More on Seymour

Many of us who read and loved The Catcher in the Rye in the tender years of adolescence are puzzled by the new J. D. Salinger. We took Holden Caulfield to heart because he was our friend, betrayed and maltreated like us by an insensitive world. But the Glass family is beyond our ken. The saga of Seymour, Zooey and the others, clouded by esoteric references to Eastern philosophy, can not hold us as the story of the guileless school-boy did. Has Salinger changed in the ten years of transition? No, he remains essentially the same. We have changed; by growing up we have passed out of the author's small in-group into the unappreciative outside world.

The Glass stories have all been reprinted from the New Yorker in book form, and Salinger, on the dust jacket of the latest offering, Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters (1955) and Seymour: an Introduction (1959), promises several more, which will no doubt be well received by the growing Salinger cult. The heroes of the saga, as everyone knows, are or were seven children (two are now dead), the offspring of a Jewish-Irish vaudeville team. Super-intellegent from birth, they started in rotation on a radio quiz kid show. Grown-ups now, they are spread far afield: Buddy teachers English at an upstate New York girl's college; Walker is a priest; Boo Boo a Westchester matron; Zooey a rising TV actor; and Franny a college student. The greatest of them all, however, was Seymour, who committed suicide on vacation in an earlier Salinger story, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish."

Spirit of Seymour

Seymour's spirit pervades the life of all the extant Glasses. As the oldest child, he initiated them into Zen and other mystical religious cults, and guided them in the ways of discovering whatever is inadequate or phony in their fellows. Dead, he became their high priest or Guru: his letters and diary are sacred relics, his poems too holy to submit to the public piece-meal. His legacy of knowledge brings Franny to the verge of insanity, and saves Buddy constantly from despair.

Raise High is the account of Seymour's wartime wedding day, told as a memory by Buddy, complete with a treasured excerpt from his brother's diary. The prevalent key of the story is dullness and confusion, for the constant use of asides and unfamiliar terminology snows under the genuinely touching scene of Buddy's adventures in a limousine with a selection of the Salinger out-group.

Seymour is a rambling description of the departed Guru by Buddy in a turgid, you-see-writing-in-the-making style, filled with such interjections as "I'm suddenly time-conscious. It's not yet midnight, and I'm playing with the idea of sliding to the floor and writing this from a supine position." The first story is an average New Yorker slice of life effort, the second a pretentious and unsuccessful attempt to play Gertrude Stein. Yet the book has been on the best seller list for some time.

The Appeal of Salinger

Such a response from the public cannot come wholly from the author's reputation alone. Part of the appeal of the Glass stories lies in the series' consistency. Sensing a membership in the great cognoscenti, Salinger's readers can corroberate "fact" in Seymour from any of the previous books, in the same way that fans of the James Bond mysterics can describe their hero in every detail.

But Salinger's greatest support comes from the group that can consider themselves among the "ins," to a large degree the younger adolescents - the same readers who feld Catcher was their Bible. Holden Caulfield's in group includes himself, his sister, Gatsby, Eustasia Vye, Ring Lardner, and all youths who think themselves sensitive and oppressed. On the outside are parents, teachers, roommates, and adults in general. The exclusiveness of the Glass family is similar: creative people like professors and earnest students (exception is made, of course, for Seymour and Buddy), Mrs. Glass and all who slight super-intellegence in general and the Glasses in particular (like the wedding guests in Raise High) are in the out-group. The Glass children and their devotees are and the rest of the world is an audience-the "Fat Lady in the third row" who Zooey maintains is the real god.

Critics Alfred Kazan and Mary McCarthy have noted the extent to which Salinger panders to the young. In fact, the author said himself, in a Time magazine interview last year, that his true audience is "too small to take my books off the shelf." Salinger's world is like fairyland in its unreality; no unpleasant adult conflicts disturb the wonderful Glasses as they grow up. Reliance on ritual is a characteristic of the childish mentality: every cigarette lighting, tie knotting, or tea drinking is a ritual to the Glasses. The temple is the bathroom (which serves as a set for the major portion of the story "Zooey"), and gospel is scrawled on the mirror with old bits of soap.

A common childhood dream is one in which the dreamer overpowers his parents and becomes their acknowledged superior. The Glass children have satisfied this desire from birth; their father is a colorless nothing, their mother a somewhat comic sycophant to their talents. In short, the Glasses have never really grown up at all, but remain big children, hating those who will not play their games, attracting those who will.

Such an attitude is salubrious and refreshing, say Salinger's supporters, for it exposes phoniness and provides amusement. But Salinger the phonyslayer is a bit of a fraud himself. For what are the Glasses but seven faces of the author, and his glorification of them is a triumph of egotism. Far from being amusing, the stories become instead a view into "a terrifying Narcissus pool." Seymour's suicide suggests the author's fear of the possibility of his own faults. "Did Seymour kill himself because he had married a phony... or because he was so happy and the Fat Lady's world was so wonderful?" asks Miss McCarthy. "Or because he had been lying, his author had been lying, and it was all terrible, and he was a fake?