The paperback cover of Nine Stories.
So far the novels of this war have had too much of the strength, maturity and craftsmanship critics are looking for, and too little of the glorious imperfections which teeter and fall off the best minds. The men who have been in this war deserve some sort of trembling melody rendered without embarrassment or regret. I’ll watch for that book.
J. D. Salinger, 1945
The paperback cover of Nine Stories.
From the dozens of stories Salinger had written by 1953, he selected and arranged nine stories to form the war novel he’d been waiting for. According to Margaret Salinger, her father told a student seeking information that all biographical facts and traumatic events can be found in his work. In Harper’s, Gilbert Highet wrote that in every story in Nine Stories “there is a thin, nervous intelligent being who is on the verge of breakdown: we see him at various stages of his life, as a child, as an adolescent, as an aimless young man in his twenties. . . .” What incarnations does this being take? He is Seymour, of course, in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and Sergeant X in “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor,” but he is also Eloise in “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” Ginnie (and Franklin) in “Just Before the War with the Eskimos,” Lionel in “Down at the Dinghy,” Arthur in “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes,” and the title characters in “The Laughing Man,” “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period,” and “Teddy.” Nine Stories is the serial self-portrait of someone committing suicide, or considering it very seriously. Follow the bullet.
DAVID SHIELDS: From war to postwar trauma to suicide to believing children will save you to knowing they can’t (because you can’t have them) to looking for visionary illumination either through suicide or enlightenment to realizing suicide is enlightenment: only in reincarnation will you ever find relief from never-ending anguish, and this belief in reincarnation can come only through Vedanta (for you).
You get off at the fifth floor, walk down the hall, and let yourself into Room 507. The room smells of new calfskin luggage and nail-lacquer remover. You glance at the girl lying asleep on one of the twin beds. Then you go over to one of the pieces of luggage, open it, and from under a pile of shorts and undershirts you take out an Ortgies calibre 7.65 automatic. You release the magazine, look at it, then reinsert it. You cock the piece. Then you go over and sit down on the unoccupied twin bed, look at the girl, aim the pistol, and fire a bullet through your right temple.
Why do you do this? Why does the room smell of calfskin luggage and nail-lacquer remover? Why do you look first at your wife? Is it, in some sense, Sylvia, the enemy combatant you married, and by marrying, hoped to heal yourself and unify the world, and whom you now want to punish by traumatizing forever?
Why is it a German pistol? For you, the only great poet of the century is Rainer Maria Rilke, who could not be more Germanic.
Is there a chance you’ll completely lose control of yourself? Is it a crime that the army released you from the hospital? You’re so pale; are you sick or something? You’re utterly broken, so all you see everywhere is brokenness; everywhere you go you see more glass. The one person who might cure you (not really—otherwise why would her name be Sybil?—she’s an oracle of your own death—and why would you evoke her nemesis, Sharon Lipschutz, by quoting The Wasteland?) is a little girl.
Let’s go look for “bananafish”—your father’s invention. You hate your father, his gross materialism: bananafish swim into a hole in which there are a lot of bananas. They’re very ordinary-looking fish when they swim in, but once they get in, they behave like pigs; some bananafish swim into a banana hole and eat as many as seventy-eight bananas. After that, they’re so fat they can’t get out of the hole again, can’t fit through the door, and die. Notice, Seymour, how your critique of your father is also a parable of your own experience in war.
You hate the adult world. You hate the postwar civilian world. You hate adult women dying their hair mink. You slough off your Jewish sister, Sharon Lipschutz. You want Sybil, oblivion in a perfect little girl.
A raving maniac, you undo the belt of your robe. You take off the robe. Your shoulders are white and narrow, and your trunks are royal blue. You fold the robe, first lengthwise, then in thirds. You unroll the towel you had been using over your eyes, spread it out on the sand, and then lay the folded robe on top of it. You bend over, pick up the float, and secure it under your right arm. Then, with your left hand, you take Sybil’s hand. Notice how in performing this action you are preparing exactly for your final action; by taking Sybil’s hand—the girl you can’t have—you’re killing yourself.
You take Sybil’s ankles in your hands and press down and forward. The float noses over the top of the wave. The water soaks Sybil’s blond hair—crucial, that Germanic/un-Jewish blondness. Her scream is full of pleasure. You call her “my love” for a lot of reasons, not least of which is that she tells you that she has just seen a bananafish. Wait, not just one. Six. She possesses a child’s unself-conscious imagination, but when you pick up one of her wet feet and kiss the arch, she protests, so you stop. Why are you fixated on very young girls, especially young girls’ feet? Does it have anything to do with using girls as time-travel machines to a period before the war and before you perforce became embarrassed about your own anatomy?
In the elevator, you accuse the woman in the elevator of looking at your feet. Why is it so important that she’s wearing zinc salve on her nose? It’s rather like nail-lacquer remover, isn’t it?—an emblem of adult womanhood, exactly what you don’t want, because after the war bodies aren’t sexy; they’re fatal corpses. You accuse Zinc Salve of being a goddamned sneak about it, because, of course, you were a goddamned sneak about kissing Sybil’s feet. You know this, you know this. How could you not?
Then you let yourself into Room 507. You shoot yourself for a variety of reasons—we’ll spend the rest of this book and many other books trying to figure out why—one of which, overtly enough, is postwar trauma, but the other main one is that you can’t join the adult world of luggage and zinc salve and Muriel/Sylvia (remember, she’s a corpse). Postadolescence, post-Oona, postwar, you have nowhere to go. You are a dead man.
Ghosts are more powerful than the living. The idealized potential of a life cut short can never be superseded. Your brother Walt, say, whose regiment was resting someplace. It was between battles or something; a friend of Walt’s wrote all this to his college girlfriend, Eloise. Walt and some other boy were putting a little Japanese stove in a package. A colonel wanted to send the stove home. Or they were taking it out of the package to rewrap it; Eloise doesn’t know exactly. The stove was full of gasoline and junk and it exploded in their faces; the other boy just lost an eye. When Eloise tells this story, she tears up; she puts her hand around the empty glass on her chest to steady it. Walt’s death wasn’t an accident; it was the direct result of the colonel wanting a war relic. (Later in the book, your brother in Albany will put in a request for bayonets and swastikas for his kids now that “the g.d. war is over.”)
There is always war. There is always trauma. There is always a child. There is always the adult world of sexuality and the child world of innocence—irreconcilable. There is always art. There is always imagination, which becomes a search for transcendence/spirituality/mysticism.
Eloise, never recovering from Walt’s loss, has passed on this loss to her daughter, Ramona, who has a make-believe playmate, Jimmy Jimmereeno, who has left his sword outside. Jimmy Jimmereeno is more real to Ramona than anyone human is (Jimmy gets killed, but he quickly gets replaced by Mickey Mickeranno), just as Walt is more real to Eloise than her husband, to whom she says, “Why don’t you boys form a platoon and march home? You can say that hut-hope-hoop-hoop business.” Eloise’s former college classmate’s husband was stationed in Germany, where they had their own horse; the groom for the horse used to be Hitler’s own private riding master or something. Eloise’s drinking companion, Mary Jane, had been married to an air-minded aviation cadet who spent two of the three months she was married to him in jail for stabbing an MP.
Just after Walt had been drafted, he and Eloise were on the train from Trenton to New York. It was cold in the car, and she had her coat over the two of them. Walt sort of had his hand on her stomach—you know. Walt said Eloise was so beautiful he wished some officer would come up and order him to stick his other hand through the window. He said he wanted to do what was fair. This is the stirring of mysticism.
You know what Walt said once? He said he felt he was advancing in the army, but in a different direction from everybody else. He said that when he’d get his first promotion, instead of getting stripes he’d have his sleeves taken away from him. He said that when he’d get to be a general, he’d be stark naked. All he’d be wearing would be a little infantry button in his navel. Don’t you think that’s funny?
Postwar. Stateside. Nobody gets it: the unbridgeable gulf between civilians and veterans. Ever cut your finger, right down to the bone and all? Selena’s brother, Franklin, urges Ginnie to stick around—he’s bleedin’ to death; he may need a goddam transfusion. Well, not right down to the bone, but he has cut himself. He’s bleedin’ like mad. Ginnie, the ideal nurse, explains that he should stop touching the wound and use iodine rather than Mercurochrome. Selena’s sister, Joan, the Queen of the Snobs, who isn’t half as good-looking as she thinks she is, is marrying a commander in the navy. Franklin wrote her eight goddamn letters, not one of which she answered. He couldn’t serve in the war—bad ticker. He worked for thirty-seven months in a goddamn airplane factory in Ohio during the war. Did he like it? He loved it. He just adores airplanes. They’re so cute.
Looking down from his apartment at the street, he sees the goddam fools who are all going over to the goddam draft board. We’re gonna fight the Eskimos next. Why the Eskimos? How the hell should he know? This time all the old guys are gonna go. Guys around sixty. Nobody can go unless they’re around sixty. Just give them shorter hours is all. Big deal. Let the rear-echelon motherfuckers serve up front this time. Ginnie points out that he wouldn’t have to serve, anyway, and she also explains that when he holds his finger down it causes it to bleed more. She is the ideal wartime or peacetime nurse, urging him to put a Band-Aid on it or something—doesn’t he have a Band-Aid or something?
Eric, Franklin’s suitor, who worked with him in the airplane factory, takes the lapel of Ginnie’s polo coat between his fingers, declaring it “lovely. It’s the first really good camel’s hair I’ve seen since the war. May I ask where you got it?”
Transformed by Franklin’s wounded gentleness, Ginnie doesn’t throw away the sandwich half Franklin gives her; she puts it back in her coat pocket. A few years earlier, it had taken her three days to dispose of the Easter chick she had found dead on the sawdust in the bottom of her wastebasket.
Life has been completely desacramentalized. How can we ever make it a sacrament again? (Hint: we will return to children and wastebaskets and sacraments with Sergeant X.)
There is always storytelling within the story. There is always a girl, all the better if she’s unclassifiably beautiful at first sight, her name is Mary Hudson (not Sharon Lipschutz), she goes to Wellesley, she wears a beaver coat, smells of a wonderful perfume, talks a blue streak on the bus, smokes cork-tipped Tareytons, and hits a triple on the first pitch; her stickwork aside, she happens to be a girl who knows how to wave to somebody from third base. She also steals second three times. (Is she pregnant? Never mind.)
You, on the other hand: your head has been placed in a carpenter’s vise. You grow into manhood with a hairless, pecan-shaped head and a face that features, instead of a mouth, an enormous oval cavity below the nose. Your nose consists of two flesh-sealed nostrils. When you breathe, the hideous, mirthless gap below your nose dilates and contracts like some sort of monstrous vacuole. Strangers faint dead away at the sight of your horrible face.
You can hang around HQ as long as you keep your face covered with a pale-red gossamer mask made out of poppy petals. The mask not only spares your brothers-in-arms the sight of your face; it also keeps them aware of your whereabouts. Every morning, in your extreme loneliness, you steal off, as graceful on your feet as a cat, to the dense forest surrounding the enemies’ hideout. There you befriend dogs, white mice, eagles, lions, boa constrictors, wolves. When you remove your mask and speak to them, softly, melodiously, in their own tongues, they do not think you ugly. (You actually wind up marrying one of them.)
You’re one for keeping an ear to the ground: you pick up the enemy’s most valuable secrets; you’re in the CIC, after all. You don’t think much of army SOP, though, so you freelance around the countryside, murdering when absolutely necessary. Soon your ingenious methods, coupled with your singular love of fair play, find a warm place in the nation’s heart.
You’re obligated to lock up your enemies in a deep but pleasantly decorated mausoleum; although they escape from time to time, you refuse to kill them. There’s a compassionate side to your character that just about drives everyone crazy. You cross the border into Paris, where you flaunt your high but modest genius in the face of an internationally famous detective, Marcel Dufarge, and his daughter, who become two of your worst enemies. You toy with them, leaving no even faintly credible indication of your escape method.
You amass the largest personal fortune in the world—most of it contributed anonymously to the monks of a local monastery—humble ascetics who dedicate their lives to raising German police dogs. Your personal wants are few. You subsist exclusively on rice and eagle’s blood, in a tiny cottage with an underground gymnasium and shooting range, on the stormy coast of Tibet. Four blindly loyal confederates live with you: a glib timber wolf named Black Wing, a lovable dwarf named Omba, a giant Mongolian named Hong (whose tongue was burned out by white men), and a gorgeous Eurasian girl who, out of unrequited love and deep concern for your personal safety (she, too: the perfect nursemaid), sometimes has a pretty sticky attitude toward crime. You issue your orders to the crew through a black silk screen. Not even Omba, the lovable dwarf, is permitted to see your face.
But love, after the war, is impossible. The human body is wrecked. No baby carriages for you and Mary Hudson. At all costs, you have to stifle your natural hideous laughter. Follow the bullet:
Your best friend, your timber wolf, Black Wing, falls into a trap set by the Dufarges, those Vichy collaborators, who—aware of your fierce loyalty—offer his freedom for your own. You agree. You meet the Dufarges at midnight in a section of the dense forest surrounding Paris, where they plan to double-cross you with a stand-in, but they haven’t counted on your sentimentality and command of timber-wolf language. After Mlle. Dufarge ties you with barbed wire to a tree, you raise your beautiful, melodious voice—true—in a few words of farewell to your supposed old friend. The stand-in, impressed by your command of his language, informs you that he’s not Black Wing, but that he’ll never go with you to another country. You, infuriated, remove your mask and reveal your naked face in the moonlight. Dufarge passes out; Mlle. Dufarge lies supine on the moonlight ground.
When Dufarge comes to, he puts two and two together (what have you done—molested his daughter, killed her?) and fires at you four bullets, which you regurgitate. The Dufarges drop dead at your feet, decomposing. You’re close to death, bleeding profusely. In a hoarse but eloquent voice, you appeal for help from the forest animals, who summon Omba, the lovable dwarf, but by the time he arrives—with a medical kit and supply of eagle’s blood—you’re in a coma. Omba’s first act of mercy is to retrieve your mask, which he places respectfully over your hideous features. Then he (another ideal wartime nurse) dresses your wounds.
But you don’t drink from the vial of eagle’s blood. Instead, you weakly pronounce your beloved Black Wing’s name. Omba bows his own slightly distorted head and reveals to you that the French have killed Black Wing. You crush the vial of eagle’s blood in your hand. You again remove your mask. Because you failed to save your beloved, you don’t deserve to live. You commit suicide (again).
Remember: it will always be postwar. There is always trauma, and how do we get through trauma? There is always the gorgeousness of children and/but the illicit appeal of adult-child contact. This time it’s a boy, and this time, just once, we acknowledge the six million. Your mother, Boo Boo, is, in terms of permanently memorable, immoderately perceptive, small-area faces, a stunning and final girl. You are so traumatized that when your friend Naomi tells you she has a worm in her thermos, you seek refuge under a sink in the basement. Your mother peels down her cigarette army style. When you run away to sit in the stern of your father’s dinghy—why have you run away?—she declares herself vice admiral, come to inspect the “stermaphors.” You’re wearing khaki-colored shorts. Just because she doesn’t shoot off her mouth about it, people don’t realize Boo Boo is an admiral; she almost never attempts to discuss her rank with people—she’d be drummed out of the bloomin’ service. Sounding a bugle call, a peculiar amalgamation of “Taps” and “Reveille,” she salutes the opposite shoreline. If you tell her why you’ve run away, she’ll issue secret bugle calls that only admirals are allowed to hear. (She commands a fleet, after all.) You have goggles that once belonged to your dead uncle, a suicide. Sailors never cry, except when their ships go down or they’re shipwrecked, on rafts and all. You have run away because somebody called your daddy a big sloppy kike. Informed that a kike is one of those things that go up in the air, with string you hold, you—since you are four years old—are able to join that kite in the air. Your mother loves your adorable, precious, time-dependent innocence so much that she can’t help but kiss your neck and then put a wild hand inside the seat of your trousers, startling you considerably, although she almost immediately withdraws her hand and decorously tucks in your shirt for you. In your innocence, you have intuited that in this family there is a secret, that something is wrong, and that this has to do with the war, Jewishness, the Holocaust. Can you redeem us? No, because I will cross the line into adult-child eroticism, which I must do—after the war, all other bodies are dead to me. And so now we come to it: the war itself. Your trigger finger is itching imperceptibly, if at all. Flashes of lightning either have your number on them or they don’t. The only people who can ever save you are children, who, luckily enough, are singing in a church at 3:15 p.m. Unfortunately, you can’t marry any of them—not Sibyl or Ramona or Lionel or Esmé—so you’ll commit suicide or come this close.
Listening to the children’s chorus, you would experience levitation if you were a more denominational man. That is, you’re seeking religious salvation, and you’ll find it in Esmé, whose voice leads the way. You leave the church before the chorus director’s speaking voice can entirely break the spell. The adult world ruins the child world for you. You can’t exist in the former (your mother-in-law asks you to send her cashmere yarn first chance you get away from “camp”) and you don’t belong in the latter (you can’t marry a twelve-year-old and, anyway, she will turn into a woman soon enough).
Proof of this: she’s wearing a military-looking wristwatch that is marking that very passage into adulthood. Are you deeply in love with your wife? No, because she’s an adult. War damage is everywhere: Esmé’s father was killed in North Africa; her mother (in all likelihood) in the Blitz. The book begins with a Zen koan: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Here is another one: “What did one wall say to the other wall?” The only way past a koan is to progress beyond rationality; the only way past the damage is a leap into the mystical, which is almost always accessed through the unself-consciousness of a child, who—in this case, Esmé—is asking you to write a story, which is, of course, the very story we are reading and you are writing. You notice that, after the rainstorm, a lot of the wave in Esmé’s hair is coming back; also, quite a bit more to the point, when she crosses her feet, she aligns the toes of her shoes, she’s wearing white socks, and her ankles and feet are lovely. Wanting to kiss her, you kiss her brother, Charles—give him a loud, wet smacker—but you hate that both Charles and Esmé are headed toward a less sentimental way of life, that is, they will grow up and become self-conscious, lose their gorgeous access to their own feelings.
As for you, you’re getting better acquainted with squalor all the time. You haven’t come through the war with all your faculties intact. You’ve had a nervous breakdown, spending two weeks in a military mental hospital. You look like a goddam corpse. You had been triple-reading paragraphs; now you’re triple-reading sentences. You’ve been chain-smoking for weeks. Your gums are bleeding. The goddam side of your face is jumping all over the place. You press your hands against your temples (in an earlier incarnation, you shot yourself to death in the right temple). To you, life is hell, and hell is the incapacity to love, and your incapacity to love is because Esmé etc. Temporary expiation: you grab the wastebasket and vomit. You’re truly saved when Esmé sends you a broken watch, temporarily arresting time and temporarily joining her life to yours. The age difference disappears: you can live, in your imagination, through her imagination, forever.
After the war, you return home. Home sweet home. Christ. You’re losing your goddam mind. You’re thinking you may go back in the army—with your little helmet and big, fat desk and nice, big mosquito net. At least it’s oblivion. Your wife has fled you to be with an untraumatized man. You’re too weak for her. You’re weak—that’s the whole thing in a nutshell. Every night you have to keep yourself from opening every goddam closet door in the apartment, expecting to find a bunch of bastards hiding all over the place. (You’ll never not be in the CIC.) She’s an animal. You’re not a goddam animal. You must be bigger/better than that. To you, the body is the site of all woe. You want an adult woman to save you and she can’t, even if she holds a flashlight while you change a tire, buys you a suit that fits, or quotes a romantic poem. You’re not savable, salvageable. No real woman can be equal to the mythic wilderness of your mind/imagination. No real woman or family can coexist with your postwar rage and sentimental pioneering in Cornish/Hürtgen.
What, then, is the way out? Is there any alternative to suicide the nth? Will you always be at best a visitor in a garden of enamel urinals and bedpans, with a sightless, wooden dummy-deity standing by in a marked-down rupture truss? The thought wouldn’t be endurable for more than a few seconds. But here it comes: a transcendent experience, a case of genuine mysticism: a hefty woman is changing the truss on a wooden dummy in a shop window. She is, of course, the Fat Lady. She is Jesus Christ Himself, Buddy. When she sees you, she falls down (being thirty and hefty, she’s beside the point), but the sun speeds toward the bridge of your nose at the rate of ninety-three million miles a second. Blinded and frightened, you put your hand on the window glass to keep your balance. The Transcendent Experience lasts no more than a few seconds, but when you get your sight back, the woman has left the window, leaving behind a shimmering field of exquisite, twice-blessed, enamel flowers.
What has happened? Have you levitated or been obliterated? Both, of course, and a child will again solve that particular koan:
Although, in this incarnation, you are only ten years old, you remind yourself to find your father’s dog tags and wear them whenever possible—“it won’t kill you and he will like it.” In your opinion, life is a gift horse. You wonder why people think it’s so important to be emotional. Your mother and father don’t think a person is human unless he thinks a lot of things are very sad or annoying or unjust. Your father thinks you’re inhuman. If you have emotions, you don’t remember when you ever used them; you don’t see what they are good for. You love God, but not sentimentally. You love your parents, but only in the sense that you have a strong affinity for them. In an earlier incarnation, you were a man from India making very nice spiritual progress. Your father thinks you’re freakish because you meditate. Your mother worries that thinking about God is bad for your health. You think it’s silly to be afraid of dying; all you do is get the heck out of your body when you die. My gosh, everybody’s done it thousands and thousands of times. You know that you have a swimming lesson in about five minutes, and you know that your sister, Booper, is going to push you in and you will fracture your skull and die.
PTSD—with its endless embodied flashbacks—is a form of reincarnation, is it not? The little girl is no longer a figure of redemption; Booper pushes you to the death you eagerly embrace because you have found, in Vedanta, the source of solace: a reincarnation myth. Better luck next time. No pain—one can hope—the next go-round. Just as you forced your first wife to watch your first suicide, you are now traumatizing Booper, punishing her for being human; she will relive her participation in your death the rest of her life. Your genius/heroic/suicides/near-suicides throughout your various incarnations are a pacific/hostile action against the world’s war. Walking into the wound is more important to you than the world that caused the wound. Suicide is enlightenment. You are in this world but not of it. You are now free to be with those you love, whether they are religions or historical figures, personal friends or fictional characters.