Forty-One False Starts

by Janet Malcolm

  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.

  Salinger will often literally set his scenes in small, sealed-off spaces—such as, for example, the limousine in which the central scene of “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” is set. In “Franny” there is a startling moment when Lane, waiting for Franny to come back from the ladies’ room, looks across the restaurant and sees someone he knows. It is startling because until this moment we had no awareness of there being anyone else in the restaurant. Salinger had typically isolated Franny and Lane at their table, so that we saw nothing and heard nothing but their conversation and the remarks of the waiter who attended to them.

  The bathroom scene in “Zooey” is perhaps the consummate example of this hermeticity. As if the space of the bathroom were still not small enough, there is a space-within-a-space formed by the shower curtain drawn around the tub in which Zooey sits with a lit cigarette parked on the soap dish. The scene is one of the most remarkable mother-and-son scenes in literature. Before the drawing of the curtain occasioned by the mother’s entrance, the immersed Zooey, drawing on his “dampish” cigarette, reads a four-year-old letter from Buddy, in which, among other things (such as encouraging Zooey in his decision to become an actor rather than going for a Ph.D.), Buddy tells Zooey to “be kinder to Bessie . . . when you can. I don’t think I mean because she’s our mother, but because she’s weary. You will after you’re thirty or so, when everybody slows down a little (even you, maybe), but try harder now. It isn’t enough to treat her with the doting brutality of an apache dancer toward his partner.”

  The apache dance begins with Bessie’s entrance:

  “Do you know how long you’ve been in that tub? Exactly forty-five—”

  “Don’t tell me! Just don’t tell me, Bessie.”

  “What do you mean, don’t tell you?”

  “Just what I said. Leave me the goddam illusion you haven’t been out there counting the minutes I’ve—”

  “Nobody’s been counting any minutes, young man,” Mrs. Glass said.

  Bessie is a stout middle-aged woman dressed in a garment Buddy calls her “pre-notification of death uniform”—a midnight-blue Japanese kimono, whose pockets are stuffed with things like screws, nails, hinges, faucet handles, and ball-bearing casters, along with several packs of king-size cigarettes and matches, and who is as unlike the other women in her “not unfashionable” apartment building as her children are unlike the other people in the world at large. The other women in the building own fur coats and, like Muriel and her mother, spend their days shopping at Bonwit Teller and Saks Fifth Avenue. Bessie “looked, first, as if she never, never left the building at all, but that if she did she would be wearing a dark shawl and she would be going in the direction of O’Connell Street, there to claim the body of one of her half-Irish, half-Jewish sons, who, through some clerical error, had just been shot dead by the Black and Tans.” At the same time, her way of holding a cigarette between the ends of two fingers

  tended to blow to some literary hell one’s first, strong (and still perfectly tenable) impression that an invisible Dubliner’s shawl covered her shoulders. Not only were her fingers of an extraordinary length and shapeliness—such as, very generally speaking, one wouldn’t have expected of a medium stout woman’s fingers—but they featured, as it were, a somewhat imperial-looking tremor; a deposed Balkan queen or a retired favorite courtesan might have had such an elegant tremor.

  Bessie also has great legs. But her most significant attribute—the one that gives “Zooey” ’s comedy its tragic underside (and raises the stakes of its outcome)—is her grief:

  It was a very touch and go business, in 1955, to get a wholly plausible reading from Mrs. Glass’s face, and especially from her enormous blue eyes. Where once, a few years earlier, her eyes alone could break the news (either to people or to bathmats) that two of her sons were dead, one by suicide (her favorite, her most intricately calibrated, her kindest son), and one killed in World War II (her only truly lighthearted son)—where once Bessie Glass’s eyes alone could report these facts, with an eloquence and a seeming passion for detail that neither her husband nor any of her adult surviving children could bear to look at, let alone take in, now in 1955, she was apt to use this same terrible Celtic equipment to break the news, usually at the front door, that the new delivery boy hadn’t brought the leg of lamb in time for dinner or that some remote Hollywood starlet’s marriage was on the rocks.

  All families of suicides are alike. They wear a kind of permanent letter S on their chests. Their guilt is never assuaged. Their anxiety never lifts. They are freaks among families in the way prodigies are freaks among individuals. Walter died tragically but “normally.” Seymour haunts the family like a member of the Undead. At the beginning of “Zooey,” Budd
y (who again brashly claims authorship of Salinger’s work) describes it as a love story, and it is true that the affection the family members feel for one another is an almost palpable presence. But it is also (what family story isn’t?) a hate story. Ambivalence fills the air of the bathroom in which mother and son sit. The son behind the curtain repeatedly protests the mother’s invasion of his privacy—even as he ensures that she remain rooted to the spot, transfixed by his relentless wit. She dutifully plays her straight-man role. When she grumbles about Franny’s unhealthy diet, for example (“I don’t think it’s at all impossible that the kind of food that child takes into her system hasn’t a lot to do with this whole entire funny business . . . You can’t go on abusing the body indefinitely, year in, year out—regardless of what you think”), she only opens the way for a new flight of aggressive fancy:

  “You’re absolutely right. You’re absolutely right. It’s staggering how you jump straight the hell into the heart of a matter. I’m goosebumps all over . . . By God, you inspire me. You inflame me, Bessie. You know what you’ve done? Do you realize what you’ve done? You’ve given this whole goddam issue a fresh, new, Biblical slant. I wrote four papers in college on the Crucifixion—five, really—and every one of them worried me half crazy because I thought something was missing. Now I know what it was. Now it’s clear to me. I see Christ in an entirely different light. His unhealthy fanaticism. His rudeness to those nice, sane, conservative, tax-paying Pharisees. Oh, this is exciting! In your simple, straightforward bigoted way, Bessie, you’ve sounded the missing keynote of the whole New Testament. Improper diet. Christ lived on cheeseburgers and Cokes. For all we know he probably fed the mult—”

  “Just stop that, now,” Mrs. Glass broke in, her voice quiet but dangerous. “Oh I’d like to put a diaper on that mouth of yours.”

  When Zooey gets out of the tub, the mother leaves the bathroom, only to return when he is half dressed and shaving. During this second visit (“Ah! What a pleasant and gracious surprise!” the fresh son says when she enters. “Don’t sit down! Let me drink you in first”) she touches his bare back and remarks on its beauty. (“You’re getting so broad and lovely,” she says.) His response is to sharply recoil in a way we recall two other Salinger characters to have recoiled. One is the little girl in “Bananafish,” who says “Hey!” when Seymour impulsively kisses the arch of her foot after she says that she saw a bananafish. The other is Holden Caulfield, who jumps up and says “What the hellya doing?” when he wakes up in the apartment of the one good teacher he ever had, Mr. Antolini, to find him sitting beside the bed patting his head. “Don’t, willya?” Zooey says to his mother; and when she says, “Don’t what?” he replies, “Just don’t, that’s all. Don’t admire my goddam back.”

  The rescue fantasy from which Catcher takes its title—Holden imagines himself standing at the edge of a cliff at the end of a rye field where thousands of children are playing, catching any child who starts going over the cliff—bears on the whole of Salinger’s enterprise. Salinger is himself a kind of catcher of the children and young adults who appear in his stories and are in danger of falling—threatened by the adults who are supposed to be protecting them but cannot keep their hands off them. The frank pleasure Bessie Glass takes in the sight of her son’s body is represented as the breaching of a boundary, as “something perverty” (in Holden’s term). Even a good teacher like Mr. Antolini or a good parent like Bessie (or a good psychotic like Seymour) cannot be counted on, will ultimately fail the child in the test of disinterest. The young must stick together; only they can save each other. Thus, in Catcher, Phoebe saves Holden, and, in “Zooey,” Zooey saves Franny. But where Phoebe, in Catcher, was “normal,” in opposition to the off-center Holden, Franny and Zooey are peas in a pod. They have the Glass disease; they suffer from a kind of allergy to human frailty. The pettiness, vulgarity, banality, and vanity that few of us are free of, and thus can tolerate in others, are like ragweed for Salinger’s helplessly uncontaminated heroes and heroines.

  The second half of “Zooey” is occupied with Zooey’s blind-leading-the-blind attempt to propel Franny back into the world he himself stumbles about in. Interestingly, he does not consider his sister’s (and his own) condition of hypercriticality congenital, but believes it to have been caused by the older brothers, who at an early age indoctrinated them in Eastern religion (as well as a kind of East-inflected Christianity). (“We wanted you both to know who and what Jesus and Gautama and Lao-tse and Shankaracharya and Huineng and Sri Ramakrishna, etc., were before you knew too much or anything about Homer or Shakespeare or even Blake or Whitman, let alone George Washington and his cherry tree or the definition of a peninsula or how to parse a sentence,” Buddy writes in his letter to Zooey.) “We’re freaks, the two of us, Franny and I,” Zooey says to Bessie:

  “I’m a twenty-five-year-old freak, and she’s a twenty-year-old freak, and both those bastards are responsible . . . I could murder them both without batting an eyelash. The great teachers. The great emancipators. My God. I can’t even sit down to lunch with a man any more and hold up my end of a decent conversation. I either get so bored or so goddam preachy that if the son of a bitch had any sense, he’d break his chair over my head.”

  As Franny wanly lies on the living-room sofa under an afghan, with the Jewish cat snuggled up against her, Zooey makes his pitch—and gets nowhere for an excruciatingly long time. The charge that the story was “interminable” doubtless derived from Salinger’s unwillingness—at whatever cost to the speed of his narrative—to scant the magnitude of Franny’s retreat from life.

  Finally, Zooey resorts to an interesting stratagem—he leaves the living room and calls Franny on a telephone extension in the apartment, first pretending he is Buddy and then admitting he is himself. Salinger permits us to overhear both sides of the conversation, but to see only Franny, who has taken the telephone in her parents’ bedroom and is sitting tensely upright on one of the twin beds, smoking a cigarette, putting it out, and attempting to light another with her free hand. As Zooey talks—“If it’s the religious life you want, you ought to know right now that you’re missing out on every single goddam religious action that’s going on around this house. You don’t even have sense enough to drink when somebody brings you a cup of consecrated chicken soup—which is the only kind of chicken soup Bessie ever brings to anybody around this madhouse”—Franny’s body language tells us that his message is coming through. The cure that could not be effected in the large, light-filled living room is achieved in the dark closet of the telephone conversation. Franny will eat from now on. Also, she will not carry out her threat of giving up acting because of “the stupidity of audiences,” of “the goddam ‘unskilled laughter’ coming from the fifth row.” “That’s none of your business, Franny,” Zooey says. “An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s.” Zooey’s final offering, which causes Franny to hold the phone with both hands “for joy, apparently,” is the now famous concept of the Fat Lady in the audience, who is Everyman, and who is Christ. I would have preferred that Salinger had stopped at the chicken soup and the artist’s minding of his own business. Salinger rarely puts a foot wrong; but with the Fat Lady, I’m afraid he takes a tumble into condescension.

  Although Salinger stopped publishing after the appearance of “Hapworth,” he evidently has never stopped writing, and someday there may be dozens, maybe hundreds, more Glass stories to read and reread. On the dust jacket of the 1961 Little, Brown edition of Franny and Zooey, Salinger wrote an author’s note about his enterprise:

  Both stories are early, critical entries in a narrative series I’m doing about a family of settlers in twentieth-century New York, the Glasses. It is a long-term project, patently an ambitious one, and there is a real-enough danger, I suppose, that sooner or later I’ll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and mannerisms. On the whole, though, I’m very hopeful. I love working on thes
e Glass stories, I’ve been waiting for them most of my life, and I think I have fairly decent, monomaniacal plans to finish them with due care and all-available skill.

  The image of the patiently and confidently “waiting” writer is arresting, as is the term “settlers,” with its connotations of uncharted territory and danger and hardship.

  Salinger’s own perilous journey away from the world has brought many misfortunes down on his head. His modest wish for privacy was perceived as a provocation and met with hostility, much like the hostility toward the Glasses. Eventually it offered an irresistible opportunity for commercial exploitation. The pain caused Salinger by the crass, vengeful memoirs of, respectively, his former girlfriend, Joyce Maynard,* and his daughter, Margaret,† may be imagined. A redeeming moment occurred a few weeks after the publication of the latter book, when a letter by, of all people, Margaret’s younger brother, Matt, an actor who lives in New York, appeared in The New York Observer. He was writing to object to his sister’s book. “I would hate to think I were responsible for her book selling one single extra copy, but I am also unable not to plant a small flag of protest over what she has done, and much of what she has to say.” Matt went on to write of his sister’s “troubled mind” and of the “gothic tales of our supposed childhood” she had liked to tell and that he had not challenged because he thought they had therapeutic value for her. He continued: