Jan
J. D. Salinger (1919-2010)
Posted by
Jerome David Salinger
January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010
The little girl on the plane
Who turned her doll’s head around
To look at me.
The above poem was written by J.D. Salinger for his second-most-famous-character, Seymour Glass, who, we are told by his brother, Buddy, in Seymour—An Introduction (pp 126-7), “probably loved the classical Japanese three-line, seventeen syllable haiku as he loved no other form of poetry, and that he himself wrote—bled—haiku (almost always in English, but sometimes . . . in Japanese, German, or Italian).”
And so, one of the most intriguing characters in English literature, created by one of our best 20th century writers and stylists, is none other than a haiku poet, and a haiku bleeder. Making Salinger—no?—a downright haiku nut.
The poem was originally composed in Japanese (as readers learn in “Seymour—An Introduction” p134), on the day he committed suicide (see “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” one of Salinger’s Nine Stories), and was lovingly translated into English by none other than Buddy. The poem first appeared in Salinger’s novella, “Zooey”, published in the May 1957 issue of The New Yorker, and, in 1961, was published with “Franny” to create the double martini that is Franny and Zooey.
The poem’s focus is not the airplane, the doll, the doll’s head, or even the poet/character, but the little girl; the child. Even more so, the mind/spirit/soul of a child and what they represent: innocence, purity, emptiness, the ego-less. A kind of spiritual perfection, ultimate enlightenment and beauty—all the things they can teach us and show us, reminding us of what we once were and, perhaps, what we could be. Only to remind us, however, that to achieve this is virtually impossible.
It makes one’s head spin.
Unable to achieve this god-like (Buddha-like, Jesus-like) state of consciousness and being, Seymour (an older, more sophisticated, learned, and complex version of Holden Caulfield?) committed suicide, leaving the above “straight, classical-style haiku” behind, written in pencil, “on the desk blotter in his hotel room.”
It seems Salinger’s themes and concerns only continued from Catcher in the Rye, blooming from a field, holding in much, into a family made of glass. Haiku, it seems, presented Salinger with a kind of key, and enabled him to take his art to a whole other level.
What do you think?
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Scott, this is a powerful insight, powerfully presented. I’ll leave the scholarly responses to those more qualified, but I wanted to tell you that your tribute to Salinger *and* to the wonder of haiku will follow me for a very long time. Thank you!
Billie
Just learned of the Salinger haiku connection from Henry Allen op-ed in Washington Post, then googled here.
“Haiku, it seems, presented Salinger with a kind of key, and enabled him to take his art to a whole other level.”
You’d have to do a lot more research to prove or reasonably undergird the assertion that haiku “…enabled him [Salinger] to take his art to a whole other level.”
Bill C
The question of “levels” achieved by various arts is part of the conversation about form rather than a snide comment about the “level” achieved by the novel as opposed to the haiku, yes? Let’s say a novel and a poem/haiku deal with a universal theme — say, time. The “purity” of the act of attention (which includes a focus on this theme) is relative to the forms. Novels may say many things about time, a poem/haiku may itself be an “event” in/out of time. The haiku form isolates the event, deals with it on a “level” of participation rather than many-sided reflection as in a more “complex” form. It’s just one of the paradoxes of art that what a short poem offers can seem “higher” in some important ways than what a longer form, say novel, offers. No doubt there are various judgements hidden in these “prejudices” but there are also truths. Anyway, forms talk to one another and we should follow their lead.
I don’t believe there’s a Salinger biographer or scholar alive who would agree with the statement
that “Haiku, it seems, presented Salinger with a kind of key, and enabled him to take his art to a whole other level.”
I don’t see anything snide in my first comment or in this followup.
Bill C
The diverse meanings that can be ascribed to so short a poem always fascinate me.
Rather than childlike innocence, I experienced a sense of chilling malevolence from this scene. Perhaps that’s what Seymour (“see more”?) felt, and responded to, as well.
On the other hand, maybe I’ve just seen the movie Magic once too often. (Which is to say once.)
Scott, I too felt a sense of malevolence or violence here…perhaps it’s an echo of the haiku I’ve seen referring to the headless doll???? To me, I see no “Christ-like” innocence in having to use a vehicle to “look”…I sense a feeling of fear …
My own feeling about Christ is to banish fear and to see clearly what is true and find the beauty of that truth. But I don’t wish to get into a religious discussion here…just put that out so you’d understand why I felt as I did.
I wrote an essay, “J. D. Salinger and Haiku,” that’s in Frogpond XXIX:2 (you can also find it in RMA 2006). I feel that there are two points about haiku in his work. First, haiku was important to principal characters (both Seymour and Buddy, as you show). Second, haiku performed a key function (foreshadow and more) in the plot of certain stories (Franny and Zooey and the short story “Teddy”). That is, Salinger used haiku not only to add texture to his characters but also to provide a key to understanding these characters and the stories.
‘Salinger used haiku . . .to provide a key to understanding these characters and the stories.’ David
Yes, that sounds about right to me,David.
I was taken by a quote of Salinger’s given in a recent newspaper article that reported his death. In relation to the ’sequel’ to ‘Catcher in the Rye’, Salinger said: ‘”There’s no more to Holden Caulfield. Read the book again. It’s all there. Holden Caulfield is only a frozen moment in time.”
In my reading of:
The little girl on the plane
Who turned her doll’s head around
to look at me
the disturbing power lies in the ambiguity in L2. Do we have here a little girl who seems, to the ‘me’ of the verse, to have a sweet, doll-like head who turns around to look or do we have a little girl who literally turns a doll’s head around (by screwing the neck around 180 degrees) so that it faces ‘me’? It is not possible to dismiss either image, so the alternate images create an unresolvable tension. There is no escape, either, since the ‘narrator’ is stuck in a plane seat behind this little girl/ staring doll with her head turned around the wrong way. The situation is unpleasantly claustrophobic, even nightmarish.
Shamefacedly, I admit to having read nothing of Salinger’s but ‘Catcher’, but with this haiku as foreshadow, my guess would be that the character had irresolvable problems with ‘woman’.
lorin
Thought-provoking essay. I tend to fall on the side of malevolence and the idea that Salinger used the haiku form as a device to advance his harrowing story. I in no way entertain the idea of children as enlightened, intrinsically benevolent or innocent.