A Perfect Day for Bananafish

"You're badly sunburned?  Didn't  you use that jar of Bronze I put in your bag? I put it right —"
"I used it.  I'm burned anyway."
"That's terrible.  Where are you burned?"
"All over, dear, all over."
"That's terrible."
"I'll live."

Considering that the name of this story's protagonist is a homophone of  “see more glass,” and the young girl Sybil on the beach has quite a history behind her name, it would make sense to analyze the name of Seymour's wife, Muriel.  In Hebrew, my research tells me, Muriel means the myrrh of God (as in one of the gifts from the Magi), which is appropriate.   But in Gaelic it is even better: it means the open sea itself.

The story has two perfect halves, then a small postscript.  The first half has Muriel speaking on the phone to her mother.  Her mother, like all mothers who give a damn, is worried about her.  More specifically, she's worried about whether Muriel should have waited out the war for her fiancé, now husband to return.   This husband, a fluttering and empty creature we only meet in the story's second half, has been doing strange things since his discharge.  Apparently he's rammed a car into a tree, tried something fishy with the chair of Muriel's grandmother and said disconcerting things about her plans for death, insisted that Muriel read a book of German poetry, although she cannot read German, and otherwise behaved with no regard for society, its mores, and how normal, unshellshocked people go about their day.  Muriel's mother understands all this, and sees it as rightly tragic.  But maybe Seymour should not have been released from the military hospital (her mother calls this "a perfect crime") in the first place.  He is, after all, as fragile as glass.

We find this fragile Mr. Glass on the beach, where you can also find this strange phenomenon.  He is approached by a little girl whom he has befriended, and when she first addresses him, he lets "a sausaged towel fall away from his eyes."  He himself is no longer much older than Sybil, although he has seen more horror than she could ever think possible.  He takes Sybil to the ocean with a floating toy and proceeds to talk to her about bananafish, fantastic creatures who lead "a very tragic life":

They're very ordinary-looking fish when they swim in.  But once then get in, they behave like pigs.  Why, I've known some bananafish to swim into a bananahole and eat as many as seventy-eight bananas.

Some might see a sexual connotation here, especially since Sybil's mother refers to her by a playful children's name that also happens to be a naughty adult word and Seymour kisses her foot at the end of their playtime (perhaps the same foot used when Sybil "stopp[ed] only to sink a foot in a soggy, collapsed castle," a line that this author calls one of the best he has ever read).   But Seymour kisses her because she is innocent, and he is not.  He kisses innocence because he can make up stories like a child, he can shun responsibility and tact like a child, but his childhood is lost forever under a heap of bombs and bones, and he will never recover.  Those bananafish are young men, and they become pigs when they are told to go kill other young men.  Upon their return from battle a general might ask them whether they are in good health, whether they used the protection that the army gave them.  They did, but they became pigs nonetheless, roasted pigs burnt all over.

An allegory of war chock full of signs and symbols is easy enough, yet Salinger actually goes a step further: it is an allegory of an allegory.  Soldiers, some barely out of their teens, return to their civilian lives and become little boys again without the one trait that always distinguishes a child from an adult, innocence.  What would a fallen child be like?  What would he say and do? How can a child not be innocent?  Perhaps he "won't take his bathrobe off"; perhaps he will pretend to remember the number of tigers in a children's tale (as children love to pretend to know something they don't), the same number of bananafish that Sybil supposedly espies (as children love to imitate and one–up).  So when Seymour finally does remove his robe he is as pale as Muriel is burnt, and then we realize he is not pale but empty.  An unfilled vessel that can never regain its color.  And the color would be yellow, the color of Sybil's swimsuit and the color of the fish Seymour makes up to compete with her yellow swimsuit, just like any child would.     

The postscript reflects both perfect halves: Muriel, the sea, the scent of God, eternity, peace, and love that survived a war; and Seymour, glass crunched into sand particles and scattered onto a beach with millions more who have died for nothing or who have gone on living while already dead.  And when Seymour tells the woman in the elevator that he notices she's been looking at his feet (the part of Sybil he kisses in celebration of her innocence), we know that his own feet have walked through fields of abject destruction.  And we also know that bananafish, like all fish, have no feet.

The Italian Secretary

Although widely and justly considered second–rate works, the library of this legendary sleuth's  further adventures has been growing by leaps and even greater leaps the last forty–odd years.  A staggering number of these books, of course, wallow in that corner of chilly obscurity especially reserved for epigones.  Even an authoritative collection penned by Arthur Conan Doyle's youngest son and Agatha Christie's most heralded contemporary and based on unsolved Holmes cases never fleshed out in print suffers from the ingenious self–limitation of recycling actual Doylean plot lines.  Thus, if you are more than superficially acquainted with the original stories, you will see the guilty party marching towards you from the other end of Baker street.

Not so with the American author Caleb Carr, who comes up with an entirely new adventure and one not remiss in its Holmesian eccentricities.  Carr is the author of this other bestselling novel, which I cannot recommend, as well as a noted military historian.  His training in that field must definitely have imbued the villain's weapon of mass devastation (I shall not describe it further) with a certain  authenticity, although that is again not my business to judge.  What I may say, however, is that the historian finds Victorian dialogue to be a rather delightful affair and, while generally refraining from archaic constructions, dispatches a convincing Watson (no story is complete without him) to lead the reader from room to darkened room in search of, well, a ghost.  The ghost has been biding its time for a while now:  the Italian secretary in question is none other than this murdered gentleman, once a member of the court of  Mary, Queen of Scots, and now still very much bounding about this old palace.

Mycroft, Holmes's older brother always described by Sherlock as having the better brain of the two, if beset by irreparable indolence, summons the dynamic pair to Scotland to investigate the evisceration of an architect and a mason.  Along the way, a few belligerent Scottish terrorists decide to ventilate the train that the two visitors happen to be riding.  We are to gather that this small piece of action will be a foretaste of the revolt awaiting the detectives in the North, although the extreme violence of the novel (a very modern addition) is tempered by the cozy whispers of ghosts and goblin–like baddies from every crevice and crack of  Holyrood.  Once there, the usual chain of events ensues: Holmes becomes moody and finds the whole operation either tedious or hilarious, while Watson drifts from one shady character to another, inspecting each of them with severe medical thoroughness.  Holmes of course knows exactly what's going on and just has to test out a few of his theories to substantiate his peerless intuition; Watson, on the other hand, is tasked to play the role of the silly goat.  This thankless assignment involves irrational fears of the supernatural, excessive politeness (especially to the fairest and most distressed of Europe's damsels), and an unerring tendency for absurd deductions based on a hint or a sniff of a clue (or the hint of a sniff of a clue).  This is both the trademark of the Holmes stories and its cardinal shortcoming, and Carr smartly chooses not to tamper with a proven product.

I cannot say I like the end of The Italian Secretary, neither what happens nor how and why it happens.  The history of Rizzio's murder is a nice backdrop, but how many Holmesian solutions do we have that truly involve the otherworldly?  Despite this obvious straw–man, on most pages Carr offers a flattering and sincere imitation of Watson's unique cadence.  More impressively, the reader's attention is held even though the vast majority of the novel are lengthy dialogues: Holmes and his foil, or the Brothers Holmes, or Watson and the young woman he finds wandering the castle.  Yes, it's always Watson who finds the woman.  Holmes found a woman once, in this, his first short story.  Conan Doyle immediately recognized the schmaltzy path that his beloved creation would be taking if he continued in this vein and wisely concluded that some artists should remain monks, or at least keep bees instead of grandchildren.  Had he not, it would have been one of the most disastrous decisions in literary history.  But perhaps still not as bad as this one.

The Dead

He was undecided about the lines from Robert Browning for he feared they would be above the head of his hearers .... they would think he was airing his superior education.

How likely are those gathered for Christmas dinner in this famous tale to comprehend Gabriel Conroy's postprandial speech?  In his opinion, not at all.  How can he talk about something which doesn't interest him to people who are so obviously not on his cloudy plateau of learning?  What could he possibly do or say that would put both him and his audience at ease?  Since they have nothing in common, he will either betray his own truth or the truth of those around him.  But Gabriel's day is governed by untruth and the harsh odor of an undying passion, and no aspect of his existence is left sacred or undisturbed.  Until his wife's confession he remains, however, the only true orator in the story; that will change with mention of the curious immortal Michael Furey.

Gabriel believed, or at least was willing to say, that "literature was above politics" (a quote repeatedly attributed to Joyce himself), and for that splendid reason, kept his name and newspaper column unassociated and this important principle unuttered.  With Miss Ivors, for example, he "could not risk a grandiose phrase" because it would presumably come off as insincere.  His love for literature naturally propels him towards the richer European traditions and their languages, and, subsequently, he resents what he sees as Irish parochialism and the insufficiency of being monoglot.  Like Joyce, he is  tired of simply being Irish, and deposits truth in distant, foreign lands.  The term "West Briton" stems from his work at The Daily Express, but the fact that Miss Ivors reiterates it following his praise of Europe and disparagement of Ireland shows her keen psychology: she will not accord him his desired status, that of a "European."  He fears he might never escape this despicable parochialism.  When Gretta asks him "what words" he had had with Miss Ivors, he responds: "no words ... no words ... only she wanted me to go for a trip to the west of Ireland."  Gabriel's tribute to his aunts is perhaps fake, or perhaps he takes pains to mention nothing save their so-called 'admirable' qualities.  Otherwise, they were "only two ignorant old women."  After the spinster Julia's rendition of "Arrayed for the Bridal," Gabriel seizes her hand in congratulatory ecstasy, "shaking it where words failed him," and offers compliments on her performance:

I never heard your voice as it is to-night.  Now!  Would you believe that now?  That's the truth.  Upon my word and honour that's the truth.

The truth is that he couldn't care less about his batty aunts' modest capabilities, and it is no coincidence that his speech is directly preceded by the story of the monks of Mount Melleray.  These monks never speak because they seek to atone "for the sins committed by all the sinners in the outside world."  Hardly an original concept, this "outside world" of "sins" and lies, and an inner world of truth, silentium est aureum, and so forth.  And Gabriel, unlike his creator, is hardly an original.

The speech itself is laden with pious observations.  "We are living in a sceptical and ... thought-tormented age," Gabriel says, then adds that the past days, "might, without exaggeration, be called spacious days."  He has just held forth on "genuine warm-hearted courteous  Irish hospitality," and fearlessly so; his truth has nothing to do with custom, it is in fact the shunning thereof, the break with the expected that evokes his anti-patriotism.  The "thought-tormented age," the present climate of doubt and revolt, does not dovetail with the romantic quirks he reveals near the narrative's end, where his speech becomes an almost purely rhetorical construct tinged with vindictiveness towards those who might dare question his interpretation of values.  When he mentions "those dead and gone, great ones whose fame the world will not let willingly die," he is taken to mean the idols of his aunts and their generation.  But he is really thinking of his own masters, such as Browning.  As he does to the living, Gabriel accords to the dead a certain hierarchy, what can be loosely termed an aesthetic index, by which he measures those around him.  And so he would never imagine a scene like the story's ultimate, because Michael Furey is supposed to be lost in oblivion.  Someone like Michael Furey, or any trivial, rustic aspect of life cannot possibly be true.  "Unless he tells a lie," this simple or parochial emphasis on true things (a predilection for honesty in contrast to the current "sceptical" times), could very well summarize the falseness in Gabriel's discourse.

The Lass of Aughrim dominates the last third of the story, but initially Gabriel reminisces about his love for Gretta.  His passionate letters contain quotes such as, "why is it that words like these seem to me dull and cold?  Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?"  The truest part of Gabriel in The Dead comprises his tender inner thoughts that invariably flow towards his wife, and, if one allows Gabriel's voice or at least a great part of his consciousness to seep through Joyce's lines, the discourse in these pages is lyrical and strong.  His inability or unwillingness to verbalize his relationship with his wife provides two effects: he retains his luster within him, and he fails to understand Gretta's own passion.  While he fretted about his speech, "the indelicate clacking of the men's heels and the shuffling of their soles reminded him that their grade of culture differed from his," and yet Michael Furey is unquestionably "delicate."  Gretta turns out to be "country cute" as Gabriel's mother had warned him, and this "overeducated"  Irishman now sees himself as

a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts ... a pitiable fatuous fellow.

His own repository of truth, his wife, proves itself to some extent a lie, and its cause is a part of culture he has hitherto denounced openly.  The immortal power of the silent dead, and their famous equation with the living in the story's final line, indicates the vacuity of bold and learned words when compared to the few, small and perhaps simple passions, much like those of a child, that linger forever in memory.

Amsterdam

Goethe famously claimed to have read this book in five and a half hours, a whole morning. When asked whether authoring a great novel or a great poem would be more satisfying, a renowned critic opted for verse because he could sit down with a glass of scotch in his study and finish the deed between dinner and bed.  And while each of us must decide his own threshold of sustained artistic pleasure, with our poor attention span constantly assailed by news bytes masquerading as watersheds, its natural length seems to be about two and a half to three hours.  There is something inherently sumptuous about a literary work that can be read and enjoyed in the same time as an opera, play, or artistic film.  A major asset of the 1998 Booker Prize winner is precisely this feeling of round edges.  The circle, beginning with two bad men and excessive ambition, will certainly be completed.  Since the only reference to the Dutch city involves a very controversial procedure, even the news–bitten reader understands that death awaits one of the co–protagonists, who in no small irony begin their fatidic march at the funeral of a shared lover.

Several years past their forties, Clive and Vernon are long–time friends and not unremittingly bad.  But too many of their own concerns clutter their living space.  Clive can barely leave his privileged residence to mingle with the rabble, and has to turn to the whims of nature to inspire himself to Europe's next great symphony (reminiscent of the central motif, literally and figuratively, of this film).  Vernon on the other hand is a gambler of souls, making money off reputations and what readers of his tabloid could possibly be led to believe.  Snippets of boardroom banter reveal that he is neither respected nor feared by his staff, and that his life has been wasted on the petty faults of the famous.  A clear dichotomy between the artist and the huckster, except that our dear composer is an unrepentant boor and snob (there is an excellent passage in which he "dares" to think of himself as a "genius").  He is also, like his yellow newsman chum, sentimentally attached to the late and lovely Molly Lane.  Funerals of lovers, especially those loved in a distant past, are convenient moments to mull over the deceased's infidelities, promiscuity and forks in the road.  Molly's husband George, unpleasantly aware that no fewer than three mourners had prior enjoyment of his companion, sets the two friends upon the third, an MP of rising importance and unaccountable physical repulsiveness.  What did Molly see in him? They both stare and frown and shake their heads as all boys do when they see a pretty girl with anything less than an Adonis.  Ah, but George knows what.  And he has the pictures to prove it.

It is here that George, McEwan, and the reader wisely lean back and watch the spectacle run its course.  Each of our protagonists is a misanthrope (a surly and unproductive Clive is even shrouded in "misanthropic gloom" on a train ride): Vernon has to make his readers hate celebrities in order to get them to read about their hatefulness, and ends up hating everyone except Molly (he has always, it should be said, hated himself), while Clive hates people because they were not assigned the honor of composing the symphony of Europe and all they do is prevent him from fulfilling his destiny.  In time, hate becomes the mantra for the entire novel, and we know that hate is only rewarded in one way.  And if it isn't, then we have just wasted our expectations on one of most uniformly detestable casts of characters in recent memory.  What follows is both perfectly predictable and perfectly preposterous.  Considering the "moral choices" that the two men make (a point given emphasis in most blurbs on the novel), the results merit no questioning.  Just deserts could not be stamped more clearly on their lurching backs.  About two–thirds through Amsterdam, Molly vanishes into a corner of both her former lovers' minds to remain beautiful and haunting forever and ever.  With her go the youth and youthful frivolity of two souls whose idea of facing adulthood is watching a grown man squirm.

The Holmes Classification and Jeremy Brett

Many winters ago I offended an acquaintance when, in a moment of unforgivable cavalierness, I declared the Sherlock Holmes stories to be "works written for children."   Rarely have I made a comment that I so regret.  In point of fact, I had loved the stories as I suppose all young boys do, and was particularly taken by the magnificent screen embodiment of Holmes by the late and sensationally talented Jeremy Brett.  If you have never seen these productions, which ran on PBS's Mystery! from 1984 to just before Brett's death in 1995, I cannot possibly recommend them more highly.   Of the 56 stories and four novellas, rediscovered and readored by me the last few years, 41 episodes (with one episode combining elements of two stories) were filmed and are viewable on 21 discs.

1) The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Disc 1, 1984): “A Scandal in Bohemia”; “The Dancing Men”; “The Naval Treaty”; “The Solitary Cyclist”
2) The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Disc 2, 1984): “The Crooked Man”; “The Speckled Band”
3) The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Disc 3, 1984): “The Blue Carbuncle”; “The Copper Beeches”
4) The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Disc 4, 1984): “The Greek Interpreter”; “The Norwood Builder”
5) The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Disc 5, 1984): “The Resident Patient”; “The Red–Headed League”; “The Final Problem”
6) The Hound of the Baskervilles (1984) 
7) The Return of Sherlock Holmes (Disc 1, 1986): “The Empty House”; “Abbey Grange”
8) The Return of Sherlock Holmes (Disc 2, 1986): “The Second Stain”; “The Six Napoleons”
9) The Return of Sherlock Holmes (Disc 3, 1986): “The Priory School”; “Wisteria Lodge”
10) The Return of Sherlock Holmes (Disc 4, 1986): “The Devil’s Foot”; “Silver Blaze”; “The Bruce–Partington Plans”
11) The Return of Sherlock Holmes (Disc 5, 1986): “The Musgrave Ritual”; “The Man with the Twisted Lip”
12) The Sign of Four (1987)  
13) The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (Disc 1, 1991): “Lady Carfax”; “Thor Bridge”
14) The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (Disc 2, 1991): “Shoscombe Old Place”; “The Boscombe Valley Mystery”
15) The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (Disc 3, 1991): “The Illustrious Client”; “The Creeping Man”
16) The Eligible Bachelor (1992, based on the story “The Noble Bachelor”)
17) The Last Vampire (1993, based on the story “The Sussex Vampire”)
18) The Master Blackmailer (1993, based on the story “Charles Augustus Milverton”)
19) The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (Disc 1, 1994): “The Three Gables”***; “The Dying Detective”
20) The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (Disc 2, 1994): “The Golden Pince-nez”; “The Red Circle”
21) The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (Disc 3, 1994): “The Mazarin Stone***/ The Three Garridebs”; “The Cardboard Box”

For now I will spare you the disquisition, but the spurious (***) authorship of both "The Three Gables" and "The Mazarin Stone" has long been a topos for Sherlockians.  All these discs are available for rental or purchase from the usual suspects.  Brett's performance in My Fair Lady also reminds me that I saw a fine version of the same classic the other night at the Kennedy Center.