In this blog post, we’ll examine J. D. Salinger’s literary world, mysticism, love, and the dilemmas of modern life, focusing on his “Glass Family” series.
From 1945 to 1951, Salinger published 16 short stories; five of them were about Holden Caulfield and his family, while three were part of the so-called “Glass Family” series, which is widely regarded as a projection of Salinger himself. This family saga, centered on Seymour Glass’s suicide, serves as a key motif and theme running through Salinger’s second collection of short stories, ‘Nine Stories’. In the Glass Family stories, Salinger turns to Eastern Zen Buddhism and mysticism as potential solutions to the dilemmas of modern people, but ultimately concludes that mysticism alone cannot resolve the problems faced by Westerners.
Among his early short stories, “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” and “Teddy” deal with mysticism. The former features Salinger’s signature protagonist, who reacts sensitively to a hypocritical, fake world, rebels against it, and isolates himself from society. Since the protagonist, Jean, had never truly loved anyone other than his mother during his childhood, his isolation—caused by a lack of love—deepens even further. After his mother passes away, he moves to New York with his stepfather and, exaggerating his career based on his experience of having his artistic talent recognized in Paris, applies for a position as an instructor at an art correspondence school in Montreal.
In this way, he escapes the Oedipal inner world—where he and his stepfather both loved the same woman—and steps into the outside world. He recounts his childhood and present circumstances to impose order on the confusing reality he now faces. However, even in the outside world, he remains thoroughly isolated while concealing his true identity. Even the students he teaches through correspondence are people he can never meet in person.
The correspondence art school where he works is run by two Japanese men. When he mentions that he likes Buddhism, an irony unfolds as the two men reply that they are, in fact, Presbyterians. Jang, Salinger’s lonely protagonist, discovers beauty in the paintings created by Sister Irma of St. Joseph’s Convent and, through her, recognizes the possibility of truly connecting with another sensitive soul. He becomes infatuated with the nun and sends her passionate letters.
However, when the Mother Superior discovers his letters and severs Sister Irma’s ties with the art school, he falls into deep despair. Yet, through a religious epiphany that comes upon him unexpectedly, he escapes despair and finds hope once more. That mystical epiphany comes to him like intense sunlight, guiding him back to a normal life. Although he is not a mystic, he experiences a mystical awakening.
The protagonist of another short story, “Teddy,” is Teddy McAdoo, a ten-year-old boy who, through meditation, attains “satori”—the state of enlightenment described in Zen Buddhism. Through mysticism, Teddy overcomes his rejection of his parents and his dissatisfaction with reality. In this work, Salinger portrays Teddy’s mysticism in a lyrical and positive light. An interest in Zen Buddhism and mysticism was also a common trait among Beat Generation writers, including Allen Ginsberg. This was because, to them at the time, Eastern Zen Buddhism and mysticism seemed to offer an escape from Western civilization, which had reached a dead end.
However, in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” which tells the story of the Glass family, Salinger implies that Eastern mysticism is not the ultimate solution to the dilemmas faced by Westerners. The Glass family consists of seven siblings: Seymour, Buddy, Boo Boo, the twins Walt and Waker, Zooey, and Franny, in that order. Their father, Les, is of Jewish descent, and their mother, Bessie, is of Irish descent and performed with a famous vaudeville troupe. Taking after their parents, the children were also exceptionally talented, and all appeared on the radio program ‘It’s a Wise Child’. Named after Telemachus’s reply to Athena in Greek mythology—“a wise child who knows his father”—the program serves as a symbol foreshadowing the mental odyssey the Glass family would later undergo.
In the story of the Glass family, Seymour Glass travels to Florida with his wife to seek treatment for his depression. In “A Good Day for Bananafish,” the reader gains insight into the origins of Seymour’s depression through a phone conversation between Seymour’s wife, Muriel, and her mother. Muriel prefers an ordinary, stable life and finds emotional release by watching melodramas. The hotel room where Seymour commits suicide is permeated with the scent of her newly purchased calfskin bag and nail polish remover. In this sense, Muriel appears to symbolize the superficial consumer culture that Seymour and Holden despise. However, Seymour’s motive for suicide can be understood not simply as a reaction against such culture or a fabricated world, but rather as a tragedy stemming from his mystical way of life failing to harmonize with reality.
While Muriel is talking with her mother, Seymour spends time on the beach with a young girl named Sybil Carpenter. He tells her various fantastical stories, one of which is about the bananafish. According to Seymour, the bananafish is no different from an ordinary fish until it enters a hole containing a banana; but once inside, it greedily devours the banana, causing its body to swell, and ultimately meets its doom, unable to escape.
Although Seymour has had a variety of spiritual experiences—enough to remind his younger siblings of Christ—he becomes so deeply immersed in his inner world that he can no longer adapt to the external, real world. After parting ways with Sybil and returning to the hotel, he takes his own life with a pistol. This plot device clearly illustrates Salinger’s view that mysticism, by severing humans from the world, cannot resolve the problems faced by modern people living in an absurd reality. In particular, it appears to be Salinger’s conclusion that, within the context of Western culture—which values exploration and engagement with the external world—Eastern mysticism cannot serve as the ultimate solution.
In “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenter,” Seymour is so overjoyed by the prospect of marriage that he is unable to attend his own wedding. He feels happy because marriage serves as an opportunity for him to step out of his inner world—where he had been trapped like a “bananafish”—and into the outside world. However, unable to completely abandon his spiritual experiences and ultimately unprepared to live in the real world, he agonizes and eventually ends his life by suicide. Salinger implies that both spiritual miracles and suicide represent extremes, and that the true answer lies somewhere in between. In his work, spiritual mysticism is never the ultimate answer to life; rather, an active attitude—striving to find meaning in one’s life even amidst an absurd reality—is what matters most.
Buddy Glass appears in “Seymour: An Introduction.” A shy and cynical creative writing teacher, he is the character who most strongly reflects Salinger himself. While Buddy resembles Seymour in terms of spiritual practice, he is a much healthier and more down-to-earth character mentally. Seymour’s younger sister and her husband (Boo Boo) do not play a major direct role but appear at Seymour’s wedding; in another short story, she is portrayed as the mother of the sensitive boy Lionel.
Waker becomes a Roman Catholic priest, but religion, too, fails to resolve the problems facing the Glass family. Walt does not appear in person, but in “Uncle Wigley in Connecticut,” he loses his life in an explosion while packaging a Japanese-made kerosene heater. “Uncle Wigley in Connecticut,” the only Salinger work to be adapted into a film, unfolds as two women reminisce about their innocent past. In this story, Walt appears as a symbol of lost innocence and warmth, while the two women drink and converse to escape their disheartening reality. Eloise believes that Walt, her former fiancé, was ruined by the materialistic world symbolized by her current husband, and she turns to alcohol to numb the pain of her loss. She attempts to rediscover the value of life through her love for her innocent daughter, Ramona. Although such hope may be fleeting, the power of love stands as a central motif running through Salinger’s literature.
In this short story, Eloise confides in her friend Mary Jane about just how materialistic her husband is.
“But why don’t you tell your husband about him?”
“Why? Because he just doesn’t get it. That’s why. Listen to me carefully. If you ever get married again, don’t say a word to your husband. Do you understand?”
“Why?” Mary Jane asked.
“Because it’s no use. That’s why. Men want to believe that their wives have hated every other man but them their whole lives. I’m not joking. You mustn’t say anything unnecessary to men. Just don’t be honest. If you want to say you once knew a handsome man, you have to say he was like a pimp; if you want to say you met a witty man, you have to say he was a sly one. Otherwise, whenever anything happens, they’ll bring that story up and nitpick.”
Eloise brought her glass to her lips and fell into thought for a moment.
“And they also pretend to listen carefully—as if they were the most understanding people in the world. But don’t be fooled. Trust me. If you believe they’re truly understanding, you’ll suffer terribly.”
“Then why did you get married?” Mary Jane asked.
“Good heavens, I’m not really sure myself. He said Jane Austen was his favorite author. He said her novels had had a huge impact on his life. He really did say that. But once we were married, it turned out he hadn’t read a single one of Jane Austen’s novels. Do you know who his favorite author is?”
Mary Jane shook her head.
“El Manning Bines. Have you ever heard of that author?”
“No.”
“I’ve never heard of him either. He’s an author nobody’s ever heard of. Apparently, he wrote a story about four people who starved to death in Alaska. Lou couldn’t even remember the title of the book, but he said it was the most beautifully written work he’d ever read. It’s mind-boggling. The truth is, people don’t even have the courage to admit honestly that they like it because it’s a story about people starving to death in an igloo. They just say it’s a beautiful work.”
Eloise’s daughter Ramona plays with her imaginary friend, Jimmy Jimirino. Later, after coming to believe that Jimmy had died in a car accident, Ramona creates a new imaginary friend named Mickey Mickeyrino and even makes room for him to lie beside her when she goes to sleep. This serves as a symbolic device that parallels Eloise’s own inability to forget her former lover, Walt—nicknamed “Uncle Wiggly”—whom she continues to hold dear in her heart. At the end of the novel, Eloise’s attempt to remove the spot reserved for Ramona’s imaginary friend appears to symbolize her own deliberate effort to forget Walt. After clearing the spot from the bed, Eloise is overcome with emotion as she recalls her lost, pure love.
Eloise walked over to the light switch and turned off the light. Then she stood in the doorway for a long time. Suddenly, in the darkness, she ran toward the nightstand beside the bed but bumped her leg hard against the corner of the bed; she didn’t even feel the pain. She clutched Ramona’s glasses in both hands and pressed them against her cheek. Two streams of tears flowed down, wetting the lenses.
“Poor Uncle Wiggly!”
She repeated those words over and over. After a long while, she placed the glasses back on the table and, staggering slightly, carefully smoothed down the blanket at the edge of Ramona’s bed. Ramona was crying. It seemed she had been crying the whole time. Eloise kissed Ramona on the lips, brushed the hair from her eyes, and left the room.
She went downstairs and woke Mary Jane.
“What’s going on? Who is it?” Mary Jane asked, sitting bolt upright on the sofa bed.
“Mary Jane, please listen to me.”
Eloise said, sobbing.
“Do you remember when we were freshmen? You know, when I bought that brown-and-yellow-patterned outfit at ‘Boys,’ and Miriam Ball said there were no women in New York who wore clothes like that? That’s why I cried all night.”
Eloise grabbed Mary Jane’s arm and shook her.
“I was a good girl back then, too, wasn’t I? Right?”
Salinger’s central concern—“How to live in a society devoid of morality”—is most clearly revealed in “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor.” This work can be read as a story written by the protagonist, Sergeant X, in response to receiving Esmé’s wedding invitation, much like a wedding toast.
A lonely man, he meets Esmé while training for the Normandy landings in England. One Saturday afternoon, Captain X enters a church in Devon and is deeply impressed by Esmé, a thirteen-year-old girl in the choir. The two meet again later at a tea room, and as they part ways, Esmé asks Captain X to write a story for her about “love and squalor.”
On the European front, Sergeant X witnesses the world’s “filth” firsthand. He comes to realize that this filth ultimately stems from the absence of love. In Bavaria, he struggles to overcome the horrors of war he has experienced. However, his callous comrades remain indifferent, and his younger brother asks him to send a bayonet and a Nazi armband as souvenirs. In a German civilian home being used as headquarters, he discovers the phrase “God, life is hell” written on a bookshelf and writes the following passage from Dostoevsky beneath it.
“What is hell? It is the suffering caused by the inability to love.”
Thus, ‘For Esme—With Love’ is also a tribute of love that Sergeant X dedicates to Esme. Tormented by the horrors of war, Sergeant X finds salvation not through mysticism, but through the love of a pure young girl. In this work, Salinger demonstrates that what saves humanity is not mysticism that escapes reality, but genuine love and empathy toward others.
