The problem with genius

In J.D. Salinger's world, you don't want to be more gifted than everyone else. It only leads to trouble. And that's if you're lucky.

This theme in Salinger's work was evident even in his Nine Stories, published in 1954. The first and last stories in this classic collection, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and "Teddy," are most striking, even shocking, in this regard. In the first, Salinger introduces Seymour Glass, a brainy character found or at least mentioned in much of Salinger's later work, who engages in an imaginative conversation with a little girl at the beach, then returns to his hotel room and calmly shoots himself in the head while his wife sleeps in the bed next to his.

Teddy is a precocious 10-year-old on an ocean voyage with his parents and little sister. In a deck-chair conversation he tells a man about how his belief in reincarnation makes him unafraid of death. Readers may get a premonition about what happens next.

"De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period" tells of a young man with phony credentials who works for a shady company that, for a fee, gives advice by mail to aspiring artists with very little talent. Then he discovers that one of his students has extraordinary talent, but she is a nun whose priest and mother superior frown on her worldly pursuit of art.

Other stories in this priceless collection are almost as notable for their titles as for their subtle and masterful content — "Down at the Dinghy," "Just Before the War with the Eskimos," "Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut" and "For Esme — with Love and Squalor" among them.

I first read this book back in the 1960s. My paperback, purchased in a college bookstore, cost 50 cents. It was a pleasure returning to it all these years later.