Salinger’s Children

One thing that distinguishes Salinger’s Nine Stories from the other collections we’re reading this semester is the number of children that appear on his pages—and not just as side-players, incidental members of the main character’s family, but as distinctive, individuated characters who often play a decisive role in the story. Anyone who has spent any time around young children will attest that Salinger has a remarkable ear for children’s speech and their idiosyncratic conversational rhythms. But these stories aren’t primarily concerned with the children’s world as such—rather, the children are presented as part of the adult world. He doesn’t tend to depict children among children, but children interacting with adults, and often the children influence the adult characters in profound and ambiguous ways.

Readers of Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye will recall the key role played by sixteen-year-old misanthrope Holden Caulfield’s younger sister, ten-year-old Phoebe, late in the novel. After Holden shrugs off every adult in his life as “phony” and not worth listening to, this little girl is able to get through to him, to challenge him to reassess some of his recent self-destructive tendencies. He talks about her as the least phony person he knows. Ironically, though, Phoebe comes off as more mature and level-headed than her older brother, as she asks him tough questions about his plans for the future and the fact that he’s royally screwing up his life, and she doesn’t let him off the hook when he offers his usual half-assed, whimsical answers. He might think he’s about to have some light and easy conversation with the little kid he loves most in the world, but that’s not what he gets.

So it’s too simple to say that children simply represent innocence in Salinger, although that is part of the picture. He definitely seems drawn to children’s lack of pretense, their sometimes uncomfortable honesty, their unself-consciousness (remember Ramona scratching herself while her mother keeps telling her to cut it out), the fact that they aren’t trying to impress anyone—and “innocence” is a part of this. There’s a sense, throughout the book, of the adult world as corrupt, self-absorbed, traumatized, and children often serve the role of dramatizing the gap between who these people are now, and what they might have been like not too long ago. When Eloise pauses in the doorway of Ramona’s room, after berating her quite harshly for “replacing” Jimmy Jimereeno with Mickey Mickereeno, she is suddenly overcome with emotion, and while her reaction is ambiguous, it seems to have something to do with suddenly seeing—and recoiling from—the nasty, embittered woman she has become: “I was a nice girl, . . . wasn’t I?” (56). Ramona’s imaginative play has forced the traumatized Eloise, who is still grieving the loss of her beloved Walt, to face the fact that her grief has changed her, made her jaded, ironic, and cynical. The story ends with her seeming to lament a lost innocence, to want affirmation of the “nice” person she once was.

Instead of viewing childhood as a necessary formative stage before “real life,” Salinger often seems to take the opposite view: children are more in touch with what’s “real” (ironically, even through imaginary friends), while adults have, for a range of reasons, compromised themselves, become artificial, materialistic, cynical, status-obsessed. Remember that the book opens with a Zen koan. A central aim in Zen spiritual practice is to achieve a “child’s mind” or “beginner’s mind,” and through many of his child characters Salinger seems to be exploring this idea in the very un-Zen milieu of postwar, privileged, northeastern white Americans. In the final story in the collection, a precocious child prodigy, Teddy, tells Bob Nicholson that he must empty his mind of logic and reason in order to truly understand anything and laments how hard it is to articulate this idea in midcentury America.

Consider the role of Sybil, in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” We are introduced to the story’s central character, the enigmatic and war-traumatized Seymour, through her perspective. She has reinterpreted his name as a sentence, “See more glass,” and she indeed seems to “see more” in him than just the erratic and potentially dangerous veteran described by Muriel’s mother. Salinger establishes the dynamic of a free-spirited child existing within an adult world that doesn’t really value them as individuals right away, as her mother absently applies “sun-tan oil” (a relic of the pre-sunscreen-conscious era) while talking to the woman next to her about a lovely silk handkerchief someone was wearing the other day. She speaks to Sybil mainly to get her to “hold still,” before prompting her to “run along and play” while she sneaks off to the bar for a Martini. “I’ll bring you the olive,” she says (15). Sybil seems completely unaffected by her mother: she more or less patiently endures the application of sun-tan oil before being “set loose” to run off on her own. Her mother isn’t the least bit interested in this “See more glass” stuff; she just wants that Martini.

What seems to set Seymour apart in this story—aside from his paleness and his propensity to wear his hotel bathrobe on the beach—is his total engagement with Sybil, on her level. Some in class and on the blogs have mentioned feeling uneasy throughout the scene where they’re together, and this suspicion toward Seymour is built into the story from the start: you’re thinking like Muriel’s paranoid, hysterical mother, seeing him as a dangerous “crazy” person. And perhaps it’s a measure of our own loss of innocence that when we see a grown man interacting with a child like this, we assume the worst. But the scene Salinger provides is actually quite innocent, and in light of the story’s abrupt ending, quite poignant. What we actually get in the scene with Sybil is not a predatory monster or dangerous psychotic but a witty eccentric who doesn’t seem to care about “adult” concerns and seems quite jaded with the privileged, materialistic life he leads. As he brushes off questions about Muriel’s whereabouts with a satirical crack about how she might be off “having her hair dyed mink” (17), we note how he associates adulthood with artificiality and self-indulgence. Seymour, at the very least, seems disillusioned with the life of luxury and leisure his postwar existence affords. The setting is an elite Florida beachfront hotel, but he doesn’t seem to be having fun there the way the other adults do, playing the piano in the lobby and joking around with Sybil and Sharon Lipschutz.

And it seems clear that Sybil prefers Seymour’s company to her mother’s—she doesn’t care how eccentric and weird he looks, sitting on the beach in his bathrobe. He engages her at her level, sometimes making jokes that go a little over her head, but silly enough that she can appreciate the playful tone (“Olive and wax. I never go anyplace without ’em” [21]). He seemingly improvises a fanciful story about “bananafish” and their habits while wading out into the water with Sybil, and she quickly picks up on the game and plays along (“I just saw one” [24]). The bananafish story is not a happy one, though—“They lead a very tragic life” (23), overindulging in the thing they think they want (bananas) until they die. Not exactly The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Seymour seems to be communicating something here, but it’s not at all clear what, at the time. In retrospect, it’s possible to read this bananafish story as a parable, even a kind of suicide note. Seymour may be expressing his own disillusionment with adult life, with the materialistic overindulgence that has followed the war. His same ironical sense of humor suddenly turns paranoid and nasty in the elevator with the woman. Whatever is going on with Seymour—and he remains enigmatic throughout the story—it seems clear that this brief episode with Sybil is decisive, and seems to represent a significant moment of human connection, perhaps the kind of thing he can no longer achieve among the adults who now populate his world. Sybil accepts his fantastical, alternate reality without skipping a beat; she believes in bananafish. I’m not sure exactly what it means, but it seems that her claim to have seen a bananafish with six bananas in its mouth (24) seems decisive to him. He ends their little swim and immediately returns to the hotel. There’s no sentimentality in Sybil, either—she runs off  “without regret in the direction of the hotel” (25).

In the opening story, Sybil is unable to “save” the traumatized veteran, and her role in the story remains ambiguous and open to interpretation; it even seems that she “inspires” Seymour’s final act, in some unintended way. But in “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor,” a story that is widely considered to be a very personal one for Salinger, the D-Day veteran who experienced a debilitating nervous breakdown after the war and who remained profoundly out of step with and even hostile toward mainstream American culture for the rest of his life, we see a much more restorative role played by a child. The story’s “before and after” structure, with the wartime trauma passed over in silence, turns our attention to Esmé and her role—she promises that she’ll write a letter to the narrator, and he promises to write a story for her in turn. She’s another precocious Salinger child, who seems both wise beyond her years and innocent at the same time. It’s not as if she is “naturally” compassionate; indeed, she’s consciously working on her compassion. He gets her letter at a point where he is unable to function like a human being. His “faculties” are not “intact.” The simple but profound gesture of giving him her dead father’s watch serves to connect with him in a way that Clay’s clumsy efforts at conversation do not. It seems to make him able to “sleep,” and the story ends in a hopeful tone that is reinforced by the comparatively “healthy” narrator who opens the story, talking about Esmé’s wedding invitation. The end of the story is in the beginning, and the story we read is, self-reflexively, the story the narrator promises to write for Esmé. It stands as Salinger’s most straightforward treatment of the trope of a child helping an adult, and Esmé remains one of Salinger’s most beloved and memorable characters. But we see here a paradigm for Salinger’s treatment of children in his work: her precocity, lack of pretension, emotional intelligence, and simple, unsolicited compassion provides the narrator—and the author?—with something he seems unable to find in the adult world.