Forty-One False Starts (17 page)

Today “Zooey” does not seem too long, and is arguably Salinger's masterpiece. Rereading it and its companion piece, “Franny,” is no less rewarding than rereading
The Great Gatsby
. It remains brilliant and is in no essential sense dated. It is the contemporary criticism that has dated. Like the contemporary criticism of
Olympia
, for example, which jeered at Manet for his crude indecency, or that of
War and Peace
, which condescended to Tolstoy for the inept “shapelessness” of the novel, it now seems magnificently misguided. However—as T. J. Clark and Gary Saul Morson have shown in their respective exemplary studies of Manet and Tolstoy
*
—negative contemporary criticism of a masterpiece can be helpful to later critics, acting as a kind of radar that picks up the ping of the work's originality. The “mistakes” and “excesses” that early critics complain of are often precisely the innovations that have given the work its power.
†

In the case of Salinger's critics, it is their extraordinary rage against the Glasses that points us toward Salinger's innovations. I don't know of any other case where literary characters have aroused such animosity, and where a writer of fiction has been so severely censured for failing to understand the offensiveness of his creations. In fact, Salinger understood the offensiveness of his creations perfectly well. “Zooey” 's narrator, Buddy Glass, wryly cites the view of some of the listeners to the quiz show
It's a Wise Child
, on which all the Glass children had appeared in turn, “that the Glasses were a bunch of insufferably ‘superior' little bastards that should have been drowned or gassed at birth.” The seven-year-old letter writer in “Hapworth” reports that “I have been trying like hell since our arrival to leave a wide margin for human ill-will, fear, jealousy, and gnawing dislike of the uncommonplace.” Throughout the Glass stories—as well as in
Catcher
—Salinger presents his abnormal heroes in the context of the normal world's dislike and fear of them. These works are fables of otherness—versions of Kafka's
Metamorphosis
. However, Salinger's design is not as easy to make out as Kafka's. His Gregor Samsas are not overtly disgusting and threatening; they have retained their human shape and speech and are even, in the case of Franny and Zooey, spectacularly good-looking. Nor is his vision unrelentingly tragic; it characteristically oscillates between the tragic and the comic. But with the possible exception of the older daughter, Boo Boo, who grew up to become a suburban wife and mother, none of the Glass children is able to live comfortably in the world. They are out of place. They might as well be large insects. The critics' aversion points us toward their underlying freakishness, and toward Salinger's own literary deviance and irony.

Ten years before the “interminable” and “shapeless” “Zooey” appeared in
The New Yorker
, a very short and well-made story called “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” appeared there, and traced the last few hours in the life of a young man who kills himself in the story's last sentence by putting a revolver to his temple. At the time, readers had no inkling that Seymour Glass—as the young man was called—would become a famous literary character, and that this was anything but a self-contained story about a suicidal depressive and his staggeringly shallow and unhelpful wife, Muriel. It is only in retrospect that we can see that the story is a kind of miniature and somewhat oversharp version of the allegory that the Glass family stories would enact.

The story, which takes place at a Florida resort where the husband and wife are vacationing, is divided into two sections. In the first we overhear a telephone conversation between the wife and her mother in New York, which mordantly renders the bourgeois world of received ideas and relentless department-store shopping in which the women are comfortably and obliviously ensconced. The second section takes place on the beach, where the despairing Seymour is conversing with a little girl named Sybil Carpenter, whose mother has told her to “run and play” while she goes to the hotel to have a martini with a friend. Seymour is revealed as a man who is wonderful with children, not talking down to them, but rather, past them, as thus:

“My daddy's coming tomorrow on a nairiplane,” Sybil said, kicking sand.

“Not in my face, baby,” the young man said, putting his hand on Sybil's ankle. “Well, it's about time he got here, your daddy. I've been expecting him hourly. Hourly.”

“Where's the lady?” Sybil said.

“The lady?” The young man brushed some sand out of his thin hair. “That's hard to say, Sybil. She may be in any one of a thousand places. At the hairdresser's. Having her hair dyed mink. Or making dolls for poor children, in her room.”

Seymour is the Myshkin-like figure whose death inhabits the Glass family stories. But as he appears in “Bananafish,” he isn't quite right for the role. He is too witty and too crazy. (When he leaves the beach and goes back to the hotel to kill himself, his behavior in the elevator is that of a bellicose maniac.) Salinger takes care of the problem by disclaiming authorship of “Bananafish.” In “Seymour: An Introduction,” he allows Buddy Glass, the second-oldest brother and the story's narrator, to claim authorship of “Bananafish” (as well as of
Catcher
and the story “Teddy”) and then to admit that his portrait of Seymour is wrong—is really a self-portrait. This is the sort of “prankishness” one imagines Kazin to have been complaining about and that no longer—after fifty years of postmodern experimentation (and five Zuckerman books by Philip Roth)—sticks in our craw. If our authors want to confess to the precariousness and handmade-ness of their enterprise, who are we to protest? Salinger would also considerably amplify and complicate the simple, harsh sketch of the regular world that “Bananafish” renders. But he would permanently retain the dualism of “Bananafish,” the view of the world as a battleground between the normal and the abnormal, the ordinary and the extraordinary, the talentless and the gifted, the well and the sick.

In “Zooey” we find the two youngest Glass children, Franny and Zooey, in their parents' large apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Salinger's use of recognizable places in New York and his ear for colloquial speech give the work a deceptive surface realism that obscures its fundamental fantastic character. The Glass family apartment is at once a faithfully, almost tenderly, rendered, cluttered, shabby middle-class New York apartment and a kind of lair, a mountain fastness to which Salinger's strange creations retreat to be with their own kind. Twenty-year-old Franny, who is brilliant and kind as well as exceptionally pretty, has come home from college after suffering a nervous collapse during a football weekend. In the shorter story “Franny,” which serves as a kind of prologue to “Zooey,” we have already seen her in the alien outer world, vainly struggling against her antipathy to her boyfriend, Lane Coutell. If the mother and daughter in “Bananafish” represented the least admirable features of mid-century female bourgeois culture, so Lane is an almost equally unprepossessing manifestation of 1950s male culture. He is a smug and pretentious and condescending young man. Over lunch in a fancy restaurant, the conversation between Franny and Lane grows ever more unpleasant as he obliviously boasts about his paper on Flaubert's mot juste, for which he received an A, and she tries less and less hard to hide her impatient disdain.

Lane is not alone as an object of Franny's jaundiced scrutiny. “Everything everybody does is so—I don't know—not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and—sad making,” she tells him. The one thing she finds meaningful is a little book she carries around with her called
The Way of a Pilgrim
, which proposes that the incessant repetition of the prayer “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me” will bring about mystical experience. Lane is as unimpressed with the “Jesus Prayer” as Franny is with his Flaubert paper. As the breach between the pair widens, another agon is played out, that of food. Lane orders a large meal of snails, frogs' legs, and salad, which he eats with gusto, and Franny (to his irritation) orders a glass of milk, from which she takes a few tiny sips, and a chicken sandwich, which she leaves untouched.

As we follow Lane's consumption of his lunch (Salinger shows him chewing, cutting, buttering, even exhorting his frogs' legs to “sit still”), we also watch—with the bated breath of parents of anorexics—Franny's nonconsumption of hers. At the end of the story she falls into a faint. In “Zooey,” at the Glass apartment, the drama of food continues as the daughter continues to refuse to eat. As in
Metamorphosis
(and in its pendant “The Hunger Artist”), the person who is other, the misfit, is unable to eat the food normal people eat. He finds it repellent. Kafka's heroes die of their revulsion, as does Salinger's hero Seymour. (Though Seymour shoots himself, there is a suggestion that he, too, must be some sort of hunger artist. When he is on the beach with the little girl he tells her a cautionary tale about underwater creatures called bananafish, who crawl into holes where they gorge themselves on bananas and get so enlarged that they cannot get out again, and die.) In “Zooey,” Franny is pulled back from the brink by her brother. The story has some of the atmosphere of the Greek myths about return from the underworld and the Bible stories in which dead children are resurrected.

“Neither you nor Buddy knows how to talk to people you don't like. Don't love, really,” Bessie Glass tells Zooey. She adds, “You can't live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes.” But Buddy and Zooey do, in fact, live in the world, if uncomfortably. Buddy is a college teacher, Zooey a television actor. They have passed through crises like Franny's. They are misfits—Mary McCarthy will always be cross with them—but they are not Seymours. They will live. Now the job at hand is to bring Franny out of her dangerous state of disgust. As she lies fitfully sleeping in the Glass living room on a Monday morning, the mother urges the son to get going with the rescue mission.

The conversation takes place in a bathroom. Zooey is in the bathtub with a shower curtain drawn decorously around him—a red nylon shower curtain with canary-yellow sharps, flats, and clefs printed on it—and the mother is sitting on the toilet seat. (The influence of the story's genteel first publisher, William Shawn, may be adduced from the fact that Salinger never comes right out and says where the mother is sitting.) Both are smoking. In his essay on Salinger, Kazin writes with heavy irony, “Someday there will be learned theses on
The Use of the Ash Tray in J.D. Salinger's Stories
; no other writer has made so much of Americans lighting up, reaching for the ash tray, setting up the ash tray with one hand while with the other they reach for a ringing telephone.” Kazin's observation is true, but his irony is misplaced. The smoking in Salinger is well worth tracking. There is nothing idle or random about the cigarettes and cigars that appear in his stories, or with the characters' dealings with them. In “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” Salinger achieves a brilliant effect with the lighting of a cigar that has been held unlit by a small old deaf-mute man during the first ninety pages of the story; and in “Zooey” another cigar is instrumental in the dawning of a recognition. The cigarettes that the mother and son smoke in the bathroom play less noticeable but no less noteworthy roles in the progress of the story.

Like the food in “Franny,” the cigarettes in “Zooey” enact a kind of parallel plot. Cigarettes offer (or used to offer) the writer a great range of metaphoric possibilities. They have lives and deaths. They glow and they turn to ashes. They need attention. They create smoke. They make a mess. As we listen to Bessie Glass and Zooey talk, we follow the fortunes of their cigarettes. Some of them go out for lack of attention. Others threaten to burn the smoker's fingers. Our sense of the mother and son's aliveness, and of the life-and-death character of their discussion, is heightened by the perpetual presence of these inanimate yet animatable objects.

Bessie and her husband, Les, respectively Irish-Catholic and Jewish, are a pair of retired vaudeville dancers; they closed down their act when the fourth of their seven children was born, and Les took some sort of vague job “in radio.” He is himself a vague, recessive figure, an absence. (Note the name.) He is never physically described, nor does his Jewishness play a part in the narrative. One of the things that really got up Maxwell Geismar's nose was what he saw as Salinger's craven refusal to admit that all his characters were Jewish. Of
Catcher
, Geismar wrote, “The locale of the New York sections is obviously that of a comfortable middle-class urban Jewish society where, however, all the leading figures have become beautifully Anglicized. Holden and Phoebe Caulfield: what perfect American social register names which are presented to us in both a social and a psychological void!” (In his discussion of “Zooey,” Geismar drily noted that the family cat, Bloomberg, “is apparently the only honest Jewish character in the tale.”) As it happens, Salinger is him-self honestly half Jewish: his mother, née Marie Jillich, was an Irish-Catholic who, however, changed her name to Miriam and passed herself off as a Jew after she married Salinger's father, Sol, with the result that Salinger and his older sister, Doris, grew up believing they were wholly Jewish; only when Doris was nineteen, and after Salinger had been bar mitzvahed, were they told the surprising truth.

The connection between this piece of biography and Salinger's refusal to be an American Jewish writer writing about Jews in America is impossible to fully sort out, of course, given Salinger's reticence; we can only assume that it exists. But the refusal itself is what is significant. Geismar is acute to note it—but obtuse, I think, to condemn it. The “void” of which he speaks is a defining condition of Salinger's art. The preternatural vividness of Salinger's characters, our feeling that we have already met them, that they are portraits directly drawn from New York life, is an illusion. Salinger's references to Central Park and Madison Avenue and Bonwit Teller, and the Manhattanish cadences of his characters' speech, are like the false leads that give a detective story its suspense. In Salinger's fiction we never really quite know where we are, even as we constantly bump up against familiar landmarks.
The Catcher in the Rye
, though putatively set in an alien nighttime New York, evokes the familiar terrifying dark forest of fairy tales, through which the hero blunders until dawn. Near the end of “Zooey,” its hero picks up a glass paperweight from his mother's desk and shakes it to create a snowstorm around the snowman with a stovepipe hat within. So, we might say, Salinger creates the storms that whirl around his characters' heads in the close, hermetically sealed world in which they live.