J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [175]
If we assume that Buddy’s story represents actual events in Salinger’s life, it may shed light on the inspiration for Seymour’s character as well as the source that Salinger tapped to invoke Buddy’s grief. The most logical assumption is that Buddy’s story recounts the pain that Salinger experienced between October 1944, when he crossed the Siegfried Line toward the Hürtgen Forest, and December of that year, when he finally staggered out of the bloodbath. It was in those months that Salinger turned to writing poetry as a comfort. And it was in Hürtgen that Salinger completed “A Boy in France,” a story that takes the William Blake poem “The Lamb” as its source of spiritual sustenance.
Buddy’s reaffirmation of the values that Salinger clung to for survival during combat reminds the reader that the author became painfully accustomed to the grief of fallen brothers during the war. The absence of subsequent events in Salinger’s life that might inspire the depth of mourning displayed by Buddy Glass for his brother indicates that Salinger may well have reached back into the anguish of those years in order to replay their emotions on the written page. The forerunner of Seymour Glass, Kenneth Caulfield, had been born during the war as a symbol of hope and triumph over death, as a reaction to despair. Salinger likely used this same wartime motivation when developing Seymour’s character, and it can be said with reasonable certainty that Seymour Glass was actually born in the misery of active combat.
What inspires admiration about these connections is Salinger’s apparent ability, fourteen years after the war’s end, to relive its anguish so vividly as to give it fresh life. Yet the heartbreak of Seymour’s death and the subsequent sadness felt by Buddy are not the major thrust of these characters. Instead, they represent Salinger’s affirmation of life—his enduring enchantment with the beauty of the world and his belief in its power of redemption. Through Buddy’s account, Seymour Glass is portrayed as a fleeting poem, a holy transient haiku. His value was not in his longevity but in the simple fact that he existed and touched the lives of those around him. Buddy sees it his duty to continue the enlightenment that came from knowing his brother, and he feels obligated to share that enlightenment with the rest of the world by collecting and publishing Seymour’s poems. Salinger, therefore, portrays the poems of Seymour Glass not as mere works of art but as an “unusually fast-working form of heat therapy,” a poultice offered as remedy to a spiritually aching world.
The enlightenment and inner beauty that Seymour represents and Buddy’s appreciation of Seymour’s gifts, despite the weight of his personal grief, stood in stark contrast to the negative cynicism of Salinger’s generation. Seymour’s and Buddy’s characters challenged the Beat generation for its aversion to beauty and its emphasis upon the ills of the world around it. As Salinger offered faith and hope, the beatniks tendered only complaint and spiritual blindness. Employing the long-suffering, God-loving characters of Buddy and Seymour, Salinger condemned these “Zen-killers” for looking “down their thoroughly unenlightened noses at this splendid planet where—Kilroy, Christ, and Shakespeare all stopped.” To Salinger then, the Beat poets and writers were not creative or spiritual equals to be embraced. Like professional readers, they were a “peerage of tin ears” to be rebuked.13
In the final analysis, Salinger’s truest motivation for penning “Seymour—an Introduction” is found not in literary intent or biographical messages but within the spirit of