On parrots and Salinger – Rosa Lyster in LRB:

‘One of our neighbours has a parrot – an African Grey, I think. It lives in the front room of the flat closest to the street, and seems to spend most of its time on a perch against the back wall. I’ve never been able to get a good look at it. The windows are too high to peer into discreetly, and the lace curtains are almost always drawn. All you can make out is a hulking bird shape, hardly moving, and issuing the most extraordinary variety of noises. I wish everyone could hear this parrot. It can do a sexy whistle (my brother once asked me if there were ‘a lot of perverts’ living on our block). It can say: ‘Come on.’ It can imitate any type of alarm – car, house or phone – and does a stunning impression of a yowling cat. It recently started copying a text message alert, and a few weeks ago I heard it blaring the sound of an incoming Skype call.
This struck me, at first, as profoundly dispiriting. Here was this bird, that should be in the jungle learning to emulate the sound of gibbons and rushing water, but was instead imitating Skype ringtones, trapped in a dreadful situation made still more wretched by the fact that its owner was also trapped, with nothing to look forward to for the duration of the lockdown except more Skype calls and getting whistled at by her parrot.
After a few days, however, I started to see the matter differently. The bird was coping better than I was. It was drawing stimulation from its immediate environment, learning new skills, entertaining itself. Perhaps I could take a leaf out of the bird’s book.
I had been rereading J.D. Salinger’s Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpentersaround the time I came to this conclusion. The story, first published in the New Yorker in 1955, is a hymn to confined spaces. It begins with an enforced quarantine, during a ‘siege of mumps’ in the enormous Glass family. Franny, the baby, is moved into the ‘ostensibly germ-free room’ shared by her oldest brothers, Buddy (the narrator, who will grow up to be a university professor) and Seymour (who will grow up to shoot himself in a hotel room at the end of ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’). Franny wakes up crying in the middle of the night, and Seymour reads her a story about a horse. A few pages later, Buddy gets a letter from his sister Boo Boo, informing him of Seymour’s impending wedding. Buddy reads the letter while lying in a military hospital bed, having his diaphragm strapped up with adhesive tape, ‘a usual medical procedure with pleurisy patients, presumably guaranteed to prevent them from coughing themselves to pieces’.
Even when Salinger’s characters aren’t confined to sickbeds or forcibly quarantined, they’re at odds with the outside world, unconvinced by it. Train journeys are a trial; the heat in New York is ‘indescribable’; large public gatherings leave an impression of vague, murky unpleasantness. Buddy has a ‘thirteen-year blackout’ regarding the physical details of the room in the enormous brownstone where Seymour is supposed to be getting married. He can remember only two things that happen in the hour and a half during which Seymour fails to materialise: an organ is playing directly behind him, and the woman to his right introduces herself in a ‘festive whisper’. No other conversations are reported, and even the ‘cardinal fact’ of the bride’s abandonment is something of an anticlimax. There’s no description of what she says or does or looks like, or even of her dress – she’s just a figure being escorted down the aisle by her anonymous parents, and later deposited ‘almost hand over hand’ in the first in a line of waiting cars.
Throughout the story, the outside, public world is presented as an impediment to conversation and understanding, to be retreated from as soon as possible. No good can come from tarrying there too long.’

Read the blog post here.

Somehow Salinger disappeared, when I began writing in the early nineties his name was often mentioned in articles, in conversation. So was Nabokov by the way. And he also faded away.
Revelations about Salinger’s private life added probably to his, well, let’s call it exile.

How a parrot that can blare ‘the sound of an incoming skype call’ is connected to Salinger is a matter of intuition.
According to Rosa Lyster, it’s the confinement to spaces that links the parrot to Salinger.
The summarization of Salinger’s description of a wedding that fails to materialize is somehow closely connected to a parrot that can imitate an incoming skype call.

Yes, a wedding is like an incoming Skype call, but sometimes nobody answers the call.
And now it’s time to go back to Salinger.