He is drunk and is not wearing his glasses. Bunny has forbidden him to wear them, insisting that he perform eye exercises. Reduced to a child-like state, Ford reports that Bunny never liked his poetry but rather was drawn to him because she thought he looked like someone she had seen in the movies. He is “with the Brain again,” he says, implying that Bunny has assumed his mother’s role. Bunny is writing her own novel and says she hopes that Ford will “stoop to writing for money” (107). As Corinne leaves, Bunny speaks to Ford abusively, echoing his mother’s tone the night of Corinne’s eleventh birthday party.

“A Girl I Knew.” Good Housekeeping, 126 (February 1948): 37, 186, 188, 191-196.

John, the narrator, has failed five of his college classes and expects to be forced to work in his father’s business, but instead he is sent to Vienna and Paris to learn languages. He goes to Europe in July 1936, staying in Vienna for approximately five months to study German while living in an apartment above a Jewish family with a beautiful sixteen-year-old daughter, Leah, with whom he falls in love. Leah and John meet often in his sitting room, where he speaks German and she speaks English. She listens to his phonograph records and learns to sing “Where Are You” in her heavily accented English. Although there is no intimacy in their relationship because Leah is engaged to a young Polish man her father wants her to marry, John is enthralled by her beauty and innocence. When he leaves for Paris in December 1936, he writes to Leah, promising to write again and to send her a copy of Gone with the Wind. He does neither and returns to the United States, where he is permitted to re-enroll in school. John receives a package from Leah containing phonograph records he left behind and a letter dated 14 October 1937, informing him that she is living with her husband in Vienna. John cherishes the letter.

During the war John works in intelligence, stationed with an infantry division in Europe. He learns from a prisoner he interviews what “terrible things had been done to the Jews in Vienna” (194). After the war, John returns to Vienna and learns that Leah died in the concentration camp at Buchenwald. He visits his old apartment, hoping to have a last look, but discovers that it is being used as quarters for American military officers. A staff sergeant initially refuses to let John go upstairs. The sergeant asks, “What’s the big deal, anyhow, up there?” John replies that it is “no big deal,” that he once knew a girl who lived in the balcony apartment who, along with her parents, was “burned to death in an incinerator ...” (196). The sergeant relents; John climbs the stairs, goes into the apartment, and looks at the balcony below. When he returns to the ground floor, the sergeant wants to know “what the devil you were supposed to do with champagne” (196), which he is required to chill for an upcoming party. John says he does not know and leaves.

“Blue Melody.” Cosmopolitan, 125 (September 1948): 51, 112-119.

The narrator tells a story that a soldier named Rudford told him in the back of an infantry truck traveling from Luxembourg to the war front at Halzhoffen, Germany, in 1944. As an eleven-year-old child, Rudford and his classmate Peggy spent their afternoons at a hamburger cafe, Black Charles’s, listening to their friend Black Charles play the piano, which he also did in the cafe at night. Black Charles, who played “like somebody from Memphis—maybe even better . . . was kind and interested when young people came up to the piano to ask him to play something, or just to talk to him. He looked at you. He listened” (112). Rudford and Peggy found a new friend when Black Charles’s niece Lida Louise, a singer, arrived for a four-month performance engagement. When she sang “Nobody Good Around” for them on the afternoon of her arrival, Rudford had “gooseflesh,” and Peggy put her fist in Rudford’s coat pocket.

On the night of Lida Louise’s first performance at Black Charles’s, Rudford and Peggy, who told their parents they were attending “a hygiene lecture at school” (115), were present, along with a college crowd home for the Christmas holidays. Lida Louise opened with “Nobody Good Around” in honor of Rudford and Peggy, who were so moved by the singer’s voice that Peggy cried and Rudford told Peggy he loved her. During one of Lida Louise’s performances, a college student asked Lida Louise to sing “Slow Train to Jacksonville,” a song he had heard performed by a singer in New York. Lida Louise assumed that the singer was Endicott Wilson, a man whom she apparently knew well.

Lida Louise left Black Charles’s place when she was booked into a famous jazz emporium on Beale Street in Memphis, where she was an extraordinary success. She signed with record companies and recorded eighteen “sides.” The songwriters Joe and Sonny Varioni (introduced in Salinger’s 1943 story “The Varioni Brothers”) composed “Soupy Peggy” for Lida Louise, a song based on Peggy’s telling the singer that she liked Rudford when she saw him “standing at the blackboard in school” (116). Following a mysterious altercation with a man in Memphis, possibly Wilson, Lida Louise returned to Black Charles’s cafe to stay with her uncle. The fall after her return, Black Charles, Lida Louise, her mother, and Peggy had a farewell picnic before Rudford’s departure for boarding school. At the picnic Lida Louise suffered a ruptured appendix and was taken in Black Charles’s car to Samaritan Hospital. Rudford rushed into the reception area, only to find out that Lida Louise could not be admitted because she was black. When a second hospital also refused to admit the singer, Peggy yelled, “Damn you. Damn you” (118), and the group left for a hospital in Memphis. Lida Louise died on the way, her head in Rudford’s lap. Peggy and Rudford met again accidentally in 1942, fifteen years after Lida Louise’s funeral, in the Palm Room of the Biltmore Hotel in New York. Peggy was now married and accompanied by her husband, and Rudford was waiting for his date. When Peggy mentioned Lida Louise’s record “Soupy Peggy,” she was astonished to find out that Rudford had a copy and begged him to call her the next day so that she could hear it. Although Rudford promised to call, he did not, and he never saw Peggy again. The record, he told the narrator, “was terribly scratchy now. It didn’t even sound like Lida Louise any more” (119).

“Hapworth 16, 1924,” New Yorker, 41 (19 June 1965): 32-113.

Continuing his efforts to illuminate the life of his brother Seymour, Buddy Glass reproduces for the reader “an exact copy” of a thirtythousand-word letter written by seven-year-old Seymour to his parents and family in 1924 from Camp Hapworth, where he and Buddy were summer campers. In erudite prose Seymour describes his and Buddy’s daily activities and reassures the family of their well-being. Showing extraordinary analytical skill, Seymour also provides critiques of other campers—their cliques and conformity—and of the camp director, Mr. Happy, and his wife. He finds Mr. Happy a boorish sycophant but considers Mrs. Happy an attractive, sympathetic woman who, he says, arouses his own lust. He also reports on his and Buddy’s writing progress, acknowledging his brother’s advanced talent. Although Seymour himself has written some worthwhile poems, his best one, he says, “is one I have not written at all” (50). His letter is laced with allusions to Eastern religion and references to his own reincarnations, to which he refers as “appearances” (44). He is disturbingly prescient, predicting his own lifetime as “thirty (30) years or more” (60; Seymour is thirty-one when he commits suicide in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”).

Convinced that there is a divine plan that cannot be directed, Seymour suggests that the “loose ends” of life “find each other in the world if only one waits with decent patience” (62). He advises each of his family members to develop the talents with which he or she is blessed and to recognize the importance of performing good deeds for all human beings, without drawing attention to one’s self. Seymour’s “one last request” of Les Glass, his father, is that he ask Miss Overman, Seymour’s librarian friend, and Mr. Willard G. L. Fraser, a member of the library council, to send books to him at camp. The list of books is extensive, including voluminous samplings of international literature, languages, and spiritual works.

Seymour’s talk of books ignites his wrath against “false scholars, men of condescension, exploitation and quiet personal ambition . . . models of the feculent curse of intellectuality . . . without talent or penetrating humanity” (102). He acknowledges the presence of God in his own writing and also the note of warning sounded by readers of his poetry who fear that his “consuming admiration for God, straightforward and shapeless” (105), will harm his work. Concluding his booklist, Seymour again emphasizes his reincarnations, requesting works written by authors in the mid nineteenth century who, he says, he knew personally in his “last appearance” (198). At the close of the letter Seymour assures his parents that Buddy’s devotion to his art will provide him with a release from the world’s travail and sustain him.

CRITICAL SUMMARY

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

Although Salinger’s stories published in The New Yorker from 1948 to 1951 brought him to the attention of a wide audience of readers and earned him favorable critical recognition, no one anticipated the extraordinary success that his novel, The Catcher in the Rye, ultimately found throughout the world. Early reviews were positive but uneven in their praise, often failing to acknowledge the complexity of Salinger’s most memorable character, Holden Caulfield. Nash K. Burger, writing in The New York Times, praised the narrative voice in the novel and noted, concerning Holden, that “there is nothing . . . that a little understanding and affection, preferably from his parents, couldn’t have set right.”⁸ In the New York Herald Tribune Virgilia Peterson viewed Holden as “contaminated ... by vulgarity, lust, lies, temptations, recklessness, and cynicism,” but “on the side of the angels.” For Peterson the integrity “of Salinger’s implication that our youth today has no moorings, no criterion beyond instinct, no railing to grasp along the steep ascent to maturity” was yet to be affirmed.⁹ James Stern, reviewing the novel in The New York Times Book Review, praised the book in dialogue parodying Holden’s voice but offered no insight into the protagonist’s character.¹⁰

Harvey Breit, writing in The Atlantic, was among the first reviewers to anticipate the direction later critics were to take concerning The Catcher in the Rye. Breit saw Holden as “an urban, a transplanted Huck Finn,” making a comparison that defined much of the literary criticism of the novel throughout the 1950s.¹¹ In a long review in The New Yorker playwright S. N. Behrman declared that he “loved” the book, calling it “brilliant, funny, and meaningful.” Unlike Breit, who thought the humor in the novel overwhelming, Behrman pointed to tragic “self-communings” taking place below the “hilarity of his [Holden’s] surface activities.”¹² Writing for the Book-of-the-Month Club News, Clifton Fadiman was one of the most effusive reviewers in his praise for The Catcher in the Rye, seeing it, like Behrman, as “brilliant” but also acknowledging Salinger’s “polish and depth” in creating a “rare miracle of fiction . . . out of ink, paper and the imagination.” A main selection for the Book-of-the-Month Club in the summer of 1951, the novel also received the praise of the Club’s editorial board, which issued a statement asserting that Salinger’s novel was “a source of wonder and delight—and concern.”¹³

Several reviewers of The Catcher in the Rye offered strongly negative opinions and objected to Holden’s language. T. Morris Longstreth wrote in The Christian Science Monitor that Salinger had written a book “not fit for children to read,” one in which “immorality and perversion” are “countenanced in the name of art or good intention.”¹⁴ In Catholic World Riley Hughes also objected to the language in the novel, finding the book “made monotonous and phony by the formidably excessive use of amateur swearing and coarse language.”¹⁵ These sentiments were echoed in England, where a reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement (TLS) said that “the endless stream of blasphemy and obscenity” in Holden’s speech “palls after the first chapter.”¹⁶ In an article written three decades after the publication of The Catcher in the Rye, Adam Moss points to reasons why some readers found the book obscene: “237 godamns, 58 bastards, 31 Chrissakes . . . were enough to earn the book its place as a major target of righteous school boards and legions of decency everywhere.”¹⁷ Although reviewers such as Longstreth and Hughes seemed to many readers to miss the point of the novel, their focus on the objectionable language in it set a tone that was to resonate later with would-be book censors.

The republication of The Catcher in the Rye as a Signet paperback in 1953 marked the beginning of a publishing success seldom seen in American literature, soon making Salinger a cult figure among many readers. Priced at 25, the paperback was affordable to a wider range of readers than the $3.00 hardcover first edition. A decade after the publication of the first Signet edition, the paperback had sold 3,364,000 copies.¹⁸ By the mid 1950s The Catcher in the Rye had made its way into the nation’s colleges and universities, being read and discussed by thousands of students and becoming a subject of scholarship for professors in English departments. In 1956 Arthur Heiserman and James E. Miller Jr. published the most influential of the early articles on Salinger’s novel, placing it in the epic tradition and “the tradition of the quest,” comparing Holden, as Breit had done, to Mark Twain’s character Huck Finn.¹⁹ The following year, another critic complained that “J. D. Salinger, one of the most gifted of the young writers to emerge in America since World War II, is rarely acknowledged by the official guardians of our literary virtue in the quarterlies.”²⁰ Throughout the 1950s and the 1960s literary journals were deluged with submissions of scholarly articles exploring similarities and differences between Huck and Holden from a variety of perspectives, putting Salinger at the center of a widespread and sometimes passionate scholarly debate.

Edgar Branch produced one of the richest of the early Huck-Holden studies, arguing that Salinger’s novel and Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) were “related in narrative pattern and style, characterization of the hero and critical import” and that The Catcher in the Rye extends Huck’s “archetypal story” beyond the fiction of Sherwood Anderson, Ring Lardner, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner.²¹ Not all critics approved of drawing comparisons between Holden and Huck. John Aldridge saw each novel as “a spiritual picaresque,” but he considered Holden, unlike Huck, incapable of finding a “concrete embodiment of the ideal against which he judges,” leaving him merely to “register his contempt.”²² In an influential essay Ihab Hassan refuted Aldridge’s thesis, arguing not only for the validity of comparisons between Holden and Huck—as well as Salinger and Twain—but also drawing F. Scott Fitzgerald and Miguel de Cervantes into the comparison. Hassan claimed that the four writers endowed their characters with “a rare quixotic gesture” that seeks to embody an “idea of truth” and “style in action.” An “outsider,” Holden finds himself repeatedly facing “vulgarians” who “stand for all that is crude, venal, self-absorbed, and sequacious in our culture.”²³

As the 1950s drew to a close, the first monograph on Salinger’s works appeared. In The Fiction of J. D. Salinger (1958) Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner called Holden “saintly” and stimulated further discussion of the character’s spiritual dimension.²⁴ Predictably, the extraordinary critical attention Salinger received generated a backlash, evident in George Steiner’s attack on what he called “The Salinger Industry.” Steiner argued that scholars were ignoring worthier writers, as they had during the “[James Gould] Cozzens ecstasy of a few seasons back... ,”²⁵ An outpouring of articles on The Catcher in the Rye continued to nourish “The Salinger Industry” throughout the 1960s, with increasing focus on Holden as “saint” and on the spiritual qualities of the novel. In particular, the short story “Teddy,” which provides evidence of Salinger’s growing interest in Eastern religion and philosophy encouraged critics to examine the Zen Buddhist underpinnings of the novel.²⁶

The criticism of The Catcher in the Rye broadened further to include linguistic and psychological approaches. Donald P. Costello saw the novel as an authentic record of the vernacular of the 1950s,²⁷ and Carl F. Strauch suggested that “meaning” could be derived from the interlocking metaphorical structure in the book involving “neurotic deterioration, symbolical death, spiritual awakening, and psychological self cure.”²⁸ Salinger criticism reached its zenith in the 1960s. Two academic journals devoted issues to him and his work, and the first comprehensive study appeared: Warren French’s J. D. Salinger (1963).²⁹ Collections of Salinger criticism and casebooks were published, treating especially The Catcher in the Rye. The first Salinger bibliography, by Donald F. Fiene, appeared in 1963.

Although the flood of scholarly criticism on The Catcher in the Rye abated in the 1970s, scholars continued to write about Holden, varying critical approaches and emphasizing psychological and political perspectives. James E. Bryan offered what he called “a full-fledged psychoanalytical reading,” provoking strong reaction from the critical community by arguing that Holden struggled against his own desire to have sexual intercourse with his little sister, Phoebe.³⁰ In an argument as provocative as Bryan’s, the Marxist critics Carol and Richard Ohmann suggested that previous critics wrote about the novel from a capitalist point of view and ignored Salinger’s political intention, which was to offer a “critique of class distinction” by depicting “bourgeois life.”³¹ Although few critics concurred with this Marxist interpretation, many had taken other directions by the mid 1970s, moving away from traditional close readings and thematic and structural approaches and toward criticism driven by literary theory, with heavy emphasis on psychoanalytical readings influenced by French theorists. James M. Mellard’s reading of The Catcher in the Rye is representative of the new focus; drawing on the theories of Jacques Lacan, Mellard charted Holden’s “Oedipal” journey by which the character constructs a “self” during his evolving sexuality.³² Another critic put Holden in the context of the Cold War, interpreting him in theoretical terms set forth by Michel Foucault and contending that Salinger’s protagonist, as “both subject and object,” is caught without options and is able to replace his illusions only with an asylum.³³ One feminist theorist argued that the reason for the highly successful reception of the novel was that male critics, who identified with Holden and presumed that Holden’s male voice spoke for women as well, were biased in favor of the book and had “privileged” Holden.³⁴

Although critical interest in The Catcher in the Rye waned in the last two decades of the twentieth century, important books about the novel continued to appear. New collections of critical essays brought together much of the best criticism written about the book. Holden Caulfield (1990), edited by Harold Bloom; Critical Essays on Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1990), edited by Joel Salzberg; New Essays on The Catcher in the Rye (1991), edited by Jack Salzman; and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (2000), edited by Bloom, are especially worthy of note. In 2001 a new Little, Brown edition of The Catcher in the Rye³⁵ appeared, replacing the ten-year-old mass-market paperback that, having been reprinted thirty-one times, provided evidence of the continued success of Salinger’s enduring novel. Jack R. Sublette’s J. D. Salinger: An Annotated Bibliography, 1938-1981 (1984) provided an indispensable research tool not only for criticism of the novel but for all of Salinger’s fiction.

NINE STORIES

In 1953 Salinger’s eagerly awaited second book, Nine Stories, was published. Although story collections do not usually enjoy the sales of successful novels, Nine Stories proved to be an exception. Published by Little, Brown on 6 April 1953 and priced at $3.00, it was soon on The New York Times best-seller list, remaining among the top fifteen books for three months. Reviews were generally good, but cautious, uneven, and inconsistent in their assessment of the collection. In the Saturday Review William Peden welcomed Salinger’s “pleasing disregard for conventional narrative form and style” and praised the collection but thought “Just Before the War with the Eskimos” and “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes” were “chi-chi, cute, or even coy.” In Peden’s view, Salinger was too aware of his cleverness.³⁶ Writing in The New Republic, Arthur Mizener asserted that several stories in the collection were “better than anything in The Catcher in the Rye” because the novel lacked the “controlling intention” present in most of the stories. Mizener praised “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” but, surprisingly, did not mention “For Esmé’with Love and Squalor” or “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut.”³⁷ Gilbert Highet wrote in Harper’s that Salinger, who” published one of the best novels of adolescent distress, which have appeared in our time . . . has just produced a splendid set of Nine Stories” and “there is not a failure in the book.” Nevertheless, Highet warned that Salinger needed to avoid “falling into unconscious repetition.”³⁸

Charles Poore, reviewing Nine Stories in The New York Times, called the collection “over-rich ... in small monsters and large shadows of the macabre and the malign” and “disappointing coming from the man who wrote the outstanding first novel of 1951, The Catcher in the Rye.” Poore liked “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” and found “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes” successful even with its “double tricked ending.” Nevertheless, he thought Salinger should “put away his Halloween tricks and write as good a novel of World War II.”³⁹ A Newsweek reviewer seemed to agree in part with Poore, but found “even the mildest of Salinger’s nine an ogre” but claiming that the ending to “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes” reached “a new level of nightmarish reality.”⁴⁰ Reviewing the British edition of the collection, titled For Esmé—with Love and Squalor, and Other Stories (1953), Angus Wilson said Salinger was the best of the newest American writers whose works reveal “an intensely personal vision.” Wilson praised Salinger’s portrayal of “the behaviour of ... children” but, like Peden, thought the author “a shade too clever.” Wilson singled out “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” as the best story in the collection.⁴¹ An anonymous reviewer for The Nation praised the “accomplished and effective” stories by a “fiction writer of great brilliance” but noted that Salinger might, unfortunately, be “infatuated with the charms of juvenile diseases at the expense of a larger and more complex area of human suffering.”⁴² Salinger could not have hoped for a more positive review of Nine Stones than the one by Eudora Welty, who wrote in The New York Times that he was “a born writer” whose work was “original, first rate, serious, and beautiful.” Salinger had the ability “to honor what is unique and precious in each person on earth” with “a loving heart.”⁴³

Although Nine Stories generated far less critical response than The Catcher in the Rye did, individual stories in the collection were the subjects of seventeen scholarly articles by the end of the 1960s, more than half of which concerned “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” and “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”⁴⁴ Among the first critics to comment on “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” were Gwynn and Blotner, who considered the story “the high point of Salinger’s art, the moment at which particular narrative and general truth are identified most successfully with one another. ...” They argued that the story is balanced by four squalid forces countered by forces of love that help to restore “the possibility of life (’f-a-c-u-1-t-i-e-s’)” for the protagonist, Sergeant X.⁴⁵ John Hermann challenged the critical assumption that Esme is the main regenerative force in the story leading Sergeant X from despair to hope. Hermann argued that Esme’s little brother, Charles, “is the key” and that his “Hello Hello Hello” in the postscript of his sister’s letter triggers in the sergeant memories of a riddle the boy told him: “What did one wall say to the other wall? . . . Meet you at the corner!” (149). Hermann interpreted the riddle to mean “the corner of sanity and insanity” and asserted that Charles provides more authentic “compassion and affection” than does Esme, “the distillation of squalor” and “a truth lover or statistics lover.”⁴⁶ Rebutting Hermann’s thesis, Robert M. Browne argued that Hermann followed “a romantic preconception” when asserting that lovers of truth or statistics are unable to love people and that he neglected “the role of the narrator.” Brown also contended that Hermann ignored the point of view of the narrator in concluding that Esme was “terribly cold” (her aunt’s assessment), that her “inattention in church” was “objectionable,” or that she was, as her choir coach calls the children, one of those “silly-billy parrots.”⁴⁷

Other critics sought to identify Sergeant X. Tom Davis suggested that Seymour Glass is Sergeant X, pointing to “thematic parallels between ’For Esmé—with Love and Squalor’ and the Seymour stories,” to Seymour’s having been treated for an emotional breakdown, like Sergeant X, in a hospital in Germany, and to similarities between the wives and mothersin-law in “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” and “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”⁴⁸ Fred B. Freeman Jr. contested Davis’s argument, pointing out that the sergeant had met Esme in 1944 and received the wedding invitation six years after that meeting, in 1950. Because Seymour killed himself in 1948, said Freeman, he could not have been Sergeant X.⁴⁹ Bryan argued that critics who have consistently interpreted “For Esmé— with Love and Squalor” to be about “a man’s miraculous salvation from war and squalor by the love of a child” have ignored the importance of the story’s “unsentimental and even philosophical attitude toward love and squalor,” grasped finally by the protagonist, who recognizes the

“complexities—and interdependency” of those two opposites in his own life. Bryan contended that the story’s focus is not only on war but also on marriage and the necessity of accommodation and tolerance as one faces responsibilities.⁵⁰ John Wenke pointed to the difficulty of communication in the story, a problem common to Salinger’s characters. The conversation between Esme and Sergeant X, said Wenke, shows that, despite their seemingly unrelated surface meanings, the words used offer “insights” into the “psychological needs” of the characters and are essential to “the formation of a deep and lasting bond of love.” Wenke noted that the story confronts an issue central to Salinger’s fiction: how “individuals might pass through squalor to love, achieving meaningful, redemptive expression, even though the successful uses of language are a constant reminder of its general failure.”⁵¹

Seymour’s suicide in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” proved an especially stimulating subject for critics following the publication of Nine Stories. Gwynn and Blotner saw the story as another of “Salinger’s major esthetic successes” in “a world of psychically underprivileged persons occasionally saved by love.” Seymour, they claimed, was “destroyed by his own hypersensitivity pathetically heightened by lack of love,” a void made evident to him by a small child. Gwynn and Blotner also suggested that one “underlying motif” in his suicide is “sexual inadequacy,” a claim supported by phallic images in the story—the trees, for example, at which Seymour stares.⁵² Miller acknowledged the possibility of a Freudian reading of Seymour’s fascination with trees but suggests that this interest “might well be born of his intuitive grasp of the tree’s deep and enduring natural knowledge of its place and its role. . . .” Seymour “can see more (in trees, for instance)” because he has “begun to vomit up the apple of logic.” Miller attributed the suicide to a glutting of Seymour’s senses to the extent that “continued physical existence is unendurable” and argued that the act is a double release: for Seymour, for whom life has become too painful, and for Muriel, who can “engage life again at a level she can apprehend.”⁵³

Leslie A. Fiedler also affirmed the role of the little girl, Sybil, in sharpening Seymour’s awareness that continued existence in the world of his wife and mother-in-law is impossible. According to Fiedler, Seymour “is awakened by the innocence of a child to enough of the awareness of the lost world he inhabits to kill himself!”⁵⁴ In the early 1970s Frank Metcalf supported the view advanced by Bryan in the essay “Salinger’s Seymour’s Suicide” (1962) that Seymour commits suicide because he is unable to transcend his sexual desires, but Metcalf also argued that Seymour tended toward “heterosexual pedophilia.” Metcalf examined a pattern of behavior in Seymour that he traced from Charlotte Mayhew (a beautiful child whose face was scarred, according to Buddy Glass in” Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” after Seymour threw a rock at her) to Muriel Fedder in “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” and to Sybil in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” whose innocence, Metcalf said, makes clear to Seymour his “erotic pretense,” leaving him to see no option but suicide.⁵⁵ Noting the prominence of the number six in the story, Charles V. Genthe argued that “six is an important key to ’Bananafish’s’ interpretation, and ... to the moral and psychological problems of Seymour.” Like the sybils of Greek mythology who predicted the future, the Sybil of the story, Genthe said, prophesies the doom that Seymour ensures by his suicide when she says that the bananafish she saw had six bananas in its mouth, suggesting the six years of Seymour’s marriage that have led to his destruction: “Seymour . . . must destroy his physical being as the ’bananas’ have destroyed his soul.”⁵⁶

Gary Lane examined the relevance of the book of German poetry that Seymour gave to Muriel, concluding not only that the poet is Rainer Maria Rilke but also that the particular poems are Rilke’s Duino Elegies (1923). According to Lane, these poems lamenting the “insufficiency of man . . . and of necessary failure” reflect the problems faced by Seymour: the “poignant perception of the nearness to death” that “a child’s imagination and self-supporting world attains” and the revelation of the “unbridgeable gap between human aspiration and human possibility,” acknowledged by Seymour’s suicide.⁵⁷ Ruth M. Vande Kieft claimed that Seymour’s suicide comes not from total despair or an intense awareness of the futility of human effort but from the “excess of joy” and “a rather complicated overindulgence in ecstasy.”⁵⁸

Bryan examined the relationship between Boo Boo and Lionel in “Down at the Dinghy,” focusing on Boo Boo’s skill in ensuring that her son will be able to cope with life’s unpleasant experiences. Bryan, William Bysshe Stein, and Laurence Perrine have provided varied but helpful readings of “Teddy,” Bryan and Stein discussing the influences of Eastern thought in the story and Perrine attacking the way Salinger chose to end the story.⁵⁹ Bernice and Sanford Goldstein pointed to the potentially disastrous effects of artificial boundaries and logic on the seeker of enlightenment in Nine Stories.⁶⁰

Challenging David L. Stevenson’s unfavorable comparison of “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes” with Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936), John Hagopian explicated the Salinger story, lauding the use of details “embedded in imagery and ongoing action with such skill that they are not readily detachable for separate observation,” especially by readers who become “so dazzled by ... surface wit and realism . . . that they completely miss the more profound undertones of meaning.” After demonstrating the subtle skill of Salinger’s style and technique, Hagopian concluded that “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes” is “one of the best of the lot” of “the finest American short stories of the last quarter-century.”⁶¹

Although there have been far fewer articles written about the other stories in Nine Stories, they have not been altogether neglected. French’s “The Phony World and the Nice World” (1963) remains one of the best examinations of “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut”; Richard Allan Davison’s “Salinger Criticism and The Laughing Man’: A Case of Arrested Development” (1981) is an excellent review of Salinger criticism and a provocative explication. John Russell’s reading of “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” is one of the most thorough and convincing explications of the story. Russell argued that this longest of the nine stories represented a turning point in Salinger’s art and was the first of his stories to present a “transcendent” experience by which a protagonist solves his “problem of appropriation,” an attempt at possession that ends in relinquishment, followed by “wisdom and joy,” and, ultimately, freedom.⁶²

Several longer or book-length studies provided more comprehensive approaches to Nine Stories. Discussing sequence and unity in the collection, Paul Kirschner explicated each story, discussed relationships among them, and concluded that they reveal a pattern of progression leading to the spiritual advancement realized in the final story, “Teddy.”⁶³ Miller examined the nine stories as a unit with “thematic groupings” that give “the volume a singleness of impact which belies its multiplicity.” Tracing the “dominant theme,” alienation, as well as “marital estrangement and betrayal” throughout the stories, Miller found patterns that unify the collection.⁶⁴ In J. D. Salinger, Revisited (1988) French argued that Nine Stories is a unit, “a nine-story cycle,” with an “interconnectedness” resulting from a narrative “progression based upon the slow and painful achievement of spiritual enlightenment. ...” After offering readings of each of the stories, French suggested that from a “Brahman view-point, the stories may be seen as a succession of vignettes of incarnations of the soul on its path from destructive self-indulgence to readiness for the long-desired union with the infinite” but added that there are alternatives to the path Teddy McArdle takes, as de Daumier-Smith and Esme demonstrate.⁶⁵ In a more recent study of Salinger’s short fiction with theoretical underpinnings, Wenke conceded that there were “thematic complexes” in Nine Stories but argued against the existence of “an ordered thematic continuum with a beginning, middle, and end,” which he saw as French’s and Miller’s desired “critical goal” deriving from “privileging the problematic.” Wenke found a “generic analogue” for Nine Stories in “those fictional domains which create the context for establishing interconnections” but do not “impose the fiction of completed wholeness,” citing as examples such modernist story collections as James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), and Hemingway’s In Our Time (1925), as well as more-recent collections such as John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968) and Susan Minot’s Monkeys (1968) that “refuse to impose the fiction of closure” or “deny aesthetic closure.”⁶⁶

FRANNY AND ZOOEY

When Franny and Zooey was published in 1961, eight years after Nine Stories, readers rushed to buy it, and some bookstores reported lines forming early on the day of publication, 14 September 1961.⁶⁷ Many reviewers, however, did not share the enthusiasm of the reading public. The novelist John Updike wrote in The New York Times that the book, with its “grim bravado, . . . humor, . . . morbidity,” and “persistent hopefulness,” truly reflected American life but paid “the price . . . of becoming dangerously convoluted and static.” Updike said that “the Franny of ’Franny’ and the Franny of ’Zooey’ are not the same person,” and he added that there was nothing in “Franny” to indicate her relationship with the Glass family of “Zooey.” Finding in the Glass stories “vehement editorializing on the obvious” as well as condescension, Updike hoped, nevertheless, that Salinger would not “bog down,” as Salinger suggested he might, in his own “methods, locutions, and mannerisms.”⁶⁸ After noting that Salinger “is surely the most read and reread writer in America today” and that his power is “in some ways extraliterary,” Joan Didion belittled the substance of Franny and Zooey, calling it “finally spurious” because Salinger flatters “the essential triviality” in his readers and “gives instructions for living.” The book is appealing, Didion said, because it is “a self-help copy” that “emerges as Positive Thinking for the upper middle classes.”⁶⁹

In a more vitriolic review, Isa Kapp attacked Salinger’s “educating us by adopting a recklessly chummy attitude toward ideas and moral concepts” in “Zooey,” where she found equating “the Fat Lady” with Christ an offensive “democratization of the Spirit.” Kapp also thought Salinger was “embarrassed by any token of erudition” and held “a low opinion of mankind.” Although she liked the bathroom scene with Zooey and his mother and Franny’s lunch with Lane Coutell, she thought Salinger resisted “locating the moral enemy.”⁷⁰ Carl Bode saw Franny and Zooey as “a Dialogue between Body and Soul” and was struck by “how bitterly Salinger hates Body.” Bode found Salinger’s hostility toward Lane “so open that the effect is overdone” and his descriptions of Franny “schoolboyish.” “Zooey,” he continued, was “a religious tract” that suffered from Zooey’s “posturing” and Salinger’s attempts “to impress us with the depth of the Glass erudition”; yet, Bode thought the conversation between Zooey and his mother in the bathroom “a delightful tour de force.”⁷¹

Other reviewers had a far more positive response to Franny and Zooey. In Library Journal Robert B. Jackson called the book a “significant work, especially pertinent for the young,” that “must be included in all collections of important American writing”; he also praised Salinger’s use of Buddy as “an alter ego.”⁷² Poore wrote in The New York Times that “Franny and Zooey is better than anything Mr. Salinger has done before” and that every page of the book showed Salinger’s “increasing mastery.” Poore saw no danger that Salinger would “bog down” rather, he said, “Mr. Salinger’s stories will decidedly continue to widen the range of contemporary reading.”⁷³ Anne Marple thought Buddy’s first-person introduction to “Zooey” “unnecessary,” but she generally liked the book, calling “Franny” “beautifully written” and the scene in “Zooey” between Zooey and his mother a “Salingeresque masterpiece of characterization and dialogue.” Marple found Salinger “too enmeshed in his material” for the good of his “artistic judgment” and thought his avoidance of the topic of sex might “impede the free flow of Salinger’s creative life.”⁷⁴ Summing up a long list of books published in 1961 that he had reviewed that year, Granville Hicks said that Franny and Zooey was one of two he would put at the top of his list. (The other was Bernard Malamud’s A New Life.) Franny and Zooey “has something to say about the human predicament,” said Hicks, and Salinger “has no equal” in “the handling of the vernacular.”⁷⁵

John P. McIntyre’s long review article offered an informative assessment of Franny and Zooey. Strongly praising the book, McIntyre took issue in particular with Maxwell Geismar⁷⁶ for establishing an improper criterion for measuring Franny and Zooey in claiming that Salinger had ignored the “social, economic, and psychological bases of his craft.” McIntyre also challenged Alfred Kazin’s assertion that Salinger’s creation of “two estates,” one for the Glasses and one for everyone else, “the great mass of spiritual savages,” had “led to a violation of art.” McIntyre argued that a “social reference is not primary” in the work of Salinger, whose focus is on the “spiritual.” Salinger makes readers conscious, McIntyre concluded, “of the tension which existed between ’the Kingdom of God is here!’ and ’the day of the Lord approaches.’”⁷⁷ James G. Murray called Franny and Zooey “a work of art” that makes “profound comments on our morals and mores.” That there is neither plot nor action in the book is of no real consequence, Murray said; Salinger’s characters are interesting, his talk is stimulating, and his craftsmanship is “impeccable.” Although Murray feared that the linking of “[St.] Paul and Zen” and “Jesus and the gurus” put Salinger “perilously close to the beats,” he still had something they did not have, Murray thought: “sense, wit, and taste.”⁷⁸

Obviously, readers could only have been confused by the wide variety of opinions expressed by reviewers about Franny and Zooey. In fact, they probably wondered whether some of the reviewers revealed more about themselves than they did about the book.⁷⁹ Nevertheless, readers made their own decisions in bookstores, where they purchased 125,000 copies of Franny and Zooey in the first two weeks after its release. The book remained on The New York Times best-seller list for six months, eventually reaching number one.⁸⁰

Although critics continued to publish great numbers of articles about TheCatcher in the Rye in academic journals, they gave relatively little attention to Franny and Zooey. In the two decades following the publication of the book, fewer than a dozen articles about it appeared in American journals.⁸¹ Monographs and chapters devoted to Salinger provided the most extensive examinations of the work. As Gwynn and Blotner observed in 1958, Salinger had begun by 1953 “to mine a new vein” of transcendental mysticism, which he introduced in “De DaumierSmith’s Blue Period” and further developed in “Teddy,” continuing in the same “vein” with “Franny,” “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” and “Zooey.”⁸² Consequently, some of the most informative criticism relevant to Franny and Zooey was written about the individual stories “Franny” and “Zooey” before they were published as a single volume. Gwynn and Blotner provided concise but helpful Zen background for what they called “the Glass Menagerie” and showed some relationships between the Glasses and Zen. They also flatly rejected early readings by critics who claimed that Franny’s malady is a pregnancy, and they called her silent prayer at the conclusion of the story a signal that she is “at least striving toward some remote satori” (an awakening or state of pure consciousness). Gwynn and Blotner offered less a reading of “Zooey” than a review, in which they condemned the length and verbiage of the story, arguing that only “two or three” of Zooey’s “parts” were needed to advance Franny’s case history. They thought Salinger had “said something morally profound” but that he had said it more concisely elsewhere in his earlier fiction, especially in “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period,” in which de Daumier-Smith observes, “Everybody is a nun.”⁸³

In his Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel (1961) Hassan argued that “Salinger succeeds far better in rendering the experience of Smith’s conclusion: ’Everybody is a nun.’” Countering criticism that Salinger had avoided the topic of sexual love, Hassan contended that the Glass family provided Salinger “the means to exploit the nonsexual forms of love” and to examine a group whose members “deny themselves sexual preoccupations to lose themselves in an imaginative or altruistic ideal.” Hassan asserted that Franny’s wish to break out of the “ego’s shell does not confine itself to the action of an adolescent who, for the first time, reaches out beyond himself in sexual love.” In Zooey’s remedy (the union of the Fat Lady and Christ) for Franny’s spiritual sickness, Hassan found a reconciliation of “the vulgarian and the outsider . . . not in the momentary flash of a quixotic gesture, not even in the exclusive heart of a mystical revelation, but in the constancy of love,” and possibly Salinger’s own awareness of “contradictions of his vision.”⁸⁴ In J. D. Salinger French provided a reading of Franny and Zooey that included a perceptive analysis of the tensions between Franny and Lane Coutell. French saw “Franny” as one of the most “devastating satires to have been written about a world that is full of pedants eager to display their erudition rather than . . . pilgrims still seeking to learn.” He also concluded that “Franny” is incomplete without “Zooey.”⁸⁵ French’s section on “Zooey” is less helpful, reading rather too much like a review, speculating about Salinger’s motives in the com-position, and underscoring Updike’s contention that Salinger lectures too much.⁸⁶ A quarter-century later, in his J. D. Salinger, Revisited, French suggested that Woody Alien’s movies Annie Hall (1977), Interi ors (1978), Manhattan (1979), and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) had superceded Salinger’s “dated . . . portrayal of its particular Upper East Side Manhattan apartment society.”⁸⁷

In a challenging and informative Freudian reading of “Franny,” Daniel Seitzman argued that the language of the story is homoerotic and that Franny’s devotion to religious ritual “serves to repress the forbidden,” as Sigmund Freud had shown was often the case with such devotion. Seitzman attempted to demonstrate through close reading that “Franny’s hostility, her intense rivalry, and her scarcely concealed wish to emasculate all men are at the root of her problem.”⁸⁸ He pointed to Franny’s praise of Sappho and her lead role of Pegeen Mike in Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World as examples of her antimale sentiment, born to a considerable degree out of her complex relationship with her dead brother, Seymour, who was, Seitzman said, the “punitive superego” of her early years. The Jesus Prayer, Sietzman postulated, enables Franny to effect a union with “the Omnipotent Father” and dissipate the harshness of the superego. Because Franny probably fantasizes that “Jesus is Seymour,” she can also be reunited with her late brother “without anger and guilt.”⁸⁹ In a companion piece Seitzman analyzed Zooey’s role as Franny’s therapist. After reexamining Franny’s “illness,” illustrating the history of depression in the Glass family, and showing Zooey’s distrust of any “ordinary psychoanalyst,” Seitzman delineated Zooey’s therapy methods through three “sessions,” contending that he ultimately heals himself as he cures his sister. When Zooey who has also been affected by his strong brothers, Seymour and Buddy, assumes the role of Buddy while speaking to Franny from Seymour’s room, he surrenders the self in order to “become Buddy,” thus eliminating his own feelings of rivalry with the parent-surrogate, a major impediment to his own cure. Furthermore, when Franny accepts Zooey’s counsel, the Fat Lady becomes “Franny’s first ego ideal.” Through the Fat Lady’s “holy vision” Franny “can be embraced by Seymour” and “enfolded in the arms of the mother,” thereby replacing the “over-idealized image of Seymour.” Subsequently, the Fat Lady becomes an “amalgam of all the disparate elements,” all the rivalries in Franny’s life. Reunited with these “rivalries” through the Fat Lady and Christ, Franny is cured.⁹⁰

Father Ernest W. Ranly, who reread Franny and Zooey ten years after visiting India, affirmed the “accuracy of Salinger’s knowledge of worldwide mysticism” and of “every great mystic from the East and West, every tradition, every prayer,” in particular “the true tradition of heyschasm” (purity and simplicity of the heart). Ranly also argued that the philosophy of Jainism supported Franny’s rejection of Christ’s statement that human beings are more important than “the fowls of the air.”⁹¹ Eberhard Alsen argued in his Salinger’s Glass Stories as a Composite Novel (1983) that the two stories comprising Franny and Zooey, as well as other stories dealing with the Glass family, were part of a larger narrative plan showing Buddy’s development as a writer and person. Pointing out that the religious theme in “Franny” is based primarily on Christian ideas and that no mention of Seymour is made and Franny’s last name is never given in the story, Alsen contended that “Franny” was written after ’“De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” and before “Teddy,” the true starting point for Salinger’s fiction reflecting the influence of Eastern religions. Alsen saw in “Zooey” evidence that Buddy, the proclaimed author of the stories, has made progress in his attempt to understand “the meaning of Seymour’s life and death,” in particular in his letter to Zooey indicating that “there was something wrong with Seymour’s teachings.” Alsen’s argument added significantly to the relevance of Buddy’s letter to the story as a whole and suggested a reason for Zooey’s more liberated approach to a cure for Franny.⁹²

Wenke’s J. D. Salinger: A Study of the Short Fiction (1991) included helpful background information on the Glass family, interesting observations about the effects of Salinger’s narrative process, and a perceptive reading of Franny and Zooey. Although Wenke’s explication was not heavily psychoanalytical, his probing of the complexities of the “conflicted psyche” of Zooey, as well as that of Franny, was stimulating and credible. Wenke argued that the Jesus Prayer as said by Franny initially “disengages her from, rather than connects her to, the actualities of life. ...” He maintained that Zooey, playing the role of Buddy and participating in a mutually advantageous therapy, “rehabilitates Buddy.” According to Wenke, Zooey also “rehabilitates Seymour” by reviving the image of the Fat Lady, “a synoptic metaphor for everyone” that leads both Franny and Zooey to “a healthy communal interaction.” Wenke concluded that “the (at least momentary) achievement of peace suggests the possibility of a full-hearted embrace of spiritual identity that is compatible with ego.”⁹³

RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM, CARPENTERS AND SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION

Knowing that Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction was to face many of the same reviewers who attacked Franny and Zooey, Salinger must have anticipated hostility from his critics. In fact, Hicks predicted as much in his review of the book for the Saturday Review. Hicks thought the two stories would cause difficulties for both the “admirers of Salinger and those out to get him,” noting that” Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” had Salinger’s “mastery of dialogue” and “Seymour: An Introduction” “the wordy style” to which the narrator admits. Hicks thought the book “at times unbearably self-conscious and coy,” and yet speaking “with power and authority.” Although he found “self-righteousness and sentimentality” in the Glass stories, he praised Salinger as “a gifted and serious writer” and implied that he should simply “get on with his work.”⁹⁴

Hicks’s predictions were soon fulfilled. In The New Republic John Wain gave examples of what he considered “slipshod writing . . . soap opera prattle . . . and sweat-making dribble of author-comment from the straw-filled headpiece of Buddy Glass.” Wain did “not like Buddy,” whom he found “insufferable” because he could not “leave anything out.”⁹⁵ William Barrett wrote that he preferred “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” “the more traditional and successful narrative,” to “Seymour: An Introduction,” “a series of rambling notes and ruminations” in which Salinger had abandoned form. Barrett saw the “the whole Glass family” as imitating Seymour and remaining “curiously childlike.”⁹⁶

Especially sardonic, Robert Martin Adams observed in the Partisan Review that although Salinger had refused to provide “a manageable title” for Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduc tion, he had not objected when “some languid menial” working for his publisher put “$4” on the dust jacket. Adams added that “as works of literature” the stories needed little comment. In more a personal attack on Salinger than a review of the book, Adams concluded, “If Mr. Salinger can’t forget about Seymour Glass altogether, he’d be well advised to hold back indefinitely his further appearance in the fiction.”⁹⁷ Negative and mocking, Kathleen Nott had little but scorn for the book, apart from an observation that Salinger had transcended the Beats and written a “quite funny” account of the wedding that Seymour did not attend. Nott found the book “bad” and “wicked,” not only “Holier-than-Thou” but also “Holier-than-thy-holiness” and theorized that it “is a Koan, one of those cock-eyed Zen riddles which provide the formula for the antirational.”⁹⁸ Hugh McGovern acknowledged that the stories “demonstrate the trappings of his [Salinger’s] genius and compulsive charm, but . . . are frequently irritating in the manner in which they avoid coming to real grips with their subject, Seymour Glass.” McGovern thought “Seymour: An Introduction” “a nearly manic effort” to “reconstitute . . . Seymour,” who emerges as “an attractively brilliant ’weirdo’” who killed himself, an act out of which not even “our only authentic literary giant” can make a God.⁹⁹

In The New York Times Book Review Irving Howe called Salinger “the priest of an underground cult” of nonactivist young people “who have inherited the material good of this world.” Howe also described Salinger as a spokesperson for “inner emigration,” referring to the creation of a “compensating inner life” as a substitute for a preferred life denied. Howe thought that Buddy, the narrator, influenced by Seymour’s “Buddhist quietism” and a “sentimentalized version of Christian love,” failed to portray a Seymour whose saintliness readers could accept. Howe considered both stories in the book “hopelessly prolix” and “marred by the self-indulgence of a writer flirting with the depths of wisdom, yet coy and embarrassed in his advances.” He added that Salinger’s characters were “largely compliant,” failing to “struggle” against “the familiar social world” or to make “a true retreat from it.”¹⁰⁰ In Library Journal Robert B. Jackson expressed gratitude that “two of the most important stories of the Glass family” were available in book form. Salinger’s new book, Jackson said, was a “significant work by an important writer and essential, for God’s sake, to all fiction collections.”¹⁰¹ Laurence Smith, writing in The Critic, conceded that Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction seemed to provide “author-invitational licenses to open season” for reviewers and critics, whom Salinger teased “with impetuous disregard,” but claimed that “these stories are every bit the artistic achievement, every bit as significant, and perhaps more revealing than Franny and Zooey.” Smith contended that in light of the problem with which Seymour and subsequently all the Glass children struggled—the reconciliation of “the private conscience of Zen with the public conscience of Christianity”—the “tortured style” of “Seymour: An Introduction” is “artistically valid.” In Smith’s view the story implies “Buddy’s own dilemma of reconciliation, to live by what his brother taught” and “to learn to live with the world on its own terms” while putting “his brother’s suicidal ghost to rest.”¹⁰²

Hassan offered the most informative review of Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction and made the best case for Salinger’s style and method. Hassan argued in the Saturday Review that because Salinger’s Glass stories marked a shift in the author’s focus from squalor to love, the “language and the form, or rather antiforms, of his later stories are conditioned by a sacrament of vision” whose “verbal correlative” in Zen would be “a kind of silence.” As a writer, Hassan continued, Salinger’s difficult task was “to convey in words a life that finds its true consummation beyond words,” while not only capturing the essence of Seymour but also releasing him, exorcising his ghost, and forgetting him “without betrayal.” Thus, Hassan said, the narrative “form must be shattered, and the language must aspire to a wordy silence,” which he called Salinger’s “stunning achievement.” Hassan saw Salinger not as a writer lacking control but one “in clownish guise,” seeking “to inhibit the profane impulse of language by indulging language prodigally,” especially in “Seymour: An Introduction,” in which language is “brilliantly diffracted in various forms: letters, diaries, footnotes, quotations, scrawled messages, telephone conversations, and endless digressions that divert the power of speech.” Hassan pointed out that the epigraphs from Kafka and Kierkegaard are central to the form and design of “Seymour: An Introduction.” The conflict in the story, Hassan contended, is between “love” (Kafka) that “prevents language from exercising its verbal power” and “language” (Kierkegaard) that “openly revolts against the author.” The “true artist,” Hassan concluded, will “accept the subversion of language in the name of a more integral, a more sacred art” (as it is implied Salinger does in the narrative) and “like Seymour playing marbles must try not to aim, try not to try.”¹⁰³

Although Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction generated even fewer individual critical articles than Franny and Zooey, many general studies of Salinger’s work include perceptive and compelling examinations of his last book to appear in the twentieth century. Examining Salinger’s “later novelettes” in Wisconsin Studies in Con-temporary Literature, Hassan greatly expanded the argument he offered in his review of Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. Hassan remarked that “the stories exhibit a new conception of form, particularly suitable to their vision . . . essentially sur-real,” making “use of all the resources of language, including accident or distortion, to convey an unmediated vision of reality.” Commenting on the effect of Salinger’s intent, Hassan explained that “the relations between author, character, and reader are redefined in space as in time; they no longer maintain their habitual distance from one another.” There is no longer “a formal frame” of action, and “language and reality are refracted in a thousand mirrors—witness the “endless chatter, overlapping modes of discourse, dazzling interplay of views—so that language and reality may appear for what they are in Salinger’s estimate: something whole, holy, and perhaps as ineffable as silence.” Hassan argued that Salinger’s aim in “Seymour: An Introduction” was “less to describe Seymour . . . than to justify language which must, in the same breath, try and fail to encompass holiness.” In this regard, Hassan said, “Salinger and Buddy are similar; they both seek confirmation of their art in the wordiness which is at the other side of silence.” Hence, according to Hassan, “the maddening shapelessness of the narrative, the protean distortions of the language.”¹⁰⁴

Underscoring Hassan’s argument concerning Salinger’s narrative approach in “Seymour: An Introduction,” Sam Baskett asserted that “Salinger’s . . . fictional technique”—“the minimizing of action in favor of characterization” and the “inclusion of seemingly irrelevant detail”— could “be most meaningfully understood in the context of Zen,” which considers “codification” and “formal systems” to be “antithetical” to “apprehension.” Baskett’s opinion is consistent with Hassan’s observation that artists writing within the context of Zen “must try not to aim” in their narrative approach, and that Buddy’s story introducing Seymour “inveighs against any formalizing scheme.” Furthermore, in trying “to capture the paradoxical splendor and squalor of life” while attempting to enable his readers to “apprehend Seymour’s meaning,” Buddy observes that Seymour’s character did not lend itself to a spare presentation. Baskett implied that Salinger’s technique bore comparison with the sentiment expressed in two lines of the poet Wallace Stevens: “The poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice.”¹⁰⁵

Bernice and Sanford Goldstein shared Hassan’s contention concerning the centrality of the quotations from Kafka and Kierkegaard that preface “Seymour: An Introduction.” The Goldsteins agreed that the Kafka quotation supported the view that Buddy’s “excess of love” for Seymour would inhibit his ability to portray him accurately, and they maintained that the Kierkegaard quotation underscored Salinger’s concern, as expressed through Buddy, for his own “lack of ability” as a writer.

The “entire story is a fictional treatise on the artistic process,” the Goldsteins argued, in which the impediments of “love” and “lack of ability” are resolved at the conclusion of the story. The “key” to the story “becomes,” for Buddy, “process, change, and eventual illumination, partial-satori (state of illumination).”¹⁰⁶ Responding “to critics’ discomfort” that Salinger placed himself “in the middle of his fiction” and failed to recognize “brevity to be the essence of fiction,” John O. Lyons wrote that Salinger should not be judged by the style and form of more-modern writers. Rather, Lyons said, he should be compared to “the Romantic writers,” whose work, like his, was “discursive, organic in form, autobiographical, anti-intellectual, and mystical.” Examining the works of Laurence Sterne, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and Henry David Thoreau, Lyons identified techniques in their writing that helped to explain Salinger’s methods in “Seymour: An Introduction”: a seeming lack of revision in order to maintain the appearance of spontaneity; the “assertion by the Romantic writer that he is dealing with reality and not fiction,” an illusion supported by references to specific times and place in the writing; “a venerable Romantic tradition for ... incompleteness”; “joy in digression”; a “mysterious interrelation of all things”; the occasional “spot in time” that provides a moment of ecstasy; and the protagonist or central object of the fiction (such as the title figure in Byron’s Don Juan [1819-1824] and Walden Pond in Thoreau’s Walden [1854]) as a benchmark or reference point by which the world is measured. To “be testy” about the flouting of the rules in “Seymour: An Introduction,” said Lyons, “is quite mistaken”: Salinger resuscitated an “effective literary stance” that roughened “the sheen coating most modern fiction.”¹⁰⁷

Ernest J. Johannson also responded to critics who objected that in Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction there was no “distinction between reality and illusion” and that Salinger’s alter-ego relationship to the narrator, Buddy, was an artistic flaw. Rather than provide a defense of Salinger, Johannson charted the evolution of changes in his fictional techniques from “Franny” to “Seymour: An Introduction” in an attempt to explain how the narrator’s dilemma came to be, pointing out that “the closer the author approaches Seymour through Buddy, the more diffuse, discursive, and unexpected the writing becomes.” Johannson argued that because Salinger “has not limited Buddy’s place in the development of Seymour,” readers consider Buddy’s memorial to his brother as nothing more than “Buddy’s dramatic narration of his [own] feelings.” Johannson also suggested that because of Buddy’s lack of restriction, the reader is deprived “of the illusion of knowing Seymour as a fictional character” or “as an actual brother” and “gets neither illusion nor reality, neither fiction nor biography” from the book. Consequently, the reader is unable to greet “Salinger’s justification of form and style with anything but ambivalence.” Concurring with other critics who saw the narrator’s dilemma foretold in the Kafka and Kierkegaard epigraphs to “Seymour: An Introduction,” Johannson explained that the relevance of the quotations is amplified because Buddy and Seymour “spring from the same aesthetic-emotional matrix,” a condition that makes more difficult the narrator’s assumption of a separate identity from his brother.¹⁰⁸

In his Salinger’s Glass Stories as a Composite Novel Alsen provided an extended discussion of “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” and of “Seymour: An Introduction,” devoting chapters to each of the stories and examining them as parts of what he regarded as Salinger’s evolving composite novel, from two structural perspectives: “Buddy’s struggle to understand Seymour by writing about him” and “Seymour’s quest for God.”¹⁰⁹ Alsen examined what he saw as the primary concern in “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters”: “Buddy’s attitude toward Seymour’s choice of Muriel as a marriage partner”¹¹⁰ when the wedding took place, in 1942, and later, in 1955. According to Alsen, the story involves a process of discovery, during which Buddy experiences resolution of his “inner conflict” as he reads the last entry in Seymour’s diary prior to his marriage to Muriel. In the first half of his study Alsen focused largely on Buddy as narrator and the way in which both “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” and “Seymour: An Introduction” mark different stages of his development as narrator. Alsen pointed out that in the first of the two stories, although Buddy’s narrative style has changed since he wrote “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (as he claims to have done in “Seymour: An Introduction”) he has not been able to “follow his heart and write spontaneously” as Seymour suggested; therefore, he has given “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” a “conventional structure.”¹¹¹ Alsen also offered a rationale for one of the most perplexing scenes in the story: Seymour’s

hitting Charlotte Mayhew with a rock. Algren contended that in Charlotte, Seymour saw not only beauty but also “the person who he thought would make him relinquish the paths of study and meditation.”¹¹²

In “Seymour: An Introduction,” Alsen asserted, Buddy has reached “the high point” of his “development as a writer” and demonstrates by the form of the story that he has accepted Seymour’s advice about writing, that he is no longer bound by the forms and conventions of “a Beginning, a Middle, and an End.”¹¹³ The “form [of the story] expresses its meaning,” and its “rambling narrative development,” or formlessness, is consistent with Seymour’s advice about writing, which is implicit in his advice about marbles, paraphased by Alsen as “Aiming but no aiming.” Buddy has not chosen the story: “it chose him.” Buddy understands “the essence” of “Seymour’s teachings,” Algren concluded, but he does not learn the reason for his brother’s suicide until he reproduces “Hapworth 16, 1924.”¹¹⁴

In J. D. Salinger, Revisited French responded to Alsen’s reading of “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” agreeing with his judgment that Seymour needed his wife’s “simplicity and undiscriminating heart just as Muriel needs his intellectual and spiritual values” but taking issue with Alsen’s argument that Seymour’s in-laws, the Fedders, are “normal” and that intellectuals are the target of the story.¹¹⁵ In French’s view Seymour, who triumphs over “Mrs. Fedder’s half-baked psychoanalytic busybodying,” “the matron of honor,” and “anti-intellectualism,” is the victor in the story. French saw the “real message”¹¹⁶ of “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” in one of Seymour’s diary entries: “Marriage partners are to serve each other. Elevate, help, teach, strengthen each other, but above all, serve” (106). French read the enigmatic rock-throwing incident as a “key to understanding Seymour’s vision and his doom”¹¹⁷ and concurred with Alsen’s contention that Seymour threw the rock at the beautiful Charlotte because he feared she would cause him to abandon his study and meditation. French rejected the exalted opinion of Seymour voiced by “Buddy-Salinger,” as well as Seymour’s claim that indiscrimination leads to happiness. French read “Seymour: An Introduction” as “Salinger’s most original experiment in attempting to manipulate readers,” cultivating them by attributing special status to them, apart from “the grounded everywhere” (113)¹¹⁸ but thought that the description of Seymour not as an “artist” but as a “seer” required “testimony” rather than “criticism” from the narrator.¹¹⁹ French also concurred with Alsen that form expressed meaning in the story and was evidence of the success of “Seymour: An Introduction” as “a work of presentational art.”¹²⁰

In J. D. Salinger: A Study of the Short Fiction Wenke suggested that Seymour’s character in Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction is illuminated by “competing perspectives that speak explicitly to Seymour’s fitness for marriage and implicitly to his relationship to those who survive his death”: Boo Boo Glass, Mrs. Fedder (Muriel’s mother), the matron of honor, and Buddy.¹²¹ Wenke read Seymour’s preference for “indiscrimination” differently from French, seeing it “not so much a blanket acceptance of individual idiosyncrasy as the capacity to perceive all entities without regard to hierarchy, classifications, or distinctions.” Although he made no attempt to interpret Seymour’s hitting Charlotte with a rock, Wenke suggested that “symbolically Seymour’s marriage seems to include a reconciliation with Charlotte,” who looks like Muriel. Despite a recurring pattern in which Salinger’s characters find peace and sleep after a moment of enlightenment or consolation (Babe Gladwaller, Sergeant X, and Franny Glass), Wenke found no relationship between Buddy’s reading Seymour’s last diary entry and his falling asleep, saying only that “Buddy then passes out from too much drink.”¹²²

Discussing “Seymour: An Introduction,” Wenke acknowledged the relevance of the Kafka and Kierkegaard epigraphs but suggested that Seymour is like Vincent van Gogh, whom Buddy lists among the “notorious Sick Men or underadjusted bachelors” (117). Wenke also endorsed Hassan’s contention that the “true aim” of the story is less to describe Seymour than to “justify language” that must “try and fail to encompass holiness.”¹²³ Buddy’s inability to describe Seymour’s face, Wenke said, illustrates “the limitations of words” within the narrative and affirms the further difficulty Buddy encounters: “There is no single Seymour.”¹²⁴ Wenke concluded that Salinger’s digressive style is intentional, that it “celebrates the randomness and vagaries of the creative imagination.” “Wenke added that [t]he cessation of Seymour finds Buddy opening him-self up to the world,” prepared, like Sergeant X, “to take the next step.”¹²⁵ However diverse critics’ readings of Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction may be, the opinion most commonly shared is that Salinger’s discursive, digressive, free-flowing narrative was not only intentional but also appropriate to show Buddy engaged in the process of discovering his art, his brother, and himself.

A NEW GENERATION OF WRITERS RESPONDS

With Love and Squalor: 14 Writers Respond to the Work of J. D. Salinger (2001), edited by Kip Kotzen and Thomas Beller, comprises fourteen articles by contemporary American fiction writers discussing their responses to Salinger and his work and describing his influence on a more-recent generation of writers. Kotzen underscores the universal quality of Salinger’s themes: “conformity, loneliness, community, family, friendships, and relationships with the opposite sex.” The highly personal responses to Salinger in this collection differ from those of academic critics. As Kotzen points out, the writers express “both deep affection and deep frustration with Salinger. . . ,”¹²⁶ Walter Kirn notes that he has occasionally reread The Catcher in the Rye as an adult, after having been introduced to it in the eighth grade. One is never free from the influence of the best books, such as The Catcher in the Rye, Kirn says; they seem to vanish, but they always return. Rene Steinke shares her feelings as a young woman reading Salinger’s fiction in Friends-wood, Texas, identifying with both his characters and his writer’s mind and concluding that she wanted to protect Salinger; what she wanted to protect in him was her “own thirteen-year-old self.”¹²⁷ Charles D’Ambrosio discusses Salinger’s treatment of suicide in the context of his own brother’s suicide. Lucinda Rosenfeld offers a view based on a separation of Salinger the man from his art, implying that he is probably like other fiction writers whose writing process requires a total suspension of outside voices. Whatever his “self-aggrandizement,” his prose “in the context of its own terms, achieves some kind of perfection.”¹²⁸

ART IMITATING LIFE

In his published writing Salinger was, like most authors, a perceptive observer of society. He carefully registered its values, its distinctive qualities, and its vices and virtues, much of which found its way into his fiction. Although two biographies and two memoirs about Salinger have been published, relatively little is known about his personal and professional life in comparison with what is known about other writers of note.¹²⁹ The reason is simple: Salinger has guarded his privacy so fiercely and denied access to and dissemination of his papers so effectively that many documents essential to a portrayal of his life and creative process have not been available. Nevertheless, what spare facts have been forth-coming reveal that his life has informed his art.

UNCOLLECTED STORIES

Salinger’s early stories not only reveal the influence of events from his youth but also affirm the heartfelt effects of his personal experiences. His soldier stories of 1944, written when he was anticipating being shipped overseas, convey the resignation, tension, and anxiety associated with such departures. Babe Gladwaller in “Last Day of the Last Furlough” and the protagonist in “Once a Week Won’t Kill You” both wish to set their houses in order before leaving home. Uncertain about his own future, as Salinger must have been about his, Babe is nonetheless concerned about the future of his sister, Mattie, as he tosses in bed on his last night home, thinking about how he should advise her. The main character in “Once a Week Won’t Kill You” is also concerned about the situation he is leaving behind and wants to make sure that his self-absorbed wife will provide a comforting alternate reality for his delusional Aunt Rena by taking her to the movies at least once a week.

Salinger’s later soldier stories show more-specific influences of time and place and reveal a change in tone reflecting the horrors of war he experienced during the Normandy invasion and the deadly advance across France and Belgium toward Germany. “A Boy in France” depicts Babe Gladwaller trying to find rest in a muddy foxhole once inhabited by a German soldier. Babe can only fantasize about the warmth and comfort he has left behind in America, finding peace only in the love expressed in a letter from his little sister. In the weeks prior to the Normandy invasion Salinger sensed that his own happiness would likely be found in recollection rather than in anticipation. He wrote his former fiction-writing teacher, Whit Burnett, from England, saying that his “nostalgia” was then directing his fiction “because that’s all there seems to be anymore.”¹³⁰ It is a remark that speaks to his anxiety as much as to then-current writing trends. Set in an army truck filled with soldiers like those Salinger had known while stationed in Georgia in 1943, “This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise” is, like “A Boy in France,” nostalgic, imparting a sense of loss and of longing for happier times. In “The Stranger” Salinger again expresses loss and sorrow born out of personal experience. An old phonograph record stirs prewar memories of young men of the Twelfth Infantry Regiment (Salinger’s own regiment) dancing before they had “ever heard of Cherbourg or Saint ô or Hürtgen Forest or Luxembourg,”¹³¹ where so many of them died in battles that Salinger knew first-hand. “The Stranger” also focuses on the fragility and problems of civilian readjustment for the battle-scarred Babe Gladwaller, an experience Salinger also shared.

“I’m Crazy” and “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” Salinger’s first published stories to feature Holden Caulfield as the protagonist, derive from the author’s prewar life. He experienced complex emotions as a result of his unsuccessful academic record, which brought disappointment to his father, and he feared that he would be required to take a job with his father’s importing business, a career in which he had no interest. Having returned home after being expelled from his preparatory school, Holden, the neurotic narrator in “I’m Crazy,” says, “I knew this time when Father said that I was going to work in that man’s office that he meant it, that I wasn’t going back to school again ever, that I would be working in an office.”¹³² Although the Holden character in “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” has not been expelled from school but is home for the Christmas holidays, his neurotic symptoms are even more pronounced than those of the Holden in “I’m Crazy.” This Holden is “fed up” and wants to run away from New York, which he finds filled with phonies and stifling in its demands for conformity, but Sally Hayes, his date, refuses to accompany him, assuring him that there will be time later for such escapes. “It would not be the same at all,” Holden replies. “And I’d have to work at my father’s and ride in Madison Avenue busses and read newspapers.”¹³³

“A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All,” the story of a brief romantic encounter between Ray Kinsella, a young man working on a cruise ship, and Barbara, a young woman traveling with her future mother-in-law, reveals not only awareness of complex human relation-ships but also firsthand knowledge of cruise ships. Again, the story was inspired by Salinger’s personal experience. After a brief stay at New York University, Salinger, probably seeking to avoid working for his father, joined his friend Herbert Kauffman to take a job in 1937 with the recreation staff on the cruise ship Kungsholm, which toured the Caribbean and provided the two friends with opportunities to enjoy the company of young women on board.¹³⁴ A description of the Havana harbor in the story is a possible acknowledgment of that episode from Salinger’s past:” Through the mist the Kungsholm could be seen, anchored sleepy and rich, just a few hundred feet aft.”¹³⁵

After a brief and unsuccessful stint at New York University, Salinger appeared certain to join his father’s importing business, but because Sol Salinger thought that his son might be better prepared if he traveled to Europe first in order to learn German and French, Salinger left for Europe in the fall of 1937 and spent time in Vienna and Paris. From his visit to Vienna came “A Girl I Knew,” the story of John, a young man who falls in love with Leah, a young Jewish woman living with her parents in the same apartment building where he lives. The opening of the story, highly autobiographical, offers reasons for the narrator’s trip to Europe, much in the same terms that Salinger later used in an interview with William Maxwell in 1951.¹³⁶ According to Ian Hamilton, Salinger was probably in Vienna during the months of January and February 1937 and thus could have observed the Nazi disturbances then taking place in the city,¹³⁷ an experience that would have prepared him to write the conclusion of” A Girl I Knew,” in which John recounts his return to Vienna after the war only to discover that Leah has died in a concentration camp. While serving in the army, John had the same military duties as Salinger: “During the war in Europe,” John says, “I had an Intelligence job with the regiment of an infantry division. My work called for a lot of conversation with civilians and Werhmacht prisoners.”¹³⁸ It is a page out of Salinger’s own life.

“Hapworth 16, 1924,” Salinger’s last published work of the twentieth century, owes its setting, a summer camp for boys, to his own experiences at Camp Wigwam in Harrison, Maine, in 1930. Although the story probably includes some of his memories of his time at the camp, the essence of it comes from experiences in his life some twenty years later, when he began his serious study of Eastern religions. On the surface Salinger is removed from the narration, that duty falling briefly to Buddy Glass, who offers only a brief introduction to a nearly thirty-thousand-word letter that seven-year-old Seymour Glass wrote to his parents from Camp Hapworth. Buddy shows his similarity to his creator by indicating that he is forty-six years old, the same age as Salinger at the time the story was published. Seymour, a genius, speaks of his reincarnations and demonstrates extraordinarily wide reading and wisdom, revealing particulars of Salinger’s own literary influences and knowledge of Advaita Vedanta, a Hindu school of thought, and Zen Buddhism.

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

It is not unusual for first novels to be drawn from a writer’s life. In fact, Salinger affirmed similarities between Holden Caulfield and himself in one of his rare interviews, given two years after The Catcher in the Rye was published, when he said that the novel was “sort of autobio-graphical” and that his “boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the novel.”¹³⁹ As French has observed, Salinger had been developing the character of a young man “hard pressed by the world” for a long time, probably from his early days at Valley Forge Military Academy, when he first determined to become a writer.¹⁴⁰ Classmates from Valley Forge remembered that he had a “sardonic wit,” that his conversation was frequently filled with sarcasm, and that he hated “the silly routines” the cadets were required to follow. One former cadet reported that Salinger “enjoyed breaking the rules” and sneaking off “at 4 A.M. to enjoy a breakfast at a local diner.” Others recalled that Salinger “couldn’t stand stuffed shirts” and “seemed miscast in a military role.”¹⁴¹ He was “sort of a ’wise guy’ and rather cynical about everything.”¹⁴² Students from Ursinus College also remembered him as much like his famous protagonist, one woman remarking that when she knew “Jerry” Salinger at the college, he wore “a black Chesterfield coat (complete with velvet collar),” and he “was Holden Caulfield.”¹⁴³

Salinger began writing about Holden at least by 1941, when his memories of his own youth were fresh. Like Holden, Salinger had disappointed his parents by his poor academic performance and an inability to remain in school. He felt estranged from them, in particular from his father, whose business career he rejected much as Holden rejects his father’s career as a lawyer in The Catcher in the Rye. Salinger attended a military school over which Colonel Milton S. Baker, recalled by one former student as “a great promoter,” presided; Baker is thought to have been the inspiration for the headmaster at Pencey Prep in the novel.¹⁴⁴ Salinger’s roommate at Valley Forge was Ned Davis, a strong, handsome young man recalled by a classmate as someone who “combed his hair constantly and believed himself to be the answer to a woman’s prayer.”¹⁴⁵ Davis was possibly a model for Holden’s roommate, Ward Stradlater. Salinger, of course, was also thoroughly familiar with New York, the city of his birth and upbringing, visiting theaters, museums, and Central Park like Holden.

Salinger’s thinking is manifested in The Catcher in the Rye in Holden’s insistence on the importance of essence, of purity, in its various forms. Salinger demonstrated on more than one occasion his strong feelings about the importance of leaving the essence of art unobstructed and free from commentary or labeling,¹⁴⁶ a sentiment Holden exemplifies obsessively in The Catcher in the Rye with regard to music, theater, and religion. All three of these, he observes, are consistently obstructed by people who have lost touch with spontaneity and the core of original inspiration. Like Holden, Salinger also suffered a mental breakdown, and he empathized knowingly with Holden’s desperate cry “I’m in lousy shape” (171), as well as with his protagonist’s search for peace. By early 1950 Salinger had begun such a search through his study of Eastern religion at the Ramakrishna Vivekananda Center in New York,¹⁴⁷ learning of the possibilities for the kind of enlightenment Holden experiences near the conclusion of the novel, when he sits watching Phoebe ride the carousel in the rain.

NINE STORIES

The stories collected as Nine Stories were written from 1948 to 1953. Although “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” is assumed to be derived most directly from Salinger’s experiences, other stories in the collection also have parallels to events in his life. He informed his friend Elizabeth Murray of the dissolution of his short-lived marriage to his first wife, Sylvia, in a letter sent from the Sheraton-Plaza Hotel in Daytona Beach, Florida, a setting similar to that in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Salinger told Murray that for the first time since his marriage he could complete a story, one called “The Male Goodbye.”¹⁴⁸ This choice for a title suggests not only a departure or farewell but also the release, albeit by suicide, achieved by Seymour Glass in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”

From 1948 to 1952 Salinger lived in Connecticut. In “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” he depicted the sad result of acquiescence to the materialistic values and superficiality of affluent suburban culture, an aspect of postwar society he knew well. Salinger’s disgust for military inefficiency and absurdity likely grew out of the horrific scenes he witnessed in the five campaigns he had endured in World War II.¹⁴⁹ In “Just Before the War with the Eskimos“ Salinger might have had a youthful version of himself in mind as a model for at least some of the characteristics of Franklin Graff, the poorly groomed, repulsive misfit who was kept out of the armed services because of heart problems. Although Franklin bears a stronger resemblance to Holden’s schoolmate Robert Ackley in The Catcher in the Rye, one of Salinger’s classmates at Valley Forge Military Academy remembered him as similarly ill formed and ill fitted: “He was all legs and angles, very slender, with a shock of black hair combed backward. His uniform was always rumpled in the wrong places. He never fit it. He always stuck out like a sore thumb in a long line of cadets.”¹⁵⁰ Like Franklin in “Just Before the War with the Eskimos,” Salinger had a slight heart problem that meant he was not subject to the draft.¹⁵¹

One reading of “The Laughing Man” is consistent with a major target of Salinger’s real-life contempt: the artificial nature of WASP society, in which the true merits of John Gedsudski are ignored because of his low social status.¹⁵² It should also be noted that Gedsudski is pursuing his law degree at New York University. Although the university is not an Ivy League institution, Salinger abhorred the snobbishness and class-consciousness he encountered there as a student. “Down at the Dinghy,” a story that explores the irrepressible malice of anti-Semitism, likely had its roots in Salinger’s experiences as the son of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother.

In the first half of “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor,” often considered Salinger’s finest short story, the narrator says, “In April of 1944, I was among some sixty American enlisted men who took a rather specialized pre-Invasion training course directed by British Intelligence in Devon, England” (132). This statement derives entirely from the facts of Salinger’s first overseas assignment in April 1944 with the Fourth Infantry Division in Devon, England, where he, too, was given intelligence training prior to participating in the Normandy invasion on 6 June 1944. Salinger also listened to a children’s choir in a local Methodist church¹⁵³ and probably dined in local civilian tearooms, as does the narrator of the story. The second half of “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor,” depicting Sergeant X after his return from a German hospital, where he was treated for a mental breakdown, also blends Salinger’s life into his art. After surviving five of the bloodiest campaigns in the European theatre, Salinger checked himself into a German hospital following what has been described as a breakdown.¹⁵⁴

“Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes,” Salinger’s story of betrayal and marital infidelity, appears to bear no comparison with documented events in his life. Yet, Wenke’s characterization of the story as “a world of disposable friendships and easy betrayals”¹⁵⁵ calls to mind Salinger’s disillusionment during his dealings with publishers who he felt betrayed him.

“De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” and “Teddy” are the most obviously spiritual selections in Nine Stories. By 1951 Salinger had become deeply immersed in Eastern mysticism, dashing off a list of “the ten best books on Zen” for a new friend, Leila Hadley, and railing against her plan to write a descriptive travel book because “he couldn’t see the separateness of things ... so why bother to describe them?” As Gwynn and Blotner have pointed out, “De Daumier-Smith and Teddy McArdle, the protagonists in the last two of the Nine Stories, are very different from the other central figures in the collection.”¹⁵⁶ One reading suggests that these characters represent the spiritual enlightenment toward which all the previous stories in the collection have been tending: “the successive stages that a soul would pass through according to Vedantic teachings in at last escaping fleshly incarnations.”¹⁵⁷ Of all the nine stories in the collection, “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” and “Teddy” are the ones most informed by Salinger’s increasingly mature awareness of transcendental mysticism and Zen Buddhism during his own personal search for enlightenment and the truest examples of his spiritual life in his art.

FRANNY AND ZOOEY

Franny Glass’s visit with her boyfriend, Lane Coutell, on the weekend of the Yale game and their subsequent conflicts, which cause Franny to seek refuge in “the Jesus Prayer,” have led to much speculation concerning events from Salinger’s life that might have served as sources for “Franny.” Paul Alexander suggests that the name Franny Glass came from one of Salinger’s friends at Ursinus College with whom he corresponded, a woman named Frances who married a man named Glass-moyer shortly before Salinger wrote “Franny.”¹⁵⁸ Claire Douglas, whom Salinger married in 1955, is often suggested as the model for Franny, based on assertions made by her half brother Gavin, who reported that after meeting Salinger in 1953, Claire discovered mysticism and “was hung up on the Jesus Prayer.”¹⁵⁹ She also had an Ivy League boyfriend, a Harvard Business School graduate, whom she continued to date during 1953 and married suddenly in 1954, after breaking off her relationship with Salinger. Gavin added validity to the Claire-Franny parallel by reporting that his half sister, too, had a blue suitcase like the one Franny carries in the story, “the navy-blue bag with the white leather binding ...” (10). Salinger’s daughter, Margaret, supports the view that Claire was the model for Franny. In Margaret’s account, her mother said that “Franny” was indeed based on her life and pointed out that she herself was “the girl in a blue dress with the blue-and-white overnight bag slung over her shoulder. ...” Margaret adds that her mother “still has the order slip from Brentano’s Bookbinding Department for ’Franny’s’ book, The Way of the Pilgrim.”¹⁶⁰

Salinger’s own religious study, emphasizing the rejection of ego, likewise corresponded closely with the views Franny expresses in the story, and his animosity toward persons he considered Ivy League phonies and pompous intellectuals was consistent with her opinions. He, too, resented the exploitation of writers by academics, whom he viewed as making their reputations at authors’ expense. Furthermore, Lane’s pos-turing and pontificating, as well as his pretentious labeling of writers, were from Salinger’s perspective not only functions of what Franny sees as “ego, ego, ego” (29) but also manifestations of studied academic demeanor, a kind of group affectation, that drew attention from writers’ work and focused it on members of the group. Lane is a perfect target for Franny’s and Salinger’s disgust.

Addressing Franny’s spiritual malaise and debilitation, Salinger attempts in “Zooey” to provide a remedy that will enable her to proceed with her life and career. Margaret Salinger’s recollection of her father’s activities during the years in which “Zooey” was evolving suggests that both Franny and Zooey derive in great part from events in Salinger’s life. The most important of these activities was his spiritual quest during a time when he appears to have confronted issues common not only to Franny and Zooey but also to their brother Buddy, who reveals in the story an awareness of the potentially harmful effects of the heavy dose of Eastern religion he and Seymour gave their siblings. Margaret Salinger reports that her father not only became a God seeker but also encouraged Claire to study religious literature before they were married. By 1954 they were reading Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi (1946), which was encouraging to Claire because of Yogananda’s report that his guru, Lahiri Mahasaya, had said that “the path of the yogi” was not restricted to celibates but open to married persons.¹⁶¹ Salinger also included Claire in his sessions at the Ramakrishna Vivekananda Center in New York.

Having read Autobiography of a Yogi, Salinger and Claire intensified their spiritual pursuits. They both wrote to the publishers of the book asking for a recommendation of a “teacher-guru” who would consider initiating them into “the Self-Realization Fellowship.” Their request granted, they studied outside Washington, D.C., with Swami Premananda, who gave them a mantra and taught them how to coordinate their breathing. According to Margaret Salinger, her father apparently immersed himself in a wide variety of religious literature:” Zen Buddhism, Vedanta Hinduism, 1950s off and on; Kriya yoga, 1954-55; Christian Science, . . . Scientology, called Dianetics at the time, 1950s; something having to do with the work of Edgar Cayce; homeopathy and acupuncture. . . .”¹⁶² Claire expressed her frustration at being required to follow her husband as he shifted from one spiritual path to another, each new one displacing an old one and becoming “Jerry’s new super-encompassing God.”¹⁶³

Reaching toward myriad and diverse paths, Salinger, like Franny, needed a remedy for the problems he encountered in his own search for enlightenment. Zooey speaks of Franny’s incapability, comparable to Salinger’s, of finding spiritual satisfaction, pointing out that she has moved from Jesus to St. Francis of Assisi and on to the Rus-sian peasant’s Jesus Prayer, only to become immobilized. Yet, finding parallels for the Jesus Prayer in Nembutsu Buddhism and the anonymous fourteenth-century English mystical work The Cloud of Unknowing, Franny reveals that her sampling of mystical routes has been even more extensive than Zooey’s examples suggest. Salinger had provided the answer that ultimately satisfies Franny in “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period,” in which de Daumier-Smith acknowl-edges the oneness of everything by declaring that “Everybody is a nun” (164). The secret that Zooey reveals to Franny in “Zooey” is essentially the same: there is no separation, separateness, or distinction. “Jesus,” he says, “realized there is no separation from God” (170). Given this premise, Zooey’s argument is logical. If everybody is Seymour’s Fat Lady, and the Fat Lady is Christ, and Christ is inseparable from God, then all is oneness. This lesson permeates the teachings of Swami Vivekananda, who observes that “Each action of our lives, the grossest as well as the finest, the highest, the most spiritual—is alike tending toward this one ideal, the finding of unity.” There is no “I,” only “Thou . . . and what is meant by this is the recognition of non-individuality— that you are part of me, and I of you; the recognition that in hurting you I hurt myself. . . . This is the theme that runs through the whole of Vedanta, and which runs through every other religion.”¹⁶⁴ Both “Hindus and Buddhists,” says Alan W. Watts, “prefer to speak of reality as ’non-dual’ rather than ’one’ since the concept of one must always be in relation to that of many.”¹⁶⁵ The teachings of Vedanta occupied much of Salinger’s life throughout the 1950s and greatly inform Franny and Zooey.

RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM, CARPENTERS AND SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION

“Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” was published in 1955, the same year as “Franny,” and also conveys, albeit with more subtlety, the Hindu and Zen message of one-ness with which Zooey leads Franny out of her spiritual quagmire. Seymour loves and needs Muriel’s “undiscriminating heart” (77), and he, too, is disturbingly undiscriminating from Buddy’s point of view, saying in his diary that he loves Muriel’s mother, Mrs. Fedder, and finds her “unimaginably brave” (84), despite her cold psychoanalytic probing and brutal labeling of Seymour. Buddy cannot initially grasp that the undiscriminating Seymour is able to transcend the ugly distinction that Mrs. Fedder represents for Buddy and others because Seymour knows that Christ is the Fat Lady and that even Mrs. Fedder is the Fat Lady. Salinger found a metaphor for oneness even in a frequently criticized phenomenon of postwar America that he and every other soldier saw soon after their return home: the look-alike houses that filled the new suburbs. Zooey, Seymour says in his diary, giving his spiritual concept a physical context, thought the housing developments “nice” because they blurred difference. Zooey “even wished that everybody in the world looked exactly alike” so that “you’d keep thinking everybody you met was your wife or your mother or father” (79-80). Margaret Salinger reports that her father “has three cats whose names are Kitty 1, Kitty 2, Kitty 3,”¹⁶⁶ distinctions but barely so.

In “the author’s formal introduction” (47) to “Zooey,” Salinger distances himself from his narration, creating an “alter ego collaborator”¹⁶⁷ in Buddy. Since Buddy is also the narrator of “Seymour: An Introduction,” Salinger once again stands back from the narrative, claiming no real ownership of his character’s observations. Buddy’s narration demonstrates a process of discovery during which he, like Franny and Zooey, gains more distance from Seymour while remaining a beneficiary of his brother’s lesson of oneness. The narration also provides Salinger with an opportunity to express through Buddy a thinly disguised version of himself and his thoughts about his own reception by the world. Buddy’s close resemblance to Salinger is illustrated in the early pages of “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” in which he says that in the year 1942 he “was twenty-three, newly drafted” (29). Salinger, too, was twenty-three when he was drafted that same year. In “Seymour: An Introduction” Buddy declares that he also served in “the European Theater of Operations” (132), as did Salinger.

Because “Seymour: An Introduction” follows the organizational structure of “Zooey,” moving from rancor to rest, many of Salinger’s targets appear in the early pages of the story: “the Dharma Bums, . . . the Beat and the Sloppy and the Petulant, the chosen cultists ... all the bearded, proud, unlettered young men and unskilled guitarists and Zen-killers . . .” (114); “the neo-Freudian Arts and Letters clinics” (118); “the current ruling intellectual aristocracy educated in one or another of the big public psychoanalytical schools” (121); and “the little band of regulars, moderate-salaried pedants, and income supplementers who can be trusted to review new books on poetry not necessarily either wisely or passionately” (133-134). From Salinger’s perspective, the members of the Beat generation were not serious students of Eastern religion but dabblers for whom he always felt contempt. He disliked those who saw psychoanalysis as the easy answer to personal ills and psychoanalytical criticism as the key to the interpretation of a writer’s life and work. Salinger had come to detest critics, despite his repeated assertions that he did not read their reviews. Joyce Maynard, the young woman who was briefly involved with Salinger in the early 1970s, reported that he expressed “a particular loathing for John Updike, who once published a highly critical piece about his work.”¹⁶⁸

Salinger also mocks his own reclusiveness in “Seymour: An Introduction.” In a long footnote that includes advice about suitable translations into English of Japanese poetry, Buddy says in one of his many parenthetical asides, “This last little piece of pedantry, I repeat is for the young, who write to authors and never get any replies from the beasts” (137). Salinger’s refusal to respond to inquiries is well known, as is his refusal to admit literary pilgrims to his compound in Cornish, New Hampshire. Buddy speculates that the publication of Seymour’s poetry will stimulate a mad dash to his door by “matriculating young men and women ... in singlets and twosomes, notebooks at the ready.” Even Buddy has been visited by “many young English Department people” who know where he lives, and he has “their tire tracks” in his “rose beds to prove it” (159). As Lane Coutell might have wanted to know, they wish to learn whether there is “an endemic American Zeitgeist” (161). Salinger is recounting scenes from his own experience with curious students. The freely discursive voice of Buddy in “Seymour: An Introduction,” speaks both for Salinger and about him, providing readers with an opportunity to hear the intensely private author respond to events that have touched his life and informed his writing.

THE PLACE OF SALINGER’S WORKS IN LITERARY HISTORY

The Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction remained in print throughout the twentieth century, and new paperback editions of all four were published in 2001. The Catcher in the Rye has been not only Salinger’s most successful book but also one of the best-selling novels in American literary history.

Appearing a decade before the political activism of the 1960s, The Catcher in the Rye spoke to young Americans who saw themselves as driven to conform to the dictates of an increasingly materialistic and success-oriented society. Those who chose to reject societal prescriptions for and gauges of success shared Holden Caulfield’s sense of alienation and his contempt for what they viewed as the hypocrisy and phoniness of the era. Salinger’s novel caught the spirit of an evolving rebelliousness among American youth that was exemplified in subsequent books and movies.

Although The Catcher in the Rye enjoyed an extraordinarily large following, it also elicited a vituperative public reaction among parents and citizens’ groups objecting to offensive language in the book. Steven J. Whitfield observes that “no postwar American novel has been subjected to more—and more intense’efforts to prevent the young from reading it.”¹⁶⁹ By 1954, one year after the first paperback edition of the novel made it more accessible, attempts to censor the book began to spread. According to Pamela Hunt Steinle, “The base of censorship operations in this period was the National Organization for Decent Literature,” and it supported attempts to ban books such as The Catcher in the Rye that were thought to have “’immoral,’ ’atheistic,’ or ’communist’ content.”¹⁷⁰ Although teachers assigning the novel to students in public schools were particularly vulnerable to the hostile forces of censorship (many of these teachers were transferred or fired), college and university professors were also subject to attack. A Houston attorney objected to his daughter’s being assigned The Catcher in the Rye in an English class at the University of Texas and threatened to remove her from the institution, charging that no sane person would use language like Holden’s. He also attacked the university for corrupting youth and encouraging the “lessening of spiritual values which in turn leads to communism.”¹⁷¹

Two deranged readers of The Catcher in the Rye credited the novel with inspiring them to commit acts with tragic consequences that few people would have imagined. On 8 December 1980 Mark David Chapman fatally shot musician John Lennon, the former Beatle, as he stepped from his limousine to enter his apartment building in New York. At the time of his arrest Chapman had in his possession a copy of The Catcher in the Rye that he had inscribed “To Holden Caulfield from Holden Caulfield.” Later he proclaimed that those looking for explanations for his crime could find answers in the book. During the trial, Chapman testified that he had killed Lennon because he thought the pop star had become a phony, “corrupted by commercialism,” in Alexander’s para-phrase. Killing him, Chapman believed, had preserved Lennon’s innocence.¹⁷² On 30 March 1981 John W. Hinckley Jr., waiting outside a hotel in Washington, D.C., where President Ronald Reagan was to speak, stepped from the crowd when the president arrived and fired six shots at him. Hinckley, who confessed to shooting Reagan in order to impress the actress Jodie Foster, was carrying in his pocket a well-worn copy of The Catcher in the Rye at the time of his crime.¹⁷³

Critics continue to evaluate The Catcher in the Rye, arguing about whether it merits recognition as an enduring work of literature. Harold Bloom acknowledges that Holden Caulfield continues to speak “for our skepticism, and for our need,” and he asks whether the “aesthetic salvation” of the book or its relegation to the status of “a period piece” will not ultimately be determined by Holden’s success or failure to address these issues to the satisfaction of future readers over an even greater period of time.¹⁷⁴ Sanford Pinsker maintains that The Catcher in the Rye, “the novel we most associate with the nervous, angst-ridden 1950s,” has already “stood the test of time better than the novels” of Salinger’s contemporaries.¹⁷⁵

Although Salinger’s reputation was made by his one novel, his other three books have continued to attract readers, but in far fewer numbers than has The Catcher in the Rye. New generations have been drawn to Salinger’s works, often for the same reason readers rushed to buy Nine Stories when it was published in 1953. They are enthralled by The Catcher in the Rye, and they want to see more writing by the same author. Salinger’s increasing reclusiveness following the success of his novel and the publication of his story collection also generated interest in his work for readers who sought to discover the mysteries of the missing artist through his art. The serial quality of his fiction has likewise attracted readers who, after being introduced to the Glass family, looked forward to future installments. Interest in Eastern religion and transcendental meditation in the 1960s also contributed to the popularity of the Glass stories.¹⁷⁶ French has conjectured that some of Salinger’s appeal, based on readers’ fascination with the mystical pursuits of his characters, likely waned because of “the overreaching” of more-recent “emissaries from the orient,” leading to a disaffection from which not even Seymour Glass was spared.¹⁷⁷

Public schools, colleges, and universities that have introduced Salinger’s books annually to students are largely responsible for ensuring that they continue to be read. Nevertheless, critical attention has not remained as constant as his readership, having sharply diminished since the surge of response during the first two decades after the publication of The Catcher in the Rye. Writers, of course, go in and out of favor with literary pundits, who, as Salinger demonstrated, often pursue their own private agendas while following the critical herd, sometimes expressing voguish opinions or even fashionable contempt. Yet, The Catcher in the Rye has remained in favor with readers since it was published in 1951, probably because, as Whitfield has said, it “is utterly apolitical,”¹⁷⁸ and perhaps even because of the continued presence throughout the world of the objects of Holden’s scorn.

ADAPTATIONS OF SALINGER’S WORK

As a young writer Salinger wanted to have his work adapted for the cinema. Other writers had reaped financial gains from Hollywood, and he, too, hoped to see his works translated to the screen. As early as 1943 he wrote to Burnett indicating that he was eager to “sell some stuff to the movies.”¹⁷⁹ Hamilton says that Salinger was “looking toward Holly-wood” for “one big killing in the movies” in order “to buy the freedom to set up as a full-time writer after the war.”¹⁸⁰ Hamilton nevertheless suggests that the young author was also ambivalent about Hollywood, con-tending that Salinger’s work “had movie potential” but that he “both yearned for and despised the movies.”¹⁸¹

By 1948 Salinger’s New Yorker stories had begun to gain considerable attention. Samuel Goldwyn bought the screen rights to “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” at the suggestion of the successful screenwriters Julius and Philip Epstein and adapted the story as the motion picture My Foolish Heart. Although Samuel Goldwyn Studios officially released the movie on 21 January 1950, it had been shown in 1949 in New York and Los Angeles in order to be eligible for the Academy Award nominations for that year. Goldwyn made every effort to ensure the success of the movie by having the Epsteins write the screenplay and hiring proven director Mark Robson to direct a cast that included the stars Dana Andrews and Susan Hayward. Victor Young composed the theme song, “My Foolish Heart,” which soon became a popular-music standard.¹⁸² Salinger, however, loathed the movie, especially the screenplay, which greatly distorted his story and turned it into a sentimental tearjerker.

Although William Brogden praised My Foolish Heart in Variety,¹⁸³most other reviewers agreed with Salinger’s assessment. Movie critic Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times that the purpose of Goldwyn’s picture “is obviously to tear at the emotions in the most elementary and uninhibited ways.”¹⁸⁴ An anonymous reviewer in Time concurred, noting that “the screenplay turns on all the emotional faucets of a Woman’s Home Companion serial.”¹⁸⁵ Even harsher, Jane Lockhart, reviewing the movie in The Rotarian, wrote that if “intelligent people” were “this maudlin . . .they would be more suitable subjects for a psychiatrist or the writers of soap operas than for grade-A motion-picture attention.”¹⁸⁶ John McCarten must have anticipated Salinger’s feelings when he wrote in The New Yorker (the magazine in which “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” was first published) that My Foolish Heart was “full of soap-opera cliches” and that it was “hard to believe it was wrung out of a short story by J. D. Salinger. . . .” McCarten said the screenwriters, the Epsteins, “have certainly done Mr. Salinger wrong.”¹⁸⁷ Salinger obviously agreed with this view and refused all future requests to have any other work of his adapted for radio, television, or the cinema. Despite many requests for the movie rights to The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger’s response has always been the same: “I had a bad experience with Hollywood once.”¹⁸⁸

NOTES

1. J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (Boston: Little, Brown/Back Bay, 2001), p. 3. Subsequent parenthetical page references in the text are to this edition.

2. Salinger, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” in Nine Stories (Boston: Little, Brown/Back Bay, 2001), p. 7. Subsequent parenthetical page references in the text for this and all other stories collected in Nine Stories are to this edition.

3. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (Boston: Little, Brown/Back Bay, 2001), p. 3. Subsequent parenthetical page references in the text for “Franny” and “Zooey” are to this edition.

4. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (Boston: Little, Brown/Back Bay, 2001), p. 9. Subsequent parenthetical page references in the text for “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” and “Seymour: An Introduction” are to this edition.

5. “I’m Crazy” is Salinger’s first published story to feature Holden Caulfield as the protagonist. Salinger integrated most of the material in this story into chapters 1, 2, 21, and 22 of The Catcher in the Rye.

6. “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” was accepted for publication by The New Yorker in 1941, but the magazine delayed publication until after World War II. Salinger incorporated parts of the story into chapters 17, 19, and 20 of The Catcher in the Rye.

7. Salinger changed the name of Holden’s preparatory school in this story to Pencey, the same name as the school from which Holden is expelled in The Catcher in the Rye.

8. Nash K. Burger, “Books of The Times,” New York Times, 16 July 1951, p. 19.

9. Virgilia Peterson, “Three Days in the Bewildering World of an Adolescent, New York Herald Tribune, 15 July 1951, p. 3.

10. James Stern, “A, the World’s a Crumby Place,” New York Times Book Review, 15 July 1951, p. 5.

11. Harvey Breit, “Reader’s Choice,” Atlantic, 188 (August 1951): 82.

12. S. N. Behrman, “The Vision of the Innocent,” New Yorker, 27 (11 August 1951): 71, 76.

13. Henry Seidel Canby and others, in The Book of the Month: Sixty Years of Books in American Life, edited by Al Silverman (Boston: Little, Brown, 1986), p. 127.

14. T. Morris Longstreth, “New Novels in the News,” Christian Science Monitor, 19 July 1951, p. 11; reprinted in Holden Caulfield, edited by Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1990), pp. 5-6.

15. Riley Hughes, “New Novels: The Catcher in the Rye,” Catholic World, 174 (November 1951): 154.

16. “Young Minds,” Times Literary Supplement, 7 September 1951, p. 60.

17. Adam Moss, “ Catcher Comes of Age,” Esquire, 96 (December 1981): 56.

18. Ibid., p. 51.

19. Arthur Heiserman and James E. Miller Jr., “J. D. Salinger: Some Crazy Cliff,” Western Humanities Review, 10 (Spring 1956): 129-132; reprinted in Malcolm M. Marsden, If You Really Want to Know: A Catcher Casebook (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1963), pp. 16-22.

20. David Stevenson, “The Mirror of Crisis,” Nation, 184 (9 March 1957): 215.

21. Edgar Branch, “Mark Twain and J. D. Salinger: A Study in Literary Continuity,” American Quarterly, 9 (Summer 1957): 158; reprinted in Studies in J. D. Salinger: Reviews, Essays, and Critiques of The Catcher in the Rye and Other Fiction, edited by Marvin Laser and Norman Fruman (New York: Odyssey, 1963), pp. 39-49.

22. John W. Aldridge, In Search of Heresy: American Literature in an Age of Conformity (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956), p. 129.

23. Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 262-263. The chapter from which the quotations are taken was originally published as “Rare Quixotic Gesture: The Fiction of J. D. Salinger,” Western Review, 21 (Summer 1957): 261-280.

24. See Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, The Fiction of J. D. Salinger (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1958), pp. 28-31.

25. See George Steiner, “The Salinger Industry,” Nation, 189 (14 November 1959): 360-363; reprinted in Salinger: A Critical and Personal Portrait, edited by Henry Anatole Grunwald (New York: Harper, 1962), pp. 82-85.

26. See Tom Davis, “J. D. Salinger: Some Crazy Cliff Indeed,” Western Humanities Review, 14 (Winter 1960): 97-99; reprinted in Marsden, If You Really Want to Know, pp. 95-97; Bernice and Sanford Goldstein, “Zen and Salinger,” Modern Fiction Studies, 12 (Autumn 1966): 313-324; and Gerald Rosen, “A Retrospective Look at The Catcher in the Rye,” in Critical Essays on Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, edited by Joel Salzberg (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990), pp. 158-171.

27. See Donald P. Costello, “The Language of The Catcher in the Rye,” American Speech, 34 (October 1959): 172-181; reprinted in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, edited by Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2000), pp. 41-49.

28. Carl F. Strauch, “Kings in the Back Row: Meaning through Structure—a Reading of Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 2 (Winter 1961): 5-30; reprinted in Critical Essays on Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, p. 66.

29. See Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, 1 (Winter 1963); Modem Fiction Studies, 3 (Autumn 1966); and Warren French, J. D. Salinger (New York: Twayne, 1963). For another perceptive analysis of The Catcher in the Rye, see Miller, J. D. Salinger, University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, no. 51 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1965).

30. James Bryan, “The Psychological Structure of The Catcher in the Rye,” PMLA, 89 (October 1974): 1065-1074; reprinted in Critical Essays on Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, pp. 101-117. For a response to Bryan’s article see Dennis Vail, “Holden and Psychoanalysis,” PMLA, 91 (January 1976): 120-121; reprinted in Critical Essays on Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, pp. 117-119.

31. Carol and Richard Ohmann, “Reviewers, Critics, and The Catcher in the Rye,” Critical Inquiry, 3 (Autumn 1976): 15-37; reprinted in Critical Essays on Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, pp. 119-137. For a response to the Ohmann article see Miller, “Catcher In and Out of History” in Critical Essays on Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, pp. 140-144.

32. See James M. Mellard, “The Disappearing Subject: A Lacanian Reading of The Catcher in the Rye,” in Critical Essays on Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, pp. 197-214.

33. Alan Nadel, “Holden and the Cold War,” Centennial Review, 32 (Fall 1988): 351-371; reprinted in Holden Caulfield, pp. 153-166.

34. Mary Suzanne Schriber, “Holden Caulfield, C’est Moi,” in Critical Essays on Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, pp. 226-238.

35. Little, Brown’s Back Bay edition of the novel was published in January 2001; it features the cover illustration used for the original hardcover edition and the same pagination.

36. William Peden, “Esthetics of the Story,” Saturday Review, 36 (11 April 1953): 43-44.

37. Arthur Mizener, “In Genteel Traditions,” New Republic, 128 (25 May 1952): 19-20.

38. Gilbert Highet, “New Books: Always Roaming with a Hungry Heart,” Harper’s, 206 (June 1953): 100-109.

39. Charles Poore, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, 19 April 1953, p. 25.

40. “Nine by Salinger,” Newsweek, 41 (6 April 1953): 98.

41. Angus Wilson, New Statesman and Nation, 46 (15 August 1953): 187.

42. “Youthful Horrors,” Nation, 176 (18 April 1953): 332.

43. Eudora Welty, “Threads of Innocence,” New York Times, 5 April 1953, sec. 7, p. 4.

44. Sublette, Jack R., J. D. Salinger: An Annotated Bibliography, 1938-1981 (New York: Garland, 1984), pp. 187-193.

45. Gwynn and Blotner, The Fiction of J. D. Salinger, pp. 4-8.

46. John Hermann, “J. D. Salinger: Hello Hello Hello,” College English, 22 (January 1991): 262-264; reprinted in Studies in J. D. Salingen pp. 254-259.

47. Robert M. Browne, “Rebuttal: In Defense of Esme,” College English, 22 (May 1961): 584-585; reprinted in Studies in J. D. Salinger, pp. 559-561.

48. Tom Davis, “The Identity of Sergeant X,” Western Humanities Review, 16 (Spring 1962): 181-183; reprinted in Studies in J. D. Salinger, pp. 261-264.

49. Fred B. Freeman Jr., “Who Was Sergeant X?” American Notes & Queries, 2 (September 1972): 6. Freeman also refutes Dan Wakefield’s attempt to identify the sergeant as Buddy Glass, pointing out that Buddy is not married. See Wakefield, “Salinger and the Search for Love,” in Studies in J. D. Salinger, pp. 77-87.

50. Bryan, “A Reading of Salinger’s ’For Esmé—with Love and Squalor,’” Criticism, 9 (Summer 1967): 275-276, 288.

51. John Wenke, “Sergeant X, Esme, and the Meaning of Words,” Studies in Short Fiction, 18 (Summer 1981): 251-259.

52. Gwynn and Blotner, The Fiction of J. D. Salinger, pp. 19-21.

53. Miller, J. D. Salinger, pp. 27-30. Miller’s remark that Seymour has “begun to vomit up the apple of logic” is an allusion to Teddy McArdle’s advice to Bob Nicholson in “Teddy,” the last story in the collection. See Salinger, Nine Stories, p. 291.

54. Leslie A. Fiedler, “From Redemption to Initiation,” New Leader, 41 (26 May 1958): 20.

55. Frank Metcalf, “The Suicide of Seymour Glass,” Studies in Short Fiction, 9 (Summer 1972): 243-246.

56. Charles V. Genthe, “Six, Sex, Sick: Seymour, Some Comments,” Twentieth Century Literature, 10 (January 1965): 170-171. Dallas E. Weibe also discusses the relevance of the number six in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” suggesting that Seymour thinks he has six toes, just as he thinks he has a tattoo. See Weibe, “Salinger’s ’A Perfect Day for Bananafish,’” Explicator, 23 (September 1964): item 3.

57. Gary Lane, “Seymour’s Suicide Again: A New Reading of J, D. Salinger’s ’A Perfect Day for Bananafish,’ Studies in Short Fiction, 10 (Winter 1973): 27-33.

58. Ruth M. Vande Kieft, Eudora Welty (New York: Twayne, 1962), p. 153. That Seymour suffers occasionally from “an excess of ecstasy” is supported by Buddy Glass’s explanation for Seymour’s hitting Charlotte Mayhew with a stone. “He threw it,” Buddy says, “because she looked so beautiful sitting there in the middle of the driveway with Boo Boo’s cat.” See Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, p. 104.

59. See James Bryan, “A Reading of Salinger’s ’Teddy,’” American Literature, 40 (November 1968): 352-369; William Bysshe Stein, “Salinger’s ’Teddy’: Tat Tvam Asi or That Thou Art,” Arizona Quarterly, 29 (Autumn 1973): 253-265; and Laurence Perrine, “Teddy? Booper? Or Blooper,” Studies in Short Fiction, 4 (Spring 1967): 217-224.

60. See Bernice and Sanford Goldstein, “Zen and Nine Stories,” Renascence, 22 (Summer 1970): 171-183.

61. John V. Hagopian, “’Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes’: Salinger’s Paolo and Francesca in New York,” Modern Fiction Studies, 12 (Autumn 1966): 351, 354.

62. John Russell, “Salinger, From Daumier to Smith,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 4 (Winter 1963): 70-87.

63. Paul Kirschner, “Salinger and His Society: The Pattern of Nine Stories,” London Review, 6 (Winter 1969-1970): 34-54.

64. Miller J. D. Salinger, pp. 19-21.

65. French, J. D. Salinger; Revisited (Boston: Twayne, 1988), pp. 63, 87.

66. Wenke, Salinger: A Study of the Short Fiction (Boston: Twayne, 1991), pp. 31-62.

67. Ian Hamilton, In Search of J. D. Salinger (New York: Random House, 1988), p. 176.

68. John Updike, “Anxious Days for the Glass Family,” New York Times, 17 September 1961, sec. 7, pp. 1, 52; reprinted in Salinger: A Critical and Personal Portrait, pp. 53-56.

69. Joan Didion, “Finally (Fashionably) Spurious,” National Review, 11 (18 November 1961): 341-342; reprinted in Salinger: A Critical and Personal Portrait, pp. 77-79.

70. Isa Kapp, “Salinger’s Easy Victory,” New Leader, 45 (8 January 1962): 27-28; reprinted in Salinger: A Critical and Personal Portrait, pp. 79-82.

71. Carl Bode, “Book Reviews,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 3 (Winter 1962): 65-71.

72. Robert B. Jackson, review of Franny and Zooey, Library Journal, 86 (1 October 1961): 3303.

73. Poore, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, 14 September 1961, p. 29.

74. Anne Marple, “Salinger’s Oasis of Innocence,” New Republic, 18 (September 1961): 22-23.

75. Granville Hicks, “Another Look at the Deserving,” Saturday Review, 44 (23 December 1961): 18.

76. See Maxwell Geismar, American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity (New York: Hill & Wang, 1958), p. 207.

77. John P Mclntyre, “A Preface for ’Franny and Zooey,’” Critic, 20 (February-March 1961): 25-28.

78. James G. Murray, “Books,” Critic, 20 (October-November 1961): 72-73.

79. The novelist Mary McCarthy wrote one such critique of Franny and Zooey. Paul Alexander, a Salinger biographer, describes her review as “so vicious it bordered on a personal attack.” See Alexander, Salinger: A Biography (Los Angeles: Renaissance, 1999), pp. 220-221. See also McCarthy, “Franny and Zooey,” Observer (London), 3 June 1962, p. 21; reprinted in Harper’s, 225 (October 1962): 46-48.

80. Alexander, Salinger, pp. 212-214.

81. Sublette, J. D. Salinger: An Annotated Bibliography, pp. 201-204.

82. See Gwynn and Blotner, The Fiction of J. D. Salinger, pp. 32-33, 42-44, 46-52.

83. Ibid., p. 48, 50, 51.

84. Hassan, Radical Innocence, pp. 278-279, 281-283.

85. French J. D. Salinger; pp. 139-143.

86. Ibid., pp. 143-148.

87. French, J. D. Salinger, Revisited, pp. 97-98.

88. Daniel Seitzman, “Salinger’s ’Franny’: Homoerotic Imagery,” American Imago, 22 (Spring-Summer 1965): 58-59.

89. Ibid, pp. 73-74.

90. Seitzman, “Therapy and Antitherapy in Salinger’s ’Zooey,’” American Imago, 25 (Summer 1968): 140-153, 159.

91. Ernest W. Ranly, “Journey to the East,” Commonweal, 97 (23 February 1973): 468-469.

92. Eberhard Alsen, Salinger’s Glass Stories as a Composite Novel (New York: Whitston, 1983), pp. 21-22, 57-59.

93. Wenke, J. D. Salinger: A Study of the Short Fiction, pp. 63-89.

94. Hicks, “A Glass Menagerie,” Saturday Review, 46 (26 January 1963): 37-38.

95. John Wain, “Go Home, Buddy Glass,” New Republic, 148 (16 February 1963): 21-22.

96. William Barrett, “Reader’s Choice,” Atlantic, 211 (February 1963): 128, 129.

97. Robert Martin Adams, “Fashions in Fiction,” Partisan Review, 30 (Spring 1963): 128-130.

98. Kathleen Nott, Encounter, 20 (June 1963): 80-82.

99. Hugh McGovem, America, 2 (February 1963): 174-175.

100. Irving Howe, “More Reflections in the Glass Mirror,” New York Times Book Review, 7 April 1963, pp. 4-5, 34.

101. Jackson, review of Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, Library Journal, 88 (15 January 1963): 237.

102. Laurence Smith, Critic, 21 (February-March 1963): 73-74.

103. Hassan, “The Casino of Silence,” Saturday Review, 46 (26 January 1963): 38.

104. Hassan, “Almost the Voice of Silence: The Later Novelettes of J. D. Salinger,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 4 (Winter 1963): 5-6, 14.

105. Sam Baskett, “The Splendid/Squalid World of J. D. Salinger,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 4 (Winter 1963): 56, 60, 61.

106. Bemice and Sanford Goldstein, “’Seymour: An Introduction’: Writing as Discovery,” Studies in Short Fiction, 7 (Spring 1970): 248-249, 256.

107. John O. Lyons, “The Romantic Style of Salinger’s ’Seymour: An Introduction,’” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 4 (Winter 1963): 62, 65-67, 69.

108. Ernest J. Johannson, “Salinger’s Seymour,” Carolina Quarterly, 12 (Winter 1959): 51-54

109. Alsen, Salinger’s Glass Stories as a Composite Novel, pp. xi-xii.

110. Ibid., p. 33.

111. Ibid., p. 46.

112. Ibid., p. 189.

113. Ibid., p. 75.

114. Ibid., pp. 76-77.

115. French, J. D. Salinger, Revisited, p. 102.

116. Ibid., p. 103.

117. Ibid., p. 105.

118. Ibid., p. 107.

119. Ibid., p. 108.

120. Ibid., p. 109.

121. Wenke, J. D. Salinger: A Study of the Short Fiction, p. 93.

122. Ibid., p. 99.

123. Ibid., pp. 100-101.

124. Ibid., p. 105.

125. Ibid., 106.

126. Kip Kotzen, introduction to With Love and Squalor: 14 Writers Respond to the Work of J. D. Salinger, edited by Kotzen and Thomas Beller (New York: Broadway Books, 2001), pp. 3, 4.

127. Rene Steinke, “The Peppy Girls of Friendswood, Texas,” in With Love and Squalor, p. 26.

128. Lucinda Rosenfeld, “The Trouble with Franny,” in With Love and Squalor, p. 87.

129. See Hamilton, In Search of J. D. Salinger; Alexander, Salinger; Joyce Maynard, At Home in the World: A Memoir (New York: Picador, 1998); and Margaret Salinger, Dream Catcher: A Memoir (New York: Washington Square Press, 2000).

130. J. D. Salinger to Whit Burnett, 19 March 1944, quoted in Sublette, J. D. Salinger: An Annotated Bibliography, pp. 30-31.

131. J. D. Salinger, “The Stranger,” Collier’s, 116 (1 December 1945): 18.

132. J. D. Salinger, “I’m Crazy,” Collier’s, 116 (22 December 1945): 51.

133. J. D. Salinger, “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” New Yorker, 22 (21 December 1946): 78.

134. Hamilton, In Search of J. D. Salinger, pp. 38-39. Hamilton says that Salinger worked on the Kungsholm with Herbert Kauffman, a friend from Valley Forge Military Academy, in 1937. French disputes this date, saying that Salinger worked on the ship in 1941 and “may have been cruising the Caribbean when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.” The Kungsholm, French adds, did not return from its cruise, like the ship Salinger describes in “A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All,” but “was commandeered by the United States and converted into a troopship.” See French, J. D. Salinger, Revisited, p. 5.

135. J. D. Salinger, “A Young Girl In 1941 with No Waist at All,” Mademoiselle, 25 (May 1947): 222.

136. See William Maxwell, “J. D. Salinger,” in The Book of the Month, pp. 128-130.

137. Hamilton, In Search of J. D. Salinger, p. 41.

138. J. D. Salinger, “A Girl I Knew,” Good Housekeeping, 126 (February 1948): 194.

139. Shirley Blaney, “Twin State Telescope,” Claremont (New Hampshire) Daily Eagle, 13 November 1953, p. 1.

140. French, J. D. Salinger, Revisited, p. 33.

141. Quoted in Hamilton, In Search of J. D. Salinger, p. 23.

142. Ibid., p. 31.

143. Ibid., p. 45.

144. Ibid., p. 23.

145. Ibid., p. 25.

146. See Maxwell, “J. D. Salinger,” pp. 129-130. Salinger told Maxwell that after commenting about his favorite writers while speaking to a short-story class at Sarah Lawrence College, he was embarrassed about becoming “oracular.” He observed to Maxwell that when a writer is “asked to discuss his craft,” he ought to respond to such a question by merely calling “out the names of the writers he loves in a loud voice,” without affixing labels. See also Salinger, “A Salute to Whit Burnett, 1899-1972,” in Hallie and Whit Burnett, Fiction Writers Handbook (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 187-188. Salinger praises Burnett’s reading of William Faulkner’s story “That Evening Sun” (1931), saying that with Burnett “You got your Faulkner straight,” that “not once did Burnett come between the author and his beloved silent reader.”

147. French, J. D. Salinger; Revisited, pp. 11-12.

148. Hamilton, In Search of J. D. Salinger, p. 98.

149. Ibid., p. 101.

150. Quoted in Hamilton, In Search of J. D. Salinger, p. 23.

151. French, J. D. Salinger; Revisited, p. 5.

152. Ibid., p. 74.

153. Alexander, Salinger, p. 91.

154. Ibid., pp. 107-109. Alexander recounts how Salinger checked himself into a military hospital in Nuremburg, Germany, where he was treated for a “nervous breakdown.”

155. Wenke, J. D. Salinger: A Study of the Short Fiction, p. 55.

156. Gwynn and Blotner, The Fiction of J. D. Salinger p. 33.

157. French, J. D. Salinget; Revisited, pp. 63-64.

158. Alexander, Salinger, pp. 185-186.

159. [Jack Skow], “Sonny: An Introduction,” Time, 78 (15 September 1961): 89.

160. Margaret Salinger, Dream Catcher, p. 84.

161. Ibid., pp. 86-87.

162. Ibid., pp. 94-95.

163. Claire Douglas Salinger, quoted in Margaret Salinger, Dream Catcher, p. 95.

164. Swami Vivekananda, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, volume 6 (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1978), pp. 5-6.

165. Alan W. Watts, The Way of Zen (New York: Random House, 1957), p. 40.

166. Margaret Salinger, Dream Catcher, p. 107.

167. J. D. Salinger makes this observation on the dust jacket of the first edition of Franny and Zooey.

168. Maynard, At Home in the World, p. 87.

169. Stephen J. Whitfield, “Cherished and Cursed: Toward a Social History of The Catcher in the Rye,” New England Quarterly, 70 (1997): 575.

170. Pamela Hunt Steinle, In Cold Fear: The Catcher in the Rye Censorship Controversies and Postwar American Character (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000), p. 73.

171. Quoted in Whitfield, “Cherished and Cursed,” p. 577.

172. Alexander, Salinger, pp. 270-271.

173. Ibid., pp. 271-273.

174. Bloom, introduction to J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, p. 2.

175. Sanford Pinsker, The Catcher in the Rye: Innocence under Pressure (New York: Twayne, 1993), p. 15.

176. Salinger’s works reveal his strong dislike for dabblers in social science, art, and religion The references to the psychology-student girlfriend of Clay (a corporal in Sergeant X’s unit) in “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” and Buddy Glass’s observations about “all the bearded, proud, unlettered young men and unskilled guitarists and Zen-killers” in “Seymour: An Introduction” underscore Salinger’s strong dislike of such dabblers. It is unlikely that the rush to mysticism in the 1960s would have received his blessing.

177. French, J. D. Salinger, Revisited, pp. 122-123.

178. Whitfield, “Cherished and Cursed,” p. 587.

179. J. D. Salinger to Whit Burnett, early 1943, quoted in Sublette, J. D. Salinger: An Annotated Bibliography, p. 29.

180. Hamilton, In Search of J. D. Salinger, p. 75.

181. Ibid., pp. 106-107.

182. See Alexander, Salinger, pp. 140-141. Hamilton says that it was Darryl Zanuck who bought the screen rights to “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut.” See Hamilton, In Search of J. D. Salinger, p. 107.

183. William Brogden, “My Foolish Heart,” Variety, 19 October 1949, p. 8.

184. Bosley Crowther, “Heart Trouble,” New York Times, 22 January 1950, sec. 2, p. 1.

185. “Cinema,” Time, 55 (6 February 1950): 83.

186. Jane Lockhart, “Looking at the Movies,” Rotarian, 75 (April 1950): 39.

187. John McCarten, “The Current Cinema,” New Yorker, 26 (28 January 1950): 75.

188. J. D. Salinger, quoted in Alexander, Salinger, p. 142.