Forty-One False Starts

by Janet Malcolm

  The true “heroine” of the book is Newland Archer (several critics have pointed out the name’s connection to James’s Isabel Archer), who, like Ralph Marvell in The Custom of the Country and Lawrence Selden in The House of Mirth, lives a dilettantish half-life of longing (“Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life,” Archer reflects at the novel’s powerful end) and is the culminating figure in Wharton’s pantheon of unmanned men. (In Newland’s case, the castrating female comes in the guise of the conventional “nice” young woman of good society who traps him into loveless marriage.)

  George Darrow, the suave hero of The Reef (1912), deviates from the formula in being a seducer and manipulator of women, rather than their victim; but Wharton—as if herself under his spell—extends to him the same sympathy she extends to Marvell, Selden, and Newland. The Reef has been called Wharton’s most Jamesian novel, but it is merely her least cleverly plotted one. James would never have committed the solecism of narration that Wharton commits in The Reef—telling the story of a secret relationship forward instead of backward in time, thus bringing into glaring relief the incredible coincidence by which the characters of her eccentric fable of sexual guilt are brought under one roof. James would have begun the novel with the characters securely in position.

  The second place in A Backward Glance where Wharton reveals more about her art than she appears to realize is a passage criticizing the late novels of Henry James, whose close friend she became in middle age. (“His friendship has been the pride and honour of my life,” she wrote with moving truth to a friend during James’s last illness, in 1915.)

  She says:

  His latest novels, for all their profound moral beauty, seemed to me more and more lacking in atmosphere, more and more severed from that thick nourishing human air in which we all live and move. The characters in “The Wings of the Dove” and “The Golden Bowl” seem isolated in a Crookes tube for our inspection: his stage was cleared like that of the Thêâtre Français in the good old days when no chair or table was introduced that was not relevant to the action (a good rule for the stage, but an unnecessary embarrassment to fiction). Preoccupied by this, I one day said to him: “What was your idea in suspending the four principal characters in ‘The Golden Bowl’ in the void? What sort of life did they lead when they were not watching each other, and fencing with each other? Why have you stripped them of all the human fringes we necessarily trail after us through life?”

  With uncharacteristic obtuseness, Wharton goes on to describe James’s profound puzzlement at her words—for the void that Wharton describes is, of course, not James’s, but her own, and it is precisely where she has pruned the fringes of naturalism most ruthlessly that she achieves her most powerful and individual effects. Her strongest work (Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country) has a stylization and abstraction, a quality of “madeness” that propels it out of the sphere of nineteenth-century realism and nudges it toward the self-reflexive literary experimentation of the twentieth century. In the primal horror of Ethan Frome, in the brittle pathos of The House of Mirth, and in the satiric surrealism of The Custom of the Country, Wharton most commandingly comes into her own as a literary artist. If she is an artist from whom we shrink a little and to whom we finally deny the highest rank, she remains—as Q. D. Leavis very fairly put it in her 1938 essay on Wharton in Scrutiny—“a remarkable novelist if not a large-sized one, and while there are few great novelists there are not even so many remarkable ones that we can afford to let her be overlooked.”

  * The Library of America single-volume edition of The House of Mirth, The Reef, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

  SALINGER’S CIGARETTES

  2001

  When J. D. Salinger’s “Hapworth 16, 1924”—a very long and very strange story in the form of a letter from camp written by Seymour Glass when he was seven—appeared in The New Yorker in June 1965, it was greeted with unhappy, even embarrassed silence. It seemed to confirm the growing critical consensus that Salinger was going to hell in a handbasket. By the late fifties, when the stories “Franny” and “Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” were coming out in the magazine, Salinger was no longer the universally beloved author of The Catcher in the Rye; he was now the seriously annoying creator of the Glass family.

  When “Franny” and “Zooey” appeared in book form in 1961, a flood of pent-up resentment was released. The critical reception—by, among others, Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Joan Didion, and John Updike—was more like a public birching than an ordinary occasion of failure to please. “Zooey” had already been pronounced “an interminable, an appallingly bad story,” by Maxwell Geismar* and “a piece of shapeless self-indulgence” by George Steiner.† Now Alfred Kazin, in an essay sardonically entitled “J. D. Salinger: ‘Everybody’s Favorite,’ ” set forth the terms on which Salinger would be relegated to the margins of literature for doting on the “horribly precocious” Glasses. “I am sorry to have to use the word ‘cute’ in respect to Salinger,” Kazin wrote, “but there is absolutely no other word that for me so accurately typifies the self-conscious charm and prankishness of his own writing and his extraordinary cherishing of his favorite Glass characters.”* McCarthy peevishly wrote: “Again the theme is the good people against the stupid phonies, and the good is still all in the family, like a family-owned ‘closed’ corporation . . . Outside are the phonies, vainly signaling to be let in.” And: “Why did [Seymour] kill himself? Because he had married a phony, whom he worshiped for her ‘simplicity, her terrible honesty’? . . . Or because he had been lying, his author had been lying, and it was all terrible, and he was a fake?”†

  Didion dismissed Franny and Zooey as “finally spurious, and what makes it spurious is Salinger’s tendency to flatter the essential triviality within each of his readers, his predilection for giving instructions for living. What gives the book its extremely potent appeal is precisely that it is self-help copy: it emerges finally as Positive Thinking for the upper middle classes, as Double Your Energy and Live Without Fatigue for Sarah Lawrence girls.”‡ Even kindly John Updike’s sadism was aroused. He mocked Salinger for his rendering of a character who is “just one of the remote millions coarse and foolish enough to be born outside the Glass family,” and charged Salinger with portraying the Glasses “not to particularize imaginary people but to instill in the reader a mood of blind worship, tinged with envy.” “Salinger loves the Glasses more than God loves them. He loves them too exclusively. Their invention has become a hermitage for him. He loves them to the detriment of artistic moderation. ‘Zooey’ is just too long.”§

  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 listene
rs 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. Th
ey 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.