Writing (Not Living) Your Way To Nirvana
J.D. Salinger, the Glass Family, and the Four Noble Truths
"Rarely if ever in literary history has a handful of stories aroused so much discussion, controversy, praise, denunciation, mystification and interpretation. There will be more Glass stories, Mr. Salinger says. Perhaps, when there are, a more coherent pattern will be apparent and certain mysteries and ambiguities will be explained."
This is what Orville Prescott wrote in his 1963 New York Times review of J.D. Salinger's third short story collection, "Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour an Introduction."
The Prescott quote is instructional, because a coherent pattern was being executed by Salinger. Those “certain mysteries and ambiguities” were being explained. When Salinger published "Hapworth 16, 1924" in 1965, the set of clues was complete, at least as far as Salinger wanted to go with them in his published life.
With the publication of three books (excluding “The Catcher in the Rye”), Salinger had managed to structure a body of work that distinctly reflects the Four Noble Truths, the philosophical core to the Vedanta Buddhism he had been following since the late 1940s.
Vedanta Buddhism, put across in a bold stroke, is a faith that embraces all paths to oneness with God, whether its Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, or Christian. Salinger's stories invoke each of these religions at certain times, and his attempt to reach a oneness with God becomes more and more explicit with each Glass story. ("I advocate no doctrine; it is not in my nature to do so," the narrator Jean de Maurier-Smith says in the short story "de Maurier-Smith's Blue Period.")
Salinger’s reputation rests, quite famously, a very slim body of work: “The Catcher In the Rye,” “Nine Stories,” “Franny and Zooey” and to a lesser extent “Raise High The Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour An Introduction.”
I say his reputation rests on those published works because his 28,000-word novella, “Hapworth 16, 1924,” isn’t even afforded cult status because it is long, boring, and dense. Written as a letter from seven-year old Seymour Glass to his parents Bessie and Les (and published in The New Yorker in June of 1965), the piece has been derided and mocked by critics and readers alike. But it’s a critical piece of Salinger’s religious beliefs.
Critics claimed that Salinger, with this curious piece of writing, had finally devolved into the “methods, locutions, and mannerisms” that Salinger had himself predicted would eventually “bog” him down. His audience was gone, and so was the enthusiasm of his publishers. Rather than growing in stature over time, as some misunderstood works of art do, "Hapworth" remains unloved and for the most part unread. But that is because it is judged on the conventional merits of what a short story should be (and certainly what a Salinger story should be). No one sees it for what it is: a path to attempting to find happiness for both Salinger and his creation, Seymour Glass — or, the Fourth Noble Truth.
If you look at each published piece as a representation of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, Salinger’s literary path doesn't seem so curious at all. The writings may not all be entertaining, but for Salinger, by the time “Raise High the Roofbeam” came out in paperback, entertainment may have been the least of his goals.
Salinger was quite out in the open about where he was headed. One doesn’t even have to be a particularly astute reader. Salinger carefully, as the stories progress, tells the reader that he is no longer interested in creating stories that have, as he says in various stories, a beginning, middle and an end. Salingr was writing his way out — toward happiness.
The first Noble Truth is that suffering (or dukkha) is a key factor to life. The second noble truth seeks the origin of dukkha. The third noble truth is the cessation of dukkha, and the Fourth Noble truth charts a path to the end of dukkha.
Now chart the publications this way:
• “Nine Stories” — all stories have a theme or undercurrent of human suffering
• “Franny and Zooey” — two stories examining the origin of Franny Glass's suffering and, by extension, the other members of her family
• “Raise High The Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour An Introduction” — these two stories are told in a state of bliss
• “Hapworth 16 1924” - a litany of all that which gives (and will give) Seymour happiness.
There’s a reason for not including “The Catcher In The Rye’ in this design because he was finding his spiritual path through the Glass stories. (There’s a happy reason why he chose this word as their last name.)
In “Seymour An Introduction,” Salinger, as Buddy Glass, writes: “Some people—not close friends—have asked me whether a lot of Seymour didn’t go into the young leading character of the one novel I’ve published. Actually, most of these people haven’t asked me, they’ve told me. To protest this at all, I’ve found, makes me break out in hives, but I will say that no one who knew my brother has asked me anything of the kind—for which I’m grateful...”
Salinger also pointedly did not include any stories featuring Holden Caulfield in “Nine Stories” despite the fact that the collection came out two years after “The Catcher In The Rye” was published. Holden was introduced in “I’m Crazy,” which was published in Collier’s in 1945 and was featured again in “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” in The New Yorker in 1946. Other mentions of the Caulfield family are made in “The Last Day of the Furlough” from 1944 and in two unpublished short stories from the mid-1940s. Any one of these works could have been included in “Nine Stories,” — particularly since that collection came out after the astounding success of the novel, but Salinger kept those stories, and Holden Caulfield, away from anything connected to the Glasses.
We need to be relatively straightforward about The Four Noble Truths in order to see the connection between the works. In the primer “Buddhism In Ten,” by Annellin Simpkins and C. Alexander Simpkins, the first noble truth is described this way: “Life is suffering, not just in the narrow sense of pain or discomfort, but as a broader, existential condition. Buddha described six kinds of universal suffering: 1) Suffering begins with the trauma of birth. 2) Throughout life we all must deal with the pain and discomfort of sickness. 3) Old age inevitably comes with its infirmities and limitations. 4) The ever-present fear of death is always there. 5) Throughout life we have to be involved with things we dislike. 6) We suffer when we are separated from what we love."
This last one, in Salinger’s world, is significant. Everyone in Salinger’s world is separated, physically or psychologically, and they are all almost masochistically wallowing in their own pain. “Detached” is a word that pops up quite frequently in Salinger's work. That is because Salinger's theme is that people have separated themselves from what truly makes them happy, or content. Instead, they pursue worldly goods or sensual desires.
The First Noble Truth: Suffering (or dukkha) is a key factor to life. “Nine Stories.”
Why, out of the 30 Salinger stories available to the publishers for an anthology, were these specific nine chosen?
By 1953, Salinger would of course be supremely aware of the importance of the Four Noble Truths. He had by that time been following Vedanta Buddhism for years. Deeply committed to his beliefs, it is easy to see how Salinger would not only want his life, but his work, to intertwine. Looking at “Nine Stories” in this way, it’s easy to see the path he was beginning to choose. In fact, one of the earliest stories featuring a member of the Glass family, "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut," begins by one of the characters literally losing her way.
There is, in these stories, suffering with no relief.
"Uncle Wiggily" ends, in fact, with one of the two suburban housewives passed out and the other crying and asking, aimlessly, "I was a nice girl... wasn't I?"
In "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes," a drunken, disembodied Arthur, who we only hear over the phone, asks his friend Lee if he saw his wife leave the party they had both attended. "Why? What's up? Joanie lost?"
Arthur tells his friend, who may or may not be with the missing wife, that he comes home almost every night in a jealous rage: "I practically have to keep myself from opening every goddamn closet door in the apartment—I swear to God. Every night I come home I half expect to find a bunch of bastards hiding all over the place. Elevator boys. Delivery boys. Cops—"
This story is a veritable catalogue of detachment and dissatisfaction.
There is more, in "Nine Stories," including descriptions of violence (“The Laughing Man”), the effects of war (“For Esme — With Love and Squalor”), and, of course, suicide (“A Perfect Day for Bananafish”).
The last story in the collection, "Teddy," ends with a haunting moment of when the main character, the impossibly precocious Teddy McCardle, possibly murders his own sister. Teddy, all of ten, is detached from his own emotions, as he tells his interlocutor, Bob Nicholson. Teddy quotes Japanese poetry. ("They're not full of a lot of emotional stuff."— Teddy says.") He has apparently just come back from Boston after being examined by psychologists, presumably. Teddy is a follower of "the Vedantic theory of reincarnation," according to Nicholson, to which Teddy replies that it is not a "theory." There is more discussion about where God can be found — even in a glass of milk. He talks about death, and how he might be pushed into an empty swimming pool by his sister.
The story ends with Nicholson walking down to the pool where Teddy is having his lesson with his sister. "[Nicholson] was a little more than halfway down the staircase when he heard an all-piercing, sustained scream—clearly coming from a small female child. It was highly acoustical, as though it were reverberating within four tiles walls."
The Second Noble Truth seeks the origin of dukkha. “Franny and Zooey>”
The second Noble Truth recognizes that there is a basic cause for suffering, which is self-centered desire. This is almost exclusively what these two long stories are about: The impact of self-centered desires on our true contentment.
“The problem with selfish cravings is that it tends to take over and compel us on a narrow course, limiting our potential,” write the Simpkins in their Buddhist primer.
There are only four characters in the stories, Franny, her boyfroend Lane Coutell, Zooey and matriarch Bessie Glass — but there are references to the other Glass family members. The story “Franny” begins with Franny’s boyfriend, Lane Coutell, waiting at the station platform for Franny. They are physically separated, though Lane is hoping this weekend will result in a sexual encounter with Franny (a hope he cruelly clings to even after she has broken down). Lane is the embodiment of self-serving desire. He’s a sensualist. He eats frog’s legs and talks endlessly about a paper he hopes to get published.
(Salinger even takes a moment to show us how the Eightfold Path to happiness can be perverted. The Eightfold Path is: Right View, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness and Right Concentration. As Lane and Franny sit down in Sickler’s, the restaurant that is the “highly favored place among, chiefly, the intellectual fringe of students at the college — “, Lane takes care to notice that he is “in the right place with an unimpeachably right-looking girl.”)
Franny is, however, experiencing some disorientation. She orders food but does not eat it. She drinks martinis and smokes. She is a bundle of anxiety and unhappiness. She is carrying a mystical little book, “The Way of the Pilgrim” — an allusion to another path, and silently repeats its prayer.
Lane puts a question to Franny that goes to the root of the Second Noble Truth: “You’ve got a goddamn bug today—you know that? What the hell’s the matter with you anyway?” In the Second Noble Truth the question of the source of our suffering is only acknowledged. It is not answered.
In delicate moments Salinger is able to portray the physical and emotional gulf between Lane and Franny, the negative detachment that leads to unhappiness: “Franny quickly tipped her cigarette ash, then brought the ashtray an inch closer to her side of the table.” There begins the great divide. A page later, Salinger gets more specific. When speaking of Lane, Salinger writes: “Quite probably, he resented and feared any signs of detachment in a girl he was seriously dating.” Salinger wrote with precision, and it is easy to see here he crafted a sentence that could have the signs of detachment refer to the divide between Franny and Lane or the divide within Franny herself.
“Zooey” also begins with a physical divide: Zooey (Zachary Martin Glass) is in the bathtub, cocooned by a shower curtain (“scarlet, with a design of canary yellow sharps, clefs and flats on it” — a color scheme not unlike the iconic paperback cover of “The Catcher In The Rye”). Zooey is reading another long Glass letter, and then his mother comes in to talk about the crisis that Franny is experiencing. Franny, too, is separated; she is in another room in the apartment, lying on the couch.
Even during the justifiably famous conclusion to “Zooey,” during which Zooey offers his own counsel to Franny about how she can experience some contentment once again, Zooey is talking to his sister on the phone even though they are in the same apartment. (It’s possible that if more recent writings of Salinger are published we’ll be able to hear what he has to say about computers and cell phones, two subjects ripe for his worldview about how we are detached from each other.)
Later, Salinger has Zooey tell Franny to reject those selfish cravings, which includes her reading of the Jesus Prayer, because she is expecting to receive something from it. “You can see the Jesus Prayer from now till doomsday, but if you don’t realize that the only thing that counts in the religious life is detachment. I don’t see how you’ll ever even move an inch. Desirelessness. ‘Cessation from all hankerings.’”
Salinger is not only talking about himself — he’s talking to the reader. He is reiterating the tenets of the Second Noble Truth.
The Third Noble Truth is the cessation of dukkha. “Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour An Introduction”
As we get closer to the end of “Zooey,” Salinger becomes more explicit about his intentions, both artistic and spiritual. He’s giving us clues. When Zooey walks into the old bedroom that belonged to his brothers Seymour and Buddy, he reads some of the quotations that Seymour had copied onto an old board. The first of which Salinger quotes is not ambiguous:
“You have the right to work, but for the work’s sake only. You have no right to the fruits of work. Desire for the fruits of work must never be your motive in working. Never give way to laziness, either.” This is from the Bhagavad Gita.
The third noble truth is the cessation of all unsatisfactory sensations.
“Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour An Introduction” are two long stories that seek to find a way out of the suffering some members of the Glass family have experienced over the years. The writing here begins, very early, to let the reader (and certainly those critics who started to turn on Salinger) that the Glasses, and Salinger himself, and the very book they have in their hands, no longer exist for them. This is an exercise in melding the beliefs of the writer into the very DNA of the text itself — and further than that, into the experience of reading that text. It is the sound of the words, much like the saying of the Jesus prayer, that should bring the reader happiness, not in anything that is actually being said.
“Raise High The Roofbeam, Carpenters” is one of the loveliest, most sustained pieces of comic writing accomplished by any American writer. There is a happy mix of voices and activities. You can see and hear these people. There are none of the “phonies” we’ve come to expect. There isn’t an adolescent (unless one wishes to count the immature Seymour, who of course remains off stage.) As you read this story, you can almost physically feel Salinger letting go, getting closer to how people should feel when they no longer suffer, when they become whole with themselves.
The famous ending is not really so ambiguous when you realize that Salinger was reducing everything to its essence, and that if you let go of everything, you can be happy with yourself. There is no need to explain, or even do anything, to be true to yourself.
If each of the nine stories in the original collection were composed to express the notion of ever-present pain, and if “Franny and Zooey” is an attempt to articulate the origin of that pain, then, in these penultimate stories, the reader can see Salinger having let go of that pain.
In “Seymour An Introduction,” the pain of Seymour’s suicide is often referenced, but there is little residual pain of this event as expressed by Buddy Glass about his brother.
Salinger also isn’t any longer interested in making the reader happy. He’s immersing himself in the process of the work he is doing: “And while I think an ecstatically happy prose writer can do many things on the printed page—the best things, I’m frankly hoping—it’s also true, and infinitely more self-evident, I suspect, that he can’t be moderate or brief; he loses very nearly all his short paragraphs. He can’t be detached—or only very rarely and suspiciously, on down-waves.”
He’s telling the reader what he’s doing. Salinger is going to be happy in his work, and you can take it or leave it.
In “Roofbeam”, he writes: “Worst of all, I think, he’s no longer in a position to look after the reader’s most immediate want; namely, to see the author get the hell on with his story.”
Salinger then takes off on his own sweet ride, taking issue with critics and academics — all of whom have misinterpreted his work — past issues (“But where does by far the bulk, the whole ambulance load, of pain really come from?”), reader expectations (he plainly tells the reader that his plan to lay out the history of Seymour Glass in more detail has been abandoned), literary expectations (“…I don’t dare go anywhere near the short story form. It eats up fat little detached writers like me whole.” And even his voice, so immediately and widely praised, he freely lets go of. “Oh, this happiness is strong stuff” he writes in all italics, something the earlier Salinger would never have done.
He also says this: “… the true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.”
For more than 100 pages, Salinger rambles about Seymour’s poems, his attitudes, his profession, his philosophy on shooting marbles, and on the way he looks, the way he dresses, his athletic prowess, a raggedy list of anything and everything that either amused Seymour or someone else in the family, whether it was a ride on a bike or the memory of something simple (Seymour’s cut hair jumping about in the barber’s chair.”
Salinger (and Buddy) are deliberately obtuse about everything: Seymour was either a great athlete, or not. He was either handsome, or not. He was either amused, or not. He was an aesthete, or not. He was sociable, or not. You decide.
Say what you will about the story, and it is no doubt challenging to get through, there is no rancor in it. It may be, as Salinger himself called it, “literary Cubism,” but he’s having a high old time, reader (and critic be damned.) It’s the work that counts.
One last thing. Salinger knows this is all a cosmic joke. He titled this story, “Seymour An Introduction” but knew, and the world knew, that Seymour was introduced to the world in 1948, when he committed suicide.
The Fourth Noble Truth. A path to the end of dukkha. "Hapworth 16 1924"
Salinger, in “Seymour An Introduction,” tells the reader what's in store with “Hapworth 16 1924.”: “I feel I have a knowledge, a kind of editorial insight gained from all my failures over the past eleven years to describe him on paper, and this knowledge tells me he cannot be got at with understatement.”
"Understatement" is not a word that a reader or critic would ever attach to this odd piece of writing. Odd is itself an understatement. Had there been a more quixotic piece of writing to ever appear in a modern mainstream publication by a major writer? Has there been comparable instances where a writer of proven abilities abandons those abilities in order to achieve such personal and private goals?
"Hapworth 16" is not, in any way, an experimental piece. It isn't attempting to stretch the boundaries of short fiction. It's just that it’s so absurd as to be utterly unbelievable. So what was Salinger thinking?
He was thinking of the Fourth Noble Truth, which is the Noble Truth of the Way Leading to the Cessation of Suffering. It is the Noble Eightfold Path, that is to say: Right View, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness and Right Concentration.
One definition puts it this way: "This Noble Truth must be penetrated to by cultivating the Path..." It is the way out of suffering, both for Seymour and his creator.
The respected Salinger blog "Dead Caulfields" puts Salinger's twinning of his work and faith this way: "But perhaps the single teaching of Vedanta that most informed Salinger's work—and possibly most affected his life—is the Vedantic concept of karma yoga. Karma yoga teaches that everything in life—from one's vocation to the smallest daily duty—can be approached as an act of service, accomplished as a prayer, as a meditation, and can lead to a clearer realization of God. Salinger readily embraced the concept of karma yoga as an interpretation of his own craft. In short, he came to believe that his own work – his writings – were potentially holy and he learned to regard his work as a path to unity with God if approached and executed with humility."
Fully a quarter of this story is devoted to a catalogue of books and other writings that Seymour wants to read during the weeks he has left at camp. Other moments in the story mention those things that make him happy, whether it is his lustful thoughts about Mrs. Happy, the mother of a fellow camper, to his fond thoughts of all his brothers and sisters, Seymour's letter is a tone poem to bliss and happiness.
This is not the same thing as saying it is a successful piece of writing. It isn't. But this is the Seymour before any damage was done to him by war, by the world, by the cruelties that other human beings can inflict on each other even during peacetime. This is the happy Seymour, not the paranoid, off-putting Seymour of "Bananafish." This is a Seymour that is pure and whole, one that is almost pure energy and thought.
I think Salinger made Seymour such an old soul is because he regretted the literary stunt that he pulled off to such great success in 1948, when he had Seymour commit suicide. I thoroughly agree with Charles McGrath in an essay he wrote for The New York Times in 2008, called "Still Paging Mr. Salinger": "It’s as if Mr. Salinger realized, belatedly, that he had prematurely killed his best character and wanted to make it up to him." I think that's entirely true. Seymour was only 31 when he died, but how much fuller those 31 years would seem if he was intellectually and sexually fully developed by the age of seven. Killing Seymour was the one thing Salinger could not undo, literally speaking, but he was trying to tell us that he had had a full life.
So pick a page, any page, in "Hapworth," and one finds the words overflowing with a kind of generoisty of spirit that is very much absent from almost all of Salinger's earlier works: "Piled on top of all this good fortune, what else does one find? A capacity to make many wonderful friends in small numbers whom we will love passionately and guard from uninstructive harm until our lives are finished and who, in turn, will love us, too, and never let us down without very great regret, which is a lot better, more guerdoning, more humorous than being let down without any regret at all, be assured."
"I quite ask you, though, to imagine how marvellous it is to see this chap, your son Buddy, spring in a trice from a lad of five, who has already lost his heart to every pencil in the universe, into a mature, swarthy author! How I wish I could lie on a pleasant cloud in the distant future, perhaps with a good, firm, Northern Spy apple, and read every single word he writes about this eventful, pregnant party in the offing!"
But if the Fourth Noble Truth is the path away from suffering, that included, for Salinger, not to publish any more.
Salinger writes: "'Silence! Go forth, but tell no man!' said the splendid Tsiang Samdup. Quite right, though very difficult and widely abhorred."
And then, at the end, Salinger says "goodbye." After mentioning what kind of writing tablets Buddy prefers, Salinger says this: "Also worth keeping in mind, it is this chap’s leonine devotion to his literary implements, I give you my word of honor, that will be the eventual cause of his utter release, with honor and happiness, from this enchanting vale of tears, laughter, redeeming human love, affection, and courtesy.
"With 50,000 additional kisses from the two looming pests of Bungalow 7 who love you,
Most cordially,
S. G."
Salinger, in this story, doesn't describe the world as a horrible, brutal place, full of phonies and section men and unthinking academics; it is, rather, a "an enchanting vale of tears" a place of laughter and "redeeming human love."
For the next half of his life Salinger went quiet, literarily speaking. We have learned, in the many years since his death, that he was not quite the recluse once thought, that he was fiercely protected by his neighboring New Hampshireites, and that he had ugly predilections.
One wishes that the tenets of The Four Noble Truths he had charted for his characters had translated to his own life. But, in the end, there is some small dignity in that he tried to find peace for the characters (particularly Seymour) he had created on the page.
(A version of this post was first written and published in 2013.)
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This is an amazing piece!
Really kind of wild, actually.
I didn’t know much about Salinger, and now I do.
Makes me wanna read some stories (esp. Raise High + Hapworth)
Congrats on crafting a beautiful voyage into the mind and work of a writer !!