By Amanda Shubert
“‘It’s us,’ Zooey repeated, overriding her. “We’re freaks, that’s all. Those two bastards got us nice and early and made us into freaks with freakish standards, that’s all. We’re the Tattooed Lady, and we’re never going to have a minute’s peace, the rest of our lives, till everybody else is tattooed, too.’” –Franny and Zooey
I am not an expert on J.D. Salinger, but I am probably as much of an expert as anyone on reading Salinger as an adolescent. I first encountered his work at the age of twelve, when my prescient seventh grade English teacher lent me her copies of his books one by one: Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour—An Introduction. (Those last two books are pairings of novellas.) In the introduction to the story “Zooey,” Buddy Glass, our narrator and Salinger’s alter ego, explains to the reader that The Great Gatsby “was my Tom Sawyer when I was twelve.” Franny and Zooey was mine. And thus one girl’s intellectual overreaching, spiritual longing and social alienation—not so unlike that of Franny, Zooey and the Glass family siblings—was born.
But, as Salinger’s vast appeal and mythic status as a popular icon immediately suggests, I am far from the only person to claim this status. As I began to work on this piece I spoke to friends of mine—fellow experts on reading Salinger as an adolescent—about returning to his work today, a project that seemed to all of us somehow dangerous in its invitation for nostalgia, bound to disappoint. We were nervous that the work would not hold up—and, truly, what reality can withstand the memory of teenage affiliation? The assumption was that these are books for and about precocious young people, and we may have outgrown them.
What I missed in my hasty identification with the memory of reading the books throughout my adolescence, and realized almost immediately upon returning to the books themselves, is that Salinger’s subject is not precocious childhood at all, the experience of knowing too much too early, but what comes after: the prospects of precocious children once adulthood has caught up to them. Kenneth Slawenski’s new biography Salinger: A Life, released in January 2011 to coincide with the one-year anniversary of J.D. Salinger’s death, brings Salinger’s less recognized status as a writer for adults excellently, and elegantly, into relief.
Before Salinger’s books became cult classics for high school misfits, they were indisputably the stuff of high literary culture, critical as well as commercial successes. In the 1950s and 60s Salinger was on the staff of New Yorker as their regular fiction contributor, championed by the legendary editor and literary gatekeeper William Shawn. F. Scott Fitzgerald was his literary hero and John Updike one of his great admirers; Sylvia Plath admitted to styling The Bell Jar after Catcher in the Rye. The notion of Salinger as a writer for young people came later, percolating with the anti-conformist movement in the late 1950s and surging with the social issues movements in the 1970s. As the generational gulf between youth and adults grew to seem insurmountable, Catcher in the Rye became an anthem for youth culture. It probably didn’t help that when Salinger published Franny and Zooey in 1961, critics almost universally panned it, with a furor they seemed to be saving up for him through the years of his celebrity. If High Art was going to drop J.D. Salinger, counter-culture youth was more than happy to claim him.
The juvenile appeal of Salinger’s work was part of what critics came to deplore. Joan Didion denounced Salinger as the writer of avant-garde literary self-help books, describing Franny and Zooey, hilariously, as “Double Your Energy and Live Without Fatigue for Sarah Lawrence girls.” It’s hard not to imagine Salinger was thinking of her jab when later, in Seymour—An Introduction, Buddy Glass admits that his English department colleagues might easily title a letter of Seymour’s “A Nineteen-Year-Old Prescription for Writers and Brothers and Hepatitis Convalescents Who Have Lost Their Way and Can’t Go On.” Yet the wisdom in Salinger—and his stories certainly claim to purvey moral truths—is at once highly unusual and highly personal. A half-century’s mass identification with his characters just doesn’t cover or explain it. Like the letters the Glass siblings write one another, his stories have the effect of seeming to be written for just one reader, the one with the book in her hands.
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Salinger himself had a fairly undistinguished childhood and adolescence. Born into an upper middle class New York Jewish family, “Sonny” grew into a clever, sarcastic, distracted young man. He had a preternaturally strong sense of ambition and destiny, particularly for a boy who, like Holden Caulfield, would move shiftlessly between schools, earning a high school diploma but never a college degree. When he was sixteen his parents sent him to Valley Forge military boarding school, where one fellow student said of him “he always talked in a pretentious manner as if he were reciting something out of Shakespeare.”
In 1936, Salinger enrolled in New York University to pursue a bachelor’s degree, but the lure of the city, with its coffee houses and movie theaters, was far more powerful than that of the classroom, and he quickly dropped out of school. He moved in and out of the upper crust circles that he simultaneously loathed and was drawn to—this was where he met and fell in love with the young Oona O’Neill, the beautiful but by all accounts vapid daughter of the playwright Eugene O’Neill, who later left him for Charlie Chaplin.
You can’t imagine Salinger writing a character like Holden Caulfield, sixteen year-old protagonist of Catcher in the Rye, without those years bumming around Manhattan, a misfit drifter through the privileged circles of the wealthy and the avant-garde, and indeed he wrote his first Caulfield story, “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” during that time. It was 1941, a year before Salinger would be drafted into the U.S. Army. He called the story “a sad little comedy about a prep school boy on Christmas vacation,” and it featured a Holden Morrisey Caulfield, a New York teenager trapped by the mundane, “phony” social world he knew no alternative to, a scenario powerfully suggesting Salinger’s own youth.
But it took the Second World War, a trial by fire, for Salinger to create his best-known and most beloved novel, and to crystallize his unmistakable voice as a writer. Slawenski’s furiously researched chapter on the war is the most surprising and illuminating component of the biography, though it is also the most speculative; little is actually known about Salinger’s experience as a soldier because he refused to write or speak about it. He fought with the Twelfth Infantry Regiment, which suffered the highest rate of casualties of any American regiment to serve in Europe. A time of untellable horrors, his war experience was defined by silence. After the disastrous rehearsal of the D-Day landing that attracted the attention of German torpedo boats—749 Allied soldiers lost their lives—everyone involved was sworn to secrecy. As a member of the Counter Intelligence Corps, Salinger was forced to see and suppress more than we can know; one of his tasks was liberating Dachau after the war.
Astonishingly, Salinger worked on a series of short stories during wartime, which he later worked up into the novel that became Catcher in the Rye. The stories were about Holden and occasionally one of his two brothers (relegated to minor roles in the novel); often they are soldiers in the same war Salinger was fighting, wondering about the others, about home. What Slawenski’s deductions and close-readings of the unpublished stories show is that Catcher is a war novel without a war in it. Developed on a battlefield, its privileged teenage protagonist bears the ghost traces of wartime suffering. He represents Salinger the soldier, working out his relation to a world that has betrayed his faith in humanity, as much as he represents Salinger the adolescent.
Even though Holden is a mere sixteen years old it would be a mistake to read Catcher in the Rye, or any of Salinger’s works, only as stories for young people. Holden has all the contradictions and hypocrisy, all the immaturity, of a teenager, but he is equally the receptacle for adult Salinger’s ideas about loss, meaninglessness and redemption. The source of the sense of exile that pervades Catcher is not just the inability to return to childhood but also the inability to regain spiritual coherence in the post-war world. In Holden’s now famous misreading of the Robert Burns poem “Gin a body meet a body coming through the rye,” he imagines it is his job to catch the children playing on a grassy hill before they fall over the ledge. It’s a fantasy that time can be stopped, that innocence can be preserved, the fantasy of a young person naïve enough to believe that our worst problems have solutions, but also the fantasy of someone decidedly beyond childhood, whose only relation to innocence or purity can be to attempt to protect it in others. It is when Salinger reconceives this fantasy for grown up characters, the once precocious children and now disillusioned adults who make up the Glass siblings in Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters, that he does his most profound, most enduring and most loveable work.
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The Glass family stories are what Janet Malcolm, in her vindicating essay “Justice to J.D. Salinger,” brilliantly termed “fables of otherness—versions of Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis.’” “We’re freaks, that’s all,” Zooey Glass puts it, “we’re the Tattooed Lady.” Born to an Irish-Catholic mother and a Jewish father, a former vaudeville duo (Bessie and Les), the seven Glass siblings each appeared as children on a fictional radio quiz show called It’s a Wise Child where, under pseudonyms, they were misunderstood by enthusiastic listeners on a weekly basis. Hopelessly intellectual and bewilderingly eclectic, their spiritual guide is their eldest brother, Seymour, whose name—see more—suggests his saint-like omniscience. Seymour raises his brothers and sisters on a mixture of Christian, Vedantic and Buddhist philosophy, as well as a selection of literary classics both eastern and western, immortalized in “Zooey” in a collection of quotations that fill the inside of the door to Seymour and Buddy’s shared childhood bedroom. Buddy is the second oldest sibling, a writer and in later years English professor at an unnamed women’s college in upstate New York as well as Seymour’s closest confidant and the frequent narrator of these tales. The youngest two are Zooey, an actor, preternaturally handsome, and Franny, a college junior, an actress, and a student of literature discontent with the pursuit of knowledge.
Seymour’s most powerful and most inscrutable lesson to his protégés is his suicide on a vacation in Florida with his wife described in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” the first story in the collection Nine Stories. His death reverberates through the lives of his younger siblings who struggle to live in a world without him. In Franny and Zooey, Buddy, too, has receded from family life and, to the best of his ability, social life. He lives in a cabin in the woods without a telephone, much to Bessie’s quite verbal distress, meanwhile refusing to disconnect the telephone in the childhood bedroom he shared with Seymour, as though a call might come through any minute
It is against these absences, which are, in fact, tremendous presences, that Franny and Zooey takes place. In “Franny,” the titular character has a nervous breakdown over lunch with her boyfriend Lane the weekend of the big Yale football game—frog’s legs for him, a chicken sandwich for her (she never touches it), and several martinis between them. Their conversation, as incompatible as their lunches, composes the better part of the story. “Zooey,” even wordier, takes place at Bessie and Les’ Manhattan apartment, where Franny is recuperating and Zooey is rehearsing a part in a soap opera. Zooey rebukes Franny for her shortsightedness, just as Franny rebukes Lane, by the end succeeding in persuading her to give up the Jesus Prayer that she has taken to reciting under her breath, an affectation she has picked up from a cloth-bound book called The Way of the Pilgrim that once belonged to Seymour. To do this, Zooey has to channel both Buddy and Seymour, but his greatest asset is not the inherited role of the Glass family spiritual guide, but his status as Franny’s peer, equally marked as a “freak” by the unconventional education handed down by their older siblings, still on the threshold of a full adult life. (He is out of college and works full time as an actor, but still lives in with his parents.)
John Updike wrote that Salinger “made room for a new shapelessness, for life as it is lived,” and it is precisely the moral indeterminacy and meandering style of the Glass family stories that confounded the critics (including Updike) who later scorned them. Yet in a weak turn in Salinger: A Life, Slawenski maintains that it is not Salinger’s astonishing realism but the Vedantic messages encoded in his stories—the themes that Slawenski argues were closest to the author’s heart and which he was endlessly infuriated to learn that critics would not acknowledge—for which he was most maligned and least understood. I well believe Slawenski that Salinger saw his Glass stories as narrative Vedantic philosophy, but Slawenski’s inability to recognize that the stories are more complex than even their creator would admit is his greatest blind spot. At one point he describes an early, unpublished story operating like a “medieval morality play.” He may be right, but he also has a tendency to read Salinger, even his most subtle work, like Franny and Zooey, in precisely this way—schematically, in broad allegorical gestures.
Those readings are at times quite ingenious, like when he discusses the metaphoric use of space in “Zooey,” a story set entirely in Bessie and Les’ “not unfashionable” but almost pathologically cluttered apartment. In the opening scene, Zooey sits in the bathtub with the curtain drawn while his mother smokes on the toilet seat—the bathroom is the temple of ego. Later, Zooey joins Franny in the living room, where she is bearing out the tail end of her nervous breakdown on the living room couch while the workmen paint her bedroom—the living room is a tomb. But Slawenski also reads Salinger’s unforgettable page-long list of the contents of Bessie’s bathroom cabinet in that mother-and-son bathroom scene as a catalog of human vanity. It may refer to ego—Franny Glass’ word for what Holden Caulfield calls “phoniness”—but it’s not ego that Salinger wholly disparages. Hardly a symbol of spiritual vice, the bathroom cabinet list is an example of the kind of joyous romp Salinger leads his readers through, a tour-de-force that interrupts the flow of the story for the pure pleasure of excess, a showstopper. “I think your prose is getting to be all the theater your characters can withstand,” Seymour writes to Buddy in response to one of his short stories in Seymour—An Introduction. But that’s just it—it’s theater: like Zooey’s relentless mockery of his mother, a performance at once painful and transfixing, like the quotations that fill Seymour and Buddy’s bedroom door, like the six page long letters the siblings send one another and read till the edges of the creases tear. Asceticism marks neither style nor theme in Salinger. “Zooey” is the story, after all, in which Franny has to learn to stop reciting the Jesus Prayer in order to uncover the quotidian spirituality that will nurture rather than narcotize her.
The real subject of these stories is not ego, or the renunciation of ego, but their paradoxical sameness. Suicide might be the ultimate enlightenment for Seymour, but it is also the ultimate act of selfishness. Similarly, the Glasses may be spiritually advanced (as Seymour claims they are), but they are first and foremost a family of intellectuals and performers. Franny and Zooey are actors, Seymour and Buddy writers, and they are all the children of vaudevillians. Franny’s breakdown takes the form of a spiritual crisis, but it is equally catalyzed by academic burnout. (Franny’s problem is that of all the Glass siblings—she is so brilliant that mere brilliance bores her.)
The predominant metaphor for the foursome could be religious: Seymour as Christ, Buddy as his faithful St. John, and Franny and Zooey the urban pilgrims wandering directionless in a barren landscape that God has abandoned. But religion takes unconventional forms for Salinger and for his characters. “When has writing ever been anything but your religion?” Seymour asks Buddy in a letter. Vocation in the Glass stories is at once aesthetic and religious. “Zooey” is a story twice over—the story Salinger writes encasing the story Buddy writes—but it is also, as Buddy labels it in his introduction, “a prose home movie,” which is to say, a performance, one that is tightly choreographed by Salinger and by Buddy, his scribe, one where (Slawenski is right here) the various rooms of the house, as in the set of an Ibsen play, stand for rooms of the mind. Franny and Zooey are the actors, Buddy the writer, and Seymour the director from beyond the grave whose cryptic instructions the rest are left to interpret. But in order for Zooey to rescue Franny from her despair, to resurrect her from what Slawenski calls “the tomb,” he must play all the roles. Seymour is dead and Buddy is unreachable even by telephone. Zooey has to act the part of the savior, but he also has to write the script and direct the scene.
“We speak a kind of esoteric, family language,” Buddy writes of the Glasses, “a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle.” Performance, linguistic or otherwise, is what the Glasses share, but it’s also what causes friction in their confrontations with the rest of the social world. Significantly, it’s not the savant or the writer who bears the final wisdom in Franny and Zooey but the actor. Unlike the reclusive Buddy (or the reclusive Salinger), Zooey performs his art in front of an audience that may or may not understand, right in the heart of the hostile, messy, phony social world we all live in and some of us, like the Glass family and the readers who love them, less comfortably than others.
“Act, Zachary Martin Glass, when and where you want to, since you feel you must, but do it with all your might.” That’s Buddy’s advice to Zooey in the five-year old letter Zooey reads in the bathtub in the first scene of “Zooey.” Here, “act” refers not just to his vocation as an actor but to what neither Buddy nor Seymour was able to do, but which Franny and Zooey still have some hope of—passing out of the “semantic geometry” of their precocious childhoods and into adulthood. If they must be the “Tattooed Lady,” they can still be actors in the social drama of life. Salinger’s work is finally not about denying or overcoming social alienation and the intellectual and spiritual precocity it springs from, but about simply learning to live after it.
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