Wow! This one really blind sided me. I, of course, love The Catcher in the Rye (see Review), but when I tried reading Nine Stories, I was put off by them, so between that & his notorious silence, I just assumed Salinger was a one hit wonder. Still, he's got a birthday coming up (1/01/1919) and I found the book for a dollar, so I figured what the heck. Boy, am I glad.
The book consists of two interconnected stories from the Glass family series, originally published in The New Yorker; Franny is the youngest sister, Zooey the youngest brother. All seven of the children were featured, each as they came of age, on a radio program called "It's a Wise Child", where:
In general, listeners were divided into two, curiously
restive camps: those who held that the Glasses
were a bunch of insufferably "superior" little bastards
that should have been drowned or gassed at
birth, and those who held that they were bona-fide
underage wits and savants, of an uncommon, if
unenviable, order.
I wavered between these two opinions, though leaning towards insufferable, through the first story, Franny (1955), which concerns Franny's visit to her college boyfriend as she teeters on the edge of a breakdown, and the first three quarters of Zooey (1957), which opens with an extended scene featuring the visiting TV star Zooey taking a bath and arguing with his mother as she tries to convince him to help Franny, who is continuing her breakdown on the family couch, having abandoned acting class. It seemed that these characters were simply Holden Caufields a little farther along in life--precocious, bright and charming, but hypersensitive to the point of neuroses. But then all of a sudden, when Zooey does intervene, the story really takes off.
Franny, who shares with Zooey and her other siblings (and with Holden Caufield) an exasperation with the inadequacies of all those around her and with the problems of the world in general, has become fascinated by the works of a Russian mystic who advocates endless repetition of a certain Jesus Prayer as a means of getting in touch with God. But Zooey offers an important general observation on such religious self-flagellation:
...the religious life, and all the agony that goes
with it, is just something God sicks on people who
have the gall to accuse Him of having created an
ugly world.
And he has an even more insightful observation to make about Franny's particular inability to accept the frailties of others:
But what I don't like--and what I don't think either
Seymour or Buddy [older brothers] would like,
either, as a matter of fact--is the way you
talk about all these people. I mean you don't just
despise what they represent--you despise them.
It's too damn personal, Franny, I mean it. You get
a real homicidal glint in your eye when you talk
about this Tupper [one of her professors], for
instance. All this business about his going
into the men's room to muss his hair before he comes in
to class. All that. He probably does--it
goes with everything else you've told me about him. I'm
not saying it doesn't. But it's none of
your business, buddy, what he does with his hair. It would
be all right, in a way, if you thought his personal
affectations were sort of funny. Or if you felt a
tiny bit sorry for him for being insecure enough
to give himself a little pathetic goddam glamour,
But when you tell me about it--and I'm not
fooling, now--you tell me about it as though his hair
was a goddam personal enemy of yours. That
is not right--and you know it. If you're going to
go to war against the System, just do your shooting
like a nice, intelligent girl--because the enemy's
there, and not because you don't like his
hairdo or his goddam necktie.
From there, he continues into a long exposition on the unique character of Jesus, which leads him to expose the egotism that lies at the heart of her misuse of the prayer:
...you're missing the whole point of the Jesus Prayer.
The Jesus Prayer has one aim, and one aim
only. To endow the person who says it with
Christ-Consciousness. Not to set up some cozy,
holier-than-thou trysting place with some sticky,
adorable divine personage who'll take you in his
arms and relieve you of all your nasty Weltschmerzen
and Professor Tuppers go away and never
come back. And by God, if you have intelligence
enough to see that--and you do--and yet you
refuse to see it, the you're misusing the prayer,
you're using it to ask for a world full of dolls and
saints and no Professor Tuppers.
He concludes:
One other thing. And that's all. I promise
you. But the thing is, you raved and you bitched when
you came home about the stupidity of audiences.
The goddam 'unskilled laughter' coming from the
fifth row. And that's right, that's right--God
knows it's depressing. I'm not saying it isn't. But it's
none of your business, really. That's none
of your business, Franny. An artist's only concern is to
shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his
own terms, not anyone else's. You have no right to
think about those things, I swear to you.
Not in any real sense, anyway. You know what I mean?
Finally, he recalls an admonition delivered by their older brother, Seymour, one time when Zooey was about to go on the radio program and didn't want to shine his shoes:
I was furious. The studio audience were all
morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors
were morons, and I just damn well wasn't going to
shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I
said they couldn't see them anyway, where we sat.
He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine
them for the Fat Lady. I didn't know what
he was talking about, but he had a very Seymour look
on his face, and I did it. He never did tell
me who the Fat Lady was, but I shined my shoes for the
Fat Lady every time I ever went on the air again...
...I'll tell you a terrible secret--are you listening
to me? There isn't anyone out there who isn't
Seymour's Fat Lady. That includes your
Professor Tupper, buddy. And all his goddam cousins
by the dozens. There isn't anyone anywhere
that isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. Don't you know
that? Don't you know that goddam secret yet?
And don't you know--listen to me, now--don't
you know who that Fat Lady really is? ...Ah,
buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself. Christ
Himself, buddy.
For joy, apparently, it was all Franny could do to hold the phone, even with both hands.
This beautiful revelatory story is so suffused with empathy, humanity and spirituality, I had very nearly the same reaction as Franny. Zooey/Salinger has offered a way out of Franny's/Holden's/our' dilemma: the dissatisfaction with the seeming shortcomings of the world and the people around us. First, we must let go of our obsession with the failings of those around us; we can not be, nor should we try to be, catchers in the rye, trying to save or change everyone. Second, we must polish them for the Fat Lady; seek to live our lives perfectly, that we may be worthy of the audience, Christ Himself.
If you have ever read and enjoyed The Catcher in the Rye, you owe it
to yourself to read this book, an extended coda which, in effect, completes
Holden's tale. It is one of the most moving and profoundly Christian
works I've ever read. No wonder folks get so wound up at the
thought of what Salinger has been writing during his extended silence.
(Reviewed:25-Dec-99)
Grade: (A+)
