JD Salinger centenary: His best work was not ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, but his Glass family stories

There’s nothing in this world like the bonds of family – adamantine threads that bind people together and have remained a prominent theme in literature for many writers. American author JD Salinger published prolifically, by his standards, about two families in his oeuvre – the Caulfields and the Glasses. He set out to unleash something quite idiosyncratic through his Glass family saga – a sense of loss, a search for equanimity, delusional beliefs, trials, aspirations, frustrations, and what World War II did to a family of nine members: an Irish mother, a Jewish father and their seven children, who are all eccentric, clever and a few among them super-intelligent for their age while growing up.

The fictional history of the Glass family itself is an achievement of sorts, considering Salinger gave readers bits and pieces about the members of the family quite randomly. The Glass stories – eight in total – have different settings. All have been told through (or revolve around) different characters. The last one to be published, “Hapworth 16, 1924” (1965) was written in the form of a letter where Seymour Glass obtrudes his ideas upon his parents. It was lambasted by many critics who found it preposterous for its frivolous content. Soon after its appearance, Salinger ceased to publish – the silence and reclusiveness that followed became legendary with the passage of time.

Seymour and Sergeant X

Seymour – the clairvoyant sage – only appears physically in the first story about the Glass family, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”, which The New Yorker published in 1948. In this long story, he has recently returned from serving in the army and is visiting Florida with his wife, Muriel. At the onset of the story, we learn from a telephone conversation between Seymour’s wife and her mother that he is mentally unstable. When her mother begins to fret over Seymour’s condition, Muriel assures her that Seymour is no threat. When the scene changes we come across Seymour with a child, Sybil, at the beach making witty, somewhat funny conversation. There’s hardly anything about Seymour that tells the reader that he is deranged while he is with the child, until he returns to his room and commits suicide.

On April 8, 1950, The New Yorker carried “For Esmé: With Love and Squalor”, which was received with great enthusiasm by the American reading public. Salinger was flooded with mail soon after its appearance and he himself admitted that none of his works had garnered such interest in the past. The story aptly defines Salinger’s prowess as a writer. There is a drastic contrast between the opening and the “squalor” part of the story. And it remains one of the most gracefully constructed pieces by the writer. The story is about the war’s impact on a certain Sergeant X. We come across this man with “all his faculties intact” before D-Day in England, and later shell-shocked at an occupied German home in Bavaria. Along with Salinger’s trademark cleverness, the story depicts the innocence of children beautifully through the characters of Esmé and her little brother Charles – something that he had shown earlier in “Down at the Dingy” (1949) with the character of Lionel, BooBoo Glass’s five-year-old son, and later explored deeply in his first novel.

Enter ‘The Catcher in the Rye’

The publication of The Catcher in the Rye in 1951 established Salinger’s reputation as the top-flight writer in America. Shortly after it was released, Salinger moved to Cornish, New Hampshire from Manhattan to ward off obstreperous fans following him around. But the enigma that Salinger created with Holden Caulfield continued to swell.

Interestingly, The New Yorker had initially turned down some of his submissions such as the novella Zooey (1961) and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” (1963), which are considered his best efforts. But after the success of the novel, some magazines started re-running Salinger’s lesser-known stories, ones the author found somewhat imperfect. Much to his dismay and despite his best efforts to stop the publishers, the stories were reprinted. Even though Salinger’s popularity may have burgeoned after the success of the novel, it is with the Glass series that he came nearest to the perfection that every artist pursues.

Original or ‘middle-brow’?

Among the series, the novella Zooey stands out for its lucidity and remarkable execution. A sequel to Franny, it was originally written in the form a novel of around 41,000 words. But it was only accepted by The New Yorker after Salinger agreed to compress it. Any reader acquainted with Salinger’s short fiction would deem Zooey his best work, despite the presence of too much philosophy and religion. Salinger admirably describes the atmosphere of the Glass house; the opening section of the story involving Zooey and Bessie (his mother) is particularly memorable, containing imagery that unravels like a movie on screen. It is a story that anyone who grew up in a close-knit family can associate with, and one through which Salinger once again proved his flair for building stories through meaningful conversations.

The Glass family ­is the artistic achievement of a man whom some critics called “a garrulous pseudo-mystic”, a “sick middle-brow writer” and “a delayed adolescent”. But those who acknowledged Salinger for his originality and praised him for his literary adroitness, ability to create crisp prose were greater in number. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between – Salinger had his flaws but he also had consummate craftsmanship and the intelligence to write delightful pieces. Plausibly, he was termed “a twentieth-century classic” and was compared with none other than Mark Twain. His unpublished work – eagerly awaited by his fans – might make him the classic of this century as well.