Laughing Boy and “Laughing Man”?
As we get closer to the present I think we’re gonna find more flickering traces of these books, even the ones that are themselves not as well known today. For instance, Laughing Boy and La Farge generally has been cited as an influence on J.D. Salinger; I found an interesting old post on a Salinger discussion board that argues that Salinger’s story “The Laughing Man” was influenced by and parallels La Farge’s novel.
The Laughing Man—which is excellent, and you should follow the link and read it if you haven’t—concerns a group of boys who are picked up after school and ferried about by a young college student, to play baseball in the park and so forth. The boys call themselves Comanches, and their leader, The Chief; in foul weather when they can’t go outside and play The Chief often passes the time by telling them stories of “The Laughing Man” a disfigured half-Chinese international thief and spy. The Comanche’s afterschool idyll is broken up when a woman, Mary Hudson, starts dating the chief and accompanies the lads on some of their outings.
I won’t say too much more so I don’t ruin Salinger’s story for you, but I’ll say that I think that ancient forum poster may have something when he says this:
The Navajo/American conflict is key to LAUGHING BOY. It’s a love story – for sure – but the major stumbling block to Laughing Boy (LB) and Slim Girl (SG) are their cultures and transforming between them. Slim Girl sees Laughing Boy as “a light with which to see her way back to her people, to the good things of her people.” (58) However, she isn’t truly sincere in returning to all the ways — she doesn’t want to herd sheep or grow old and ugly — plus she’s sleeping with another man. Likewise, Laughing Boy becomes enthralled by parts of the American culture (like whiskey): “She observed to herself that this man, who was to bind her to The People, seemed to be driving her yet farther apart from them.” (140) Eventually Laughing Boy renounces the American ways (crushes a bottle of Whiskey) and then finds out about SG’s adultery. She also renounces American ways…and they ride off into the sunset. Slim Girl’s tragic death is difficult for Laughing Boy to accept but – unlike the Laughing Man – he eventually makes it through.
Salinger translates the Navajo/American conflict in LAUGHING BOY to the Salinger-esque clash between the ‘nice’ and ‘phony’ worlds (as French simplifies it in his review of Salinger’s works). Just as Laughing Boy represented the Navajo lifestyle, John Gedsudski represents the authentic, the true. [Another poster] noted that the Navajo lifestyle is similar to Eastern religions — perhaps Salinger presents Gedsudski as an unwitting characterization of the Eastern philosophies. Further, most Salinger characters that can relate to and understand children are always the special, rare, ‘nice’ ones. Similarly, Mary Hudson is obviously represented by Slim Girl in LAUGHING BOY. They’re both gorgeous. They are both educated. They are both rich. Slim Girl must change to Laughing Boy’s Navajo lifestyle, Mary must change to John’s lower class life.
The poster goes on to try and draw a number of other parallels between the story within the story of The Laughing Man and the novel Laughing Boy. If you ask me I’d say his thread breaks here, as a lot of the Chinese opium den, wily Parisian nemesis stuff that marks the Laughing Man’s milieu has a much clearer source in the movie and radio serials of Salinger’s boyhood than it does in La Farge’s novel: a Dante-esque one-for-one allegory the story is not. But it was an interesting take, and interesting to see a bit of evidence on how La Farge might have influenced other writers. (Tony Hillerman, the detective novelist who set his series in New Mexico with Navajo detectives, knew La Farge in person and had some interesting things to say about his also.)
