Story Time with Seymour Glass

I taught tenth graders once. I survived one year. Of the six classes in my charge, the one I enjoyed sometimes was the smallest: eleven kids. One tired Friday, they asked for a story, and I told them to gather around on the carpet like kindergarteners and listen to one of my favorites, J.D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”

And everything was fine as I read about Muriel Glass on the phone with her mother, and Seymour Glass on the beach with the little girl, Sybil. Everything was fine until I approached that final paragraph, when my heart rate jumped, and sweat poured out, as it occurred to me that I might be about to traumatize eleven kids. But I kept reading, and when Seymour put the bullet in his head, one girl, Elizabeth, crumpled on the floor.

It’s a story that gets under your skin because, in retrospect, you should have seen it coming. People who’ve lost loved ones to suicide will say the same: I should have seen it coming. Why didn’t I?

I wish I could absolve that guilt from anyone who feels it, but it strikes me as one form of a universal worry: I have not paid sufficient heed. I haven’t paid attention.

Salinger is a master of the multivalent, koan-like, almost mythic symbol: kings kept on the back row in a checkers game, an ocean full of bowling balls, a teenage boy catching children before they run off a ledge. In this story, of course, the symbol is a bananafish, which eats so many bananas it gets stuck in its feeding hole, and dies.

Ever since first encountering the story in my own high school days, I have wondered what Seymour’s bananas were. His experiences as a soldier in World War II? The superficialities of his wife and mother-in-law? Sheer depression?

As a teacher, I was depressed. My bananas were fatigue, and the apathy of students, and loneliness. But rather than follow Seymour’s example, I followed his author’s. I put my sadness on the page, and made a screenplay of it.

Out of that screenplay came a film, which went nowhere, except that a connection from the film got me the job I’ve had for five years now, a much better job, for me, than teaching was. It brought me to Houston, where I met my wife, and now we have a son almost six months old.

“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” taught me that when you take art to the darkest place, it becomes a place of light. It taught me, and still teaches me, to pay attention, to give heed to the small things that add up to the one short span we get to live.

Elizabeth, crumpled on the carpet, eventually got up, and years later sent me a poem she’d written about pain, devastation, and growing up. She, too, was paying attention. I had done something right, or the story had.