by David Stromberg
How do we read reality in light of the stories that shaped us before we knew how to read them critically?
It happened to be that I reread Salinger's "Perfect Day for Bananafish" – which I remembered as being a story about a couple’s trip to a hotel on the beach at the end of which the man kills himself – on the very same day that my wife and I went to spend a weekend at a seaside hotel.
I was reading the story for the first time in nearly twenty years – and what surprised me most was that I’d entirely blocked out the section in which the man converses with a four-year-old girl and goes with her into the water. Reading it now, I vaguely recalled registering the inappropriateness of their interaction, but also feeling what others have said – that it’s ambiguous, that only perverse people interpret bananafish perversely, that it’s really a story about the difficulty of reconciling childhood innocence with the demands of adulthood. Now I could no longer read the story this way. It was, I felt, scandalous.
It wasn’t the situation that did it – it was the images. The sausaged towel around the man’s eyes, the girl’s living in the town of Whirly Wood – the word wood is repeated four times in the span of half a page – the candles that she likes to chew, the delicate . . . blades of her back. Not to mention the bananafish, which like to swim into a hole, behave like pigs, gorge themselves until they’re fat, and have habits that are very peculiar. The man says these words – very peculiar – just as the narrator tells us that the water was not quite up to his chest, which is to say, above his torso. A wave appears, soaking the girl’s hair, and as it passes she says she saw a bananafish. It’s difficult to quote the narrator’s words just before this happens without feeling a little gross: her scream was full of pleasure. The man kisses her wet feet – while the owner of the feet protests. Out of the water, she runs off without regret. The man, for his part, walks back to the hotel carrying the slimy wet rubber tube – going up to his room, in the narrator's words, to put a bullet through his right temple.
There’s much in the story to shock a first-time reader, not least of which being the man’s decision to blast open his skull on the bed next to his wife, who could only have been scared to death by the sound of the gunshot, waking to the sight of bits of flesh and bone all over the room, maybe even on her. This probably shocked me the first time I read the story – but it wasn’t what bothered me now. I also wasn’t especially invested in the possibility that the man shot himself out of guilt for exposing himself to a little girl, since, if anything, it was his flirtation with the possibility that seemed to provide him enough proof for what he felt anyway: that he deserves to die. I wasn’t even particularly interested in the idea that Salinger – who was known for writing letters to teenage girls later in his life – had exposed some sort of hidden pedophiliac tendency in the story, for the simple reason that the story hid very little, and went to great lengths to insinuate as much as possible.
I was bothered by something else. I just couldn’t understand why Salinger had gone out of his way, in 1948, to write a story about a thirty-something man’s sexualized interaction with a little girl – and then published it in a venue as prominent as The New Yorker. What was he trying to get us to talk about? What was behind this stunt?
As we drove there, my wife asked me whether I was looking forward to our weekend on the beach. I said that I was feeling a little apprehensive. I told her about the story I’d read and the strange images I couldn’t get out of my head. What I didn’t say, but what I kept thinking as we drove down to the beach, was that I didn’t like the idea that life imitated art.
/
Maybe it was the crack in the bed, or maybe it was the bright sea sun, but for some reason we didn't sleep as well as we’d hoped. After coffee we went out onto the hotel terrace to read. I'd brought a new book with me, Joseph Roth's Weights and Measure, but I just couldn't focus. I looked up from the book at my wife, who was reading Masha Gessen's book on Birobidzhan, and said to her, "I just can't stop thinking about Salinger. How is it possible that no one ever mentioned anything about the story being so creepy? Forget that the man is having an intimate conversation with a four-year-old girl, that's obvious, but I’ve never heard anyone mention anything about the narrator’s words. Sasuaged. Yuck. Hole. What's wrong with us? How did we miss this?"
She'd put her book down in order to listen and then asked me why it bothered me so much.
"Because we missed it," I said. "As a culture. We missed this extremely obvious – this very-very-out-in-the-open – thing. I'm almost forty years old," I said, "and this is the first time I'm reading the story in such a graphic way."
"Are you sure people missed it?" she asked. "Has no one ever written anything about this?"
"I never heard anyone talk about it that way," I said, "but I'll look it up."
My wife went back to her book and I started googling. I googled Salinger bananafish penis and waited for the results. I was using a phone, so the text was a little small, but I opened up a few links in order to see what I could. No scholarly articles appeared in the search but there were about six or seven sites that discussed the possibility that bananafish was a phallus. One said bananafish is an "obvious metaphor for his penis," another that "bananas are a go-to phallic image," and a third asked directly: "Does bananafish allude to his greedy penis which is clearly beyond his control?" Another said the story's "utter transparency as a pedophile story is probably why no one (that I know of) has ever mentioned it before. It's just so in your face." I was partly relieved. There were others out there who were asking the same questions that I was asking – and having the strange feeling that "no one" ever really talked about this aspect of the story. But these kinds of questions, which should have resulted in many more search results, were also obviously not part of the public consensus.
Then there were the defenders. One, referencing the man’s suicide, said that it’s only "cynics who think he did it from remorse after exposing his penis underwater to his angelic interlocutor." Another took a more practical approach: "Sybil is facing outwards, towards the ocean, and Seymour is behind her. So that scenario doesn't work." And a high-school paper, written ten years ago by a certain Lauren, put it in even stronger terms: "why does our society automatically pin the cause of this behavior on a societal sexual taboo? Have we as a nation become so desensitized to illicit sexual behavior that we instinctively deem this the reason behind every action?" She, too, had a point. Do we see these kinds of behaviors behind every action that looks strange to us – and, perhaps more to the point, is that wrong?
People on the internet were having a conversation, not always coordinated, about “Bananafish” having sexual elements that were relatively clearly appropriate. But what about scholars?
After a little more searching I came across an article with the subtitle: "Jerome David Salinger, author of Lolita." Its author noted that Nabokov had graded all stories in a New Yorker collection, and reserved an A+ only for himself and Salinger, both of whom had published tales of what she calls child-brides in 1948. She then quotes another academic who put forth a theory that various autobiographical innuendos suggest Nabokov was molested by a relative he calls Uncle Ruka – so that the Dolores Haze of Lolita is actually a gender-reversed Nabokov, while Humbert Humbert is a version of his uncle. I'm not here to postulate on the accuracy of this theory. But, from this perspective, it seems interesting that Nabokov shortened his uncle’s name, Vasiliy Rukavishnikov, to Uncle Ruka – which, translated into English, would be Uncle Hand. And hands, when considered from this perspective, are anything but innocent.
As I read this article, I thought, again, about the girl in "Bananafish" and did a gender-reversal on her. What if she were a version of Salinger and the man a version of someone who showed him his bananafish?
I went back and googled Salinger sexual abuse. There were many results – mostly around Salinger's role in first writing letters, and later developing real-life romances, with teenage girls, some before and some after the legal age of consent. This was disturbing – but it wasn't new. Allegations of his misbehavior had been around since I’d read "Bananafish" twenty years ago, and very few people, regardless of their opinion of his writing, still considered Salinger to be anything other than a weirdo. So my surprise wasn't really about Salinger the man. It was about "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and how our culture seemed to have missed the conversation around sexual abuse that it should have engendered seventy years ago.
And then I found an anonymous blog post titled "The Secret Rape of Holden Caulfield." The entry describes not only the scattered innuendos but also the systematic way that child sexual abuse is discussed and thematized in Salinger's most-read book. The analysis is powerful in that it traces this possibility throughout the entire span of the novel before concluding that Holden "is a teenager whose psychology and personality have been tragically damaged by pedophilia and our tendency to condemn those who expose uncomfortable truths." He ends by suggesting that we should read Catcher in the Rye "as an example of how teachers and other trusted adults can manipulate children into madness."
I read this line – and then I started crying.
/
My wife noticed I was crying and put down her book. She sat next to me and hugged me – asking what was wrong. I put my phone down but I couldn't say anything. I could just barely whisper, "We missed the whole thing. We missed the whole thing."
"What?" she asked. "What did we miss?"
I still had tears in my eyes but I was starting to regain some composure. I waited a few more moments, took some deep breaths, and kissed her hand.
"The pain, the abuse," I said when I could speak again. "We missed everything. "
She picked up the phone and saw the article. And then she nodded in understanding.
"Let's get out of here," she said, "and go on a walk. I heard some people saying they were going to Apollonia – some kind of Crusader-era fortress nearby. Let's go check it out."
I nodded back.
"Let's do that," I said.
/
I have no desire to save Salinger from judgment, but I do believe that understanding him can help us understand the damage he might have caused. Salinger gave us a chance to examine the consciousness of abuse – the way the mind and heart function after emotional torture of one sort or another. Why am I so sure of this? Because I, too, am a survivor of abuse. Except that, in my case, I don't even know who or what it was.
I have no memory, no image, of what happened. But in recent years I’ve become aware of a pain – which I apparently felt as a child and managed to bury for about thirty years – as part of what's called re-experiencing, a kind of regressive sensation in which your consciousness returns to the time of abuse and you are, suddenly, caught in what are sometimes called emotional flashbacks. My wife has come to accept that there's little that she, or anyone, can do about this sensation – especially since, in my case, it’s an amnesiac mystery. Which doesn't make it any less real.
So her suggestion to go to Apollonia was perhaps the best thing she could have done: get out of the world of books, the world of words, and enter the world of buildings, ruins, and history. The ancient Persian-Hellinistic-Roman-Arab-Crusader-Mamluk-Ottoman-British-Israeli site was just big enough and just varied enough to give an unexpected foray into local history – and to remind us that we live in a land of conflict that has been that way for many thousands of years. Sure, it's a history of devastation and war, but it's also a real place with beautiful views of the beach, wild spring flowers blooming, fresh sea air blowing in straight from the Mediterranean.
We talked about all kinds of things – and I admitted how nice it was, despite my grumbling, to get away and see the blue waters, to feel the sea breeze, and experience the heat of the sun on our faces. At some point, we turned back and headed to the car. It was almost Shabbat.
/
The trip had done what it was supposed to do – I managed not to think about Salinger for a while – but as soon as we got back to the room, and I saw the beach below, I felt I was back inside "Bananafish." I looked down from our fourth-floor balcony and saw all those people – women and men, girls and boys – and I thought about all the Seymours that could be down there, and how I, too, just by being near the beach, could be seen as a Seymour. It was the last thing I wanted and yet I couldn't deny that, from the outside, anyone could be anything, and who knew what kinds of intentions people hid deep inside? We all have the potential for evil in us – and it only gets more powerful the more we try to deny this simple fact.
After showering and lighting candles, we went to dinner, finding a table for two on a platform at the end of the room – the closest we could get to having a quiet dinner alone. My wife made the Friday evening blessing on the wine, we tasted it, and then went to do our ritual hand-washing became coming back and breaking bread, over which I said the blessing. A young waiter, standing just behind us, said in Hebrew that he’d never heard the wine prayer sung that way. My wife said it was a family’s tradition – that her father had sung it that way and that his father sang it that way and probably his father before him. The waiter smiled.
We went over to the buffet, put food on our plates, and came back. I gestured for the waiter in order to order some wine – my wife asked for a white, I asked for a rose – and he left, returning with our glasses. I asked him where he was from and he said he grew up way up north, in Kiryat Shmona, but that he was a student at the local college, where he focused on computer science. My wife asked him what happened to the uneaten food – whether it was given to employees to take home. He said employees were allowed to eat the food but that regulations made it illegal for anyone to take food away. She asked whether the hotel worked with any organization that picked up uneaten food for the needy. He said he thought they did but that he really didn't know because this was his first day on the job – and, he added with a smile, probably his last. We asked him why and he said it was obvious: he couldn't bring himself to spend his nights asking people whether they were done with their plates. He needed the money, and nothing was easier than getting this job, but he just couldn't do it another day.
I nodded and noted that he was the first Hebrew-speaking waiter we'd seen since arriving the night before – everyone else being either Russian-speaking or Arab-speaking. I told him that I spoke Russian, too, and that it made it awkward to overhear what people said to each other when they thought no one understood. He pointed to a young man, about seventeen, who he said had come from Russia two months earlier, and was working while waiting to start his army service. I looked over at the young man – he was pale, thin, shy, almost afraid, like someone who didn't say much of anything to anyone. I had never before seen anyone who looked so much like how I’d imagined Bartleby. When he came over, later, to clear our plates, I smiled and said spasibo. He perked up, surprised to hear me speak Russian, and nodded shyly before going on to clear someone else's table.
/
The next day my wife and I skipped breakfast. I got us a couple of cups of coffee and we sat out on the hotel terrace reading. She was reading her book on Birobidzhan and I read Joseph Roth's Weights and Measures, a book about the disintegration of a young couple. But this story, at least, took place in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, well over a century ago, before the Second World War, before even the First World War, and the couple’s problems, though human problems with which anyone could relate on an elemental level, did not resonate as deeply and directly as did those of Salinger's characters – so that I was able, one hour after another, to read through the novella almost to the end.
But each time I put the book down and looked up at the beach – I again thought of Salinger. I didn’t know what, but something still bothered me about "Bananafish." Why had Salinger created a story in which a young man who is himself a danger to little girls recognizes this about himself – and does what Humbert Humbert should have done before touching Dolores Haze?
Time had come for lunch and my wife went into the dining hall to get us a plate from which to snack. And then, just as she left, I remembered Junot Diaz. Everyone had loved Junot Diaz as soon as he published his first stories, some of which appeared in the New Yorker too, and he became a sensation, like Salinger, as well as a literary voice for minorities in America. I’d met Diaz once, as a student, and found his poise no less impressive than his prose. Then last year, long after moving to Jerusalem, I read about the controversy of his own confession in The New Yorker. He had been raped as a child, had never been able to cope with the fallout, and had hurt others in his attempt to hide from his own pain. I remember crying when I read that confession. I’d had an urge, then, to write to him and to say that I, too, had been abused, and that I, too, had probably hurt others. But then I read more and saw that not everyone was satisfied with how he'd handled his revelation, especially his decision to combine the abuse caused to him with the pain he'd caused others. Some considered it to be an attempt at avoiding responsibility for his own abuse. Others defended him. I didn't know myself what to make of it at the time but, now, almost a year after his confession appeared, I realized something I’d not seen then. Just like with Salinger, it was the pain in Diaz's writing that our culture seemed to have registered, but also missed – or at least not openly recognized, even though he'd put it all in the fiction. He’d revealed the whole thing in 2012: "I always wrote Yunior as being a survivor of sexual abuse,” he said about one of his characters in an interview. “He has been raped, too. The hint of this sexual abuse is something that's present in Drown and it is one of the great silences in Oscar Wao." Six years Junot Diaz sat with his pain without anyone in our culture asking whether the hint in his literature might be to something real that should be discussed about the lives of children. Six years Junot Diaz hurt others despite his fictional attempt to draw attention to his rape which, bringing him critical attention and accolades, failed to recognize the pain he was passing on to others.
Junot Diaz's ability to transform pain into literature was rewarded, yet his pain – which perhaps drove his writing – remained unacknowledged. But Diaz, unlike Salinger, was still alive, and able, despite everything, to reveal what was likely the post painful part of his own childhood. Even if it did not excuse the pain he caused others, at least, in his next book, he would not need to hint about rape.
/
After lunch, I went back to reading Weights and Measures. It was so beautiful out – cool, sunny, breezy – that my wife and I stayed on the hotel terrace for the rest of the day, reading. I finished the book. It was sad, but also powerful, and it filled me with hope to see someone turn desolation into such fine writing.
"A good book," I told my wife as I set it down. "Depressing."
"You wouldn't read any other kind," she said.
I smiled.
"But it's not just depressing," I said. "It's also good."
I got up to get myself another cup of coffee and asked her whether she wanted anything. She asked for herbal tea. I went into the dining hall and over to the hot beverages. As I walked out with our drinks in hand, I noticed the Russian-speaking teenager I'd seen before. This time he came over to me and asked who I was. I told him I taught literature in Jerusalem. He said I seemed different from the other people at the hotel. I asked him how, and he said he couldn't say, that I just seemed different. I asked him where he was from, he said that he'd been born in Israel, but that he’d left at the age of five and grown up in Russia, first in Krasnodar and later in St. Petersburg. I asked him where he lived now and he said he'd found a room in a dormitory in Tel Aviv. I asked him what he was planning to do and he said he was waiting to start his army service – hoping to become a computer programmer. The conversation, stunted and awkward from the beginning, had reached its end. I had nothing else to say to him and he, it seemed, had nothing to say to me either. He was called by his boss to clear someone's table and as I smiled, about to say goodbye, he leaned over and asked, quietly, "Do you have any work?"
I was stunned. How could I not have seen that someone in his position, alone and vulnerable, would look to another man, who went out of his way to smile at him, for more than moral support? I’d missed the whole thing.
"I don't," I said to him, feeling rather powerless. "I don't have any work."
He nodded, disappointed, and left without saying another word. Not even goodbye.
I went out, sad, because I'd seen his pain – the loneliness of immigration – but I hadn't been able to recognize what he needed, which was a way to earn some money, and maybe, beyond that, a friend on whom he could depend. All weekend long, I'd been inside "Bananafish," but I now found myself in Dostoevsky's "Dream of a Ridiculous Man" – where a desolate man, walking home deciding to shoot himself, is approached by a young girl asking for help. His first instinct is to brush her away, but when he gets home, he agonizes over his dismissal of someone so needy – having a series of strange dreams. His guilt reaches such heights that, when he wakes, he resolves to find her, to help her, to help others – convinced, suddenly, that humanity can be good.
I turned around but no longer saw the young man. I wanted to go looking for him – but then I caught myself. He wasn’t Dostoevsky’s little girl. He wasn’t even Bartleby. He was just a young man looking for work – of which I had none to offer.
I went back out onto the terrace, feeling a little like Bartleby myself, and put our mugs down on the table. I settled down next to my wife, kissed her, and together we watched the afternoon sun sink slowly into the sea.
This piece is grounded in several related speculations: What happens when our perception of reality blurs with our literary perception? How do we read reality in light of the stories that shaped us before we knew how to read them critically? Or, in the most abstract sense, how does our naive or preconscious self influence our conscious life even after we have awakened to the need for critique? And, finally, when and how does intentionality in life – particularly our striving for integrity – get shaken by our personal trauma, which can sometimes threaten our faith in ourselves or in others? And both the ability and need to speculate on these issues comes, in this piece, directly from the confluence between going to a seaside hotel with one's partner for the weekend just after reading a story about a couple at a hotel on the beach. The dwelling in the real-world locale is coincident with the dwelling in the story, and the two can no longer be separated – it's a double-dwelling in which each influences the other. The story suddenly takes on a physical aspect while reality turns literary – and what appears from the shadows of unprocessed emotion is pain. In dwelling, we are able to slowly separate between the sources of past pain and the reality in which we are now located, making it possible to more clearly see the people around us.
—
David Stromberg is a writer, translator, and literary scholar based in Jerusalem. He is the author of four cartoon collections, including BADDIES (Melville House, 2009), and two critical studies, Narrative Faith (U Del Press, 2018) and IDIOT LOVE (Palgrave, 2020). His fiction has appeared in Ambit, Atticus Review, and KGB Bar Lit, and his translations in The New Yorker, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Lapham’s Quarterly. His nonfiction has appeared in The American Scholar, Literary Matters, Entropy, and Public Seminar, which published a series of personal essays about growing up on the ethnic and cultural margins of Los Angeles.