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Salinger: A New Introduction
How I (re)discovered the hidden source of the Glass family
As an unsuspecting reader, I realized J. D. Salinger had borrowed the Glass family characters from someone else’s work. It took me 30 years to find the last piece of evidence. I’ve often thought a seasoned academic would publish this gem before me, but I was lucky.
I made this discovery through abductive reasoning, the same method used by Sherlock Holmes. You all know the trick, he does it all the time. Faced with an unexplained material fact, what hypothesis would allow you to find the cause? You simply drop the improbable, difficult, or fanciful assumptions first. The last explanation standing becomes the most plausible and, in the end, the only possible one, however incredible or simple it may seem.
Let’s start with the baffling part.
We’re in 1990 and I’m reading a used copy of Cat’s Cradle (1963) by Kurt Vonnegut. Towards the end of the story, I’m hit with a strong feeling of déjà vu. Picture this. A black Labrador dies instantly when transformed into an ice statue. Fear shines through his frozen stiff body.
I remember seeing something similar seven years earlier, in 1983, in John Irving’s novel, The Hotel New Hampshire (1981). This time, an amateur taxidermist is stuffing a Labrador into an awkward attack pose. The dog is scary to see.
Two pitiful doubles, one stiff, one stuffed. Even the pun can’t be coincidental.
I flip through Vonnegut’s novel for a second time. Now, the main characters can no longer hide their similarities.
In Cat’s Cradle, Angela Hoenikker has a brother called Frank. In The Hotel New Hampshire, Franny Berry’s brother is also named Frank. Both Frank H. and Frank B. are terribly fond of uniforms. The authors emphasize this, I wonder why.
After their respective mother’s death, Angela H. and Franny B. must grow wise overnight to become second moms to their younger siblings. The two Franks argue bitterly with their sister about ends, means, and everything in between.
In each family, one child is a burgeoning artist, Newton H. and Lilly B., but neither can grow up, physically speaking.
Both narrators have the same name, John.
There are two minor distinctions, though. Vonnegut doesn’t make John one of the Hoenikkers. We don’t know his last name. The second difference comes with Egg Berry, who has no counterpart in Cat’s Cradle.
I made two short lists to sum it all up:
The Berrys
(J. Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire, 1981)
Franny (second mom)
Frank (likes uniforms)
Lilly (writer, cannot grow)
John (narrator)
Egg (dies young)
The Hoenikkers
(K. Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 1963)
Angela (second mom)
Frank (likes uniforms)
Newton (painter, cannot grow)
John (narrator, no last name)
If you like speed reading, you’ll devour the two novels back-to-back. I’ve done this several times to be safe not to get carried away by my imagination. There are too many parallels to draw here. Try this at home carefully, please.
After this exercise, you’ll have no doubt that John Irving wrote The Hotel New Hampshire with Cat’s Cradle in mind. For sure, these are two original narratives. This is not a case of plagiarism. Kurt taught John at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1965. They were lifelong friends.
If Vonnegut had wanted to stop Irving from publishing his book in 1981, he could have done so by talking him out of it, or worse, calling his publisher. He did not.
Why? Here’s my best guesses.
It’s a game between two authors. Irving bets Vonnegut that if he writes a remake of Cat’s Cradle, no one will notice. Ever.
Or, after celebrating his first best-seller, The World According to Garp (1978), Irving needs his next novel to be on par. He resolves to redo Cat’s Cradle in his own way, without telling Vonnegut about it. No one will notice either.
Or, even better, Irving borrows Vonnegut’s characters knowing they are not his in the first place. Nobody could accuse him of plagiarism even if he were caught bloody-handed.
Nice try, but I’m getting nowhere. No one can support these hypotheses with a letter, a draft, or a phone transcript. And there’s no use asking the writers. I’m neither a copyright attorney nor a police investigator. Like it or not, authors won’t collaborate under duress. They will conceal their inner process at all costs. If you press them to make any confession, they’ll pretend everything is already in their books.
Fair enough.
From the only facts at hand, Irving did what he did, and Vonnegut said nothing. Either he didn’t know, he agreed, or couldn’t help it.
Sadly, I can’t publish any paper about this stunning discovery. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a researcher in comparative literature either. I don’t want to make a big splash and start a controversy that could affect these two writers’ reputation.
I put these findings away for years, hoping a new fact would eventually explain why Vonnegut didn’t say anything.
In 2007, Kurt Vonnegut dies, and I try to convince myself the answer must be in his works.
In 2010, J. D. Salinger dies, but I only know him by name. I went to high school in Montréal where we read Boris Vian.
Then in 2014, I watch Shane Salerno’s documentary, Salinger (2013), on PBS. For the first time, I meet the Glass family and a young girl called Franny.
Searching the net for her name, I come across Kenneth Slawenski’s website, www.deadcaulfields.com (2004). Thanks to this gentleman, I get a first-rate picture of the Glass family, in addition to a detailed chronology.
Comparing Salinger’s characters to those of Vonnegut and Irving, I notice a feature that hadn’t struck me before. All these kids are fabulously smart, far too much for their age. Why are the authors repeating this?
The Glasses
(J. D. Salinger, Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, 1948–1963)
Franny (seeks wisdom)
Seymour (soldier, wears a uniform)
Zooey (actor)
Buddy (narrator)
Walter (dies young, twin of Waker)
Waker (monk, twin of Walter)
Boo Boo (the only one bearing children later in life)
There are strong correspondences between the first four characters in each family. Salinger devotes most of his attention to Franny, Seymour, Zooey, and Buddy in his short stories. Vonnegut could have easily taken inspiration from the Glasses to create the Hoenikkers in 1963.
But wait, could Vonnegut have played Salinger the same trick Irving did to him?
I’m going in circles.
No, no, no. Three writers in a row, it’s a chain, not a circle. They’re all experts in the coming-of-age genre. They must be using the same gimmick. What if they were exploiting someone else’s book?
If so, that source better be in the public domain or else, hello lawsuits!
To back my hypothesis, I must first find this elusive reference. Then, anybody could verify the Glasses-Hoenikkers-Berrys got their birth certificates from this unassuming, forgotten family.
Thanks to Salinger, I now have more clues at my disposal. The family I’m looking for must include five boys, two girls and — bonus — two of these kids must be twins.
I go to my favourite search engine, but I can’t find anything. What I really need is a pattern recognition engine. It’s a pity such a beast doesn’t exist yet.
In 2016, I watch the animated feature film Meet the Robinsons (2007) by William Joyce. The movie is based on Joyce’s children book A Day with Wilbur Robinson (1990). Again, there’s a female character by the name of Franny, Wilbur’s mother.
Ms. Franny Robinson has six siblings, her sister Billie and five brothers, Art, Gaston, Judlow, Spike and Dmitri (twins). This unique family structure is recognizable among all. The Robinsons live in a not-so-distant future. Everyone is well over forty, and they all wear glasses. Their dog wears glasses, too. All of them are blessed with top-level IQs.
The Robinsons
(W. Joyce, A Day with Wilbur Robinson, 1990)
Franny (Wilbur’s mother)
Art (pilot, wears a uniform)
Gaston (human cannonball)
Judlow (thinker)
Spike (twin of Dmitri)
Dmitri (twin of Spike)
Billie (plays with a life-size train)
Everything tells me Joyce imagined what the Glasses would become as they grew older. Did he learn anything from Vonnegut or Irving? Or is he borrowing the Robinsons from the public domain on his own?
I can’t rule anything out, so I’m stuck again.
In 2019, I find in Wikipedia that William Joyce is a distant relative of James Joyce. I remember Ulysses (1922) is based on Homer’s Odyssey. Salinger must have read Ulysses in his days. Following a hunch, I jump to the Greek mythology pages and hit the jackpot. Wikipedia has a detailed family tree of the Olympian gods.
The twelve permanent dwellers of Mount Olympus are all related. Five of these gods and goddesses belong to the first generation of adults (all uncles and aunts). The next seven are the children of Zeus. I recognize at once the structure of this offspring, two girls (Athena and Artemis), five boys (Ares, Apollo, Hermes, Hephaestus, and Dionysus), and a set of twins (Apollo and Artemis).
The Olympians
(Homer, Iliad, Odyssey, c. 750 BCE)
Athena (wisdom)
Ares (war)
Apollo (arts, twin of Artemis)
Hermes (messenger)
Hephaestus (fire)
Dionysus (wine)
Artemis (midwife, twin of Apollo)
Thank you, Mr. Bill Joyce! I don’t know whether you owe the Robinsons to Homer or Salinger, but you unwittingly led me on the right track. If you must, blame your old Streamin’ Jay-Jay for breaking into my subconscious uninvited.
I always wondered why the Glasses were so smart and precocious. How silly of me, poor earthling! These wunderkinds are the avatars of immortal beings.
The first two shimmering stars are the most powerful.
Athena, goddess of wisdom, is a fearsome strategist. What makes her so wise is her down-to-earth common sense, which she inherited from her mother, Metis the eldest, the very one who endowed Homo sapiens with sapience.
Ares is the god of war and uniforms. Because he can’t stand being outwitted by a girl, he despises his sister’s way to steal victories by ruse.
The head-on clashes between Angela and Frank, or Franny and Frank, date back to the dawn of time. With Salinger, Seymour and Franny aren’t so much in direct conflict. They’re drawn in opposite directions, one towards death, the other towards wisdom.
Apollo, the god of arts, becomes an actor, painter, writer and human cannonball, a child artist, creative and curious, always desperate to be taken seriously.
Hermes, the messenger, is perfect as the narrator, reliable or not.
Salinger, Vonnegut, and Irving didn’t develop the last three deities as much as they could. Still, there are blatant hints linking Hephaestus, Dionysus, and Artemis to their spin-off characters.
Take Hephaestus. Before becoming the god of fire, the young Hephaestus fell from the sky, rejected by his mother. He has been limping ever since. Being more of a merry mortal, Egg Berry dies along with his mother in a plane crash. He too fell from the sky when he was young. As for Walter Glass, he’s only 22 when he dies in Japan, four months after the end of WWII. An absurd and freakish accident with a flaming gasoline stove. He does not survive his burns.
Salinger tells little about Waker Glass, except that he’s a Carthusian monk. I couldn’t connect him to the god of wine, Dionysus, until I noticed the Order of Carthusians is world-famous for making a liqueur, chartreuse. Isn’t it a nifty hiding place to stash away a character you don’t need yet?
Artemis, the goddess of pregnant women, is naturally related to Boo Boo, the only Glass to bear children. But what about Billie Robinson who plays with a life-size train? It looks fun but risky. Thinking of it, it would be an even greater risk for Joyce to talk about pregnancy in a children book. Getting hit by a life-size train sounds like a good makeshift for childbirth.
One last point gave me severe headaches. Why did the authors have such a tough time caring for the twins? Vonnegut and Irving get rid of them altogether. Joyce hides Spike and Dmitri in flowerpots. Salinger barely talks about Walter and Waker. I think authors, as single parents, were suddenly overwhelmed by the prospect of dealing with large families. They didn’t need boisterous extras and so they resorted to poetic license to calm down these high-spirited kids before losing their minds.
Art is choices.
Once everything is set, writers can finally stop sweating over a blank page. From now on, they can trust their Olympian archetypes to strike a chord with every reader. The technique works even when you see the strings. For eons, storytellers created puppet characters out of human faculties and used them to navigate the realm of personal inner experience.
The basic learning of young people is exploring thought (Athena), strength (Ares), language (Hermes), imagination (Apollo), sexuality (Artemis), ingenuity (Hephaestus) and drunkenness (Dionysus), again and again, and more than ever. This was true when the Greek poets were rewriting their folk tales, and it’s just as vital today.
Antique psychology is not a dying art. Teenagers grapple with it day and night.
Years later, adults can remember how they felt reading a coming-of-age story. It’s no coincidence Salinger, Vonnegut, and Irving each have had one of their books banned. Planting seeds of wisdom in the minds of teens comes with great responsibility. Sometimes a student hates the experience so much they’ll try to burn down the entire Library of Congress when they grow up.
Yeah, wisdom hurts. No big news.
So, what do you think? Was Salinger inspired by Greek mythology or not? I did everything I could as a reader. And please, don’t tell me you’ll be waiting to see what he wrote during his seclusion.
I can’t wait to read it, too.
