J. D. Salinger's House of Glass
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING J. D. Salinger's House of Glass By Stanley Edgar Hyman With the publication of Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, and Seymour: an Introduction (Little, Brown, 248 pp.,...
...For Salinger, whose only sib is an elder sister, and who disguises himself thinly as Buddy Glass, the writer of the later stories, it seems to be wishful imaginary playmates like Eloise's daughter's "Jimmy Jimmereeno" in "Uncle Wiggily...
...As a consequence, the story is interrupted, in fact severed, while Buddy leaves a group of wedding guests in his living room and sits in the bathroom reading Seymour's diary, which is quoted for 12 pages...
...The non-meshing conversation shows Salinger at his most brilliant, and the story's ending, with Franny revived and mouthing silent prayer, is extraordinarily powerful...
...Franny" (1955) is a transition to the later stories...
...Life called Salinger the most influential man of letters in the United States today, and I am sure that he is and will continue to be even after this new book...
...his great poems are in a doublehaiku form and are, from Buddy's prose paraphrases, hogwash...
...chatting about the earlier Seymour stories...
...Between the writing of "Franny" and the next story, "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters," which appeared later in 1955, Salinger seems to have created the Glass family of seven wonderful grown-up Quiz Kids...
...When the bananafish appear, in Seymour's improvisation to entertain a little girl named Sybil, they are terribly Freudian bananafish, who swim into a hole and gorge themselves on bananas, then die...
...He has been upset by the maid's reference to his father as a "big sloppy kike," which he innocently understands to mean "kite...
...Instead of the redemptive pre-sexual young girl (Sybil, Esmé in "For Esmé—with Love and Squalor," Phoebe in The Catcher in the Rye) we have the redemptive dead brother, Holden's Allie inflated to monstrous size...
...The scene is their lunch at a fashionable campus restaurant...
...Moreover, the Seymour of all this turgid hagiography is preposterous...
...The progress of his Glass series in a little more than a decade from one of the finest short stories of our time, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," to one of the most boring ever written, "Seymour: an Introduction," is appalling...
...Sybil's mother is fully defined when she goes off for a Martini and promises Sybil "I'll bring you the olive...
...I think that Jerome David Salinger is the most talented fiction writer in America...
...Raise High" is 104 pages long, and for most of its length it is a funny and charming account of Seymour's marriage to Muriel, when he failed to appear at the wedding, then eloped with the bride...
...Meanwhile, the story, like Buddy's deserted guests, sits awkwardly in the living room, and eventually departs...
...All of Seymour's shy tenderness comes out in his delightful teasing of Sybil, climaxed by his kissing the arch of her foot...
...A long introduction by Buddy, in which he says that he is offering not a short story but "a sort of prose home movie," is ruinous, as are his later apologies for his style, which is limp beyond belief (Zooey's beauty, we are told, is vulnerable to "glibly undaunted and usually specious evaluations...
...at other moments he preaches the soft humanitarian religion of loving mankind, in which their mother Bessie's chicken soup is "consecrated...
...he is a master of Zen and the arts of stoopball and curb marbles...
...he gives his brother soft and sentimental misadvice about writing...
...The ladies' room at the restaurant "appeared to be hardly less commodious" than the dining room...
...The problem is that it makes an indigestible mixture, and Franny should be sicker at the end than she was at the start...
...We could not care less...
...He committed suicide, apparently, out of the fullness of his joy...
...The first and still the best of them is "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" (1948...
...Boo Boo charms him out of it with typical Glass loving banter, and at the end the united family is about to go sailing off in the dinghy, happy kites all...
...Its subject, I suppose, is hero worship, or brother fixation...
...he buys his ill-fitting clothes "like a young brahmacharya picking out his first loincloth...
...Salinger's Big Religious Package is offered in "Zooey": the Upanishads, the Diamond Sutra, Meister Eckhart, Dr...
...But a writer breaks through limiting forms into fuller and deeper forms, like those of Moby-Dick or Ulysses, not into anarchy and incoherence...
...Before the marriage he had the scars of an earlier suicide attempt on his wrists...
...The diary tells us that Seymour married Muriel because "I love and need her undiscriminating heart," and that her middle-class vision of marriage is "humansize and beautiful...
...Franny is undergoing a religious crisis, and wants what Lane is certainly not, a guru...
...Suzuki on satori, saints, arhats, bodhisvattas, jivanmuktas, Jesus, Gautama, Lao-tse, Shankaracharya, Hui-neng, Sri Ramakrishna, the Four Great Vows of Buddhism, God's grace, the Jesus Prayer, japam, Chuang-tzu, Epictetus, the Bible...
...In the first paragraph, Muriel is shown reading an article called "Sex is Fun—or Hell...
...One can understand Salinger's rebellion as another example of the impatience of the ablest New Yorker writers with the form of the well-made story they have so well mastered (one sees the same impatience with form in the recent stories of John Updike...
...Finally, then, we have "Seymour: an Introduction" (1959), the last of the Glass stories to date...
...The third of these stories, "Down at the Dinghy" (1949), shows Boo Boo Glass Tannenbaum, sister of the dead Seymour, attempting to placate her small son Lionel...
...Although as tight and economical as the first three, it is vastly longer and more ambitious...
...Sometimes Zooey preaches the hard mystic religion of attaining to the divine by withdrawal and detachment from the world...
...The only flaws in "Franny" are the first appearances in Salinger's work of "fancy" writing...
...It is about a neurotic young man, Seymour Glass, on vacation in Florida with his empty-headed wife Muriel...
...Salinger has a marvelous sensitivity to the young, to the language, to the fraudulence of contemporary America, to the Zeitgeist...
...Every touch is masterly...
...Walt is not identified as a Glass, but the nonsense for which Eloise loves him is very Glassy (he called her wobbly ankle "Uncle Wiggily"), and Salinger later adopted him into the family...
...The story strongly suggests that Seymour's marital difficulties are sexual...
...The story is slighter than "Bananafish,' but the conversation of the girls in unfinished sentences is a triumph of craft, and the end, with Eloise crying over her daughter's myopia and her own loss and corruption, is deeply moving...
...One wonders how Muriel lived with him for six years without blowing her brains out first...
...The problem is that Seymour's ghastly mismatch and suicide, originally no more than the sort of fictional symbolic action by means of which a writer kills off a failed marriage, must now be justified in terms of a new saintly and all-wise Seymour...
...Without plot or action, it is a rambling monologue of 137 pages about Seymour by Buddy, studded with apologies for the digressions, or interpolated protests by Buddy against his own prose, or challenges to readers who want the "restrained" or the "classical" to leave now...
...As Lane eats his frogs' legs and talks conventionalities, Franny rails against the vanity of the world, warily preaches a Way of incessant prayer, cries in the washroom, and faints, presumably as a result of fasting...
...Lane wants what he thinks Franny is, "an unimpeachably right-looking girl" and familiar bedmate...
...Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" (1948) is a long carouse by two former college roommates, Eloise and Mary Jane...
...WRITERS & WRITING J. D. Salinger's House of Glass By Stanley Edgar Hyman With the publication of Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, and Seymour: an Introduction (Little, Brown, 248 pp., $4.00), all of J. D. Salinger's seven stories about the Glass family are finally in book form...
...For the reader, it is a comparable wishful fantasy, everyone's ideal family of loving geniuses...
...He can bring characters wonderfully to life even in unsuccessful wholes: the Matron of Honor cursing Seymour in "Raise High," Bessie clanking with hardware in "Zooey," Waker giving away his bicycle in "Seymour...
...Franny is miraculously cured when Zooey, after his own preaching fails, performs rites of incubation in Seymour's old room, and brings her a religious message from Seymour...
...Muriel is as perfectly defined when Seymour says that she may be out "having her hair dyed mink...
...A Perfect Day for Bananafish" is a tight and economical masterpiece...
...The first three stories about the Glasses appeared in Nine Stories in 1953...
...The book should of course have been called Seymour, to match Franny and Zooey, but the shapeless title is typical of Salinger's new look...
...as a child he found the sight of his friend Charlotte petting Boo Boo's cat so beautiful that he threw a stone at her, resulting in nine stitches and partial facial paralysis...
...He is "a mukta, a ringding enlightened man, a God-knower...
...Salinger likes those Lutherish bathroom revelations, we notice, as this one is preceded by Franny on the toilet and followed by Zooey in the tub, while the letters and memos the characters read grow to scriptural proportions...
...A college girl named Franny is visiting her date, Lane Coutell, at a college like Princeton on the day of the Yale game...
...But his highway has turned into a dirt road, then into wagon ruts, finally into a squirrel track and climbed a tree...
...apostrophizing his "infuriatingly uncommunicative" readers...
...Buddy calls Seymour his "liege lord," his "Davega bicycle.' The chief impression the piece makes is of Buddy's self-indulgent whimsy: offering the reader a "bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses...
...The sudden end of the story, Seymour's blowing out his brains while Muriel lies asleep on the other bed, has the shock of perfection...
...Zooey" (1957) is a mawkish account of the cure of Franny by family love two days after her agony in the ladies' room...
...Salinger must come down and get on about his business...
...Eloise reveals that she is unhappily married, and that her true love was Walt, killed in an absurd accident during the war...
...Franny sits down on a toilet "without any apparent regard to the suchness of her environment...
Vol. 46 • January 1963 • No. 2
