J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [174]
The novella can also be viewed as the story of an author writing a story. Buddy expresses himself intimately to the reader, relaying his personal circumstances and inner emotions as he writes. He not only relays text but also shares his personal feelings about the text he is writing.
As a family history and spiritual instruction, “Seymour—an Introduction” is fascinating. But it is the novella’s third aspect that readers have found most compelling: “Seymour—an Introduction” is often interpreted as an autobiographical sketch of J. D. Salinger himself.
In this view, Salinger transforms his Glass family series when presenting the novella. He does not tell an ongoing story in the traditional sense, apart from Buddy Glass’s trials and tribulations of authorship, but instead uses the text to address a number of issues affecting his own life: the “Dharma Bums,” his own celebrity, and his longing for privacy. In doing so, Salinger addresses readers directly, exposing their fascination with his private life and their misconceptions about his image. He then appears to set the record straight through the character of Buddy Glass. After scolding readers for being bird-watchers and leaving tire tracks on his rosebushes, he seems to offer numerous insights into his own life. Yet, the sensation of knowing Salinger better after reading “Seymour” is a finely crafted illusion. Similarly to Seymour’s poetry, Salinger goes through the entire novella “without spilling a single really autobiographical bean.”
In actuality, none of these interpretations is completely true, while, at the same time, they all are. Three parallel narrations occur in “Seymour—an Introduction,” two biographical and one autobiographical. None is stationary or linear. Instead, the three stories that Salinger delivers in this single text continuously meld together, separate, shift, and reblend. The result has alternately dazzled and confused readers for decades.
To identify the autobiographical kernels within “Seymour—an Introduction” or to distinguish the traits that Buddy Glass held in common with the author are fascinating but parenthetical readings of the novella. The greatest mystery of “Seymour—an Introduction” is in its title character; and its greatest power is the sacrifice of creation.
The ghost of Seymour Glass floods this story. Buddy’s pain over Seymour’s physical absence is etched into every thought he conveys. (When Seymour stands on the curb watching his brother play marbles in the encroaching twilight, the scene is not only envisioned by readers but also felt, heard, and tasted by them.) It was Salinger who instructed A. E. Hotchner that fiction was “experience magnified.” The great mystery of “Seymour—an Introduction” is this: What reservoir of experience did Salinger draw upon to portray the subtleties of Seymour’s character, with their lifelike exactness? Where within the soul of the author did the deep pain of Buddy Glass find its terrible origin? Salinger had no brother. No one in Salinger’s life, either relative or friend, ever came close to resembling the character of Seymour Glass. Neither, at forty, had Salinger ever known anyone who had died by his own hand. In fact, aside from the deaths of Ross and Lobrano, Salinger had been happily removed from death since the war. Yet the character of Seymour is so real as to indicate that he must have had some basis in fact. And the grief of Buddy Glass is far too fresh and poignant not to have been a recital of living emotions.
In “Seymour,” Buddy relays an interesting story. While in the army, he was stricken with a case of pleurisy which plagued him for more than three months. His illness was finally relieved in an almost mystical way: by placing