J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [89]
Climbing upon a rubber raft, Sybil coaxes Seymour into the water, where he tells the young girl the story of the Bananafish, which have a lethal desire for bananas that grow in great bunches within banana holes in the ocean. Entering the holes to consume their desire, the Bananafish fall victim to their own gluttony, an excess so great that they “become pigs” while in the hole and grow so swollen with their feast that they are cut off from escape. The correlation between Seymour’s tale of the Bananafish doomed by greed and Eliot’s Sibyl, cursed by relentless existence, is unmistakable.
In “Seymour—an Introduction,” Salinger informs readers that the Seymour of “Bananafish” “was not Seymour at all but, oddly, someone with a striking resemblance to,—alley oop, I’m afraid—myself,” adding that he was “using a very poorly rehabilitated, not to say unbalanced, German typewriter at the time.”7 From the terror of the Hürtgen Forest to the horrors of the concentration camps, the knowledge that strangles Seymour Glass may be the soul-wrenching realization of the cruelty of which humankind is capable. After experiencing such horrors, Seymour, much like his creator, perhaps found it impossible to fit into a society that ignored the truths that he now knew. The little girl on the raft may be called Sybil in reference to Eliot’s poem, but her last name is Carpenter, and within her also resides the nature of William Blake’s Lamb. Seymour may weigh the nature of humanity through the time he spends with Sybil, all the while grasping for some kind of hope or even deliverance from what he has endured.
When Sybil is delighted by the story and claims to see a Bananafish, Seymour pulls her toward shore against her will. He then presents her with a final act of blessing by kissing the arch of her foot, wishing her a path free of evil and pain, unlike the path that he himself has suffered. The action alarms the girl, and she runs from him “without regret.” The interlude over, Seymour has drawn his own conclusions regarding the makeup of human beings and the world around him.
Back in the hotel room, Muriel is asleep on one of the twin beds, just as she has been asleep to Seymour’s needs, pain, and perceptions and just as the world sleeps, disregarding the gentler possibilities of its nature. Gazing at her, Seymour no longer sees the woman he married, and she is referred to only as “the girl.” Salinger then tells us that Seymour “took out an Ortgies caliber 7.65 automatic” from his luggage, sits upon the bed with it, and stares at his wife. Unwilling to further evolve in a world where the accumulation of pain and the knowledge of evil are as unavoidable as the accumulation of age is inevitable to the prisoner of Cumae, Seymour shoots himself in the head.
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The bleakness of “Bananafish” is inescapable, and Salinger spent a fitful year reworking it. Throughout 1947, every aspect of his life was on the edge of change. As liberating a notion as his stark garage apartment in Westchester might have initially appeared, he soon found it too restricting and by winter had relocated to Stamford, Connecticut. This time the studio he rented was not in a garage but in a renovated barnlike structure that doubled as the summer home of Salinger’s new landlord, Himan Brown. A well-known producer of radio programs, including Inner Sanctum Mysteries, with its tales of “mystery, terror, and suspense,” Brown nearly refused to rent the house to Salinger upon learning he had a dog. When he reluctantly agreed