High School Curriculums, and Gordon vs. Seymour: A Fitzgerald/Salinger Comparison
The novels we choose for high school curriculums, and an analysis of despair.
Hello and Happy New Year!
Here’s a post addressing a gripe with high school English classes, then a comparison of J.D. Salinger’s Seymour Glass and Fitzgerald’s Gordon Sterrett. There will be spoilers of both stories in this post. (Here is “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and May Day as PDFs.)
Thank you! Here’s to 2022.
tylermart.substack.com
There’s a misconception about the priorities of high school English. English class isn’t necessarily supposed to nurture a relationship with Literature — it’s primary function is to develop someone’s critical thinking skills through a process of reading and close analysis. The secondary (and far cozier) function of English class is to introduce Literature as a meaningful representation of the human experience, one worth exploring for its relevance, beauty, and its answers about common (and uncommon) human dilemmas (like any other art or media.) However, three years into an English degree, I think our choices of literature fails this latter purpose.
In English classes throughout the country, there's consensus on the books we teach — Moby Dick, 1984, Of Mice and Men, Macbeth, etc. I imagine hundreds of thousands of essays are scrawled each academic year about the themes of these novels, and of them, there are hundreds of thousands worth exploring. But, how engaging are these novels to teenagers?
I suspect what spoke to me in high-school were texts that offered some substantive explanation about the encroaching transition into adulthood — not necessarily a how-to, but something that described the emotional abrasion out of adolescence and into a confusing, difficult, and sometimes insufferable reality of college, getting a job, moving out, and being wholly responsible for your actions. It was painful to sit through novels and classwork about a book that hadn’t told me anything about myself, or at least nothing that shone relevancy to the growing dissatisfaction I had about life and “growing up.” (The Scarlet Letter — who thought that was a good idea?)
The Great Gatsby is a good example. It’s the bane of several high school English classes, and unfortunately, is also the entry-point to a relationship with Literature for generations of teenagers. It’s been assigned to me three different times since freshman year (including once in college), and at first, I made every attempt to avoid reading it. (To be fair, the category of books that would captivate a terminally disinterested class of teenagers is probably incredibly small, but unfortunately, Gatsby didn’t make the cut.) It’s exploration of American exceptionalism, affluence, love, corruption and identity are interesting and charming, but made zero contact with what my (granted, underdeveloped) media palette was looking for.
Last week, I finished reading all of J.D. Salinger’s officially published work, ending with Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. In biographical reading about Salinger, Fitzgerald is mentioned among his major influences. On SalingerInContext.org — a collaborative site of Salinger-essays — Kathy Gabriel quotes Ian Hamilton’s Salinger biography, In Search of J.D. Salinger:
“In 1941 Salinger would have liked to think he was doing what Scott Fitzgerald had to do. Fitzgerald had died a year earlier, and his legendary aspects were fresh in everybody’s mind. Salinger, in his letters, always spoke warmly of him and took heart from the knowledge that it was the Saturday Evening Post that had supported the writing of the Great Gatsby. In later years he would denounce Fitzgerald’s association with the magazine. For the moment though, he believed that he—Fitzgerald’s successor—could perform a balancing act, which the master himself could never master: between the Nathan and the Woodford worlds, between integrity and commerce (64).”
I haven't read this biography, but I have a resistance for authors to make such omniscient claims. Really, to say confidently that Salinger “believed” anything, considering his elusiveness, is a long shot. Gabriel continues in her own words:
“Aside from Fitzgerald’s overall influence on Salinger’s vision for the direction his career would take; there is also evidence that Fitzgerald’s writing directly inspired Salinger’s own works. One prominent example of this is the end of “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” which bares a striking resemblance to the end of Fitzgerald’s novelette “May Day,” published in 1920. In his hotel room Fitzgerald’s main character Gordon Sterrett took the revolver he bought at a sporting goods store and fired a shot into his own head “just behind the temple.” Salinger’s main character, Seymour Glass also committed suicide in a hotel room.”
With a small indifference towards The Great Gatsby but a growing interest in American short stories, F. Scott Fitzgerald appeared, again, on my shelf. How was the suicide of Gordon Sterrett similar to that of Salinger’s Seymour Glass?
To investigate this very loose comparison, I read May Day from The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. In this collection are 43 of Fitzgerald’s approximately 150 short stories organized chronologically by publication date. (Micheal J. Bruccoli mentions, to my surprise, in the preface to the collection: “During his lifetime Fitzgerald was far better known and more widely read as a short-story writer than a novelist,” citing his stories being largely published in literary magazines.)
Gordon is one of several protagonists in May Day, and one of the only who is emotionally disaffected by the celebratory air of midtown New York, 1919. He’s the first character we’re introduced to, whose demeanor is antithetical to our image of the roaring twenties: he is gloom, weak, depressed, down-on-his-luck, and sunken into nervous breakdown:
(May Day):
"What's the matter?"
"Every God damn thing in the world," [Gordon] said miserably, "I've absolutely gone to pieces, Phil. I'm all in."
"Huh?"
"I'm all in." His voice was shaking.
Dean scrutinized him more closely with appraising blue eyes. "You certainly look all shot."
"I am. I've made a hell of a mess of everything."
[...]
"I'm no prig, Lord knows," [Dean] went on deliberately. "I like pleasure—and I like a lot of it on a vacation like this, but you're—you're in awful shape. I never heard you talk just this way before. You seem to be sort of bankrupt—morally as well as financially."
"Don't they usually go together?"
Dean shook his head impatiently. "There's a regular aura about you that I don't understand. It's a sort of evil.”
"It's an air of worry and poverty and sleepless nights," said Gordon, rather defiantly.
The first interaction in the story is with Philip Dean, who acts as a juxtaposition. Dean is — and continues to be — a citizen in full reap of America’s “Jazz-Age,” a familiar setting Fitzgerald finds his characters. He is indifferent, indulgent, and a brash drinker (later drunkenly parading through early-morning Manhattan for a wet breakfast.) Gordon’s life — despite graduating in Dean’s class at Yale — is in serious emotional and material debt, and he’s the only character who feels the unending emotional toll of society as it exists and is vocal about it when asked.
Seymour — a character at the center of several Salinger stories — exhibits the former (an emotional unrest) but neglects the latter (communication). In “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” Seymour is firstly characterized by his wife Muriel in an abrupt phone conversation with his stepmother. Their conversation is suffused with miscommunication and worry about Seymour’s eccentricity. It establishes an important pillar of the story, and of Seymour’s final decision: the incongruence in people and society, and particularly those who’ve seen active combat — in Seymour’s case (and, in J.D. Salinger’s case), the horrors of World War II. Our only interaction with Seymour’s nature is his playing on the beach with a young girl, whose imagination and willingness to pretend and communicate — even if abstractedly — makes their friendship “work” (though, “friendship” becomes a confusing term):
(Perfect Day for Bananafish):
"Do you like wax?" Sybil asked.
"Do I like what?" asked [Seymour].
"Wax."
"Very much. Don't you?"
Sybil nodded. "Do you like olives?" she asked.
"Olives — yes. Olives and wax. I never go anyplace without 'em.
Throughout May Day, Gordon never recovers from our introduction to him; he remains similarly distraught and convinced of his own turmoil. At the fraternity dance, he sits on the stairs alone, confronted by Edith, his long-awaited muse, who is shocked by his state:
(May Day):
"Here, Gordon. You're ridiculous. You're hurting me. You're acting like a—like a crazy man—"
"I admit it. I'm a little crazy. Something's wrong with me, Edith. There's something left me. It doesn't matter." "It does, tell me."
"Just that. I was always queer—little bit different from other boys. All right in college, but now it's all wrong. Things have been snapping inside me for four months like little hooks on a dress, and it's about to come off when a few more hooks go. I'm very gradually going loony."
He turned his eyes full on her and began to laugh, and she shrank away from him.
[...]
As he talked she saw he had changed utterly. He wasn't at all light and gay and careless—a great lethargy and discouragement had come over him. Revulsion seized her, followed by a faint, surprising boredom. His voice seemed to come out of a great void.
"Edith," he said, "I used to think I was clever, talented, an artist. Now I know I'm nothing. Can't draw, Edith. Don't know why I'm telling you this [...] I can't draw, I can't do anything. I'm poor as a church mouse." He laughed, bitterly and rather too loud. "I've become a damn beggar, a leech on my friends. I'm a failure. I'm poor as hell."
Edith is stunned by Gordon’s demeanor, and how deeply affected he’s become with the terror of failure and desolation. He’s become absolutely helpless to the weight of his own existence and is desperately plain-spoken about it. Because Gordon explains precisely what is affecting his life and driving him to exhaustion, he becomes a character whose final decision — committing suicide after the stark realization of his marriage and destitution — becomes a syllogistic effect of the story’s events.
For Seymour, however, his final scene comes abruptly and almost entirely without warning. Gordon’s story in May Day is a culmination of reasons for loading his revolver, whereas in “Perfect Day for Bananafish,” the story beckons for an investigatory re-read of Seymour’s decision-process. As we learn in the stories and novels following Bananafish, Seymour is an unconventional figure whose intelligence, eccentricity and worldly-knowledge (as explored by his siblings) often creates boundaries of miscommunication — challenging his participation in societal norms (namely, marriage, in Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters) and his ability to function normally. Though, throughout each novel and story that assembles Seymour’s identity for the reader, his suicide still remains largely a mystery, maybe deeply enveloped in mental illness brought on by his experience as a soldier.
While both protagonists suffer immensely, Gordon’s is more explicitly communicated, while Seymour’s is an implicit read on his engagement with the world. It could be said that Gordon is rejected by society, and suffers through its turmoil, while Seymour rejects society, accounting his knowledge of Eastern philosophical and religious practice. While their suicides are the conclusion to each story, they are written — and rationalized — differently.