Salinger and Sobs

In the days immediately after my brother killed himself I’d go into the backyard and lie on our picnic table and watch the November wind bend the branches of a tall fir tree across the street. Really hard gusts would shake loose a raucous band of black crows and send them wheeling into the sky. They’d caw and cackle and circle and resettle and rise again, crowing, I guess, a noisy mocking counterpart to the flock of strangers in funerary black who’d shown up to bury my brother. About a week after Danny’d put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger and a couple days after his lame orthodox funeral at our childhood church, I went for a walk along a street of patched potholes that runs around Lake Union (near where, a year or so into the future, a future I was sure had ended tragically the night Danny shot himself, my other brother Mike would pull a similar stunt, jumping off the Aurora Bridge and living to tell about it, thus revealing to me the comic, the vaudevillian underside of suicide) and saw a scavenging crow jabbing its beak into the breast of an injured robin. The robin had probably first been hit by a car. It was flipped on its back and badly maimed, but it wasn’t carrion quite yet. One wing was pinned to its breast and the other flapped furiously in a useless struggle for flight and thus the bird, still fiercely instinctive, only managed to spin around in circles like the arrow you flick with your finger in a game of chance. The robin was fully alive, but it was caught in a futile hope, and I knew this, and the crow knew this, and while the crow taunted the bird, hopping down from its perch on a nearby fence, pecking at the robin, returning to its roost, waiting, dropping down and attacking again, I stood off to the side of the road and watched.

I’ll tell you the ultimate outcome of this lopsided contest a little later, but for now I bring it up only because, some years ahead, fully inhabiting my aborted future, I often ask myself a koan-like question re: my brother that goes something like this: If I could intervene and change my own particular history would I alter past events in such a way that I’d bring Danny back to life? Would I return the single rimfire bullet to its quiet chamber in the gun and let the night of November 26, 19__, pass away in sleep and dreams or drink or television or whatever the anonymous bulk of history holds for most people? Would I uncurl the fingers from the grip, would I take away the pain, would I unwrite the note and slip the blank sheet back in the ream and return the ream to pulp and etc., would I exchange my own monstrous father for some kindly sap out of the sitcom tradition, would I do any of this, would I? And where would I be? Would I be there, in the room? Would my role be heroic? And where exactly would I begin digging into the past, making corrections, amending it? How far back do I have to go to undo the whole dark kit and kaboodle? I mean, from where I sit now I can imagine a vast sordid history finally reaching its penultimate unraveled state in the Garden, under the shade of the tree of knowledge, raising the question of whether or not I’d halt the innocent hand, leaving the apple alone, unbitten.

I’m a little wary of prelapsarian schemes in much the same way I’m leery of conspiracy theories, both of which seem only to describe the limitations, like Hamlet’s nutshell, of the holder’s mind. You don’t really want to crash down the whole universe just to satisfy your situational unease or your incapacity to see the whole picture, do you? You don’t want a life based on your failure to understand life, right? If I were able to undo Danny’s death would that mean, too, that Mike’s suicide attempt would never occur, or would it simply mean that he’d find an alternate, more surefire lethality than leaping over the rail of Seattle’s most famous suicide spot, a spot that’s worked just hunky-dory for hundreds of others? Or would my remaining brother drown or die of internal injuries instead of, as it turned out, smacking the water, breaking his pelvis, destroying his bladder, dislocating his shoulder and yet, that screwed up (plus I forgot to mention his schizophrenia), still having the presence of mind to kick off his boots, swim for shore, pull a quarter out of his pants, and call an ambulance for himself, easy as a man catching a cab? Would that little miracle not happen in this revamped history of mine? Would I just be trading one brother for another? Would I even be writing this, or would a lovely silence reign over my uneventful life, leaving me free to consider other, happier fortunes?

I’d never read J. D. Salinger or John Knowles, both staples of the high school curriculum, because somehow out of the always ripening ambient culture I’d picked up a whiff of the East Coast, of the upper crust and hoity-toity and, ipso facto, at least for me, a kind of irrelevance, irrelevance tinged with a defensive counter-snobbery that’s so characteristic of the West. I couldn’t identify with the prep-school scene. I thought it was socially atavistic, some stupid idea invented in England. So instead of the boarding-school experiences of Salinger or Knowles I read Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man strictly for its creepy Jesuit milieu and the way Stephen Dedalus uses difference and snobbery to escape. The reading of Portrait was itself a Dedalean act of snobbery on my part, a pose I hoped would piss off the jocks at my Jesuit boys school. Why? Because I was a jock, but had recently quit all sports in order to take up managing my misery full-time. At that age, at sixteen, seventeen, I read fiction because I needed advice on how to live, and I needed it to be totally free of judgment. I wanted to see how other people did life. I had exiled myself from the kind of order found on the athletic field, and the alternatives that presented themselves most obviously at my school were to become a dope fiend or a scholar. I tried both and bookishness stuck. By reading I hoped to get as far as I could from Catholic homiletics, and quickly discovered that the best place for moral-free advice was really good fiction. Immediately I saw that stories looked squarely and bravely at lives without criticizing or condemning them. Admittedly, wanting practical advice is a pretty primitive idea of what a book should do, but that’s the sort of literary sense I had, treating novels and stories like the self-help manuals that cycle through the decades, reinventing relevance. I didn’t know any better, and probably still don’t. Anyway, I came late to The Catcher in the Rye, as an adult, and thought I’d be somewhat cold to its charms.

I wasn’t. Right from the beginning my reading of Salinger’s work was lopsided, eccentric, obsessed with the reclusive writer’s legendary silence and the theme of suicide that seems to stitch a quilt out of the extant work. As is always, perhaps inevitably the case, the unbalanced weight my own life brought to the material gave the work this off-center, wobbly orbit, and even now I can’t seem to read the stuff any differently. It’s all about Suicide and Silence. Suicide is first mentioned when Holden, standing on a hill above the football field, says the game with Saxon Hall “was the last game of the year, and you were supposed to commit suicide or something if old Pencey didn’t win.” Other direct mentions of suicide or thinly veiled threats run through the story. The very word has a casual suggestive presence in Holden’s vocabulary. He volunteers to ride on top of the next atomic bomb. And then there’s the story he tells of James Castle, the boy who leaps from the window, killing himself, while wearing a black turtleneck he’d borrowed from Holden. It’s now generally a given in the literature of suicidology that every attempt is ambivalent, that some degree of chance is worked into each plan, a savior chosen, an opportunity for rescue extended, a tortured hope hidden near the heart of the suicide’s rapidly constricting universe. For instance, suicides tend to move toward society—and possible intervention—the closer they come to making and carrying out concrete plans. And of course The Catcher in the Rye takes its title from precisely this sort of ambivalence, and the story itself, in some ways an extended riff on saving and being saved, is otherwise full of specific strategies for rescue—with Holden nervously alternating point of view, vacillating between rescuer and rescued.

The passage below gives the book its name and is obviously as much about Holden’s hope for himself as it is about the fantasy of saving others.

I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye . . .

I generally don’t read biographical gossip about writers, and I don’t know a thing, not one scrap, about Salinger’s life (other than the silence), but the theme of suicide feels authentic to me, and so does his recurrent big-family thing, two elements I share with—who? Salinger, or his various narrators, or both—or neither? I don’t know. Like the Glasses (let’s say), we too had seven kids, and one thing that seems to happen in large families more often than in small is that nicknames flourish, partly because there’s always some little kid around who can’t pronounce the real names of his older siblings. Little kids forming their first syllables corrupt those names, and the corruptions stick because they’re cute or funny or whatever. Salinger’s Glass family seems to be all nicknames except for Seymour. As the oldest child, I too was somewhat exempt—more namer than named—but a good example of the process from our family would be my sister Patricia, who quickly migrated from “Tricia” to “Trish,” and then skipped sideways to “Didya” before finally arriving at “Did.” And Did’s sisters were Mugs, Gith, and Bean, and Did called my brother Danny “Mr. Sobs,” or plain “Sobs,” because when they played house he was always the baby. These goofed-up, singsong names recall Franny, Zooey, Boo Boo, etc. And too, in large families, children form their own fairly populous society, separate from the parents, and the nicknames become a kind of argot, a secret language, whereas in small families, I imagine, there’s more of an emphasis on vertical and direct contact with the adults. Anyway, Salinger’s use of nicknames, the proliferation of them, and the fact that the oldest child, Seymour, doesn’t have one, has always been for me an important detail in understanding the work.

In Salinger’s work, there is an ongoing failure of the various narrators who occupy center stage, a failure to find a separate and distinct identity outside the corporate idea of family. Holden is a little bit D. B. and Allie and Phoebe, and Buddy is Seymour and Zooey, etc., etc. People from big families tend to have this intense group identity. I don’t know why, even though, for instance, I fall easily into the first-person plural when asked about my past. My gut instinct, looking back, is to use “we.” Is it size alone that accounts for the blurring of identity in a big family? The fact that you grow up crowded into the same bathroom, brushing your teeth in front of a mirror that has three or four other foamy white grins reflecting back at you—is that it? Or the way you end up wearing some other kid’s clothes, or finding a favorite outfit, years after you last wore it, in your brother’s drawer, as if he were just another, later edition of you—is that it? Possibly. Privacy, too, is a problem. You rarely get time alone. And with so many competing parties, a constantly negotiated peace accord is necessary if you hope to get along, and for the simplest things, for using a car on Friday night or choosing a channel on the television, you end up working closely, and in concert, with the other kids. In our house, taking this closeness a step farther, we institutionalized the buddy system, a permanent arrangement in which every older kid was assigned a younger, and you were strictly accountable for that child’s safety at crosswalks as well as his mischief in the aisles of supermarkets and his happiness during the long wait to buy new play shoes at Penney’s. Since I was the oldest, my assigned buddy was my brother Danny, the youngest and rowdiest.

For Salinger’s narrators, there’s never sufficient separation from the family, at least that sense of family defined horizontally by siblings. Holden really loves only D. B., his dead brother Allie, and his sister Phoebe, mistrusting everyone else. Nobody outside the circle of family seems to make any sense to him, or at least they aren’t given the same ample room for oddity he grants his brothers and sisters. Other people simply aren’t real to Holden, not in the solid, reassuring way family is. My point here, in discussing identity and family, isn’t to draw near a psychological reading of the work. In fact, it seems to me that the decade of the fifties, which saw the first flush of a mass psychological processing of life, right away meets in Holden Caulfield its staunchest resistance. (In Seymour: An Introduction, Salinger writes of the psychiatric profession: “They’re a peerage of tin ears. With such faulty equipment, with those ears, how can anyone possibly trace the pain, by sound and quality alone, back to its source? With such wretched hearing equipment, the best, I think, that can be detected, and perhaps verified, is a few stray, thin overtones—hardly even counterpoint—coming from a troubled childhood or a disordered libido.”) There doesn’t seem to be anything really wrong with Holden, and yet everything is messed up. The conceit of the novel is that Holden’s telling the story from inside an institution, and you can imagine, you can hear in the loud nervous prose, that he’s making a direct appeal to the reader, going over the heads of doctors and nurses and various experts who don’t get it.

The subject of big families might seem fringy but it brings me to the organizing idea of authenticity. It’s a central question in all the work. What is real? What is trustworthy? Holden, of course, is famously on guard against phonies, watchful for insincere people or hypocrites, anyone giving a false impression, the pretentious, impostors and perverts. In “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” the trite phone conversation—the false narrative—between the wife and her mother is brutally wrong about Seymour. It’s untrue, it says nothing real or accurate about the world. And Buddy Glass, the narrator in Seymour: An Introduction, says, “I can usually tell whether a poet or prose writer is drawing from the first-, second-, or tenth-hand experience or is foisting off on us what he’d like to think is pure invention.” It’s not so much the content of this statement but the very issue of authenticity that piques my interest. The ability to detect authenticity is a critical faculty, something all of us develop, more or less. You can fail on either side, you can be gullible, easily duped, or you can be too skeptical, believing nothing. And with Holden, for example, it’s quite clear that something else, a voracious doubt, is driving him to question even the simplest interactions with people. Nothing is authentic for Holden, and his problem is not so much a superficial sorting of the true from the false—he can’t figure out how we come to know anything at all. That’s the noise, the frightening disturbance in the story, and it will stop only when Holden finds the authentic thing, the real (what?), or when he’s too exhausted to continue.

What can Holden rely on, what does he trust, what’s real for him? Holden’s response to life is, like that of a body in shock, to withdraw into the core of identity, in his case the family, in order to keep the self functioning and alive. There’s a love and warmth and security to the way Salinger writes about family, a kind of bulwarked intimacy most readers respond to, that sits in contrast to the false, unfriendly, wolfish world huffing and puffing right outside the door. What I feel reading Salinger is an emotional power that comes from the writer’s ingrained assumption of the value and integrity of family, in particular the idea of family defined by siblings. Family is worthy of trust. The siblings in Salinger’s work are fiercely loyal and extremely close to one another. So there’s that clear separation of family from everyone else, but something in between is missing, some understanding—for the writer, and for Holden. Holden can’t negotiate the boundaries between himself and others—Antolini’s touch freaks him out—and he can only imagine returning to his family as a refuge. But it’s my suspicion that that refuge isn’t really a haven the way Holden imagines it—nor is it safe for Salinger, who seems to defang his work by taking the parents out of almost every story. You wonder, where are the adults in this world that’s populated almost solely by precocious children?

This is guesswork, this is supposition: the real stress in Holden’s life comes from having no safe place, with his family offering him the least security of all. This remains unstated on purpose. In the injunctive first paragraph of The Catcher in the Rye, Holden says his parents would have “about two hemorrhages apiece” if he “told anything pretty personal about them. They’re quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They’re nice and all—I’m not saying that—but they’re also touchy as hell.” It’s that “touch” rather than Antolini’s that’s really got Holden running. It should be obvious by now that I don’t see The Catcher in the Rye as a coming-of-age story, especially not in the dismissive or pejorative sense; to me it’s no more about the anxious life of an average teenager than Huckleberry Finn is. The feelings Salinger’s trying to pinpoint don’t really have much to do with the fluctuating moods of a representative teen; adolescence isn’t the source of Holden’s outsized feelings. Possibly because I came to the book as an adult, for me it’s never been about the typical, but rather the exceptional; it’s not meant to illustrate a phase of life we all pass through and share but instead to explore a disturbing and extreme loss of identity that leaves this one boy absolutely alone. And the depth of that loss comes from the fact that it’s not directly his, but his family’s. My guess is that in high school students learn that Holden doesn’t go home right away because he knows he’s going to be in big trouble. He’s been kicked out of school again. He’s failed and disappointed his parents once more, and his odyssey through New York is fueled by guilt and contrition. In my reading he doesn’t go home after leaving Pencey because home is the problem. His real expulsion is from the family, not school, and his sojourn through New York renders that loss in literal terms: we see the resulting anomie, the thoroughness of his horror. Two very different engines drive the respective readings. In one, he’s ultimately headed home, in the other he has nowhere to go, and never will.

Here’s the assumption behind my guesswork. Suicide is a kind of death that makes you doubt what you know about the deceased or what you can ever know about anybody. It strikes clear to the core of identity, reaching down into the heart of your life. Since my brother died I haven’t slept a single night alone with the lights off; I wake up afraid, and I have to know where I am, I need to see right away. And when I go out, I always leave a radio on, just so that when I come home I’ll hear voices or, more precisely, I won’t hear the silence and get all spooky imagining the surprises waiting for me. By a curious mechanism my brother’s death has extended the vivid fears of my childhood into my adult life. I find that I’m alert in ways that adults don’t need to be, and I’m ignorant of things grown-ups care most about. When a suicide happens within a family, that organism takes on the taint just as much as any individual. But that taint doesn’t necessarily mean the dissolution of the family; it might have an opposite effect, banding the family together even more tightly than before. (I felt like shameful secrets had been aired publicly, and I was first of all defensive, protective.) In reality, I think both things happen: you’re pulled together, and that intense proximity exposes lines of cleavage that had begun cracking years earlier. The suicide is just a piece finally falling out. And from then on the family’s story can’t be the same. Its identity must include death, a death shared in the blood. The old narrative breaks at precisely the moment you need it to speak for you. This death, this suicide, is shattering to what, at that exact moment, is your deepest need—family, security, identity.

Rereading Buddy’s statement about his ability to detect authenticity, I find a harmonic floating just above the fundamental tone, and I think it can be heard distinctly in isolation here:

For the terrible and undiscountable fact has just reached me, between paragraphs, that I yearn to talk, to be queried, to be interrogated, about this particular dead man. It’s just got through to me that, apart from my many other—and, I hope to God, less ignoble—motives, I’m stuck with the usual survivor’s conceit that he’s the only soul alive who knew the deceased intimately. [Italics mine.]

This is the overtone you hear in Salinger’s work, the knowingness, the high proud insistent certainty, and what accounts for the sound—the instrument, so to speak—is the faculty of mind that’s meant to sift through supposed facts and separate the truth from what’s false; and the tone is this, the belief that he alone holds the key, the final authentic word on the deceased (or any other matter). The emphasis here is on the belief, not the particular key, whatever it may be. (And I want to make clear that for me this is a musical sound as much as a matter of content. It’s what makes Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters nearly unreadable for me—too much snotty, all-knowing prep-school smugness in the prose, a vague assumption of values, a social vulgarity found in the rich and privileged that’s just as revolting, and similar to, the arrogant know-nothingism of the various middle classes, upper to lower. Open the story to almost any page and you can hear the sound in the overpunctuated prose. It’s as if the pissy aggrieved prose itself were defending Seymour. You can even hear a trace of the problem in the quote above, in the word “undiscountable”—the leftover locution of a kid putting on adult airs, afraid that someone will realize he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.) And so, if there really is a single truth, and you alone possess it, there is also, by definition, a lot of falseness out there—the bulk of life, in fact. And this construction, this arrangement or priority, pitting the defense of your holy truth against the entire world’s falseness, is suicide refused, refused at least temporarily.

And it’s silence refused, too.

Here’s what I mean. A long-standing and widely accepted formulation is that suicide is redirected homicide. Edwin Shneidman, the father of the modern study of suicide, coined the phrase: “Suicide is murder in the 180th degree.” There are variations on this, of course. Suicide’s not always—probably never—an act of pure hostility. There’s a fairly old article by Ives Hendrick of the Harvard Medical School that argues the case for suicide as a form of identification with the lost love object, a fantasy of reunion rather than murder, and while this thinking doesn’t occupy a place in the fat mainstream of suicidology, it is accepted, a tributary that helps explain some cases. I’m throwing these ideas out scattershot, hoping to indicate a central theme within the wide range of psychodynamic meanings attributed to suicide: that it’s always accompanied by some shift away from life’s normal priority, where it’s perfectly natural and expected that you’d defend yourself from danger, to a condition where you give up, defenseless, or even join in on the attack. In Freud’s still fascinating “Mourning and Melancholia,” he begins by openly admitting to being flummoxed by suicide and the self ’s attack on itself. He says the ego is usually fierce and robust in the protection of itself, rallying the troops when under siege, so how or why does ego-functioning break down and become defenseless in the suicide? In short, the self can hate the self to the point of suicide only when a lost internalized object—an object, moreover, of love—turns against the self. In other words, it’s your inner daddy—protected by your love of him—messing with your defenseless inner child—or whatever, some variation of that. Later (1933) Karl Menninger develops his triadic theory of suicide—the wish to die, the wish to kill, the wish to be killed—to which, years afterward, he speculated on the need to add a fourth condition, the wish to be loved—and he talks about a mechanism by which the suicide’s “hostile component, since it would otherwise have to be directed against the whole world, is turned inward upon the self.” I’m really oversimplifying here, reducing complex theories into these candied bits, and I’m skipping the work of so many, of Maltsberger, Hendin, Leenaars, Jamison, etc., but I’m trying to get at something, this general tendency in suicide, that will bring us back to Salinger.

In suicide, then, a couple of the main poles of life flip, and the desire to talk or communicate turns into a longing for a colossal silence (most suicides don’t write a note), and the fierce defense of the self becomes an equally fierce and final defeat. It’s like the mind, exhausted by the enormous work of defending itself, turns around out of some need for efficiency or economy, and begins hating itself, doubting or attacking its reality. Being suicidal is really tiring. A lot of suicides are so lacking in affect and so lethargic that they aren’t able to kill themselves until their mood improves—spring, for that reason, has the highest rate of what people in the business call “completed” suicides. The ego first tries to protect itself and then can’t, in part because to do so would be to attack a forbidden love object. (Buddy Glass says he can’t finish writing a description of Seymour, “even a bad description, even one where my ego, my perpetual lust to share top billing with him, is all over the place”—making a sideways admission of jealousy and also expressing resentment for the sainted brother he can no longer defeat and no longer even describe without desecration.) What’s salient in The Catcher in the Rye is that Holden achieves a fragile truce between hating himself and hating the world. Holden Caulfield is probably identified in the minds of most readers as a boy whose anger at and suspicion of the world is fragilely offset by his inviolate love for Allie and Phoebe. As long as he keeps that love immaculate, as long as he defends and protects it and maintains its purity, he’s alive, and that’s what I mean by suicide refused. Holden without his holy love is a goner, and the unalloyed quality of that love is really the register of his isolation. He’s cornered, and you can see the gargantuan project he’s set for himself, that vast defense. In the novel he ends up in an institution, which isn’t really a lasting solution to his problem but instead a sort of DMZ between himself and the world.

Similarly, Buddy Glass, a writer (in two other institutions, the military and the academy—and all these institutions, these supporting structures, stand in for a neutral family), asserts his identity by claiming close inner knowledge of his dead brother, Seymour. His relation to Seymour is sacerdotal and similar to the Holden Antolini says he can imagine dying nobly for an unworthy cause. But even in the passage quoted and italicized above, in the middle of his assertion, Buddy’s already begun to undermine it, calling it a “conceit,” an instance of cleverness that, but for the writer’s vigilance, would have hardened into a fixed posture, would have become false, phony. And I would argue that only a little farther down this line of thinking we come to the idea that all writing, fixed on the page, claiming truth, is false. It’s imaginable that a writer, in the wake of a suicide, might find all coherent narratives suspect, all postures false, and, looking at life up close under a new magnifying hypervigilance, might finally come to question and mistrust the integrity of his own inventions as well. The word “conceit” cancels Buddy’s claim to know Seymour, dismissing it and sending it on its way toward silence. And silence—a kind of reunion with Seymour, or a way to equal or defeat him, head to head, silence for silence—is one possible response to this powerful but confused idea of falsity. If The Catcher in the Rye is noisy in its search for authenticity, then the rest of Salinger’s work looks for the real by stilling the very engine that drives Holden’s vast doubt—words. And this silence is related to and yet something beyond the interest in Zen quietude that crops up in Salinger’s later work.

Holden’s isolation in an institution as he tells his story points to a formal problem Salinger himself seems to have resolved through withdrawal and writerly silence. At least it’s tempting to see it that way. I’ve poked around in all the work for prodromal clues somehow indicating Salinger’s plunge into silence was symptomatic of something. What is the silence about? In some people (usually willful or grandiose or highly defended types) there’s only a very small difference between talking incessantly and saying nothing. I vaguely remember a quote from Roland Barthes, who claimed his rhetorical needs alternated between a little haiku that expressed everything and a great flood of banalities that said nothing. And in Seymour: An Introduction, Buddy Glass says of his brother, “Vocally, he was either as brief as a gatekeeper at a Trappist monastery—sometimes for days, weeks at a stretch—or he was a non-stop talker.” Interestingly, The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger’s most voluble book, begins and ends with specific comments concerning what will not be written.

Holden starts his story with a refusal: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” And he ends the novel with this hardened commandment: “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”

The quotes above bracket the book, suggesting prohibitions of both point of view and content. Holden will not look at the life of his parents or take the tack of examining his past or childhood—this is no remembrance—and by the end of the novel his instinct, in a sense, proves him right, proves that the process of writing only creates further problems. He’s not newly wise like Nick Carraway. He has no new perspective or understanding. The only thing Holden seems to learn from telling even this restricted story is that, confirming his first hunch, it would have been better to say nothing.

Silence is already there, waiting in the wings of Salinger’s most clamorous and fluent book.

Is silence for a writer tantamount to suicide? In some ways it is, I believe, but the question for me is why—why does the writer choose silence? The deliberate decision to quit clawing at the keyboard is too mechanical to be an answer. Stopping isn’t the real matter, but rather the result of some other prior disturbance that can’t be named. Silence in this sense isn’t the equivalent of suicide or death, but of secrecy. That’s what it’s about—what is not said. Taking Salinger’s oeuvre as a unified field I find a couple of elements that don’t square with either my experience or my avocational reading in the literature of suicide—elements where a silence rules. He never really looks at the role of parents in family life, and never examines, in particular, their position re: Seymour’s suicide. It’s a substantial omission, and perhaps not an omission at all but instead a protective silence. I don’t know, and on this point I don’t care to speculate beyond the observation that, in general, people from good, functioning families rarely kill themselves. And in crappy, broken-down families a child’s attention is often focused on nothing but the parents. Suffice it to say there’s something big missing in Salinger’s account. And the other thing not present in Salinger’s work is outright anger toward Seymour or a sense of doubt about him. As Buddy describes him Seymour has no flaws, and to me the absence of flaws and of anger and doubt is a texture that’s conspicuously missing. Why? I can’t say, although I feel the effects. In Seymour: An Introduction, Buddy never lets the reader forget that he, Buddy, is sitting alone at his desk, writing. It’s all just writing, he wants us to know, the lumber of it, the cut and stacked phrases, the punctuation nailed to the paper, the parentheses put up to frame different doubts, etc.—as if to say this project, this monument under construction, will always fall short of honoring the actual character. Where Holden insists on Phoebe’s innocence and pretty easily posits an idea of her essence, Buddy sees past his brother into the conceits and constructions that create him on the page. And because of this, perhaps, Seymour never feels real, never seems to emerge from the workbench of the writer, to live and walk among men.

The writer won’t or can’t let him die:

What I am, I think, is a thesaurus of undetached prefatory remarks about him. I believe I essentially remain what I’ve almost always been—a narrator, but one with extremely pressing personal needs. I want to introduce, I want to describe, I want to distribute mementos, amulets, I want to break out my wallet and pass around snapshots, I want to follow my nose.

Here again you get a kind of intense identification with Seymour, one that blocks Buddy’s way—he’s “undetached,” he has “pressing personal needs,” and because of this he can only make “prefatory” remarks. The isolated “I am” is telling; with the comma where it is, the weight of the sentence remains stuck to the subject, rather than shifting forward via the verb to its object. The “I am” seems open-ended, perpetual. (Is time taken out of the sentence because the writer won’t let history happen, won’t let his character die? It’s curious that in a life that’s ended, that’s so emphatically finished, the writer can’t begin, can’t offer anything more than an introduction. Would finishing Seymour mean outliving him? Or the converse: Does failing to finish Seymour leave him alive?) The identity thing here is ruthless, close, smothering, endless. Consider that quote and the problem when set beside this:

I privately say to you, old friend (unto you, really, I’m afraid), please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: (((()))). I suppose, most unflorally, I truly mean them to be taken, first off, as bowlegged—buckle-legged—omens of my state of mind and body at this writing.

There’s that cowardly, obfuscating “un-” construction—“unpretentious,” “unflorally”—cropping up again (which nearly always works as a mask, sneaky and meaning the very opposite of what it states, meaning, in this case, pretentious, floral ), but the point now is to draw attention to the parentheses. (Although in working through various drafts of this essay I realized my second paragraph was full of precisely this construction, the un prefix with its absences and canceled actions. It appears five times, and occupies the privileged, key position as the last word in the paragraph: unbitten. It crossed my mind to correct the problem by burying it in some low geological stratum of the piece, but I haven’t. There’s that desire in writing, as in life, to rewind everything after a suicide, to return to some pristine moment, and so in this too Salinger is mon frère, mon semblable.) The parentheses sit like Kevlar jackets all through the writing, protecting Buddy’s identity from attack, keeping the sentences safe. Seymour: An Introduction is like a story in hiding, its prose on the lam, its characters putting on disguises, its ideas concealed. The whole thing is preambular, it’s all excursus, and it’s a bad sign that for me the best or most accurate language for describing the story comes from classical rhetoric and oratory. The sentences spin eloquently over an absence—it’s as if progress has stopped, and the last few words are draining out. Earlier I said that Holden is making a loud shouted appeal directly to the audience, over the heads of those who don’t understand. The whole story is directed at you, the reader. In Seymour, Buddy Glass speaks directly to the reader too, but now he resorts to the aside, the isolated whispered phrase, safely enclosed in parentheses, addressing the audience in a low voice supposedly inaudible to others nearby.

Who is nearby?

I know: his brother.

Salinger isn’t primarily a funny writer, and humor, except sporadically in The Catcher in the Rye, is largely absent from his work. His primary thing is empathy, the yearning for it, the hope and the need, both as a giver and receiver. Buddy’s desire for empathic union with his brother is single-minded and loyal and makes for an interesting case, but Seymour never finally comes to life. The book is one long stutter and a fascinating failure. Buddy can’t write Seymour because, when he tries, Seymour fragments and falls apart—you get the parts, you get the eyes, the nose, the voice, etc. He wants his brother so bad, it’s a sad thing to watch, to see Seymour breaking to pieces in Buddy’s hands. The Salinger I’ve been discussing seems at times to feel he’s got a corner on the Truth, this unwieldy lump he keeps hidden like the kid with the secret goldfish in D. B.’s story, who won’t show it to anybody because he bought it with his own money. Perhaps this Truth is centrally important because the suicide takes his secret with him, and it’s easy to get caught up in a monomaniacal search for the Answer, pinning your painfully vast hope to a single Idea. Up to a point, you believe the person who killed himself took the ultimate truth, and life afterward often feels like a sorrowful search for that last, unknown key to the life, which will explain everything. The paradox is that this hope or need for certainty seems to make the world less stable. The belief in a single Truth leads to doubt about everything. The need for empathic union makes the actual separation just terribly, terribly huge.

When we shift the relationship away from Buddy-Seymour to Salinger-Holden, then, as an act of writing, Salinger’s empathy for Holden Caulfield makes The Catcher in the Rye something special, an intense and fierce and intimate look at a character who arouses in readers—me, let’s say—a level of sympathetic identification nearly equal to the one felt for Fitzgerald’s Gatsby.

After my brother’s death I felt I had too much feeling to be myself. I felt attacked by my emotions, under siege, and the sensation, day after day, was like life had stuck to me. Like it was pinned to my back. This whatever, this stab of feeling, probably influenced the fate of the doomed robin. I could have stood by until the crow killed it, or sat still until somebody a little more altruistic came down the street and stepped in to save it, rushing the bird off to a Humane Society shelter; or someone else could have come down the street, this time in a car, and run it over. Lots of things could have happened. But instead I scooped the bird up in my Filson cap, folding the hat like a taco shell so it couldn’t escape, and carried it to a vacant lot with a weedy path that led down to the lake. For some reason I thought the crow might follow us, but crows are comical birds and that one’s interest had already moved on to something new. I walked into the murky water of Lake Union, my mind blank, and, bending down, dunked the hat under. The bird was still trying to fly, brushing its one good wing against the fabric, and when that stopped I pulled my hat away. The robin floated to the surface, lifelessly riding the tiny waves, and I smacked the hat against my leg, knocking beads of water off the waxed cotton. I picked a few gray feathers from the inner brim and put the hat on, looking west across the water to the Aurora Bridge. And while now the bridge reminds me of my brother Mike, comically pratfalling through an indifferent universe, back then it made me think of Danny, tragically dead at twenty-one after shooting himself in my bedroom.

With Danny, years have passed and I still feel a deathly guilt. I never did anything but love my brother and that wasn’t enough. And now every breath I take is a betrayal, a refusal of his choice. It’s not sentimental indulgence, it’s not so much that I ask myself what happened to the hand I held in crosswalks, but rather that I cross all those streets again. I stay with him now, I’m always nearby. I am always ten and he is always three, and I sit in the kitchen spooning canned peas into his mouth, swallowing most of them myself, and he gets a bowl of spumoni for being a good boy and eating his vegetables. I’m with him and I never feel like I belong entirely to present-day life. I’ve never really held a serious job or applied myself to anything worthwhile, I’m an unreliable, shitty friend, and I’ve never loved anyone deeply or satisfactorily. Killing the robin was an early experiment in grieving and acceptance that didn’t work too well. I knew the bird had no life ahead of it and I wanted to anticipate that doom rather than stand off at a safe distance. I didn’t want to be uncertain. But where before I had too much feeling, after drowning the bird I felt nothing, I was indifferent, I was remorseless. I thought I could rejoin the universe by being cruel and unfeeling, but obviously I was having trouble with focal distance and zeroing in on the exact right place where most of life was happening.

Here is a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer that I treasure for capturing one side of how I feel. It gets me closer to acceptance and understanding than anything else. It’s from his Letters and Papers from Prison, and was written, I think, at a time when he knew he would die in the concentration camp, so he speaks from inside the heart of his death.

Nothing can make up for the absence of someone whom we love, and it would be wrong to try to find a substitute; we must simply hold out and see it through. That sounds very hard at first, but at the same time it is a great consolation, for the gap, as long as it remains unfilled, preserves the bonds between us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap; He doesn’t fill it, but on the contrary, He keeps it empty and so helps us to keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of pain.

From the get-go, my brother Mike’s suicide attempt struck me as a piece of comedy. Maybe that’s because it came to me like the comedian’s idea of the topper, the rule that says you follow up a good joke with a second, even better joke. Keep them laughing! Maybe it’s because I always picture Mike tumbling haplessly through space, and falls are a staple of comedy and clowning, as is anything that turns the body into an object. Maybe it’s because when he jumped over the rail he was being chased by the devil and then he was aware, halfway down, that the devil was gone and he was all alone, falling like a rock. Or maybe, as in King Lear, it’s just too much, and the wise man sees life like the fool and laughs; either that or he cracks. Mike was really wrecked-up, his body broken, and when I saw him at the VA hospital he had nuts and bolts and this kind of light-gauge medical rebar rising like scaffolding from his smashed pelvis. His right shoulder was immobilized, so that, in combination with the broken pelvis, and his ruined bladder, which was being drained by a catheter, he seemed like just another malfunctioning contraption or a Rube Goldberg contrivance. At home we always had old jalopy equipment like black-and-white televisions with no horizontal hold, and our cars were ancient and unreliable and broken-down—in one of our cars the transmission would overheat and the carpet in the backseat would catch fire and smolder on any drive longer than ten miles, so we did the obvious thing, we kept a jug of water in the car. In the hospital Mike looked to me like just another one of our crappy busted things, where the attempt at repair was funny in a way that the initial problem was not. Whereas I remember helping Danny eat his peas, I remember laughing at Mike as he tried to get a hamburger to his mouth. I sat in a chair and watched. He couldn’t do it—you can’t sit up straight with a broken pelvis—and his mouth and the hamburger just hung there, apart from each other, it seemed, for all time.

And so over here, Henri Bergson’s essay on the comic suggests another side, a possible path for me in my ongoing attempt to understand life by reading books:

I would point out . . . the absence of feeling which usually accompanies laughter. . . . Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion. . . . In a society composed of pure intelligences there would probably be no more tears, though perhaps there would still be laughter; whereas highly emotional souls, in tune and unison with life, in whom every event would be sentimentally prolonged and re-echoed, would neither know nor understand laughter.

Put in a slightly different way, it was Charlie Chaplin, I think, who said that life up close is a tragedy, but from a distance it’s a comedy. Somebody slipping on a banana peel is still funny, unless it’s you. And the genius of Salinger is that, speaking through Holden Caulfield, highly emotional, in tune and unison with life, with events re-echoing still, he told us exactly what it feels like to feel too much.