J.D. Salinger’s Most Powerful Story: “Teddy”
J.D. SALINGER ESSAY, PART TWO:
Most of what’s been written about the second half of J.D. Salinger’s life is an accounting of his sad literary decline, legal wrangling and creepy relationships with much younger women.
Salinger’s last published piece of writing came out in the New Yorker in 1965. He called it “Hapworth 16, 1924.” In seclusion, he wrote a great deal more, but showed no desire to publish it.
To many hippies, seekers or Salinger devotees, Holden Caulfield was a voice crying out in the wilderness of our national conformity, and Salinger, as Holden’s creator, was a hero. Fans wanted to talk to Salinger. But strangers who got hold of his unlisted telephone number and reached the man were told in blunt terms to stay away. A few who trespassed on his property hoping for a sighting or an autograph were met by Salinger, wearing a furious look and carrying a shotgun.
Salinger had married a young woman named Claire Douglas and they had two children together, but Salinger would walk to a sort of concrete bunker a quarter mile from the house to write — and often spend a week or two at a time there. People who knew Salinger’s routine used to ask, ‘Isn’t it awful being cooped up in a little bunker for so long?’ Salinger didn’t think so, and there was a persistent rumor that he had a pen pal in Sing Sing prison.
Perhaps he envied the man.
There was a phone in Salinger’s bunker. Someone once asked one of the Salingers if “Jerry allows people to call him there.” The answer came back: “Yes… but the house damned well better be burning down.”
When Salinger died, in 2010, at his home in Cornish, obituaries noted that he was 91 years old and had few friends but added, more charitably, that his masterpiece “The Catcher in the Rye” had sold 60 million copies worldwide, and was still inspiring to plenty of writers and readers.
But I want to focus on what I think is the most important thing Salinger ever wrote, and it’s not “The Catcher in the Rye” or “Frannie and Zooey” but the short story “Teddy.”
I tend to agree with John Updike who wrote in 1961 that Salinger loves the Glass family “more than God loves them,” and that there was in “Zooey” — “too much verbal ado about not quite enough.” Updike felt the dialogue-rich formlessness of Salinger’s stories, so appealing at first, had become a problem as Salinger pushed it to an extreme. The Glass family seems to sit around, drunk with their own gifts, looking down on everyone and everything — with the exception of children, nuns and Russian mystics.
But the short story “Teddy” has none of these problems. Published in 1953, it is terse; Salinger is holding back the giddy self-love, the bravura flourishes. The entire story takes place between 10:00 and 10:30 a.m. on a single day. “Teddy” is a brilliant, unsettling mix of Salinger’s deepest themes: his love of children, Zen Buddhism and the promise of reincarnation; his despair and guilt at having survived a war that killed hundreds of his comrades, his fear that intellect turns a man arrogant, and his instinct that the material world is no more than an illusion.
Teddy, the star of the story, is yet another precocious child — but 10-year-old Teddy is not a screw-up like Holden, and not old enough to be rattled by a lust for young women. Salinger has thrown away the wayward teen, and the wiseass flirt and focused on what concerns him most deeply: How should we regard the world? How especially should well-fed, well read upper middle class people react when they find life chronically unsatisfying?
In the story, Teddy has been on tour in England, being interviewed, poked at and pawed over by a pack of intellectuals. The professors have come from as far away as Sweden and Austria to examine the little genius.
Now Teddy is sailing home, on a luxury liner with his mediocre, self-satisfied, unhappily married parents and his curiously mean little sister, Booper.
Teddy is not classically good-looking but “his face, just as it was, carried the impact, however oblique and slow-traveling, of real beauty.”
As the story opens, Teddy is standing on his father’s suitcase, looking out a porthole window, unable to see more than a tiny fraction of the watery world, but at peace with this radical limitation. His father is cross with him, outraged by the possible damage being done to the suitcase, but Teddy rises above this pettiness.
He gives his father “a look of inquiry, whole and pure.” His voice is “oddly and beautifully rough-cut.”
Teddy sees a load of orange peels being dumped out the window and begins to instinctively freelance a Zen description of the meaning of the peels in the ocean, and of his seeing them… Neither of his parents can be bothered to listen. Teddy mentions for the first time that he might die soon, and neither parent turns a hair.
Teddy writes in his diary, and we realize he is corresponding with a lot of professors. His polite, self-sufficient manner is in stark contrast with most of the others on the luxury liner.
Later, on deck, a university instructor, Bob Nicholson, comes along in a pretentious herring-bone jacket. (Salinger is ruthless in detailing the wardrobes of characters he loathes.) Nicholson spies Teddy, and invites himself to sit down with him, though Teddy is clearly occupied with his diary. Nicholson draws Teddy into conversation, delighted by the perfect weather on deck and by his own mild witticisms but unable to conceal his vast jealousy of Teddy’s mind and spiritual attainments.
Teddy remains calm, and shares with Nicholson a line from a Japanese poem “Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die.” He also mentions that he still has water in his ear from yesterday’s swim lesson, and that reincarnation is not a theory but a sturdy piece of Buddhist reality.
He also says his sister might push him into the swimming pool that morning when it’s empty, and he might fracture his skull and die — and that this would be no tragedy at all. The sorrow his parents felt would only show they were spiritually immature.
Teddy has predicted his death three times in the story, and in its last line we hear the high-pitched scream of a young girl. Has Booper pushed Teddy to his death, then screamed in guilt? Has Teddy pushed Booper to her death, perhaps jumping in with her so they can both be reincarnated? Has the water in Teddy’s ear caused him to lose his balance and fall in without being pushed?
Salinger leaves the ending open. In a result that did not surprise him, New Yorker readers didn’t much like his story. They felt there was too much mystery about its basic facts. But Salinger was proud of it; he made it the final piece in his book “Nine Stories.”
The story seems to powerfully show that rationality and fact-gathering is a false and silly way to see the world. It should be replaced by skilled meditation. What we CALL things is not what they ARE and, though this doesn’t matter much with trivial things, with profound things it matters enormously.
Material acquisition is a trap. Logic will only betray us; in becoming spiritual, it’s the first thing to get rid of. Throw it overboard with the orange peels.
Fawning over people is always a mistake. Trying to change people as we love them ruins what love might be.
All of this comes plainly and beautifully out of the mouth of a 10-year-old boy with a bad haircut.
Perhaps hardest of all to accept is Teddy’s clear-eyed insistence that emotions are a problem, and an unnecessary one, irrelevant to deep thinking and at war with spiritual growth. He tells us that emotion leads to a lot of spilled sentiment, and when the going gets hard, sentiment is notoriously unreliable.
Teddy seems to be J.D. Salinger himself, telling us ‘Rationality is wrong.’ And in the story, Salinger makes a pretty convincing case. You read that and start to think ‘If Salinger’s right, we’ve wasted a hell of a lot of time, investing our thoughts and designs in a rational view of things, and openly showing our emotions.’
Salinger seems to be saying, ‘We well-off Americans are floating in a giant ocean we don’t understand. University intellectuals are vastly overrated. Repellant people around us are meaningless. The moronic questions of the media are irrelevant. The urge to go on living as long as possible is foolish. We’ve all died thousands of times already.’
Salinger implies we should all be like Teddy, studiously ignoring the unenlightened, the jealous, and the hateful; maintaining equanimity on this long, strange voyage of life, and eagerly looking forward to our own death.