Thoughts About Vonnegut and Salinger on a Snow-Filtered Saturday

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and J.D. Salinger are forever linked in my mind because of a trip I took some years ago to see the American West. It was during that trip that these two men, so different in their public personas, became two of the writers I most admired, I most wished I could be, and that I most loved.

There is an aspect of the work of these two men that ties them together as well, and for Salinger it’s not as celebrated as it probably should be. And that is the humor which infuses their work.

Two examples:

From Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield, possibly the coolest and most-admired drop-out of all-time, writes on his history exam:

“The Egyptians were an ancient race of Caucasians residing in one of the northern sections of Africa. The latter as well know is the largest continent in the Eastern Hemisphere.

The Egyptians are extremely interesting to us today for various reasons. Modern science would still like to know what the secret ingredients were that the Egyptians used when they wrapped up dead people so that their faces would not rot for innumerable centuries. This interesting riddle is still quite a challenge to modern science in the twentieth century.”

From “Welcome to the Monkey House” by Vonnegut, which takes place way, way in the future:

“America had changed in many ways, but it had yet to adopt the metric system.”

[[Pause for audience laughter.]]

It is really hard to write comedy in fiction without coming off either as trying too hard, or as seeming simply incompetent. To achieve the necessary blalnce takes a master’s touch. I know, because I’ve often tried and failed miserably at it in my own work. I remember this one time in my freshman composition class, back when I was going to school and trying to figure out what I would be all at the same time, I tried for a joke about orange peels in one of my stories. The professor, this balding windbag named Professor Robinson, came up to me when he was handing the graded stories back to us and said, “Were you trying to be funny with that thing about orange peels?”

“Uhh, well, I guess so, uhh, yeah,” I said, forever smooth.

“Well, it wasn’t funny,” Professor Balding said. “Don’t do that.”

I think humor, executed properly, is a powerful way to bond the reader to the story. Which probably explains, to some extent, why so many people are so passionate about Vonnegut and Salinger. And why their absences from this world are responsible for so much pain.

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One of the best essays on Salinger I’ve read lately (and there have been a lot lately), even though it was written before the man passed: The Catcher in Cornish by Sam Buntz

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“The Big Trip Up Yonder” by Vonnegut will appear on the website on Tuesday…

Frank Marcopolos
Like books-on-tape, but different

http://frankmarcopolos.com

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On the Passing of J.D. Salinger

So it goes.

Holden Caulfield: 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.

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I got the news of the man’s death on my cell phone, sitting in my car in front of the Garden City Public Library, adjacent to the Garden City stop of the Long Island Railroad. I figured there was probably a lot of symbolism about all that, and perhaps some day a better writer than myself can tie it all together with some neat word-bow, to make it seem to have some kind of deep significance. That writer is not me. Not today, anyway.

I have this theory, apparently a fairly ridiculous one, that the great writers are immortal. With each passing of people like J.D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. that little theory takes another hit from the grim realities of this life. Unfair, maybe, but true.

I can’t remember now if it was the book by his former lover, Joyce Maynard, or his sisterdaughter, Margaret Salinger, that detailed Mr. Salinger’s file cabinet system of categorizing new, unpublished stories. It indicated which ones should be published how soon after his death. On a blackened day that thought at least offers a glimmer of something like light.

I do believe that it is important to have heroes, including heroes you have never met and will never meet. People who give you comfort just because you know they’re out there, doing their thing and kicking ass. The sad thing is, when your heroes shuffle off this mortal coil, it hurts like Almighty Hell.

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Holden Caulfield: It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

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My Favorite Murder by Ambrose Bierce

Click play!

 

MP3 file downloadable via this link

“Had it not been for the fact that the honorable judge before whom he was tried was the president of a life insurance company that took risks on hanging, and in which my client held a policy, it is hard to see how he could decently have been acquitted.

If your Honor would like to hear about it….”

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Music by radiotimes of ccMixter.org.

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Ambrose Bierce Bio

Text of the Story

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J.D. Salinger’s Teddy and Saint George (and the Dragon)

Leica Camera 1953J.D. Salinger, writing as a fictional alias, in the story “Seymour: An Introduction” : “A few years ago, I published an exceptionally Haunting, Memorable, unpleasantly controversial, and thoroughly unsuccessful short story about a “gifted” little boy aboard a transatlantic liner….”

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There are a bunch of great essays on the web about Salinger’s “exceptionally Haunting, Memorable, unpleasantly controversial, and thoroughly unsuccessful short story about a “gifted” little boy aboard a transatlantic liner,” “Teddy.”

Such as:

Orange Peels and Apple-Eaters: Buddhism in J.D. Salinger’s Teddy by Tony Magagna

Along This Road Goes No One: Salinger’s “Teddy” and the Failure of Love by Anthony Kaufman

Salinger’s Teddy by Charles Deemer

The Grass Before It Was Green by Leslie English

What’s Up With the Ending? on something called Shmoop.com

Teddy McArdle – Character Analysis on Shmoop

This being the case, I don’t really want to re-hash anything that these other fine essays have already gotten into. I’ll just reiterate for the uninitiated (and if you’re one, shame on ya) that Teddy McArdle, the “gifted” little boy mentioned above, advocates a Vedantic view of the world which espouses an unemotional approach to life. He (and it) champions the abandonment of desire–sexual, financial, and material– as a path to spiritual enlightenment. This is emphasized in the story by other characters’ obsessions with name-brand things: Leicas, and Gladstones, and Eastern-seaboard regimental outfits, and Ivy League educations. Teddy believes that a focus on these things prevents a person from making spiritual progress (by meditation) which eventually allows the person to become one with God, whereby that person would then stop the cycle of reincarnation and spend eternity in perfect bliss.

The main issue of contention about the story is its abrupt, controversial ending: What, exactly, happened? Did Teddy commit suicide? Did his kid sister push him into an empty pool? Did he push his sister into a full pool?

Here’s the exact concluding text:

“At D Deck the forwardship stairway ended, and Nicholson stood for a moment, apparently at some loss for direction. However, he spotted someone who looked able to guide him. Halfway down the passageway, a stewardess was sitting on a chair outside a galleyway, reading a magazine and smoking a cigarette. Nicholson went down to her, consulted her briefly, thanked her, then took a few additional steps forwardship and opened a heavy metal door that read: TO THE POOL. It opened onto a narrow, uncarpeted staircase.

He was 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 tiled walls.”

What I’d like to discuss is something that I haven’t seen written about elsewhere (if anyone else has please point me to it): Saint George and the Dragon. It’s mentioned in the story in a rather inconspicuous way. To wit:

“Teddy passively looked up from his newspaper, but the woman had passed, and he didn’t look back. He went on reading. At the end of the passageway, before an enormous mural of Saint George and the Dragon over the staircase landing…”

It’s just mentioned in passing like that, with no significance whatsoever to the plot, or so it would seem. However, I don’t think it would be there if it had absolutely no meaning. In fact, the fact that Salinger mentions this detail at all seems to me like the man put it there for a reason, a big reason.

So,who is this Saint George fella and what’s the deal with the dragon? Turns out, it’s a legend. And, like all good legends, there’s a kick-ass lesson behind it. From Wikipedia:

“The town (Silene) had a pond, as large as a lake, where a plague-bearing dragon dwelled that envenomed all the countryside. To appease the dragon, the people of Silene used to feed it a sheep every day, and when the sheep failed, they fed it their children, chosen by lottery.

It happened that the lot fell on the king’s daughter. The king, distraught with grief, told the people they could have all his gold and silver and half of his kingdom if his daughter were spared; the people refused. The daughter was sent out to the lake, decked out as a bride, to be fed to the dragon.

Saint George by chance rode past the lake. The princess, trembling, sought to send him away, but George vowed to remain.

The dragon reared out of the lake while they were conversing. Saint George fortified himself with the Sign of the Cross, charged it on horseback with his lance and gave it a grievous wound. Then he called to the princess to throw him her girdle, and he put it around the dragon’s neck. When she did so, the dragon followed the girl like a meek beast on a leash. She and Saint George led the dragon back to the city of Silene, where it terrified the people at its approach. But Saint George called out to them, saying that if they consented to become Christians and be baptised, he would slay the dragon before them.

The king and the people of Silene converted to Christianity, George slew the dragon, and the body was carted out of the city on four ox-carts. “Fifteen thousand men baptized, without women and children.” On the site where the dragon died, the king built a church to the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saint George, and from its altar a spring arose whose waters cured all disease.”

It is my belief that Salinger’s purpose for the story (which he admits was a failure, per the quote above) was to convert a large percentage of Americans into a Vedantic (anti-materialistic) view of life. American Capitalism is the dragon, Salinger/Teddy is Saint George, and the pool is the spring whose waters cure all disease coming from the worship of money and materialism — by being the cause of Teddy’s death.

It is also my belief that Teddy is dead because, like all good prophets, he died heroically for his cause.

This story first appeared in The New Yorker magazine in 1953. The context of the culture at that time was that television was beginning its ascent to media domination in America, as more and more households turned away from radio programming to get their entertainment needs met. This is also–as a way to subsidize that entertainment–the time when Madison Avenue advertising companies began to commodify the American Dream as something you can purchase at your local retailer. (This is currently being dramatized on the AMC program Mad Men.) If you just purchase the right brand of laundry detergent, the right brand of car, the right brand of cigarettes, the American Dream could be yours. No spiritual-advancement effort required! Living in the aftermath of those early, lying-for-profit efforts, in a hyper-materialistic, puddle-deep, attention-deficit, drug-addicted America, I’d have to agree with Mr. Salinger that this story, sadly, was an abject failure.

Maybe that’s why the guy won’t come out from hiding. He can’t bear it.

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Buy Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger on Amazon.com

Buy Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger on Barnes & Noble.com

Buy Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger on IndieBound.com

Buy Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger on Borders.com

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“Teddy” and the 8 other stories in the short story collection Nine Stories are not yet in the public domain. So, there is no possible way that I, or anyone else on Earth (besides Mr. Salinger or someone authorized by Mr. Salinger) could have done an audio version of “Teddy.” So, please stop asking.

Any rumors to the contrary are absolutely false.

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FrankMarcopolos.com
Like books-on-tape, but different

http://frankmarcopolos.com

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J.D. Salinger’s Teddy : An Introduction

9 Stories by JD SalingerI first met Teddy when I was in Phoenix, Arizona, hiding from the authorities. Precocious child, for sure. But still, he had that other-worldly wisdom practically dripping from him, so there was no way I could ignore the boy.

This was in the Devil’s Summer of Nineteen Hundred and Ninety-Five, right before I decided that jumping out of perfectly good airplanes while in flight into shit-hot drop zones sounded like a good career move. I had been hanging out for weeks with the stragglers of a bunch of seasonal Mexican day workers in the back of the Wawa parking lot on Jorge Street. They were all too happy to teach me Spanish curse words and whistle at the putas as we sucked down cervezas in the 115-degrees-in-the-shade calor.

A lucky, duck-in-the-shadows fortnight of that kind of self-debilitation drove me to seek some form of healing in the one place I could hide out without any chance whatsoever of being discovered–the public library.

It was there that I first encountered Teddy, formally Theodore McArdle. I didn’t really know what to make of him. Some of the things he said–about getting out of the finite dimensions the rest of us seem trapped in, about some crazy thing called Vedantism, about vomiting up the “apple”–seemed ridiculous, seemed like the make-believe world of a 10-year-old boy with an active, vivid, intellectual imagination. At first, in short, I wrote the damn kid off.

But.

Being in the library anyway, I decided to delve into all those things they had stacked on all those shelves. Books, they’re called. Found everything I could on Vedantism and other Eastern philosophies. I read all the Salinger stories I could find, even if they had only been published in magazines. (The library had an extensive collection of magazines, too.)

And after all this extensive research, I came back to Teddy with a mind that had been grenade-blown wide open. With this new perspective, I could see that what he was saying was absolutely TRUE. It was NOT some fanciful fabrication of a hyper-intelligent kid. It was pure and beautiful truth.

You know that whole thing Teddy says about… oh, wait. You’ve met Teddy, haven’t you? Oh, no? Well, you probably should…….

Buy Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger on Amazon.com

Buy Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger on Barnes & Noble.com

Buy Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger on IndieBound.com

Buy Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger on Borders.com

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“Teddy” and the 8 other stories in the short story collection Nine Stories are not yet in the public domain. So, there is no possible way that I, or anyone else on Earth (besides Mr. Salinger or someone authorized by Mr. Salinger) could have done an audio version of “Teddy.” So, please stop asking.

Any rumors to the contrary are absolutely false.

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FrankMarcopolos.com
Like books-on-tape, but different

http://frankmarcopolos.com

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