D. A. Hosek

In “The Laughing Man,” Salinger is telling his story while ostensibly telling a different one. It’s a great use of a narrative frame to illuminate his story in ways that wouldn’t be possible directly. We have a narrator relating memories of his nine-year-old self and not employing the understanding that the older self would have gained through adult experience. 

Salinger spends six pages before Mary Hudson, the true subject of “The Laughing Man” makes any kind of appearance and that only as a picture in the bus. Her eventual arrival sparks one of those great Salinger bits of prose:

Offhand, I can remember seeing just three girls in my life who struck me as having unclassifiably great beauty at first sight. One was a thin girl in a black bathing suit who was having a lot of trouble putting up an orange umbrella at Jones Beach, circa 1936. The second was a girl aboard a Caribbean cruise ship in 1939, who threw her cigarette lighter at a porpoise. And the third was the Chief’s girl, Mary Hudson.

This is one of those Salinger stories that left me feeling, “huh?” There is the usual Salinger wit and sharp prose (certainly, this is one of my favorite titles for a Salinger story, even if the story itself is not completely satisfying). Wikipedia informs me that, “At the time of its publication, it confused yet nevertheless delighted its audience.” which is certainly a sentiment with which I can identify. 

I’ll close these comments with my favorite sentence from the story:

Very probably, it was not part o the sofa vaudeville of a showoff but, rather, the private, exposed achievement of a young man who, at one time or another, might have tried shaving himself left-handed.

The story whose film adaptation is (at least nominally) the reason that there are no other films of Salinger works. The second of the Glass family stories, in this case with Walt Glass who appears only in recollection. Told almost entirely through dialog, it’s a good example of telling a story through indirection and omission. Again, Salinger shows a great knack for the excellent turn of phrase: “[They] were talking in the manner peculiar, probably limited, to former college roommates.”

Where the story felt awkward to me is in the inherent sexism of the situation. Not merely in that the female characters were tied into the roles dictated by 1950s American society, but that Salinger’s imagination cannot really have them push very hard against those limitations. Eloise’s life exists only through her relationships with her husband Lew and the haunting specter of Walt Glass who has Eloise metaphorically sleeping to one side of her bed just as her daughter left room for her imaginary friend.

This was the first story I ever taught, in a class on Zen Buddhism I took as an undergrad (everybody in the class taught some topic for half an hour). It’s been twenty-six years, at least, so I don’t really remember the details although I think I only assigned the middle section, the interaction between Seymour and Sybil. Coming back at the story, I find myself drawn into some of the masterful elements of craft in the story, particularly the first section which I’m pretty sure I did not teach all those years ago. The remarkable specificity of the opening paragraph with its “Ninety-seven New York advertising men” and the complete record of everything Muriel did while waiting for a long distance line to open so she could call her parents. The remarkable sentence, “She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing.” The oblique references to an earlier suicide attempt by Seymour which might have taken place with Muriel in the car with him, given her parents’ concern about “that funny business with the trees.” The whole thing is a beautiful piece of art.

I wonder about my idea back then that the story was to be read as a sort of Zen koan. The fact that Nine Stories itself employs the koan about one hand clapping as its epigram might seem like support to this idea, but I had my doubts even when I was teaching the story to my classmates and they continue now. It feels, in some ways, as if Seymour is almost a slightly more sophisticated version of Kevin Kline’s character in A Fish Called Wanda who employs Eastern mysticism as a sort of justification and explanation for his own depression, but who most likely has not reached the level of satori that he believes he has. 

This is Salinger’s second story to appear in The New Yorker, following by a bit over a year, the uncollected “A Slight Rebellion Off Madison” which was incorporated into The Catcher in the Rye. 

I stopped reading Salinger over twenty years ago because I found myself being overly influenced by  is voice. I’ve decided that I’ve developed a sufficiently strong voice of my own as a writer that I can allow myself a chance to re-read Salinger. My plan is to read the published books from Catcher to Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters/Seymour an Introduction before revisiting the uncollected stories from “The Young Folks” to “Hapworth 16, 1924.” 

I first read The Catcher in the Rye in one day on a Saturday suspension at the end of my senior year of high school in 1986. Along with reading the book, I wrote a short essay reflecting on the book, my experience of the Saturday suspension and a version of the facts (not especially accurately recounted) around the ditching the field trip that led to my suspension. High on Salinger’s prose, the prose I generated led the teacher for whom this was a final assignment declared it “the best piece of student writing he’d ever read.” This fine piece of writing is, of course, now lost to the ages.

I re-read the book a few times in the following decade as I became increasingly enthralled by Salinger’s writing, especially in my undergraduate years and my copy of the book with the maroon and yellow assassin cover has grown a bit fragile as a result, but this is the copy that I re-read (I was tempted to purchase a new copy before a recent vacation and gift it to my oldest nephew after a quick re-read, but I ended up sticking with my battered copy for the re-read, hoping that the trips to the playground with my kids and a book wouldn’t end with the book falling apart.

There’s a special pleasure in re-reading a book, hitting the familiar beats that memory is ready to serve back to you along with the surprises of forgotten corners of the book. I’d forgotten how long the book stayed at Pencey Prep and found myself impatient for the story to get to the New York chapters which had been the meat of the book for me in all my earlier reads. Everything carries a host of additional associations in my mind now. Ackley will be forever associated with one of my college English profs who, in a conversation in his office, made a strong point of the assonance between  “Ackley” and “acne” which I took at the time as a bit of an insult aimed in my direction because of my own poor complexion. 

I did find that the book’s rather abrupt termination was less satisfying to me now than it had been in the past. Catcher doesn’t really have much of a plot to begin with, being more a series of scenes and the pleasure in the book is in the voice more than anything else, but it still felt as if Salinger might have just run out of gas at book’s end and decided to just let it go.