How To Be A Heroine

by Samantha Ellis

  I too thought God might want some kind of sacrifice. Or at least, I thought He wanted me to feel perpetually guilty. I still get angry when people say patronisingly how comforting it must be to believe in God. The God I sometimes believe in (I seesaw endlessly) is not a jolly old white-bearded man sitting on a cloud but an Old Testament scourge, jealous (He admits it Himself), opinionated, disapproving. My Hebrew teachers had given me the impression that our relaxed Orthodox synagogue where most people drove but parked around the corner and semi-pretended we walked, and where married women sometimes wore fascinators instead of hats, was not as good as an ultra-Orthodox synagogue. Like Nanda, I was half attracted, half repelled by the idea of a more austere faith. So, when my boyfriend wrote to ask if I’d be prepared to become more Orthodox, I was open to the idea. He asked if I’d be willing to keep a kosher home, to live in Israel, to cover my hair. We talked about shomer negiah, ‘guarding the touch’, where men and women don’t touch before marriage, and I was mainly sad we’d have to give up holding hands. But I imagined myself, married, in one of those fabulous Farrah Fawcett wigs some Orthodox Jewish women wear, slinky in a long-sleeved dress, and fearsomely erudite about kashrut. I entertained the thought. I wasn’t saying no.

  Nanda wasn’t the only heroine slaking my spiritual thirst, though. I also loved J.D. Salinger’s enchanting Franny Glass. Emma had given me the slender, perfect novella, Franny and Zooey, when we were fourteen, to fortify me for a field trip to freezing wet Snowdonia (she had wisely chosen not to do geography GCSE). I first read it by torchlight in a cold, narrow bunk bed at the youth hostel, and in the morning I wanted to discuss it with Emma so much that I skipped breakfast to beat the payphone queue. The sorry state of my pale pink paperback betrays how many times I’ve read it since. When I wasn’t taking inspiration from Anne Shirley, I tried to write my boyfriend versions of the wise, allusive, funny letters in Franny and Zooey.

  Franny is stylish, in a silk-lined sheared raccoon coat her boyfriend kisses as though it’s as desirable as she is. She’s cool enough to order a chicken sandwich and a glass of milk in a fancy restaurant where everyone else is eating things with tentacles, yet so wildly enthusiastic she doesn’t bother with bourgeois things like spelling. She carries a gold swizzle stick around in her bag because it’s a gift from a corny boy and she doesn’t have the heart to throw it out, and she’s super-bright. She and her siblings are veterans of a radio quiz show called It’s a Wise Child. And she’s a bit ditsy, a bit scattered, but never so quirky as to be annoying.

  And though I loved Franny, I was in love with her older brother Zooey, who looked like ‘the blue-eyed Jewish-Irish Mohican scout who died in your arms at the roulette table at Monte Carlo’. A heroine to admire and a hero to fancy: what more could I want in a book? (It’s also, by the way, hilarious.)

  All the Glass siblings have a difficult relationship with faith. The two eldest, Seymour and Buddy, conduct an educational experiment on the two youngest, Franny and Zooey, teaching them Eastern philosophy and metaphysics because they believe the quest for knowledge should begin with no-knowledge. But by the time Franny and Zooey come of age, Seymour has killed himself and Buddy lives like a hermit in a cabin in the woods. Zooey, a successful actor, used to meditate for ten hours straight, still swears he had a small glass of ginger ale with Jesus when he was eight, and can’t eat without first reciting the four great vows of Zen Buddhism. And now it’s Franny’s turn to confront God.

  She visits her boyfriend Lane at his Ivy League university, and is disgusted as he goes on obnoxiously about Flaubert’s lack of ‘testicularity’. He wants Franny to dress appropriately, order the right meal, so they can be correct and admired and aggressively normal. Franny is anything but. She’s odd and she knows it; she made me think it might be cool to be strange. As a stroppy teenager I sympathised with her hatred of pseuds and charmers (the same people Holden Caulfield, the anti-hero of Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye, calls phonies). She’s disgusted by the ambitious people around her. And there is something revolting about the way Lane dismembers his meal of snails and frogs’ legs, and suggests sneaking into Franny’s boarding house even though she’s clearly not up for it. Lane is fatuous, try-hard, unattractively uneasy in his own skin. And he can’t understand Franny’s latest obsession: a small book called The Way of a Pilgrim. It is about a nineteenth-century Russian pilgrim who wants to find out what it means in the Bible when it says you should pray incessantly. He discovers that if you constantly say the Jesus Prayer (‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me’), eventually it synchs up with your heartbeat and becomes unconscious. Lane doesn’t see the point of this, but Franny does: ‘You get to see God.’

  This line destroyed me. I was craving something more, something beyond. I was reading the medieval poets, who wrote about loving God as though they were writing about loving a chaste, cold, unattainable fair lady in a tower, and I was reading John Donne begging God to ‘Batter my heart’. (When I read the ‘Holy Sonnets’ now, though not insensible to their passion and wonder, I also think how much I’d love to open a Batter My Heart Chip Shop.) So I got it, about the Jesus Prayer. I saw why Franny would want to see God, even if it got in the way of her life. I thought seeing God would be infinitely better than seeing a bore like Lane. Luckily, my boyfriend was not a bore and would talk religion by the hour if I wanted to, and even if I didn’t. It was the perfect romance for a God-struck teenager, love and yearning, temporal and spiritual, all mixed up.

  After he’d been away ten months, I went to Israel. I packed a romantic wardrobe, including a wide-brimmed straw hat, a polka-dot ra-ra skirt and a swooping maxi dress. Endless practice in front of the mirror had helped me perfect a sort of extreme winged eye, in the manner of Cleopatra. (I’d decided maybe she did have something to teach me about relationships.) I’d taken the precaution of acquiring waterproof mascara, because it wouldn’t be the big reunion without a few tears. In case he didn’t know he was supposed to have a handkerchief for me (perhaps, I reasoned, he hadn’t read Gone With The Wind), I brought my own. I was ready.

  At the airport, I did the rom com run and launched myself into his arms – and he took a step back. He almost flinched away from me. Apparently he was thinking more seriously about shomer negiah than I’d realised. He had a beard. He looked like an Orthodox Jew. Over the next few days, he talked with the zeal of the newly religious. He was interested in Kabbalistic numerology and predicting the future by looking at significant Torah passages and adding up the numerical values of the Hebrew letters, words or phrases. I asked if he could predict my A-level results, but he said I was being flippant. I wasn’t; I was frantic to know if I’d got the grades that would get me away from home. In a deserted playground on a hushed Shabbat in an Orthodox suburb of Tel Aviv, we sat on the swings and talked about the messiah. It was exciting, he said, because our messiah hadn’t come yet. It was all to play for. He could come at any time. And then what? The dead would rise, starting at the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, wickedness would end, there would be peace. I didn’t want to talk about raising the dead; I wanted to swap gossip about our friends, eat falafel, and get to the beach in time for sunset. I was starting to feel that all this talk about faith was cutting us off from talking about anything real. And it panicked me.

  Franny’s Jesus Prayer is supposed to be a refuge but it sends her into breakdown. She cries her eyes out in the restaurant, faints and winds up on the sofa at her parents’ New York flat, weeping, mouthing her prayer, refusing to eat, getting pale and thin and resisting Zooey’s attempts to argue her out of it.

  I couldn’t argue my boyfriend round either. I tried to convince him he could be Orthodox without being esoteric and separate, and certainly without his politics veering to the right. And I didn’t think the dead would rise. He liked me arguing back. He said I was his anchor, connecting him to the real world. But I didn’t want to be a deadweight, stuck in the mud, dragging him back. I was on my own journey.

  Back in
London, I put aside Nanda, I turned my back on Donne. I didn’t want to read about yearning for God. Not when that yearning might lead to living in a caravan on an Israeli settlement, in a wig, with two kitchen sinks and many children. I was scared of committing to living in a way that was even more constrained. And that’s when Franny really came into her own. Because her story is really the story of losing faith, not hanging on to it. When her fanatical faith drives her to breakdown, she is rescued, not by a knight in shining armour, not by a boyfriend or a husband or a lover, but by her brother Zooey.

  What he does is truly beautiful. Franny is still stuck on the sofa, and every time he tries to talk to her, it goes wrong. So he goes down the hall to Seymour’s old room, where there’s a private phone line no one can bear to get rid of because it would be too final. Zooey does a funny voice and calls her, pretending to be Buddy. This doesn’t work either, but it breaks the ice. Somehow the phone gives them enough distance to speak honestly. He tells Franny that while she’s repeating the Jesus Prayer, she is ignoring the really spiritual stuff, like the ‘consecrated chicken soup’ their mother keeps bringing her. He tells her to drink the soup. He tells her that she can’t live a detached religious life because she has desires – she wants to act – and it’s wrong to repress those desires. And anyway, she doesn’t have to. She can have faith and art. According to him, ‘the only religious thing you can do, is act. Act for God, if you want to – be God’s actress, if you want to. What could be prettier?’ Then he quotes Seymour telling him, when they were all still performing on the radio, to shine his shoes for the Fat Lady. Franny remembers Seymour telling her to be funny for the Fat Lady too. And Zooey tells her the Fat Lady is Christ.

  Some critics think Salinger’s spirituality mars his writing; they’re wrong. In Franny and Zooey, he takes a heroine who thinks she has to shun life to serve God and he shows her that she doesn’t. Vocations aren’t just for pilgrims or nuns: her vocation is to act. This felt like the answer I’d been looking for: maybe I didn’t have to turn Orthodox. Maybe my vocation was to write. And I still love the consecrated chicken soup. This is a half-Jew being told that her Catholic mother’s quintessentially Jewish soup is holy and transcendent. It’s ebullient, it’s radical and it chimes absolutely with one of the few beliefs I still hold: that there’s nothing as healing as food cooked by someone you love. At the end of the book, Salinger sends his readers out into the world. And he insists this is worthwhile because we can find meaning everywhere. (He is also the writer responsible for my extravagant use of italics.)

  I worry I’ll respond differently to Franny and Zooey now I know that Salinger became a recluse, sequestered in deepest darkest New Hampshire, writing but never publishing again. I also know other things about Salinger, things I wish I didn’t. I know he behaved questionably to women, drank his own urine and breakfasted on frozen peas. Emma says I shouldn’t know all this prurient stuff. It gets in the way. Emma is right.

  But it does help to know that, like Franny, Salinger was half-Jewish, half-Catholic, so he felt doubly an outsider. And that he had a very bad war. When the Japanese invaded Pearl Harbor he’d already started writing, and publishing. He spent 1942 and 1943 at US army bases, and in 1944 he lugged his typewriter to Europe where he wrote in between fighting the horrific Battle of Hürtgen Forest (in a swamp full of landmines and exploding trees) and the Battle of the Bulge, as well as taking part in the Normandy landings (where two-thirds of the men in his regiment were killed) and the liberation of Paris. One of the first to enter Dachau, he later said he could never get the smell of burning flesh out of his nose. At the end of the war, he had a breakdown serious enough to get him hospitalised in France.

  For a while I thought Franny was cute and precocious and unknowable. Now I think that, like Salinger after the war, she knows too much, she’s seen too much, she’s understood things that other people deny or ignore. So of course she wants to flee the world. She knows she can never be complacent again, she can never fit in. Zooey shows her that even misfits (‘We’re freaks, that’s all’) can be at home in the world. No one is as influenced by Salinger as Wes Anderson. His film The Royal Tenenbaums is practically about the Glass family (Margot Tenenbaum is Franny’s celluloid double), and in Moonrise Kingdom, his twelve-year-old heroine is like a younger Franny, composed, mysterious, alienated, flamboyant and morbidly sensitive. She and another outsider, a twelve-year-old orphan boy, run away and set up camp in a remote and beautiful cove. He has survival skills, she has a suitcase crammed with adventure novels and a record player but most of all they have love, and that’s what they plan to live on. But by the end of the film, the most tender and romantic Anderson has made, they find a way to live in the world. Just like Franny does.

  I’m sad that Salinger didn’t find a way of living in the world, that he retreated into seclusion, guarding his privacy with a shotgun and many lawyers. But I’m very, very glad he gave me Franny and Zooey’s positive philosophy that I might be able to find meaning outside religion.

  As I was beginning to say some of these things to my boyfriend, I was also searching for some kind of safety net; Salinger leaves his heroine on the brink, but if I was going to leave my boyfriend, if I wasn’t going to become Orthodox, I needed some idea of what might happen after. So when I found that White had continued Nanda’s story past Frost in May, I read all three sequels feverishly, looking for options and answers. White changes Nanda’s name to Clara, and rows back slightly from the despair of Frost in May’s ending. But Nanda/Clara will never quite get free of Catholicism without ‘a sense of mutilation’ and, although I know it’s illogical, I will probably always feel a tiny bit guilty that I am not living an Orthodox life.

  Clara has to struggle to define herself against other forces, as well as the Church. In The Lost Traveller she battles her parents, in The Sugar House she escapes an unfortunate marriage, and in Beyond the Glass she faces her own demons, endures a breakdown, is committed to an asylum, and emerges shaky but optimistic.

  Clara is not a winning heroine. She’s short on charm; difficult, isolated, introspective and sometimes terrifyingly blank and disengaged. But White doesn’t give us time to like or dislike her. Instead she plunges us deep into her tangled interiority. This is confessional writing at its most complex – never maudlin, never wallowing, even though White was mining her own life, and that life was, at times, unbearable.

  I learned a lot from Nanda/Clara. I learned that I would probably always be wrestling with angels, that guilt would be a constant. When a friend asks Nanda how many venial sins there are, she replies gloomily, ‘Hundreds. Almost everything’s a venial sin, in fact. If I don’t eat my cabbage, or if I have an extra helping of pudding when I’m not really hungry, or if I think my hair looks rather nice when it’s just been washed’ – and she lists all the ways a Catholic can be implicated in someone else’s sins: ‘By counsel, by command, by consent, by provocation, by praise or flattery, by being a partner in the sin, by silence, by defending the ill-done.’ I always think of Nanda at Yom Kippur when I’m in synagogue atoning not just for things I know I’ve done but also for sins committed ‘under duress’, ‘inadvertently’, ‘unintentionally’, ‘unknowingly’ and ‘by a confused heart’. And when, years later, I first ate a prawn, I thought of Nanda. I felt so guilty about eating something non-kosher that I made myself throw up. The friend who had cooked me prawn curry (by mistake, he said, but then provoked me to eat it and ‘stop believing in nonsense laws created by a tribe in the desert trying to separate themselves from other tribes’) stood in the doorway saying ‘I’m not holding your hair!’ And I got rid of the prawn (but not the guilt), and wished Zooey was there instead. He would have known how to make me feel better.

  From Clara, I also learned that I would eventually lose the agonising self-consciousness of being a teenager. In The Lost Traveller, White calls Clara ‘unformed’, ‘skinless’, ‘silly’, ‘stiff’, ‘embarrassed’, ‘half-baked’, ‘pretentious’, ‘deceiving’,
‘crude and priggish and unfledged’; she’s always blushing or speaking in a ‘high, artificial voice’ and giving a ‘silly, nervous smile’. It takes going mad, losing her reason and coming out the other side for her to be her real self. To believe in herself, in fact, which is the point.

  She has to walk through fire first, though. She has to learn to mistrust charm, and specifically charming actors, like one silver-tongued seducer who is flagged up early on as a Bad Man when he says women can’t write and claims Branwell Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights. She has to learn to pit her true stories against the false ones she is told, to keep reminding herself that women can write, that she can write, that Emily wrote her own novel. (And not to be too swayed by charming actors. A lesson I have tried to learn myself.)

  She has to learn that living in a rackety, bohemian area and wearing rumpled clothes doesn’t make you an artist. And that if you feel so high and joyous you can’t believe it’s real, it probably isn’t. But she also finds that she can do extraordinary things ‘when the brakes are off’; leaving the asylum, she is told that while in the grip of madness she not only ripped up a fur coat with her bare hands but also sang quite beautifully.