Being compelled to rip a copy of Salinger in half (at a break in the prose, incidentally) is, I think, what keeps him close. The break if you'd like to know is somewhere in De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period, and if I gave its whereabouts away precisely I fear this whole attempt to get at the work would catapult pretty neatly into self-abasing generalities. I've sort of got through the short stories (and I say 'short' to distinguish them from the novellas) just so far as to find, with a sadness verging on the relief of completion, that not everything from Jerome's pen takes its stride in the throws of the Glass family. The man, the author, is more than that creation. Maybe, aside from the juicy particulars, that's why the spine of the book was nearly pulled into two parts between my leafy hands.
It's after the War, the troops have come home, enemy defeated. In themselves - and sometimes very graphically from without - J.D.'s characters are in a state of religious anticipation that might be something like waiting for a shell to land on-top your head. No matter how many chicken sandwiches you find in your pocket, the same absurdity of what is not there remains. I feel obliged to announce that up until Just Before the War with the Eskimos I was heading for the conclusion that all to be done was See More Glasses. A Perfect Day for Bananafish needs no explanation. In Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut it is Walt*, dead from a freak accident involving a Japanese stove either coming out of, or going into a package - we're never sure - that the fast-drinking suburban housewife Eloise is mourning the loss of:
"I mean you didn't really know Walt," said Eloise at a quarter to five, lying on her back on the floor, a drink balanced upright on her small-breasted chest. "He was the only boy I ever knew that could make me laugh. I mean really laugh."
The next story - with no Glasses in sight - is The Laughing Man. It is about the Comanche Club, a troop of kids who after school (and on weekends) are taken to play baseball (or on rainy days maybe to peruse the Museum of Natural History) by their twenty-two year old Chief - a story teller in his own right. After games or, while parked in wait for a new friend of the Chief's to join them, the latter invariably straddles the driver's seat of the bus and gives instalments to the boys on the exploits of The Laughing Man, a sort of wild west Elephant Man dedicated to banditry and talking with animals. One might want to say that the eventual demise of the Laughing Man, after the end of the liaison between the Chief and his new friend, has a tragic unbelievable effervescence (not lost on the child who is retrospectively narrating his experience as a Comanche- except we surmise for the effervescence) that offers a sort of deferred explanation for Walt's death. The oldest Glass sister features admirably in the next story, and after that they are out of sight.
The book still lies open. In one piece, though - having been acquired (as the front inscription ecstatically declares) by my mother in 1975, and being a paper back that has braved quite a few baths - it may just be close enough to falling apart not to require my assistance.
* From Seymour - An Introduction: Our younger brother Walt was a great bent-pin fisherman as a small boy, and for his ninth or tenth birthday he received a poem from Seymour - one of the major delights of his life, I believe - about a little rich boy who catches a lafayette in the Hudson River, experiences a fierce pain in his own lower lip on reeling him in, then dismisses the matter from his mind, only to discover when he is home and the still-alive fish has been given the run of the bathtub that he, the fish, is wearing a blue serge cap with the same school insignia over the peak as the boy's own; the boy finds his own name-tape sewn inside the tiny wet cap.
