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and spiritual downfall. The couple is visited by a young woman pretending to be a student and novice writer of poetry. She begs Corrine to have Ford, whom she claims to admire, read samples of her verse. When Ford reviews the girl’s work, he speaks the most crucial lines of the story, a reference to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” which reproaches the girl for not revealing art but constructing something that sounds artistic instead. “A poet doesn’t invent his poetry—he finds it.… The place where Alph the sacred river ran—was found out not invented.”22 True art, according to Ford, is never created but always encountered. The line equates art with spirituality and true art with spiritual revelation.

In a way never completely explained, the girl somehow works her way into Ford’s life with the intention of subduing him. After a short period of clandestine dating, Ford calls his wife and announces that he and the young woman, now known as Bunny, are running away together. Corrine tracks them down and finds them living in a run-down tenement. At this point, Salinger indicates that Bunny is a manifestation of Ford’s mother and symbolic of a callous society determined to crush his divine inspiration and expel him from his inverted forest. The treachery is apparently accomplished, because Corrine discovers Ford completely destroyed, mired in alcoholism, and incapable of producing anything approaching true poetry.

In “The Inverted Forest,” through the character of Raymond Ford, Salinger presents three stages of artistic and spiritual existence. Ford is first presented as a child, restrained by the influence of his mother, whose destructive powers threaten to suffocate him. Somehow, Ford’s artistic spirituality overcomes this abuse by developing internally, as an inverted forest might grow underground. This leads to the second presentation of Ford, as an adult who has attained true artistry (with its many afflictions) despite his painful past. In this state, Ford is granted the ability to act as intermediary between the subterranean world of art and that of common callousness. In Ford’s third manifestation, he enters the world aboveground, where the destructive influences of the first stage overwhelm his spiritual capabilities to counter them. In the end, Ford’s inverted forest is torn up by its roots.

It is ironic that Salinger wrote the story at this stage of his life. “The Inverted Forest” condemns modern society for obstructing the revelation of spiritual and artistic truth. It also proposes that true artists cut themselves apart from the modern world in order to experience and serve that truth, much in the same way as monks cloister themselves to serve God. Meanwhile, in Salinger’s own life, he was striving, perhaps more than at any other time, to live within the same society that his story condemns.

*Records show that Sylvia was fluent in German, English, French, and Italian. Her university dissertation paper (“Unmittelbare Kreislaufwirkungen des Apomorphins”) is still available in the National Library at Frankfurt am Main. On July 28, 1956, she moved to the United States, eventually marrying a successful automotive engineer and settling in Michigan. She devoted much of her life to her medical practice, which included glaucoma research. Upon the death of her husband in 1988, Sylvia dedicated her remaining years to caring for the elderly and died on July 16, 2007, after being cared for in the same nursing home where she herself had worked.

†Sylvia’s “French” passport was found among her belongings upon her death, as were numerous articles about J. D. Salinger and a number of clippings about Joyce Maynard.

*This is the first of three successive main characters whom Salinger will name Ray. The Ray of “Birthday Boy” will be followed by Ray Kinsella in “A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All” and Raymond Ford in “The Inverted Forest.” Each of these characters is portrayed as being alcoholic. This is an interesting trend in Salinger’s writings but one whose significance remains obscure.

*They are “Daughter of the