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Short Story Soiree: A Perfect Day for Bananafish by J.D. Salinger (1948)

January 30, 2010 Short Story Soiree
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For Esmé with Love and Squalor by J.D. Salinger (1953)I was planning to continue with Jay McInerney with another Alison Poole short story, but with the death of J.D. Salinger this week – a round up of the various tributes was published by the Guardian – I felt that it was a good time to look back at some of his shorter fiction. This week I’ll be reading the first of the Glass Family stories “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” from the short story collection Nine Stories, usually published outside the U.S. as For Esmé with Love and Squalor and Other Stories.

“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” follows two separate dialogues, presumably occurring at roughly the same time. The first is a telephone conversation between Muriel and her mother. The dialogue is mostly banal, Muriel is on holiday in Florida with her husband Seymour, who her mother has some misgivings about. There is constant mention of some “funny business with the trees” that concerns Muriel’s mother, especially when she discovers that Seymour drove down to Florida. Muriel asks her mother about a book that Seymour sent her from Germany:

‘No. Only he asked me about it, when we were driving down. He wanted to know if I’d read it.’
‘It was in German!’
‘Yes, dear. That doesn’t make any difference,’ said the girl, crossing her legs. ‘ He said that the poems happen to be written by the only great poet of the century. He said I should’ve bought a translation or something. Or learned the language, if you please.’
‘Awful. Awful. It’s sad, actually, is what it is. Your father said last night—’

Muriel’s mother further reveals that Seymour has been seeing a psychiatrist and has recently been discharged from an Army hospital. The psychiatrist has told Muriel’s father that “Seymour may completely lose control of himself.” The emphasis in italics in their dialogue really allows their voices to sound out, you can perfectly hear the stress they place on particular syllables. After briefly discussing a dinner with the local psychiatrist, Muriel and her mother move on to more important matters, such as the state of Muriel’s blue coat and the season’s clothing styles. Meanwhile, young Sybil Carpenter is talking with her mother as she slops sun-tan oil on her skin. Sybil keeps asking “Did you see more glass?”, driving her mother crazy. Sybil runs down to the beach and reaches Seymour Glass in an out of the way part of the beach. They strike up a conversation, suggesting familiarity.

‘The lady?’ The young man brushed some sand out of his thin hair. ‘That’s hard to say, Sybil. She may be in any one of a thousand places. At the hairdresser’s. Having her hair dyed mink. Or making dolls for poor children in her room.’ Lying prone now, he made two fists, set one on top of the other, and rested his chin on the top one. ‘Ask me something else, Sybil,’ he said. ‘That’s a fine bathing suit you have on. if there’s one thing I like, it’s a blue bathing suit.’
Sybil stared at him, then looked down at her protruding stomach. ‘This is a yellow,’ she said. ‘This is a yellow.’

Seymour’s ease of communicating with Sybil reminds me of Holden’s relationship with his younger sister Phoebe in The Catcher in the Rye. Children are easy to talk to for these characters because they don’t hide behind any illusions, that barrier that we’re forced to set up to protect us against the world hasn’t been put up yet. Innocence. Seymour engages Sybil in a hunt for the elusive bananafish, and tells her the story of the tragic life they lead swimming into holes filled with bananas. They stuff themselves so full with ripe banana flesh that they can’t swim out of the hole again, and so they die of banana fever in the hole. Again, doesn’t this suggest innocence and innocence lost? Once we gorge ourselves on all that adulthood has to offer, we can’t get out of it and reach that purer state of childhood naivety again. Here the story takes on a severe shift. After an altercation in the elevator with a woman he thinks is looking at his feet, Seymour returns to his hotel room.

Then he went over to one of the pieces of luggage, opened it, and from under a pile of shorts and undershirts he took out an Ortgies calibre 7.65 automatic. He released the magazine, looked at it, then reinserted it. he cocked the piece. Then he went over and sat down on the unoccupied twin bed, looked at the girl, aimed the pistol, and fired a bullet through his right temple.

It’s a powerful story, deceptively simple and with a macabre humour simmering below the surface. Vale Jerome David Salinger, goddamn could you write a story.

J.D. SalingerJ.D. Salinger, January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010

Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote (1948)

October 16, 2009 Book Reviews
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Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote

Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote

Other Voices, Other Rooms was Truman Capote’s first published novel; Summer Crossing was written earlier, but the manuscript was believed to have been lost or destroyed until it was rediscovered in 2005. The story of how the manuscript came to be published is more interesting than the novella itself. A semi-autobiographical coming of age novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms is lusciously poetic and attuned to the pains associated with growing up.

After the death of his mother, Joel Harrison Knox – much accepted as a stand in for Capote himself – receives a letter from his father beckoning him to stay with him in rural Alabama. Once there, living in a faded and decaying mansion with his stepmother Miss Amy and the decadent Cousin Randolph, the father is curiously absent. As Joel settles into his new residence and becomes acquainted with a number of increasingly strange characters, the truth gradually reveals itself.

He had reached the garden by following a path which led round from the front of the house through the rampart of interlacing trees. And here, in the overgrown confusion, were some plants taller than his head, and others razor-sharp with thorns; brittle sun-curled leaves crackled under his cautious step. The dry, tangled weeds grew waist high. The sultry smells of summer and sweet shrub and dark earth were heavy, and the itchy whirr of bumblebees stung the silence. He could hardly raise his eyes upward, for the sky was pure blue fire.

Capote is greatly skilled in building a foreboding sense of dread and unease. As Joel gets to know the characters and they reveal their peculiarities to him, there is an overwhelming impression of a sinister hand at work. His friendships with tomboy Idabel and the household servants Zoo and Jesus are all too briefly explored; I would have loved to have spent more time with these characters. Zoo, in particular.

But there was no prayer in Joel’s mind; rather, nothing a net of words could capture, for, with one exception, all his prayers of the past had been simple concrete requests: God, give me a bicycle, a knife with seven blades, a box of oil-paints. Only how, how, could you say something so indefinite, so meaningless as this: God, let me be loved.

The final third of the novel is fuelled by an unrelentingly frantic energy; the line between reality and imagination is frequently blurred beyond all recognition, and the novel takes on a hallucinatory tone. This part was my favourite, the writing is vigorous and captures the imagination in a vivid and memorable way. Capote’s descriptions of the natural landscapes are really magnificent and evocative. Although Joel has to leave behind a part of himself as he becomes immured in the complex world of adult relationships and family dramas, the writing is really special. Sparkling, but with a hint of dirt as well; it lacks the relative lightness of Breakfast at Tiffany’s but it works in Other Voices, Other Rooms‘ favour.