The short story begins in a Florida hotel room on a stiflingly hot day. A young woman – called “girl” throughout – is sitting in a chair. She is wearing nothing but a white silk dressing gown and reading an article entitled “Sex is Fun—or Hell.” The phone rings. It is a call from New York. The girl’s mother. Inquiring about the trip and, importantly, the girl’s husband. Is he acting funny? Did he try anything odd? Is he about to lose control? The last concern is cut off. The girl has had enough.
J.D. Salinger’s short story, “A Perfect Day for a Bananafish,” was first published in the New Yorker in 1948, three years after the end of World War II. While the story begins with an exchange between a mother and her daughter – a scene, I hasten to add, that is littered with sexual innuendo – the story soon shifts to what is happening just outside on the beach. There, a young man, the girl’s husband, is having a conversation with a three-year old girl named Sybil Carpenter. She has wandered away from her mother who is having cocktails. The exchange is icky. He teases her about her bathing suit and occasionally puts his hand on her ankle. Eventually, the young man tells her about bananafish, and the two make their way into the water where she mounts a floatie and lets him guide her about.
When prodded about what, exactly, is a bananafish, the young man says, “they swim into a hole where there’s lots of bananas” at which point they eat so much of them that they cannot swim out. The girl asks what happens next. The young man simply says they die. She exclaims, “I just saw one!” and then he kisses the arch of her foot, wades ashore, heads back up to the hotel room, and, Salinger writes, “fires a bullet through his right temple.”
The young man is named Seymour Glass, and he is a veteran of the war, and I will leave it to your imagination, dear listeners, what, exactly, the little girl spies beneath the surface of the water. It is almost certain that Salinger wants the minds of his readers to, as it were, “go there.” But what are we to make of this chain of events that leads to a suicide?
In Seymour Glass there is a curious mix of innocence and psychological damage. The war seemed to rob him of a moral compass, causing him to cross or, at least, consider crossing a serious line with a child but also a line with himself. Salinger’s prose describing Seymour Glass’s suicide is direct. As ordinary as scratching an itch. Why is Salinger’s treatment of this event seemingly so nonchalant? My grandmother once shared with me a story about her brother, Alvin. Before the war, he had jet black hair, but afterwards, it was white. He had been at the Battle of the Bulge. He had seen untold atrocities in combat. When he returned from the war and a crop duster would fly over, Alvin would dive beneath the nearest vehicle. Only my grampa could coax him out. When he got a cancer diagnosis around the same time that he discovered his wife’s infidelities, life grew to be too much. He would shoot himself. Alvin, according to my grandmother, explained himself very matter-of-factly on the front porch. What causes a person to be levelheaded or unsentimental about the horrific? Perhaps, like my great-uncle, it came down to reaching a limit. There was no more energy to bargain, no more will to fight on. Heaped upon him were so many bits of bad news, bad luck, experiences he could never forget that he saw only one way out. Like the person trying to carry too much, he let everything drop. In this case, that meant his life. In Seymour Glass’s case, that meant the same. Had America or the West or the world, for that matter, reached its limit after the largest war the world had ever fought? To be sure, over seventy-five years later, have we only gotten worse, numb as we are to violence? If so, then civilizational suicide could be around the next bend if we do nothing to, as it were, get help, correct course.