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A Perspective
As 1949 began, Salinger was putting the finishing touches on the fourth story to appear in his Nine Stories collection, a tale entitled “The Laughing Man.” This piece shows the clear influence of Sherwood Anderson and is a rough adaptation of Anderson’s 1921 story “I Want to Know Why.” It examines the fragile nature of childhood innocence and the power of the story-teller to construct and demolish dreams. Considering the recent realignment of Salinger’s personal life and career and the reexamination of his professional work during the transformative summer of 1948, this story’s themes are natural.
“The Laughing Man” is among the most beloved of Salinger stories. It is light and entertaining. In constructing it, Salinger returned to a method he was exceptionally good at: encasing a story within a story. The tale imbedded within “The Laughing Man” is by far Salinger’s most fantastical and its imaginative charm accounts for the story’s enduring popularity. It is also one of those more fortunate Salinger pieces that has steadily gained status over time and become an icon of modern popular culture. Millions of young people worldwide easily recognize The Laughing Man logo – complete with its quotation from The Catcher in the Rye – designated to The Laughing Man character of the amine series “Ghost in the Shell,” a production strewn with Salinger references.
“The Laughing Man” is the reminiscence of an unnamed narrator recalling an episode from his childhood in New York City. In 1928, at age nine, he was a member of a group of 25 boys who called themselves the “Comanches.” Each day after school, he and his fellow "Comanches" would be picked up by John Gedsudski, a Staten Island law student paid by the children’s parents to keep them busy and known by the children as “the Chief.” Although “the Chief” is described as being physically unattractive, in the eyes of the boys his stature was nothing less than heroic. Following afternoons of sports or trips to the Museum of Natural History, the Chief would regale them with the ongoing saga of a grotesquely deformed hero-criminal known only as “The Laughing Man.” Enraptured by the tale, the boys listened breathlessly to each installment, every one of them imagining themselves in the Laughing Man’s place.
From the story’s beginning, Salinger presents a dual message. The character of The Laughing Man is embraced by the boys as something of a mythic role model, possessing fantastic qualities and heroic values to aspire to. They see themselves as this character, becoming one with the Laughing Man in a way only youthful imaginations can provide. By establishing this bond, Salinger tethers the youth and innocence of these children to The Laughing Man character.
But The Laughing Man is not the boys’ only hero. They also revere “The Chief.” Blind to the reality of his lackluster traits, the same youthful imaginations that bond the boys to The Laughing Man have also granted The Chief mythic qualities. He is the storyteller, and the boys are thrown to his mercy through the tale that he weaves. The power of that story is the fragility of innocence, and as long as The Laughing Man lives, so does their youthful fantasy. Yet, at risk through this tale are not only the fragile fantasies of The Comanches. The Chief, living the final remnants of his own childhood innocence through the company of these nine-year-olds, is just as vulnerable to that fragility as are the boys.
But the Chief is not a child. He is the boy who refused to grow up, attempting to retain his childhood out of time. He is Holden Caulfield on a bus rather than in a field of rye. But he will fail Holden’s dream of being the catcher of innocence. Tethered as he is to the children, when his own innocence is finally broken, as his age determines that it must, he will drag the boys down with him – prematurely smashing something of their innocence when he does. He will do this through the tale that he tells, through the character of The Laughing Man.
The charm of the story told by The Chief is so engaging that readers are attracted to it as completely as are The Comanches themselves, drawing them directly into Salinger’s story. The Laughing Man was the son of wealthy missionaries who was kidnapped in infancy by Chinese bandits. After his parents refused to pay his ransom “out of a religious conviction,” the bandits punished the child by squeezing his head in a vice. As a result, he became hideously disfigured, with a face resembling Edward Munch’s “The Scream.” With his misshapen head and a mouth permanently agape in a grotesque laugh, The Laughing Man could barely be looked upon by mortal eyes. The bandits, who had chosen to keep the boy, were so repulsed by his face that they compelled him to wear a mask of red poppy pedals.
As the story progresses it becomes even more fantastic. As The Laughing Man grows, he develops a noble and selfless heart, which allows him to speak the language of animals. But he also learns the trade of his captors, described by Salinger as “robbing, hijacking,” and “murdering when absolutely necessary.” With his keen sense of justice, he avenges his disfigurement by entombing the bandits within a mausoleum. Traversing “the Paris-Chinese border” from his home on the shores of Tibet, The Laughing Man engages in crimes against the unjust, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor like a hideously malformed Robin Hood.
The Laughing Man’s exploits earn him the undying affection of a small group of followers, a beautiful girl in love with him, a giant, a dwarf, and the most beloved of his disciples – a timber wolf named Black Wing. They also earn him the determined hatred of the famous inspector Marcel Dufarge and his slightly transvestite daughter. The Dufarges will stop at nothing in order to catch The Laughing Man.
The stability of the narrator’s childhood fantasy world is interrupted by the character of Mary Hudson. The Chief is totally smitten by Mary, who begins to accompany the boys to baseball games and insists upon playing herself. These are the first cracks in the façade of the boy’s innocence, while The Chief, who is completely mesmerized by Mary, begins to lose the grip upon his own childhood. There is a portion of this story where the boy’s innocence appears to remain intact as they accept Mary because she can play baseball surprisingly well. But the interlude is an illusion and reality forces itself as inevitably as The Chief’s age will force him to adulthood.
Just as The Chief is captivated by Mary Hudson, The Laughing Man is soon captured by the Dufarges. After kidnapping Black Wing, the detective and his daughter strike a bargain with The Laughing Man. They will exchange the freedom of his beloved timber-wolf for his own liberty. Selflessly loyal, The Laughing Man agrees. But the Dufarges are filled with treachery and have no intention of freeing Black Wing. Instead, they exchange the wolf for another. Tied to a tree with barbed wire and helpless, The Laughing Man soon discovers the Dufarges subterfuge by conversing with the stand-in wolf. In anger and desperation, he manages to unmask himself and reveal his hideous face to his captors.
At the point of this cliff-hanger, there is another pause in the stability of the narrator’s story. Mary Hudson disappears for a time from The Comanche’s activities and The Chief becomes pensive and sour. Mary next appears on the sidelines at a baseball game, tellingly poised on the bleachers between two baby carriages. The Chief then has a somber but anxious conversation with Mary, well out of earshot of the boys. The narrator however, reports that he has “a fairly low, intuitive sense” of the conversation’s topic. If there is any doubt left in the minds of readers that Mary Hudson is pregnant, it is dispelled when the youthful narrator backs into yet another baby carriage after Mary shrilly orders him to leave her alone, a reaction that frightens the boy.
The Chief too, has completely changed. Once upon the bus, he harshly yells at the boys and curses. The Comanches are stunned. But the childhood innocence delivered by faith into the hands of The Chief has not completely unraveled for these boys. That completion is accomplished through the final installment of The Laughing Man tale.
In absolute silence, the confused and apprehensive troop listens to learn the fate of their heroic Laughing Man. That fate is delivered by The Chief, by the all-powerful storyteller, now an expectant father whose own innocence has just died on the sidelines of a children’s baseball game. It is also the fate of the innocent fantasies of each of the Comanches. And while this fate is not completely fulfilled on that day, the awareness of its inevitability is delivered clearly through the final segment of the story.
Marcel Dufarge fires four bullets directly into the heart of the boy’s disfigured and helpless hero. Yet The Laughing Man momentarily clings to life. In that time, he regurgitates the bullets and kills the Dufarges with the expulsion. Surrounded now by his loyal companions, The Laughing Man is offered precious drops of life-giving eagle’s blood. But he refuses to drink. As his life ebbs away, as will the childhood innocence of the Comanches, The Laughing Man instead removes his mask to reveal the cruel reality that life has forced upon him.
J.D. Salinger. “The Laughing Man” The New Yorker , March 19, 1949, pages 27-32.
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