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admirably close to this perception in 1953. Highet intuitively sensed Salinger’s presence in each story and expressed his feeling that through Nine Stories readers experienced stages of the author’s journey of self-examination. He also relayed his fear that the enormity of Salinger’s talent was in danger of being ensnared by the compactness of his focus. Highet saw in each of the Nine Stories a character who was unmistakably Salinger, “a thin, nervous, intelligent being who is on the verge of a breakdown: we see him at various stages of his life, as a child, as an adolescent, as an aimless young man in his twenties.”

When the pieces that make up Nine Stories are placed together, it becomes clear that they are indeed steps along the path of a spiritual journey. With “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” the collection opens with a tale of irredeemable despair. The next three stories, “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” “Just Before the War with the Eskimos,” and “The Laughing Man,” deliver that despair into the average moments of everyday lives. This first section of Nine Stories conveys bleak accounts of the spiritual agonies inherent in modern-day America. They are populated by characters who ineffectively grapple to elevate themselves above the darker forces of human nature. But Nine Stories also offers hope. The book’s philosophies are divided by “Down at the Dinghy,” a work that liberates readers from the prevailing hopelessness of the first four stories by offering an alternative to despair through genuine love. The power of hope is continued through the rest of the book, with the possible exception of the morality play “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes,” which appears in the collection out of time. In “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor,” the simple answer of strength through human connection begins to take on miraculous overtones, until in “De Daumier–Smith’s Blue Period” the revelation previously provided by human connection becomes a completely spiritual event. “Teddy,” the book’s final installment, was crafted especially to finalize the destination of Nine Stories’ journey. Through “Teddy,” readers reach a place where the power of love through human connection has been transformed into the power of faith through union with God.

Many critics and scholars have viewed “Teddy” as being a retelling of “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Salinger himself reinforced this thought when, in “Seymour—an Introduction,” he compared Teddy’s eyes to those of Seymour Glass. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and “Teddy” were deliberately situated in Nine Stories as symbolic bookends and were published exactly five years apart to the day. Both stories contain “bang! bang!” endings that result in the deaths of their main characters. Both tragic finales involve water and little girls. Seymour Glass and Teddy McArdle are both estranged from the world upon which they are impaled. It seems apparent that Salinger used the death of Teddy to reexplain the suicide of Seymour from a later perspective in an attempt to embed a spiritual acceptance into Seymour’s character that “Bananafish” alone does not supply. In other words, Salinger used “Teddy” to rewrite “Bananafish,” or at least to reroute the direction of readers’ interpretation.

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Mid-1953 found Salinger happy and content. He was at ease in his new home in Cornish, which he was transforming into a comfortable country cottage. He was friendly with his new neighbors, who all seemed to like him, and he had developed a mutually satisfying rapport with the local youths. Cornish also stimulated his creativity, and he claimed to be writing some of his finest works to date.10 His career was soaring through the paperback version of The Catcher in the Rye and the positive reception of Nine Stories. Salinger finally seemed to have found his niche, the dream of Holden Caulfield—somewhere he actually belonged.

During these months, references to the mysterious “Mary” disappeared from Salinger’s correspondence and Claire Douglas reemerged to share his happiness. Claire was now nineteen, Salinger’s junior by fifteen