Re-reading Salinger

I have re-read The Catcher in the Rye dozens of times. I have taught it in every course I could squeeze it into, even in the USA where I soon realised it was just as controversial as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And I re-read it for every course I taught, and I still find it one of the greatest novels ever written. But it does not fit into my 2020 reading challenge so I have chosen a different Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour, An Introduction. I read it soon after The Catcher in the Rye – once again, everyone I knew was reading it at the same time; we also read Nine Stories, and some of us read Franny and Zooey. I was, as many friends then, fascinated by Zen. My mother was a Japanese scholar, specialising on Zen gardens, so I knew quite a lot about Zen, probably superficially, but enough to at least start understanding Seymour Glass and his siblings.

I had vague memories of the first novella and none at all of the second; maybe I never read it then. Of the first, I remembered that it featured a cancelled wedding and started by stating that at the time of narration the bridegroom had committed suicide. I also remembered the scene in which Seymour reads a Zen text to baby Franny. I remembered that Seymour's brother Buddy is the narrator, and that their sister Boo Boo writes a message for Seymour with a bit of soap on a bathroom mirror: “Raise high the roof beam, carpenters...”

I cannot imagine what I could have appreciated in this little gem when I was seventeen. For it is a gem. It evolves in real time or even in a stretch (a temporal pattern in which it takes longer to tell an event than it takes place). Nothing, absolutely nothing happens. Buddy the narrator and a party of the bride's guests are riding a taxi in Manhattan, get stuck in traffic, go to Buddy's apartment. They have insignificant conversations, interrupted, discursively, by Buddy's reflections and memories. The characters are hilarious. The atmosphere is brilliant. I was sad when I finished because I wanted it to go on for a while yet. (I believe I will re-read it again soon).

Seymour, An Introduction was, if possible, the opposite. A long and rather pointless reflection by Buddy, many years after Seymour's suicide, ostensibly trying to create a credible portrait of his much admired brother. I was about to give up halfway when it suddenly turned more interesting, becoming what narratologist Seymour (coincidence?) Chatman calls “comment on discourse”. Buddy the narrator, by this time a published author, conveys the pain of writing, the very process of transposing memories on paper, addressing his potential reader. I guess it was a kind of self-reflection by Salinger, but I am not really interested in real authors, all the more in fictitious authors, and Buddy eventually turned out to be a fascinating storyteller, not least in contrast to the subdued narrator of the first novella. I probably won't re-read Seymour, An Introduction, but when I am finished with my re-reading challenge I might want to re-read more stories about the Glass siblings.