Are your school days out of sight? When you took King Wishard and Math, what's your favorite Fahrenheit? How sour are the grapes of wrath? Do you need a challenger? Poor disgusting challenger! Do you love the ridden word? What happened to the mockingbird? Our show is just beginning, so find a place to sit. These questions will be on the test its time for Sophomore Lit.
Welcome back to Sophomore Lit where we reread your 10th grade reading list. I'm John McCoy, and with me is returning co-host Jason Snell. Hi John, listeners to the incomparable need no introduction, but why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself anyway? Sure, so I run the incomparable network of which this podcast is on and do a podcast, the Mother Ship incomparable podcast. In another life, I am also a technology journalist and podcaster at 6colors.com and really FM.
I am excited to be back here for I don't know like the fifth time. Once again, we've managed to find a work of literature that I actually read as an assignment in high school, which is very exciting for me. This time we are doing a perfect day for Banana Fish by JD Snellenger originally published in the New Yorker Wayback in 1948. So tell me what your history is with this story.
I don't know which grade I'm going to guess this was, believe it or not, I think this was in Mr. Duggan's sophomore English class at Sonora High School in 1986 that we read this. I have I remember it beginning, I think we were given like a photocopy, right? Like a like a stapled together photocopy sheet that was handed out to the class, you know, as a reader of short stories. We were probably being encouraged as part of that class to probably write a short story of our own something like that.
But my recollection, I know I read it for sure. It's possible that it was in my junior year, but I absolutely remember sitting in the humanities building at Sonora High School in Sonora, California and reading a tale of the East Coast, a tale of New Yorkers in Miami that was entirely foreign to me as a as a Californian. But yeah, my guess is some more year also because that's I think that's when we read Catcher in the Rye. So it wouldn't surprise me if all the Snellenger came then.
This is the first time I've actually read this story, although I've I've heard its title quite often. As I was saying to you earlier, there's a very funny joke and Bojack Horseman that only makes sense if you know this title. And I leave it to I leave it to the listeners to find that joke. You'll know it when you see it.
But I was talking to my wife earlier in the evening and I was saying when I was growing up in the 1970s, I was hanging out, you know, in my parents house, my parents are academics, they would hang out with academics. It seemed like every home I went to had a copy of nine stories by JD Snellenger. I remember that cover of that paperback, they had that and they had Franny and Zoe, which is his other compilation of two stories.
And I was I was saying there must have been something about Snellenger and that generation that my my parents are technically the silent generation. They're right up the right before the boom, but it seems like mine too every boomer out there had this book. You know, they and they also had a copy. I don't know why of under milkwood. I don't know if that's your experience, but this is my experience grow. You know, probably because I grow up amongst a bunch of liberal elites, I guess.
I was going to say growing up in I mean, you were you were in the Midwest, but in a college town. I grew up in a place where I mean most of my friends were the the kids of the professional people in the town, but they were you could count us on two hands, probably the, the, you know, the reporters kid and the doctors kid and the the priests kid. And I like you and the dentist kid and the orthodontist kid. I was the orthodontist kid. I mean, that's just sort of how it was.
So no, we don't have that. Although I have always felt like, Salinger in particular. And as I've grown up and and learn more over the years, it does feel very much like this is the the fact that he was in the New Yorker. The fact that the kinds of subjects that he often wrote about it, it always feels super eastern elite. Kind of like that is the world that he was writing about at least to a certain degree and was appreciated by right.
Being all those pieces in the New Yorker, which apparently according to what I read about this story, this is the story that bonded him to the New Yorker where apparently after this, he was like, everything I read, it's put, it's going in the New Yorker, which is also kind of interesting. Yeah, this was the story that kind of made JD Salinger. Apparently he, you know, I, I did my reading of Wikipedia as well. Yep. Everybody else can check it out. It's the IMDB trivia of literature podcasts.
You know, he he published apparently on and off, but it wasn't until this story came along. And this story was something of a sensation. They mentioned that the editors of the New Yorker liked the writing style, they liked the dialogue, but they found the story absolutely inscrutable. Like they couldn't figure out what the heck the story was supposed to be about. So they apparently Salinger worked with them and changed the story. I don't know how much he changed
because it is still a very obtuse story. It sounds like what they did, and we can talk about, I mean, it's a 4,000 worth story. So get a podcast out of it anyway we can. But it sounds like what the editorial feedback to him was was essentially take one step back in the story. Basically like give us a little bit of context for what we're seeing with the main character who is Seymour Glass, who I, the thing that stuck with me through the years, through the 40 years since
I read this story is the little girl saying Seymour Glass. Seymour Glass. But anyway, he's part of the Glass family, which ended up being used in all sorts of different works by Salinger. And and their feedback was basically like, who is this guy? Give us a little more context about what happens. And so there's one, you know, this essentially two or two and a half scene, short story, two scene short story gets an extra scene that puts without seeing him puts him in
context so you know who he is a little bit, right? You're right. It's still 4,000 words. It's still oblique. But I get it. I get it. It's just like it's just seeing his wife in the hotel room on the phone or mother like, oh, okay, like just it's just enough, I think. So that's I thought a pretty good note. Yeah, it was good. It was a good note. This story opens with Seymour's wife talking on the phone to her mom. So we get all these things, a numerated for us that this is a
couple. They're from the Northeast. They're coming down here to Florida. And the wife is making reference to problems that Seymour is having. Apparently, anger management problems, a problem, perhaps crashing a car. Again, everything is dealt with very obliquely. And then I admire this about Salinger because writing exposition is hard. And he somehow gets through it in a way that seems more natural than it ought to be given the amount of information that gets dumped in this
one phone call. Yeah, it's, I mean, Salinger, nobody out there needs to be told, I suppose. Like alert, everybody, it's 2024 alert, everybody, JD Salinger, in addition to being a recluse, was a really great writer. He's just a great writer. And I was struck again. I have not read a lot of his stuff. And I remember reading Catcher in the Rine thinking, oh, you know, this, he's really good. And this is, I think, so well written and well drawn and all the details
are interesting. And I love the details of what's murial, right, on the phone with her mother and the fact that what's clear is her mother fears for her daughter because something's wrong with her daughter's husband. And then yeah, the implication is that he's, you know, you didn't let him drive, did you? I'm worried he's going to, he's going to do something like that, like that time. It's implied the time he tried to run off the road and into a tree and maybe kill himself.
It starts out reading, at least I started out reading it as worried about him being violent to her, but it becomes sort of as it resolves, it's more like she might be hurt in his impulse to hurt himself. And then we get that additional piece of information that he was in the war. And, to me, that's what, that's what you need to carry. The details are interesting, but that's what you need to carry into the next scene is a Seymour Glass is a deeply, deeply troubled man who came
back from war and is, World War II and is broken. And nobody is trying to fix him apparently, just they said, let's send him off to Miami. He'll be fine. And his wife is sitting in the hotel room, you know, smoking cigarettes, doing her nails, waiting for a phone call to her mom and, and reading women's magazines while her husband who is troubled is just out on the beach, I guess, befriending the local children. I guess the implication is this is a sort of a resort
that has a limited number of people here. They've kind of gotten to know each other over the course of a few days. We don't know how long he's been down here, but she says that he's out playing the piano every night. He's, we later, when Seymour talks to civil, the young girl he befriends. She obviously has met him before because she's saying his name over and over again. And she's apparently jealous of the fact that another little girl has sat, sat, sat on the piano, bench.
So it's, it reminds me of a sort of like a rest cure or sort of idea. Miriel doesn't seem particularly concerned. She's presented as kind of self-absorbed. You know, yeah, she's, she's doing her nails as this opens and she's, she's going to read her what sounds like a cosmopolitan magazine, although cosmopolitan as we know it didn't exist at this point. Yeah, this is 48. This is three years after the war. So it is a story about a guy who saw some stuff. And I don't think
people had a very strong understanding of the psychology of this. After World War I, there was the term shell shock that was used. And then after World War II, they talked about battle fatigue. Today, we call it post-traumatic stress disorder, but something about the way of Giskolea battle fatigue seems like it's like nothing. It's like saying, you know, yeah, he's tired,
let him let him go off and and rest. Soundshers is dealing with stuff that I don't even know that he himself has the vocabulary to talk about, you know, because Miriel on the phone mentions that there's a psychiatrist in the hotel hotel. She seems very dismissive of like like he, she said he talked to her like nothing came of it. This is also not that long after psychoanalysis is even a thing.
It doesn't get to America until probably the late 30s. So here it is. It's like a so I don't know that Soundshers knew what he was talking about in a way, but there was since I think he had a very great intuitive sense about what he was talking about. Well, yeah, and the story of the banana fish, I mean, the story that he tells a simple is about these, which he's, you know, making up as he goes to tell us to weave a tail, spin a tail for this little girl that he's chatting with on the beach
is, and it's sweet, you know, but he does say there are these fish, there are banana fish. It's perfect day to see them. And what happens is they lead a tragic life. They swim into a hole where there's a lot of bananas and they eat too many bananas so they can't get out of the hole and they die and they can't help it. They just, it's terrible and they die. And like, I mean, of all the stories to tell the little girl, and he says, I hate to tell you, but they die. But like, this is the point
where my English teacher would say, understand, it's like these fish are doomed. They go here and they're unable to get out and they're trapped and they're, it is, it is, you know, fundamentally this hopeless self-defeating, self-destructive impossible to resist urge of the fish. And I don't know, I mean, it's, it's a, this is one of the classic stories also in just in the sense that you're
saying, what am I seeing here? Until the last line at which point he, you know, he returns to the hotel and is not, is sort of acts weird and paranoid in the elevator and goes back in his room and kills himself. In the lab with the, as his wife is sleeping in the, in the other bed in the two bed hotel room, he just uploads his pranks out and that's the end. And, and so you're left to rewind. And I
think that's the intent, right? You're left to rewind and consider, were there any signs? I think that that's part of it is this, you know, as a, a suicide, where it's like, we knew he was troubled, but he seemed fine that day. And then this happened and then his conversation with a little girl, who will, which will never be recounted to anybody, right? Because it's just nonsense with this little girl, where he seems to be, you know, pouring out his heart a little bit about being, you know,
hopelessly trapped and ruined. Let's talk a little bit about this conversation he has with the, the, the, the civil on the beach. Because when I was reading it through, I was really, really uncomfortable. We have this middle aged guy who is troubled, um, alone on a beach with this little girl. Mhm. In one of the strangest, creepiest things, the, the, the narrator who never comments on anything says she's wearing a two-piece bathing suit. But one piece of that will,
won't be necessary for the next 10 years. Right. J.A.S. Allinger, I know you're, you're gone, you can't hear me. That, that, that line really creeped me out. So I guess she's what, like, nine or ten or something like that. Maybe even younger. At one point, he, he kisses her on the, on the, on the foot foot. Um, he seems to be very concerned about feet. Actually, he, when he comes back to the hotel, he's very upset because he thinks someone's looking at his feet.
Um, now I know that I am coming to this, uh, from my perspective where I am hardwired to, uh, to look with some, uh, suspicion on, uh, interactions between adults and children, particularly interactions between adult men and, uh, and little girls. I think, as I read it through, that Salon's point is more that Seymour is able to relate to civil because he's able to be silly with her. He's able to be fantastic with her. He's able to indulge in fantasy. He finds that
conversation easy. And, and I think it's met innocently, but, but what did you think? Yeah. I agree completely. I think it is, he's, he's been broken and he doesn't know how to live in the world and that the only way he can interact with anyone apparently is with this little girl and the little girl that, what he was playing the piano and, and like, on a level of
sort of fantastic and absurd things that he's able to say. Although he just point out that, that she was mean to the dog, which he doesn't, a very nice, a very nice way because he says, you know, I'll tell you what Sharon Lipschutz doesn't do is poke at that little dog. Uh, and it's like, but, but in general, he's just, it's absurd. Everything she says he has a counter for, which I think is sweet. She says, I like to chew candles because she has about wax and he's like, who doesn't?
Um, and he just doesn't, he, so I think that this is a refuge for him. He is a sad, uh, falling apart person who's completely broken and that this is like, literally the only um, way he can relate to anybody in the world is sort of how I read it. As you say, when you get to the end of the story and he takes his own life, it, it does, it is one of those, those actions by an author that makes you want to then go back and try to put the pieces together. Right.
So it's sort of the sixth sense approach of writing where you, you know, you, you, you, you, you start to think, did the author play fair with me? Did the author give me the clues that I needed? And I can see why without that opening section with his wife on the phone, you would feel completely at sea and perhaps um, not the, the, the, the, the death would seem random to you rather than
some sort of a, a tragic ending. Yeah, I also, I have another question. Um, um, related is there's that moment where the, the wife says, you know, see more doesn't want people looking at his tattoo and the mother says, did he get one in the army and she says no mother? And I had that thought, which is like, is that implying perhaps that he was taking prisoner and put in a concentration camp? Because it might be a kind of tattoo you don't get in the army.
Um, and that would be another thing on the pile of why is he so destroyed as a person? It's a really good idea. I, I would grant that that could be something that, uh, it might be not real and imagined, right? Like, I don't know. That's the thing is, the, the one thing I know about soundger is he hated to explain anything. Yeah. He refused to explain anything and he didn't like writing that he felt was too, uh, laden with, uh, meaning like obvious, obvious open meaning.
He was kind of an intuitive writer. Maybe he had a meaning in mind when he wrote this, maybe not. Maybe this was something that he followed his guts. But, uh, because of that, the experience of reading this can be, I think, a little bit bewildering. And, sure, that's, I think entirely the point. I, I will say that the, um, his father was one of the first people in one of the concentration camps. And so it's possible, but it's again, only speculation because, and I,
I get it. I mean, I, I, not revealing your tricks, um, leaving it open to interpretation. You know, David Chase always gets asked what happens to Tony soprano after the last frame of the sopranos. And he's like, whatever you want, because the show is over, right? Like, that's the answer is I'm not telling you because there's no, ultimately there's no answer in the text. And therefore, there's no answer. It's, it's for you to decide. And I, I don't mind,
I don't mind that. And I kind of, it is kind of fun, right? It's only 4,000 words to go back through the 4,000 words when you're done and say, well, what do we know about Cymor? Why would he do this? But like I said, I think part of it is the intent of the author is I think having, I've never had a close person to me commit suicide, but I have been around a lot of them,
especially when I was in high school, actually, we had a rash of them. Um, and this comes up a lot, which is the rewinding through recent history, trying to see if you can understand why it just, why it happened. And I felt like reading the story, I actually felt that same effect, which is why did he, why did he do it? Was he acting strangely? He, the last person he talked to was this little girl. Let's look at that conversation. Can we glean any meaning from it? And I actually
don't know if Salinger intends for us to try. And, and, and I don't suspect he intends for us to succeed, right? I think perhaps it's even the failure is part of the intent. I don't know. You know, before reading this, I had of course red, uh, catch on the rye. And when you read that book, Holden Caulfield is a terribly chatty narrator who is going to tell you everything that's going on through his mind. He's going to try to, he's going to try to explain scenes and motivations as he
sees them to the reader. Now he is, uh, unreliable in that one, he doesn't always aware of his own motivations. And two, he doesn't always understand what other people are doing or why they're doing it. And he may, he may project bad intent on them. But he, he's a, he's constantly going to be in your ear, telling you what he thinks. This is a completely different story. There's, this is not a first person story. There's a third person story. And other than the, the narrator has strange opinions
about little girls bathing suits, the narrator gives nothing. And the characters give almost nothing. So, so you're, you're, you're kind of left gasping for motivation here, right? Yes. Yeah. I'll say the thing about the bathing suit, I read that as being a little cynical and also, you know, whether you want to read it as how we dress little girls like they're grown up,
but they're not. But I think ultimately the purpose it serves in the story is just to make it clear that she's not somebody of a, a girl who is of interest to him or him interesting to her in any way like that. It's like it's a decade before she'll even fill out. It's sort of there, oh, it's like, no, this is a little girl. And, and yet you say like, why put it that way? But I could argue that the counter is why she dressed in the two-piece bathing suit. She's just a little girl.
But it's more, a little more oblique and a little more cynical than that, which is, yes, from our narrator who doesn't otherwise exude anything in this entire story. Salinger doesn't want to just come on and say, oh, she's seven years old. You know, if you read a lot of old stories from the the the fifties, you'll, you'll be shocked at the way that people get
introduced all the time. Like he walked into the room with his full six feet, two inches, yeah, the cold black hair, you know, they have to describe every little aspect of a character when they introduce them. You know, you can see that Salinger had an enormous effect on everyone who came after him. I can definitely see Raymond Carver in this story and all of the big post-war American male authors like Philoperoff or John Uptike. I can see in this. But you know, on the other
hand, Salinger is writing about the white male experience. The wife here is so unlikable in a way and the mom is not really a character. And when I think back to catch and the rye, you know, the the main female characters were the prostitutes or holdens younger sister. And again, an innocent in that case. The good female characters are the ones who are still children. And so, you know, maybe I'm being unfair. I should not try to
to base my opinions on these two works alone. But I there's a kind of, and I'll probably edit this all out when I don't know that I'm going to say something that makes me a sincere, but there's a kind of a post-war poor me kind of writing that I associate very strongly with people like Uptike and Roth. And that that's a little bit focused on how hard it is to be a guy. If that makes sense. And you seem skeptical. No, no. I think it is absolutely expected that a
white man in the mid 20th century is going to write about what is worrying for him. And it's about white men in the 20th century. And that just like the default chooses the default in a culture. That's not right. That's real dog bites man kind of stuff. Although you mentioned the wife. And yeah, I mean look, it's very easy to read this as that she brought her broken potentially dangerous to himself husband on vacation because she wanted a vacation. And they have not been together for
most of it. That the psychiatrist back home said he could be a danger. But that she's like, oh, there's a psychiatrist here. I talked to him at dinner. Well, I didn't really talk to him. His wife, as she goes off, his wife is awful. And I didn't like them. And it was too loud. So we really didn't say anything. I'm like, that's her answer to her mother saying, you know, does this man need help? You could read it that way. I don't know. I think it's interesting that she, she's,
yeah, like she's doing her own thing. And he's out there all alone. And they're not, they don't seem particularly connected, right? Like that is that is not the case. She and he are disconnected from each other. And she's paying attention to, you know, she's doing the stuff. It's almost like she's robotic in a way, right? She's reading a woman's magazine. She's doing her nails. She's sitting, smoking cigarettes looking out the window. And that's like all she's doing.
But it's not, I would say she's not portrayed as having a whole lot of an inner life or an inner turmoil of any sort, right? She's just kind of like hanging out in Biden time. Well, they, they, they literally live in different worlds. And that certainly was the case in this era of American history, socially, that man and women occupy different spheres. And if this is a story in some ways about, and it is about, about dealing with the trauma of war,
she literally cannot know what, what he went through. And he isn't going to tell her. He can't tell her. And that's, and that's part of the tragedy of the, of the whole story. Yeah, they're just connected. She's, well, like in reading it from the start, her confidence that Seymour is going to be okay can be read as supporting her husband. But he's not okay. And he he ends up killing himself. So she's either wrong or doesn't care when we get to that point. But
at first, she's sort of defending him. But is she really defending him to her mother? She's insisting, I think, I think bottom line is what she feels is that she doesn't feel threatened by Seymour. And that's all that, and that's the self-absorption, right? Like as far as she is concerned, he's not a danger to her and she wants a vacation. And so here they are. I have to admit that when I
read this through the first time, I was a little disappointed with the ending. And the reason is, it feels like a lot of books since the late 19th century in suicide, which, which was kind of a sort of a legitimate way to end your story. Like if you have a character who has suffered feet, who is who can see no way forward, that was kind of a go-to plot point. I feel like today,
hopefully, people are a little more cautious about approaching the subject. Because I think, first of all, I think people are a little bit more aware of things like depression or the things like trauma. If you have been around suicide in your life, you know how crushing and horrible that is for people, the survivors, and certainly must be crushing and horrible for the people who decide to take them on lives. But this kind of felt more like, oh, here's the end of the story.
Yeah. You know, it's the end of Anna Karenina. She's going to throw herself under the train. Sorry, sorry, just spoil Anna Karenina. Spoilanda Karenina. Yeah, I mean, it's a cliche. Now, I mean, leaving aside for a moment, the kind of the complexity of suicide and not making it, right? It feels like an easy exit for a story, especially since it's a story in your out, and you're never going to, you know, this world doesn't continue even though he did write more
stories about the glass family. That this is, it ends, you know, with a bang. I mean, it, but it is today, by today's standards, yeah, you look at it and you're like, it's the laziest. There was a movie or a TV show or something that had this as the shocking ending. And I thought, boo, right? Like it's like, it's just, it does feel lazy. I think in fact, in part because it was originally shocking and everybody did it to shock you. And now everybody rolls their eyes at that
because it's a cliche plus everything else about it. I'd like to be charitable here, at least in the sense that I think that that's what this is what the story is ultimately about is see more being broken and not being able to interact with anybody and that, that's when you get to that moment where he kills himself, you have to do the rewind and say, wait a second. Wait, why did
that happen? And, and I feel like I want to give Salazar credit for creating that feeling in me that I think is a thing that happens in cases of suicide where you start to sift through your own memories of the person and did I know and could I have seen and can anybody, can anybody really know that? And I think that there is an aspect of that and the, and the post-traumatic stress that, I mean, I think that's what the story is about. So I want to give him credit for that, but you're
right. Ending with a suicide as your big twist in your story is not generally, yeah, it feels like an old-fashioned and now cliched thing to do. Well, it's funny because on this podcast, one thing that happens often is people, myself and my guest will often say, oh, when I was a teenager, I didn't get this book or it just seemed like an assignment to me. You know, now I read it and it
affects me in some way. And I had kind of like the reverse experience with this story. I feel like if I had read it when I was a teenager, I would have liked it a lot because I was really into this sort of angsty, like, yeah, real stuff at the end. It's why they assign a challenger in high school. Well, I did read the catch from the rye and that one, as I recall, I had the experience of being a teenager who said, I don't understand this book. I don't understand why I have to follow this
character who I don't like. Reading it again as an adult, I'm like, of course, you don't, he's a difficult character. That's why you love him. You know, so anyway. But because this is a podcast and I try to give everything a lot of a strong chance, I read this story through again because you can read it through very, very quickly. And I think that as I read it more and more, I grew to like it more and more because his dialogue is just so intoxicating to me.
Yeah. The dialogue between Seymour and the little girl, I mean, it does go. There are some action in it. But like, it's a dialogue. That's what the story primarily is. Is this one conversation between a sad man and a little girl who's at the beach and having a good time. And he's having a good time talking to her really and having this sort of fabulous kind of conversation.
And it's real. It's so well done. Like just the art of that and the craft of that. It's really beautifully depicted, I would say, which I think it intended to contrast with what happens after. But that's what when I say he's a hell of a writer. Like, it's easy to read, but there's complexity there and his dialogue is really great. Any last thoughts before we close the book on poor Seymour? I would love to go up to JD Salinger's house and knock on his door and ask him all
about it, but he died. So he's not there anymore. I'm sure he would have welcomed us both 15 years ago, but not now, Alas. Thanks again to guest host Jason Snell. If you have an idea for a book, story, poem, or other reading to cover on a future episode, or a suggestion for a guest host, or if you simply like to say hi, you can write me at softmore.literature at gmail.com. I love to hear from listeners.
The song or lit theme song is by Malcolm Nygardt. This podcast is brought to you by the incomparable network. More funny smart podcasts are available at the incomparable.com. Okay, I think that will be it. Perfect. It's a perfect day for a podcast.