‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ by J. D. Salinger

I reread this one nearly every month. It’s hard to talk about it without falling into hyperbole; I already called it “the Great American Novel” in another interview, even though it’s just seven pages long. What I’ll say is this: in those seven pages, Salinger offers a strikingly comprehensive portrait of living—and loving someone—with mental health struggles, precisely PTSD in this case. Despite the intense subject matter (and tragic ending), it’s not all doom and gloom: Salinger gives us some amusing zingers like “Miss Spiritual Tramp of 1948” and “Sex Is Fun—Or Hell.” (Obligatory fun fact, since this is where two of my worlds collide: the band Blur, an oft-cited inspiration of mine, originally wanted to name themselves Seymour after this story’s protagonist.)

First published in The New Yorker, January 1948. Anthologized in 55 Short Stories from the New Yorker, Simon & Schuster 1949 and collected in Salinger’s Nine Stories, Little, Brown 1953

‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ by J.D. Salinger

Of course I first came to Salinger’s stories via The Catcher in the Rye, but whereas I have long stopped teaching that novel (it feels worn down now – overfamiliarity, or are there weaknesses in its DNA?), the stories are still fresh and often edgy. ‘For Esmé – with Love and Squalor’ is a heartbreaker. In the same collection ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ always grips a class. It provides lots of opportunities for voices when I’m reading it, especially the little girl Sibyl as she responds to the young man’s strange story of the fish who eat so many bananas they can’t get out of the ‘banana hole’. The shocking ending needs careful preparation in advance.

First published in The New Yorker, January 1948. Collected in Nine Stories, Little Brown 1953, sometimes titled For Esmé – with Love and Squalor, and Other Stories

‘Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes’ by J. D. Salinger

If ever a spoiler alert was needed, it is now. Because I am going to tell you about this absolutely supreme dialogue story and the unbeatable premise and twist. So avert your eyes now if you don’t want to know. The whole story is about a phone call. On one end, when the phone rings our guy leans across a woman in bed to pick it up. On the other end, it’s his good friend looking for his wife, whom he was expecting home from an event she went to earlier. It’s the same woman who is in the bed. The friends talk and talk and the other guy reminisces about how it was when he courted his wife and recites a short poem he gave her, written in her voice, containing the immortal line, “Pretty mouth and green my eyes”. Anyway, he’s a bit emotional but by the end so he wraps the call up and says something like “You know what, she just walked in.” [From memory.] I don’t think even Chekhov could beat that ending.

First published in The New Yorker, 1951. Collected in Nine Stories, Little, Brown & Co, 1953

‘The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls’ by J.D. Salinger

From the noble to the ignoble. I’ve chosen this not for its intriguing title or for its moving ending (even for a Salinger agnostic like myself) but because in order to access this story, you have to travel to Princeton University Library where you can only read it supervised after checking in behind closed doors. There’s something that interests me in things we cannot easily have and the attraction of the forbidden or just being tantalised but also how it’s essentially an illusory feeling. Anyways, for those of you who still like vaguely illicit things, someone posted a link to it here that I couldn’t possibly recommend clicking on.

Unpublished

‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ by J.D. Salinger

The way Salinger calibrates the different voices of the characters in this story from the nagging mother, to the bored young married daughter Muriel, to Muriel’s war-damaged husband Seymour, to Sybil, the child at the beach, always strikes me as masterful. Sybil, for example, says “my daddy’s coming tomorrow on a nairiplane” and “I like to chew candles.” Like any five-year-old would, she stomps on a sagging sandcastle as she runs down the beach. The tripartite structure of the story creates tension and serves the pace, and you have to read right through to the final phrase to know what happens to whom.

First published in The New Yorker, January 1948, and available online to subscribers here. Collected in Nine Stories, Little, Brown, 1953

‘Teddy’ by JD Salinger

There’s not a bum note in Salinger’s collection For Esme with Love and Squalor, but the closing story is the best. Set on a cruise ship, it centres around Teddy McArdle, a ten-year-old blessed with a universal wisdom far beyond his years. He rises above his sniping family’s emotional, easily riled American excesses, calmly musing on concepts of permanence, reality and reincarnation.

As the story gently leads us towards his 10:30am swimming lesson Teddy, we learn that he a cause célèbre among high ranking professors of religion and philosophy in various countries. Before this trip to Europe, he left some deeply ruffled feathers among an examination group in Boston. The tape of the occasion has been heard by a fellow traveller who corners Teddy, anxious to interrogate him on his views about life, God, death and existence.

‘I understand you left a pretty disturbed bunch–’
‘“Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die,”’ Teddy said suddenly. ‘“Along this road goes no one, this Autumn eve.”’
‘What was that?’ Nicholson asked, smiling. ‘Say that again.’
‘Those are two Japanese poems. They’re not full of a lot of emotional stuff,’ Teddy said.

The lightness with which Teddy embodies this enlightenment makes the impact of the final, inevitable scene – to which we’ve been inexorably drawn throughout – all the more devastating.

First published in The New Yorker, January 1953 and collected in Nine Stories, a.k.a. For Esmé – with Love and Squalor, Little, Brown/Penguin, 1953

‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ by JD Salinger

‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ by JD Salinger portrays a certain, quintessential 1950’s summer’s day: stifling Florida heat, a chic beachside hotel, a woman in a silk dressing-gown paints her nails, waiting for a long-distance New York call. A gossiping mother spreads sun cream lotion on her daughter’s back. Bathrobes are removed, martini’s drunk. It is “the perfect day for banana fish,” the main character Seymour informs a little girl, while they play in the waves. Yet, everyone talks, but no one is listening. Freud’s Unheimlich, the uncanny, permeates every page. Layers of chit-chat about sunburn, cruises and green dinner dresses, barely cover the sense of impending doom. Seymour, the main character, has just been released from military hospital with post-war trauma, he seems to be losing his mind. The familiar becomes unsettling, the banana fish disturbing. Something is deeply wrong. I first read this story over 25 years ago, and this terrible feeling of strangeness has stayed with me, a Hitchcockian atmosphere captures glimpses into the double of this perfect summer beach day, what is not quite there, what has been there: death, folly, greed and war.

First published in The New Yorker, January 1948, and available online here. Collected in Nine Stories, Little, Brown, 1953. Picked by Susanna Crossman, who is an Anglo-French writer. She has recent/upcoming work in Neue Rundschau (S. Fischer), We’ll Never Have Paris (Repeater Books), Berfrois and The Lonely Crowd. She regularly collaborates on international hybrid arts projects. Currently, she is showing the multi-lingual prose film, 360° of Morning, with screenings and events across Europe and USA. @crossmansusanna

‘The Laughing Man’ by JD Salinger

Many if not all of the stories I’ve chosen for this list are themselves about stories and storytelling, and the way in which such things operate within a person’s life. The young protagonist of ‘The Laughing Man’ is a nine-year-old member of an informal group called the Comanche Club, which meets every schoolday afternoon to play various sports under the watchful eye of their leader, the 22 or 23-year old law student The Chief. After each session, The Chief tells a long, improvised adventure story called The Laughing Man. (The transformation of The Laughing Man, and of The Chief, and of the protagonist, is what’s happening in the story, and all are woven together). I can’t imagine a more perfect argument for why stories matter than this story, this part especially: “It was a story that tended to sprawl all over the place, and yet it remained essentially portable. You could always take it home with you and reflect on it while sitting, say, in the outgoing water in the bathtub.”

Originally published in The New Yorker, March 1949, and included in Nine Stories, Little, Brown, 1953

‘For Esme – with Love and Squalor’, by JD Salinger

Whilst I’m on the mid-century Americans, here’s someone who wasn’t in the Granta book. The reason he isn’t is because at some point in the 1960s Salinger stopped giving permission for his stories to be anthologized. As a result I came to his collection For Esme with Love and Squalor (or Nine Stories, as it was in the US) late – a shame, because they are completely wonderful. The title story takes the form of an American soldier’s recollection of meeting a child, Esme, in a café whilst billeted in a rainy part of England just before D-Day. She asks him to write her a story that is ‘extremely squalid and moving’ and this, we understand, is that story. It has many of the Salinger tropes – a traumatised young man, a precocious child, a thick vein of melancholy as well as a dash of sentimentality. Cheever was reportedly jealous of Salinger and it’s easy to see why. As a writer it is difficult not to be both dismayed and joyful at the pure and apparently effortless talent on display.

First published in The New Yorker (1950), and collected in Nine Stories (the US title; elsewhere the collection takes its name from this story)