Looking Through the Glasses: J. D. Salinger's Wise Children and Gifted Education
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I .; I i i I I i Looking Through the Glasses: J. D. Salinger's Wise Children and Gifted Education Barry Grant University ofMaryland/University College, Schwdbisch Gmund, Germany (1982) mentions them, and she tells the stories of the A B S T R AC T "Quiz Kids," contestants on a radio show very similar to the fictional "It's a Wise Child" in the Glass stories. Gifted children are often Big Picture thinkers (Schultz Half a century after the first Glass story was pub- & Delisle, 1997). Even as young children, they may lished, the looking glass metaphor is still, transparently, ask profound questions and view life from the per- an illuminating idea. The Glasses are in many ways typ- spective of The Most Important Things: meaning, ical precocious gifted persons: sensitive, excitable, cyni- goodness, truth, spirituality, death, and the like. J. D. cal, highly developed in their moral thought, possessed Salinger's stories about the gifted and precocious of an odd sense of humor, readers, thinkers, appalled at Glass children offer a vivid, provocative, and very use- the awfulness of the world, and so on (cf. Gross, 1993; ful description ofa spiritual Big Picture perspective on Piirto, 1994; Silverman 1994). Most ofthe constructions life. This essay describes the Glasses' spiritual devel- opment and draws out implications of their thinking and dilemmas for a critique of gifted education. It suggests that gifted education can adequately address the spiritual life of gifted students and other "Big Picture" perspectives only by becoming concerned with educating gifted children for life. She went on at beautiful length about how she used to fly all around the apartment when she was four and no one was at home. -Boo Boo Glass describing her sister Franny Like many adolescents ofthe post-World War II gen- erations, I read J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye in high school. I still read Salinger, motivated, usually, by the most unprofessional ofdesires: for pleasure and, occasionally, for inspiration. For some time I had wondered why I had never encountered mention of Salinger by anyone in gift- ed education. His Seymour and Buddy and Franny and Zooey Glass are among the best-known gifted kids in 20th century Western literature.1 Surely, I thought, someone in the field had been inspired by these charming, upsetting, and sometimes really annoying wunderkinds to write about them. The Glass stories might have served as liter- ary looking glasses, fictional foci, offering occasions for the field to reflect upon itself. A literature search con- firmed my impression. The Glasses are not discussed in the gifted education literature. Not even R. D. Feldman I I * S* S 0 Downloaded from gcq.sagepub.com at UNIV CALGARY LIBRARY on March 4, 2011 .1- M- I I- of gifted persons in the field are products of teachers, The Glasses psychologists, and researchers who, more or less, read the same texts, take the same sorts of gifted education Salinger published the first Glass story in 1948, the last classes in graduate school, and have the same sorts of in 1965. Buddy Glass, Salinger's self-described alter ego, concerns. By examining the lives and ideas ofgifted per- "wrote" all of the Glass stories and Catcher in the Rye and sons who are creations of a professional writer, in this "Teddy" (Alsen, 1983). The seven Glass children, issues of case one possessed of exceptional talent and a peculiar Bessie and Les, were born between 1917 and 1935: religious sensibility, we can see more clearly attitudes, Seymour, 1917; Buddy, 1919; Boo Boo (Beatrice), 1920; values, and prejudices, even, in the field ofgifted educa- the twins Waker and Walter, 1921, Zooey (Zachary), tion. Indeed, any writer who has one of his characters, 1930; and Franny (Frances), 1935. All appeared pseudony- a 10-year-old boy who remembers his past lives and mously on "It's a Wise Child," a radio quiz show/round calmly predicts his death, say ofyoung children, "I'd get table guested by precocious and variously charming kids. them to empty out everything their parents and every- The two oldest, Seymour and Buddy, and the two body ever told them," should be consulted periodically youngest, Franny and Zooey, are the principal dramatisper- by everyone in education as a source of extracurricular sonae of the stories. (The other Glasses have but minor koans and disquieting ideas. roles, mostly off-stage.) Seymour, Buddy, Zooey, and The appeal of the Glass stories for adolescent seekers Franny have sterling gifted bonafides. Buddy, the bard of and wandering adults both is the Glasses' "religious life" the Glass saga, began his writing career at 5, at which age (Zooey, p. 115). We read the stories because we are fasci- he was proficient in French, Italian, and Spanish. Later, he nated by the tale of Seymour's fatal failure to follow his learned German, Latin, Greek, Japanese, Pali, and own spiritual guidance and by Franny's and Zooey's Sanskrit. From 1947 until he published his last story in ecstatic success in overcoming alienation and achieving 1965, Buddy taught at a small women's college in upstate illumination. The Glasses, like many gifted children, are New York where he lived alone in a badly insulated cabin Big Picture thinkers (Schultz & Delisle, 1997), and, as without phone or electricity. such, they place education, indeed all oflife, in the context Seymour, an English Ph.D. at 19, "nearly" a full pro- of The Most Important Things in Life. The most impor- fessor at 21, by 7 had read everything he could find in the tant things to them are spiritual in nature, and their ideas New York Public Library on God and religion. In a long and experiences provide material for a spiritual critique of letter from summer camp, which constitutes most of schooling. This critique receives support from and sup- "Hapworth 16, 1924," he asks to be sent any books on the ports developments in gifted education and gifted studies subject of God written by authors whose last names begin that are currently at the periphery of the field. The most with "H" or beyond. Buddy classes him as one ofthe great notable ofthese developments are the efforts ofRoeper to poets ofthe century, though we are allowed (for legal rea- bring the Self into education and of others to explore the sons, having to do with the wishes of his widow) to see spiritual life of gifted persons (Clark, 1992; Feldman, only two poems, one a piece ofjuvenilia from his eighth 1986; Lovecky, 1998; Morelock, 1995; Piechowski, 1991, year, the other, a Haiku, his last poem. 1992, 1997, 1998, 2000; Roeper, 1990, 1995; Roeper & John Keats Lind, 1998). Though the Glasses have the benefits and John Keats opportunities (and curses) of childhood celebrity, the rich John cultural inheritance of Irish-Jewish parents who "had a Please put your scarf on. (Seymour, p. 124) remarkably good song-and-dance-and-patter act in The little girl on the plane vaudeville and music halls" (Seymour, p. 145), and the Who turned her doll's head around To look at me. p. 64) guiding hand of a cranky, reclusive creative writer, their (Zooey, religious quest and spiritual experiences are very real (cf. Seymour, a sage and seeker, whose spiritual attainments, Coles, 1990; Hofftnan, 1992; Robinson, 1978, 1983). according to Buddy, place him somewhere in the vicinity of Seymour, Buddy, Zooey, and Franny are all "spiritually a "mukta, a ringding enlightened man, a God-knower" gifted" (Piechowski, 2000). (Seymour, p. 106), is also a "sick soul," saddled with more bad This essay traces, in classic dramatic form, the spiri- karma than he can handle in his life as a Glass. He realized too tual development ofthe Glasses, pausing at points to peer late that the spiritual path he had chosen was producing at gifted education through the lens of their ideas and results exactly opposite of those he had intended (Alsen, dilemmas. 1983). In 1948, at age 31, Seymour blew his brains out while S .. S go p 5 3 ~~1- I Downloaded from gcq.sagepub.com at UNIV CALGARY LIBRARY on March 4, 2011 i0l@ hi , ;lil1 al i his wife Muriel slept in the next bed ("A Perfect Day for In response to a question from Buddy, Seymour said Bananafish," Nine Stories). "The little girl on the plane" that nothing about teaching gets him down, but one thing Haiku was found on the desk blotter in the resort hotel room did frighten him: "the penciled notes in the margins of where he was staying with Muriel after being released from books in the college library" (Seymour, p. 168), a reference three years in the psychiatric ward of an Army hospital. to the disappointing level of understanding shown by Seymour, alive and dead, with Buddy as his aide-de-camp, is most students. Buddy refers to Seymour as "a teacher ... the younger Glasses' mentor and guide in the religious life. poor bastard" (Seymour, p. 118). He mocks almost all of Zooey is an in-demand and well-paid TV actor, a his students, usually gently, humorously, but with honest "hunk," to use the vernacular, and the owner ofone ulcer, scorn. In a letter to Zooey, he writes that, of the 38 short in full bloom. His vocabulary at age 12, a team ofpsychol- stories he has to grade, "thirty-seven will be about a shy, ogists determined, was "on an exact par with Mary Baker reclusive Pennsylvania Dutch lesbian who Wants to Eddy's" (Zooey, p. 55). An M.A. in mathematics, he "once Write, told first-person by a lecherous hired hand.