Writing on the Wall (5 page)

The source of “pale fire” is
Timon of Athens,
Act IV, Scene 3, Timon speaking to the thieves:

“...I’ll example you with thievery:

The sun’s a thief, and with his great attraction

Robs the vast sea; the moon’s an arrant thief,

And her pale fire she snatches from the sun;

The sea’s a thief...”

This idea of natural thievery is bound up with the mirror-theme, for a mirror is held by primitive people to “steal” the image of the man it reflects, and all reflection, including poetic mimesis, can be regarded as a theft from reality, which in turn is always stealing ideas and plagiarizing from itself. It is only appropriate that thieving Mercury, patron of letters, “that transcendental tramp,” as Kinbote calls Gradus, should be one of the work’s principal characters. Botkin, in effect, has stolen Shade’s poem. The moon, shining with her borrowed rays, appears in the Luna moth; Io, the cow, was originally a moon goddess, as is shown by her crescent horns. Shade’s Aunt Maud had a verse book kept open at the index (“Moon, Moonrise, Moor, Moral”), and Shade’s Webster is open at
M.
The sky-god Zeus’s love affairs with various moon goddesses—
e.g.,
Europa as well as Io—are hinted at. Finally, the Red Admiral Vanessa butterfly, which accompanies the poet Shade like a herald of death into Botkin’s garden, is often seen, as on that fatal day, at sunset; it has the unusual habit of flying at night, looking for its home—commonly a hollow tree; in other words, the Red Admiral is a butterfly that acts like its nocturnal double, a moth.

Pale Fire
itself circles like a moth, or a moon, around Shakespeare’s mighty flame. Hiding in the lines, there are many allusions to Shakespeare’s plays, to his biography, to the trees mentioned in Shakespeare, and the treacherous color green may betray the presence of Shakespeare’s enemy, the poet Robert Greene, who described the Bard as an upstart crow dressed in others’ feathers; the crow, of course, is a thief. It is also the southernmost constellation, at the other pole from Zembla.

The pale fire of the title spreads beyond its original Shakespearean source and beacons toward a number of odd corners. In the commentary there is an account of the poet burning his rejected drafts in “the pale fire of the incinerator.” An amusing sidelight is provided by the word “ingle,” used by Kinbote to mean a catamite or boy favorite, but which also means blaze, from the Gaelic word for fire. I think too of the pale fire of opals and of Shelley, whose “incandescent soul” is mentioned in Shade’s poem:

Life like a dome of many-colored glass

Stains the white radiance of eternity.

Whether the visible world, for Nabokov, is a prismatic reflection of eternity or the other way around is a central question that begs itself but that remains, for that very reason, moot and troubling. In the game of signaling back and forth with mirrors, which may be man’s relation with the cosmos, there is perhaps no before or after, first or second, only distance—separation, exile—and across it, the agitated flashing of the semaphore.

In any case, this centaur-work of Nabokov’s, half-poem, half-prose, this merman of the deep, is a creature of perfect beauty, symmetry, strangeness, originality, and moral truth. Pretending to be a curio, it cannot disguise the fact that it is one of the very great works of art of this century, the modern novel that everyone thought was dead and that was only playing possum.

June, 1962

J. D. Salinger’s Closed Circuit

W
HO IS TO INHERIT
the mantle of Papa Hemingway? Who if not J. D. Salinger? Holden Caulfield in
The Catcher in the Rye
has a brother in Hollywood who thinks
A Farewell to Arms
is terrific. Holden does not see how his brother, who is
his
favorite writer, can like a phony book like that. But the very image of the hero as pitiless phony-detector comes from Hemingway. In
Across the River and into the Trees,
the colonel gets a message on his private radar that a pockmarked writer he darkly spies across the room at Harry’s Bar in Venice has “outlived his talents”—apparently some sort of crime. “I think he has the same pits on his heart and in his soul,” confides the heroine, in her careful foreign English. That was Sinclair Lewis.

Like Hemingway, Salinger sees the world in terms of allies and enemies. He has a good deal of natural style, a cruel ear, a dislike of ideas (the enemy’s intelligence system), and a ventriloquist’s knack of disguising his voice. The artless dialect written by Holden is an artful ventriloquial trick of Salinger’s, like the deliberate, halting English of Hemingway’s waiters, fishermen, and peasants—anyone who speaks it is a good guy, a friend of the author’s, to be trusted.

The Catcher in the Rye,
like Hemingway’s books, is based on a scheme of exclusiveness. The characters are divided into those who belong to the club and those who don’t—the clean marlin, on the one hand, and the scavenger sharks on the other. Those who don’t belong are “born that way”—headmasters, philanthropists, roommates, teachers of history and English, football coaches, girls who like the Lunts. They cannot help the way they are, the way they talk: they are obeying a law of species—even the pimping elevator operator, the greedy prostitute, the bisexual teacher of English who makes an approach to Holden in the dark.

It is not anybody’s fault if just about everybody is excluded from the club in the long run—everybody but Ring Lardner, Thomas Hardy, Gatsby, Isak Dinesen, and Holden’s little sister, Phoebe. In fact it is a pretty sad situation, and there is a real adolescent sadness and lonely desperation in
The Catcher in the Rye;
the passages where Holden, drunk and wild with grief, wanders like an errant pinball through New York at night are very good.

But did Salinger sympathize with Holden or vice versa? Stephen Dedalus in a similar situation met Mr. Bloom, but the only “good” person Holden meets is his little sister—himself in miniature or in glory, riding a big brown horse on a carousel and reaching for the gold ring. There is something false and sentimental here. Holden is supposed to be an outsider in his school, in the middle-class world, but he is really an insider with the track all to himself.

And now, ten years after
The Catcher in the Rye
we have
Franny and Zooey.
The book has been a best seller since
before
publication.

Again the theme is the good people against the stupid phonies, and the good is still all in the family, like the shares in a family-owned “closed” corporation. The heroes are or were seven children (two are dead), the wonderful Glass kids of a radio quiz show called “It’s a Wise Child,” half-Jewish, half-Irish, whose parents were a team of vaudevillians. These prodigies, nationally known and the subjects of many psychological studies, are now grown up: one is a writer-in-residence in a girls’ junior college; one is a Jesuit priest; one is a housewife; one is a television actor (Zooey); and one is a student (Franny). They are all geniuses, but the greatest genius of them all was Seymour, who committed suicide on vacation in an early story of Salinger’s called “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Unlike the average genius, the Glass kids are good guys; they love each other and their parents and their cat and their goldfish, and they are expert phony-detectors. The dead sage Seymour has initiated them into Zen and other mystical cults.

During the course of the story, Franny has a little nervous breakdown, brought on by reading a small green religious book titled
The Way of a Pilgrim,
relating the quest for prayer of a simple Russian peasant. She is cured by her brother Zooey in two short séances between his professional television appointments; he recognizes the book (it was in Seymour’s library, of course) and, on his own inspiration, without help from their older brother Buddy or from the Jesuit, teaches her that Jesus, whom she has been sweating to find via the Jesus Prayer, is not some fishy guru but just the Fat Lady in the audience, plain ordinary humanity with varicose veins, the you and me the performer has to reach if the show is going to click.

This democratic commercial is “sincere” in the style of an advertising man’s necktie. The Jesus Zooey sells his sister is the old Bruce Barton Jesus—the word made flesh, Madison Avenue style. The Fat Lady is not quite everybody, despite Zooey’s fast sales patter. She is the kind of everybody the wonderful Glass kids tolerantly accept. Jesus may be a television sponsor or a housewife or a television playwright or your Mother and Dad, but He (he?) cannot be an intellectual like Franny’s horrible boy friend, Lane, who has written a paper on Flaubert and talks about Flaubert’s “testicularity,” or like his friend Wally, who, as Franny says plaintively, “looks like somebody who spent the summer in Italy or someplace.”

These fakes and phonies are the outsiders who ruin everything. Zooey feels the same way. “I hate any kind of so-called creative type who gets on any kind of ship. I don’t give a goddam what his reasons are.” Zooey likes it here. He likes people, as he says, who wear horrible neckties and funny, padded suits, but he does not mind a man who dresses well and owns a two-cabin cruiser so long as he belongs to the real, native, video-viewing America. The wonderful Glass family has three radios, four portable phonographs, and a TV in their wonderful living room, and their wonderful, awesome medicine cabinet in the bathroom is full of sponsored products all of which have been loved by someone in the family.

The world of insiders, it would appear, has grown infinitely larger and more accommodating as Salinger has “matured.” Where Holden Caulfield’s club excluded just about everybody but his kid sister, Zooey’s and Franny’s secret society includes just about everybody but creative types and students and professors. Here exception is made, obviously, for the Glass family: Seymour, the poet and thinker, Buddy, the writer, and so on. They all have college degrees; the family bookshelves indicate a wide, democratic culture:

Dracula
now stood next to
Elementary Pali
,
The Boy Allies at the Somme
stood next to
Bolts of Melody
,
The Scarab Murder Case
and
The Idiot
were together,
Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase
lay on top of
Fear and Trembling
.

The Glass family librarian does not discriminate, in keeping with the times, and books are encouraged to “mix.” In Seymour’s old bedroom, however, which is kept as a sort of temple to his memory, quotations, hand-lettered, from a select group of authors are displayed on the door: Marcus Aurelius, Issa, Tolstoy, Ring Lardner, Kafka, St. Francis de Sales, Mu Mon Kwan, etc. This honor roll is extremely institutional.

The broadening of the admissions policy—which is the text of Zooey’s sermon—is more a propaganda aim, though, than an accomplishment. No doubt the author and his mouthpiece (who is smoking a panatela) would like to spread a message of charity. “Indiscrimination,” as Seymour says in another Salinger story, “...leads to health and a kind of very real, enviable happiness.” But this remark itself exhales an ineffable breath of gentle superiority. The club, for all its pep talks, remains a closed corporation, since the function of the Fat Lady, when you come down to it, is to be what?—an audience for the Glass kids, while the function of the Great Teachers is to act as their coaches and prompters. And who are these wonder kids but Salinger himself, splitting and multiplying like the original amoeba?

In Hemingway’s work there was hardly anybody but Hemingway in a series of disguises, but at least there was only one Papa per book. To be confronted with the seven faces of Salinger, all wise and lovable and simple, is to gaze into a terrifying narcissus pool. Salinger’s world contains nothing but Salinger, his teachers, and his tolerantly cherished audience—humanity. Outside are the phonies vainly signaling to be let in. They do not have the key, unlike the kids’ Irish mother, Bessie, a home version of the Fat Lady, who keeps invading the bathroom while her handsome son Zooey is in the tub or shaving.

Sixty-eight pages of “Zooey” are laid in the family bathroom, the “throne” room, the holy-of-holies, the temple of the cult of self-worship. What methodical attention Salinger pays to Zooey’s routines of shaving and bathing and nail-cleaning, as though these were priestly rituals performed by a god on himself. A numinous vapor, an
aura,
surrounds the mother, seated on the toilet, smoking and soliloquizing, while her son behind the figured shower curtain reads, smokes, bathes, answers. We have the sense of being present at a mystery: ablution, purification, catharsis. It is worth noting that this closet drama has a pendant in a shorter scene in a public toilet in the story “Franny” which misled many
New Yorker
readers into thinking that Franny was pregnant—why else, having left her boy friend at the table, was she shutting herself up in a toilet in the ladies’ room, hanging her head and feeling sick?

Those readers were not “in” on the fact that Franny was having a mystical experience. Sex, which commonly takes two, not related by blood, is an experience that does not seem to possess erotic interest (phonies do it) for Salinger, and Zooey behind the shower curtain is taboo even to the mother who bore him. He is separated from her, as in a temple, by a veil. The reader, however, is allowed an extended look.

A great deal of attention is paid too to the rituals of cigarette lighting and of drinking from a glass, as though these oral acts were sacred—epiphanies. In the same way, the family writings are treated by Salinger as sacred scriptures or the droppings of holy birds, to be studied with care by the augurs: letters from Seymour, citations from his diary, a letter from Buddy, a letter from Franny, a letter from Boo Boo, a note written by Boo Boo in soap on a bathroom mirror (the last two are from another story, “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters”).