I used to teach *Franny and Zooey* and still find it very funny and moving. What Salinger does with dialogue and gestures (he found cigarettes useful) is incredibly good. I love Franny telling Lane to "Eat them snails," and also the description of the medicine cabinet in the Glass apartment, and also the fact that there isn't ever going to be an answer to the riddle of Seymour's suicide. I understand that it's one of those stories where you might think everyone would be better off if they just stopped thinking and feeling and watched some TV. We've tried that collectively, though, and it's not that great.
This was great! I remember reading the climax of The Catcher in the Rye at around age 14 and having my first "real literary" experience--just a moment of being emotionally knocked off of my feet and into a state of mind where the world felt strange and new, one of the highs I've been chasing ever since. I haven't re-read the book since then in part because I wondered if, with age, I would no longer appreciate the book and would be unable to re-access that old feeling.
Likewise to all of that, but I did go back and re-read it when I was approaching 30. And have to report that the magic was no longer there. I think it does indeed speak vividly to the adolescent mind, and maybe it takes an adolescent mind to respond. I had a similar experience with Hardy…
From Shell Shock or PTSD due to horrendous experiences during the invasion of Germany
In Hapworth 16, 1924, Seymour predicted he would die by age 31 or age 36 – which ever is “the perfect year and day to die” – This same theme was repeated in both “A Perfect Day For Bananafish” – and then again in “Teddy”
Seymour never got off Joe Jackson’s Nickel Plated Trick Bicycle in the Vaudeville performance when he was a kid. This was stated as the best moment of his entire life and nothing else could compare.
Seymour told Rhea Fedder (Muriel’s Mother) that he wanted to be a “Dead Cat” – His Buddhist Master says “No one wants to be a dead cat because it is known to be worth nothing. And, that makes it essentially “invaluable” or “priceless.” “A dead cat is the most precious thing in the whole world.”
Seymour wrote 184 Haiku poems. (Two in fact on his date of death in the hotel room!) Suicide is at the top of the list for creative people like himself. This will draw indefinite attention to his work and to his creative product.
The Buddhist Religion – Seymour was in his final life on this earth (or Samsara) and he will evolve now into the state of Nirvana. Yes, Seymour died but he will come back to move on to another state of being.
Seymour was too sensitive or too delicate for this world. He gorged too many worldly observations and experiences and so he couldn’t get back out of this vast hole and he had no where to go but to die.
Seymour overdosed on “happiness” and died. He says in his diary in “Carpenters” that he is SO HAPPY. He was just too happy and so he had no reason to go on any longer. Nothing could ever get better.
Seymour was essentially his brother Waker’s Davega bicycle and so Seymour's entire life was meant to be given away.
I think what many people miss about Catcher is that it's funny, at least I find Holden to be very funny.
I have come to see Catcher as in a sort of dialogue with 2 other novels, The Moviegoer by Walker Percy and Dog of the South by Charles Portis, they are all attempts to answer the question, how should I live?
Terrific essay, thank you for sharing your insights!
Loved reading this, Salinger was (and is) such an important short story writer to me, one of the first who I read a little of and then had to dive into. His tone is so addictive and distinctive. The dialogue is so enjoyable and I adore the little details like Franny wanting to lie down in the patch of light, or in the De-Daumier story the character imagining his dad's partner is waiting "wantonly, for me to slip her my Montreal address under the table."
Regarding this: "And the question remains: if he was so spiritually advanced, why did Seymour, treated as a sort of departed saint or bodhisattva throughout, kill himself in the first place?" I think, and I'm curious to see if you agree, that Salinger is essentially saying that you can't live in American capitalist society and live a spiritual life - there's that bit in Teddy: "I mean it's very hard to meditate and live a spiritual life in America. People think you're a freak if you try to. My father thinks I'm a freak, in a way." (By the way, I agree that Teddy is the most annoying of the Nine Stories). This feels like a bit of an easy way out to me.
Also I think there's more than a little of that problematic trope that also appears in Don Mclean's Vincent "this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you."
Have you read his daughter Margaret Salinger's memoir "Dream Catcher"? It's half-ish on him, half-ish on her, though he pops up throughout. I found it hugely nourishing. That sort of mystic epiphany thing you mention was a huge early draw in Salinger's works for me, though I often got the feeling he was sort of speaking over-aspiringly, from an imagined idealistic epiphany down (perhaps informed by some mini-epiphanies here and there) and not from the ground up. Dream Catcher offered a sort of reverse epiphany that reminded me of the importance of context, of the details of your life, of where you come from. My favourite dialogue in the new Dylan film (a conversation that actually got a bit stuck into character rather than zooming along) reminded me of Margaret and JD Salinger as I was watching. It's related to this context point, copied and pasted here:
BOB
People make up their past. Remember what they want, forget the rest.
SYLVIE
I’ve told you everything-- my folks, my sister, the street I grew up on.
BOB
I never asked about any of it! You think that stuff defines you?
SYLVIE
What I come from, what I want and what I don’t, what I reject. Yes!
Margaret Salinger mentions the war a lot, the crazy trauma he would've gone through - apparently it appears more directly in his early-early stories, uncollected, which I haven't yet read. She also talks about Salinger never writing about his Jewishness - in one story, she says he seems to retell a family anecdote about riding the bus with a grandparent with a strong Jewish accent, swapping it for an Australian accent. She appropriately describes "Seymour: An Introduction" as more hagiography than story, like your saint description. A lot of this feels a lot like spiritual bypassing on his end. And there are lots of great anecdotes. I really recommend it, it definitely has its flaws but was one of my favourite recent reads.
"Franny and Zooey", for me, stands a little apart, and supports re-reading better, in that the characters struggle more directly with their own faults and lack of spiritual mastery. These younger Glass children, not comfortable hearty Americans like Boo Boo, or great writers like Buddy, or enlightened like Seymour (do you ever think his name is a terrible pun on See-More, maybe with See-More Glass adding some extra koan-aspiring detail). They seem the most like real people to me, and it's the closest I feel Salinger gets to exorcising his demons. What do you think? Apologies for the long comment!
Yes I think there's some of that with Seymour, which is why, besides a few of the individual stories, F&Z was my favorite -- I like that Franny has that sort of spiritual crisis and eventually works through it, instead of being like "well, as a spiritually attuned person, I'm simply too good for this fallen world."
I have not read "Dream Catcher"! If anyone reading this wants to give me a generous stipend to do these essays full-time I promise will read all the published material plus the biographies and memoirs, haha. There is one story, "Down at the Dinghy", that circles rather obliquely around Jewishness and antisemitism, only revealing it at the very end. I thought it was an interesting outlier given that, as you said, he kept that stuff pretty out of his writing life. It's funny bc in his spiritual preoccupations and fascinations w/ the details of everyday life he reminds me a lot of Saul Bellow, who I revere and who I think chafed a bit at being categorized as a "jewish writer". So maybe he partially wanted to avoid that fate (chronologically he obviously came a bit before Bellow, Roth etc but the New Yorker was publishing IB Singer at the same time as him, IIRC).
I've read all of Salinger and also believe Franny and Zooey was the best portrayal of the American spiritual crises, which was realized following WW11. I've read the book at least five times. Great post!
Very interesting! I think you like Salinger a bit more than I do but mostly agree. I read The Catcher in the Rye at about 14 like everyone back then (50 years ago) and I quite liked it. (It was as assigned text.) I also read Nine Stories, and I think that's even better.
But I didn't get to the later books until much more recently. I read Franny and Zooey a few years ago and quite liked "Franny" but thought "Zooey" a much lesser work. But I suppose I was a bad reader because I too thought Franny was pregnant! (Until reading "Zooey" of course.) And just a few months ago I read Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; and, Seymour, an Introduction. Again -- the first story was decent enough, pretty funny, pretty sharply observed, but "Seymour, an Introduction" just lost me with its sanctification of Seymour, and with its unprofitable excess.
I’m really glad someone wrote this completist take. Seymour: An Introduction is the only thing I can recall that I initially hated and someone compellingly argued me into appreciating.
recently had one of those incredible literary experiences re-reading open city by teju cole. it didn't do it for me the first time, but there were several moments that felt to me like epiphany was just peeking through the trees or something, not knocking me in the face. he wrote a little bit about it here: https://lithub.com/teju-cole-on-the-wonder-of-epiphanic-writing/
This is the best take on Salinger I’ve ever heard. To answer your question though, Seymour might have been “spiritually advanced,” but definitely was not mentally. His standoffishness and dismissive nature are one of the first signs. Then there’s the allusions to his PTSD. Should we say he’s severely… arrested… with barely pseudo support from his naive young trophy wife… it wasn’t really hard to understand I thought, that there’s a very clear pipeline between combat and suicide.
Is it actually a burning question to you? Does his understanding of Eastern Philosophy actually seem puddle shallow to you? Maybe compared to Thich Nhat Hanh.. but to many Americans he must have been a gateway to what might have remained to them an opaque and uninteresting pedagogy. His simple but affectionate promulgation of the philosophy definitely sparked my interest in it. But I never write about Taoism. Does that prove I know nothing about it?
(Genuinely curious on your perspective because I do concede you made that remark on behalf of his “detractors.”)
Thank you, that's quite kind! Yes-- I think there are several possible answers around his suicide (not that the act ever really has one singular cause anyway). I didn't even address the PTSD angle, which i think I subconsciously largely avoided bc it appears as such a catchall explanation in a lot of writing about Salinger but that certainly has something to do with it. Another very deep rabbit hole that I didn't have time/space to do justice to is all the ambiguously sexual stuff with the little girl in "Bananafish," I don't think you're meant to take away that he's secretly a pedophile or anything like that but definitely the metaphor of the fish who get so stuffed they can't fit their way into the holes, him cajoling the girl into deeper and deeper water, plus the suicide, and all this coming (if you read in order) about 30 pages after the incident with his former teacher in Catcher...I mean it certainly raises an eyebrow in the way the very innocent relationship in "For Esme" doesn't.
I think more would become clear to me on a second read, which I unfortunately didn't have time to do. I guess the question is whether Salinger really expects you to take him as some sort of all-knowing sage. Salinger definitely appears to intend for you you to do that with the titular character in "Teddy," which i found to be by far the most didactic/annoying of "Nine Stories".
I definitely don't know enough about buddhism/taoism etc to judge whether he was an expert -- he certainly seems to understand *something* about it on a deep level that lends his stories an aspect that differentiate him from the many many other chroniclers of bourgeois anomie. From what biographical record exists he does seem to have flitted from one spiritual fad to another throughout the course of his life, but that's not necessarily a diss-- seekers obviously tend to make better writers of fiction than theologians.
Happy to see Craig Raine attracting new admirers. Areté was the only literary journal I actively looked forward to reading, and I was sorry when it gave up the ghost. Raine's poetry, too, can be miraculous, brilliant and daft all at once. He's a writer without inhibitions, which is rarer than it should be.
I loved Catcher when I was a teenager and randomly picked it up off a bookshelf (it was not a school assignment I mean). It was the first book I truly loved. I read it and i felt so seen. (I am not alone in this, Yes, I'm aware how lame that is).
Haven't read it again in over 25 years. I read all the other books as a teen as well, after I'd read Catcher a half dozen times.
I think Catcher is a book specifically for teenagers - almost a YA book in that regard. I think to read and critique outside of the teen years misses it's point.
I used to teach *Franny and Zooey* and still find it very funny and moving. What Salinger does with dialogue and gestures (he found cigarettes useful) is incredibly good. I love Franny telling Lane to "Eat them snails," and also the description of the medicine cabinet in the Glass apartment, and also the fact that there isn't ever going to be an answer to the riddle of Seymour's suicide. I understand that it's one of those stories where you might think everyone would be better off if they just stopped thinking and feeling and watched some TV. We've tried that collectively, though, and it's not that great.
This was great! I remember reading the climax of The Catcher in the Rye at around age 14 and having my first "real literary" experience--just a moment of being emotionally knocked off of my feet and into a state of mind where the world felt strange and new, one of the highs I've been chasing ever since. I haven't re-read the book since then in part because I wondered if, with age, I would no longer appreciate the book and would be unable to re-access that old feeling.
Maybe I should give it a re-read!
That's what it's all about, Mr. Kolding!
Likewise to all of that, but I did go back and re-read it when I was approaching 30. And have to report that the magic was no longer there. I think it does indeed speak vividly to the adolescent mind, and maybe it takes an adolescent mind to respond. I had a similar experience with Hardy…
Offers of Various Reasons Why Seymour Glass Died?
From Shell Shock or PTSD due to horrendous experiences during the invasion of Germany
In Hapworth 16, 1924, Seymour predicted he would die by age 31 or age 36 – which ever is “the perfect year and day to die” – This same theme was repeated in both “A Perfect Day For Bananafish” – and then again in “Teddy”
Seymour never got off Joe Jackson’s Nickel Plated Trick Bicycle in the Vaudeville performance when he was a kid. This was stated as the best moment of his entire life and nothing else could compare.
Seymour told Rhea Fedder (Muriel’s Mother) that he wanted to be a “Dead Cat” – His Buddhist Master says “No one wants to be a dead cat because it is known to be worth nothing. And, that makes it essentially “invaluable” or “priceless.” “A dead cat is the most precious thing in the whole world.”
Seymour wrote 184 Haiku poems. (Two in fact on his date of death in the hotel room!) Suicide is at the top of the list for creative people like himself. This will draw indefinite attention to his work and to his creative product.
The Buddhist Religion – Seymour was in his final life on this earth (or Samsara) and he will evolve now into the state of Nirvana. Yes, Seymour died but he will come back to move on to another state of being.
Seymour was too sensitive or too delicate for this world. He gorged too many worldly observations and experiences and so he couldn’t get back out of this vast hole and he had no where to go but to die.
Seymour overdosed on “happiness” and died. He says in his diary in “Carpenters” that he is SO HAPPY. He was just too happy and so he had no reason to go on any longer. Nothing could ever get better.
Seymour was essentially his brother Waker’s Davega bicycle and so Seymour's entire life was meant to be given away.
Steven Weinraub - Rancho Mirage, CA
I think what many people miss about Catcher is that it's funny, at least I find Holden to be very funny.
I have come to see Catcher as in a sort of dialogue with 2 other novels, The Moviegoer by Walker Percy and Dog of the South by Charles Portis, they are all attempts to answer the question, how should I live?
Terrific essay, thank you for sharing your insights!
I love the dog of the south, one of the funniest books ever written. I’ll have to keep that in mind next time I revisit it.
The Moviegoer for the win!
Loved reading this, Salinger was (and is) such an important short story writer to me, one of the first who I read a little of and then had to dive into. His tone is so addictive and distinctive. The dialogue is so enjoyable and I adore the little details like Franny wanting to lie down in the patch of light, or in the De-Daumier story the character imagining his dad's partner is waiting "wantonly, for me to slip her my Montreal address under the table."
Regarding this: "And the question remains: if he was so spiritually advanced, why did Seymour, treated as a sort of departed saint or bodhisattva throughout, kill himself in the first place?" I think, and I'm curious to see if you agree, that Salinger is essentially saying that you can't live in American capitalist society and live a spiritual life - there's that bit in Teddy: "I mean it's very hard to meditate and live a spiritual life in America. People think you're a freak if you try to. My father thinks I'm a freak, in a way." (By the way, I agree that Teddy is the most annoying of the Nine Stories). This feels like a bit of an easy way out to me.
Also I think there's more than a little of that problematic trope that also appears in Don Mclean's Vincent "this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you."
Have you read his daughter Margaret Salinger's memoir "Dream Catcher"? It's half-ish on him, half-ish on her, though he pops up throughout. I found it hugely nourishing. That sort of mystic epiphany thing you mention was a huge early draw in Salinger's works for me, though I often got the feeling he was sort of speaking over-aspiringly, from an imagined idealistic epiphany down (perhaps informed by some mini-epiphanies here and there) and not from the ground up. Dream Catcher offered a sort of reverse epiphany that reminded me of the importance of context, of the details of your life, of where you come from. My favourite dialogue in the new Dylan film (a conversation that actually got a bit stuck into character rather than zooming along) reminded me of Margaret and JD Salinger as I was watching. It's related to this context point, copied and pasted here:
BOB
People make up their past. Remember what they want, forget the rest.
SYLVIE
I’ve told you everything-- my folks, my sister, the street I grew up on.
BOB
I never asked about any of it! You think that stuff defines you?
SYLVIE
What I come from, what I want and what I don’t, what I reject. Yes!
Margaret Salinger mentions the war a lot, the crazy trauma he would've gone through - apparently it appears more directly in his early-early stories, uncollected, which I haven't yet read. She also talks about Salinger never writing about his Jewishness - in one story, she says he seems to retell a family anecdote about riding the bus with a grandparent with a strong Jewish accent, swapping it for an Australian accent. She appropriately describes "Seymour: An Introduction" as more hagiography than story, like your saint description. A lot of this feels a lot like spiritual bypassing on his end. And there are lots of great anecdotes. I really recommend it, it definitely has its flaws but was one of my favourite recent reads.
"Franny and Zooey", for me, stands a little apart, and supports re-reading better, in that the characters struggle more directly with their own faults and lack of spiritual mastery. These younger Glass children, not comfortable hearty Americans like Boo Boo, or great writers like Buddy, or enlightened like Seymour (do you ever think his name is a terrible pun on See-More, maybe with See-More Glass adding some extra koan-aspiring detail). They seem the most like real people to me, and it's the closest I feel Salinger gets to exorcising his demons. What do you think? Apologies for the long comment!
Yes I think there's some of that with Seymour, which is why, besides a few of the individual stories, F&Z was my favorite -- I like that Franny has that sort of spiritual crisis and eventually works through it, instead of being like "well, as a spiritually attuned person, I'm simply too good for this fallen world."
I have not read "Dream Catcher"! If anyone reading this wants to give me a generous stipend to do these essays full-time I promise will read all the published material plus the biographies and memoirs, haha. There is one story, "Down at the Dinghy", that circles rather obliquely around Jewishness and antisemitism, only revealing it at the very end. I thought it was an interesting outlier given that, as you said, he kept that stuff pretty out of his writing life. It's funny bc in his spiritual preoccupations and fascinations w/ the details of everyday life he reminds me a lot of Saul Bellow, who I revere and who I think chafed a bit at being categorized as a "jewish writer". So maybe he partially wanted to avoid that fate (chronologically he obviously came a bit before Bellow, Roth etc but the New Yorker was publishing IB Singer at the same time as him, IIRC).
I've read all of Salinger and also believe Franny and Zooey was the best portrayal of the American spiritual crises, which was realized following WW11. I've read the book at least five times. Great post!
Very interesting! I think you like Salinger a bit more than I do but mostly agree. I read The Catcher in the Rye at about 14 like everyone back then (50 years ago) and I quite liked it. (It was as assigned text.) I also read Nine Stories, and I think that's even better.
But I didn't get to the later books until much more recently. I read Franny and Zooey a few years ago and quite liked "Franny" but thought "Zooey" a much lesser work. But I suppose I was a bad reader because I too thought Franny was pregnant! (Until reading "Zooey" of course.) And just a few months ago I read Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; and, Seymour, an Introduction. Again -- the first story was decent enough, pretty funny, pretty sharply observed, but "Seymour, an Introduction" just lost me with its sanctification of Seymour, and with its unprofitable excess.
I’m really glad someone wrote this completist take. Seymour: An Introduction is the only thing I can recall that I initially hated and someone compellingly argued me into appreciating.
Loved this one—great to see your take on him, and especially on those strange and compelling late books.
recently had one of those incredible literary experiences re-reading open city by teju cole. it didn't do it for me the first time, but there were several moments that felt to me like epiphany was just peeking through the trees or something, not knocking me in the face. he wrote a little bit about it here: https://lithub.com/teju-cole-on-the-wonder-of-epiphanic-writing/
really nice read!
sage advice: combine with thyme, rosemary, and parsley.
I have often thought of the connections between Salinger and Rimbaud. The early gush of genius followed by years of reclusiveness and searching.
This is the best take on Salinger I’ve ever heard. To answer your question though, Seymour might have been “spiritually advanced,” but definitely was not mentally. His standoffishness and dismissive nature are one of the first signs. Then there’s the allusions to his PTSD. Should we say he’s severely… arrested… with barely pseudo support from his naive young trophy wife… it wasn’t really hard to understand I thought, that there’s a very clear pipeline between combat and suicide.
Is it actually a burning question to you? Does his understanding of Eastern Philosophy actually seem puddle shallow to you? Maybe compared to Thich Nhat Hanh.. but to many Americans he must have been a gateway to what might have remained to them an opaque and uninteresting pedagogy. His simple but affectionate promulgation of the philosophy definitely sparked my interest in it. But I never write about Taoism. Does that prove I know nothing about it?
(Genuinely curious on your perspective because I do concede you made that remark on behalf of his “detractors.”)
Thank you, that's quite kind! Yes-- I think there are several possible answers around his suicide (not that the act ever really has one singular cause anyway). I didn't even address the PTSD angle, which i think I subconsciously largely avoided bc it appears as such a catchall explanation in a lot of writing about Salinger but that certainly has something to do with it. Another very deep rabbit hole that I didn't have time/space to do justice to is all the ambiguously sexual stuff with the little girl in "Bananafish," I don't think you're meant to take away that he's secretly a pedophile or anything like that but definitely the metaphor of the fish who get so stuffed they can't fit their way into the holes, him cajoling the girl into deeper and deeper water, plus the suicide, and all this coming (if you read in order) about 30 pages after the incident with his former teacher in Catcher...I mean it certainly raises an eyebrow in the way the very innocent relationship in "For Esme" doesn't.
I think more would become clear to me on a second read, which I unfortunately didn't have time to do. I guess the question is whether Salinger really expects you to take him as some sort of all-knowing sage. Salinger definitely appears to intend for you you to do that with the titular character in "Teddy," which i found to be by far the most didactic/annoying of "Nine Stories".
I definitely don't know enough about buddhism/taoism etc to judge whether he was an expert -- he certainly seems to understand *something* about it on a deep level that lends his stories an aspect that differentiate him from the many many other chroniclers of bourgeois anomie. From what biographical record exists he does seem to have flitted from one spiritual fad to another throughout the course of his life, but that's not necessarily a diss-- seekers obviously tend to make better writers of fiction than theologians.
Typo
You missed the "he" in, "If anyone knows anything about Salinger at all, it’s that went into reclusion (...)."
many of my plays are a belated revision of Franny and Zooey
I can really see that -- it's amazing how contemporary it feels.
v good flash insight
Happy to see Craig Raine attracting new admirers. Areté was the only literary journal I actively looked forward to reading, and I was sorry when it gave up the ghost. Raine's poetry, too, can be miraculous, brilliant and daft all at once. He's a writer without inhibitions, which is rarer than it should be.
I loved Catcher when I was a teenager and randomly picked it up off a bookshelf (it was not a school assignment I mean). It was the first book I truly loved. I read it and i felt so seen. (I am not alone in this, Yes, I'm aware how lame that is).
Haven't read it again in over 25 years. I read all the other books as a teen as well, after I'd read Catcher a half dozen times.
I think Catcher is a book specifically for teenagers - almost a YA book in that regard. I think to read and critique outside of the teen years misses it's point.