Assorted Prose (29 page)

 
FRANNY AND ZOOEY

F
RANNY AND
Z
OOEY
, by J. D. Salinger. 201 pp. Little, Brown, 1961.

Quite suddenly, as things go in the middle period of J. D. Salinger, his later, longer stories are descending from the clouds of old
New Yorkers
and assuming incarnations between hard covers. “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” became available in
Stories from the New Yorker 1950–1960
, and now “Franny” and “Zooey” have a book to themselves. These two stories—the first medium-short, the second novella-length—are contiguous in time, and have as their common subject Franny’s spiritual crisis.

In the first story, she arrives by train from a Smithlike college to spend the weekend of the Yale game at what must be Princeton. She and her date, Lane Coutell, go to a restaurant where it develops that she is not only unenthusiastic but downright ill. She attempts to explain herself while her friend brags about a superbly obnoxious term paper and eats frogs’ legs. Finally, she faints, and is last seen lying in the manager’s office silently praying at the ceiling. In the second story, Franny has returned to her home, a large apartment in the East Seventies. It is the Monday following her unhappy Saturday. Only Franny’s mother, Bessie, and her youngest brother, Zooey, are home. While Franny lies sleeplessly on the living-room sofa, her mother communicates, in an interminably rendered conversation, her concern and affection to Zooey, who then, after an even longer conversation with Franny, manages to gather from the haunted atmosphere of the apartment the crucial word of consolation. Franny, “as if all of what little or much wisdom there is in the world were suddenly hers,” smiles at the ceiling and falls asleep.

Few writers since Joyce would risk such a wealth of words upon events that are purely internal and deeds that are purely talk. We live in a
world, however, where the decisive deed may invite the holocaust, and Salinger’s conviction that our inner lives greatly matter peculiarly qualifies him to sing of an America where, for most of us, there seems little to do but to feel. Introversion, perhaps, has been forced upon history; an age of nuance, of ambiguous gestures and psychological jockeying on a national and private scale, is upon us, and Salinger’s intense attention to gesture and intonation help make him, among his contemporaries, a uniquely pertinent literary artist. As Hemingway sought the words for things in motion, Salinger seeks the words for things transmuted into human subjectivity. His fiction, in its rather grim bravado, its humor, its privacy, its wry but persistent hopefulness, matches the shape and tint of present American life. It pays the price, however, of becoming dangerously convoluted and static. A sense of composition is not among Salinger’s strengths, and even these two stories, so apparently complementary, distinctly jangle as components of one book.

The Franny of “Franny” and the Franny of “Zooey” are not the same person. The heroine of “Franny” is a pretty college girl passing through a plausible moment of disgust. She has discovered—one feels rather recently—a certain ugliness in the hungry human ego and a certain fatuity in her college environment. She is attempting to find her way out with the help of a religious book,
The Way of a Pilgrim
, which was mentioned by a professor. She got the book out of the college library. Her family, glimpsed briefly in the P.S. of a letter she has written, appear to be standard upper-middle gentry. Their name is nowhere given as Glass, though some “brothers” are mentioned—once—in passing. Her boy friend is callow and self-centered but not entirely unsympathetic; he clumsily does try to “get through” to Franny, with a love whose physical bias has become painfully inappropriate. Finally, there is a suggestion, perhaps inadvertent, that the girl may be pregnant.

The Franny of “Zooey,” on the other hand, is Franny Glass, the youngest of the seven famous Glass children, all of whom have been in turn wondrously brilliant performers on a radio quiz program, “It’s a Wise Child.” Their parents, a distinctly unstandard combination of Jewish and Irish, are an old vaudeville team. From infancy on, Franny has been saturated by her two oldest brothers, Seymour and Buddy, in the religious wisdom of the East.
The Way of a Pilgrim
, far from being newly encountered at college, comes from Seymour’s desk, where it has been for years. One wonders how a girl raised in a home where Buddhism
and crisis theology were table talk could have postponed her own crisis so long and, when it came, be so disarmed by it. At any rate, there is no question of her being pregnant; the very idea seems a violation of the awesome Glass ethereality. Lane Coutell, who for all his faults was at least a considerable man in the first Franny’s universe, is now just one of the remote millions coarse and foolish enough to be born outside the Glass family.

The more Salinger writes about them, the more the seven Glass children melt indistinguishably together in an impossible radiance of personal beauty and intelligence. Franny is described thus: “Her skin was lovely, and her features were delicate and most distinctive. Her eyes were very nearly the same quite astonishing shade of blue as Zooey’s, but were set farther apart, as a sister’s eyes no doubt should be.…” Of Zooey, we are assured he has a “somewhat preposterous ability to quote, instantaneously and, usually, verbatim, almost anything he had ever read, or even listened to, with genuine interest.” The purpose of such sentences is surely not to particularize imaginary people but to instill in the reader a mood of blind worship, tinged by an envy that the author encourages with a patent leer of indulgence.

In “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” (the best of the Glass pieces: a magic and hilarious prose-poem with an enchanting end effect of mysterious clarity, like a
koan
), Seymour defines sentimentality as giving “to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it.” This seems to me the nub of the trouble. 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; there are too many cigarettes, too many goddams, too much verbal ado about not quite enough. The author never rests from circling his creations, patting them fondly, slyly applauding. He robs the reader of the initiative upon which love must be given. Even in “Franny,” which is, strictly, pre-Glass, the writer seems less an unimpassioned observer than a spying beau vindictively feasting upon every detail of poor Lane Coutell’s gaucherie. Indeed, this impression of a second male being present is so strong that it amounts to a social shock when the author accompanies Franny into the ladies’ room of the restaurant.

“Franny,” nevertheless, takes place in what is recognizably our world; in “Zooey” we move into a dream world whose zealously animated details
only emphasize an essential unreality. When Zooey says to Franny, “
Yes
, I have an ulcer for Chrissake. This is Kaliyuga, buddy, the Iron Age,” disbelief falls on the “buddy” as much as on “Kaliyuga,” and the explanatory “the Iron Age” clinches our suspicion that a lecturer has usurped the writing stand. Not the least dismaying development of the Glass stories is the vehement editorializing on the obvious—television scripts are not generally good, not all section men are geniuses. Of course, the Glasses condemn the world only to condescend to it, to forgive it, in the end. Yet the pettishness of the condemnation diminishes the gallantry of the condescension.

Perhaps these are hard words; they are made hard to write by the extravagant self-consciousness of Salinger’s later prose, wherein most of the objections one might raise are already raised. On the flap of this book jacket, he confesses, “… 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.” Let me say, I am glad he is hopeful. I am one of those—to do some confessing of my own—for whom Salinger’s work dawned as something of a revelation. I expect that further revelations are to come. The Glass saga, as he has sketched it out, potentially contains great fiction. When all reservations have been entered, in the correctly unctuous and apprehensive tone, about the direction he has taken, it remains to acknowledge that it
is
a direction, and that the refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one’s obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

 
CREDOS AND CURIOS

C
REDOS AND
C
URIOS
, by James Thurber. 180 pp. Harper and Row, 1962.

The appearance, in the yellow dust jacket that has become traditional, of one more collection of pieces by the late James Thurber is a happy event, even for the reviewer obliged to report that the bulk of the pieces are from his last years and as such tend to be cranky, formless, and lame. “The claw of the sea-puss,” Thurber once wrote (quoting F. Hopkinson Smith), “gets us all in the end”; and toward the end Thurber’s humor was overwhelmed by puns and dismay.

The puns are understandable. Blindness, in severing language from the seen world of designated things, gives words a tyrannical independence. Milton and Joyce wrung from verbal obsession a special magnificence, and Thurber’s late pieces, at their best—for example, “The Tyranny of Trivia,” collected in
Lanterns and Lances
—do lead the reader deep into the wonderland of the alphabet and the dictionary. But in such weak rambles as, in this collection, “The Lady from the Land” and “Carpe Noctem, If You Can,” logomachic tricks are asked to pass for wit and implausible pun-swapping for human conversation.

As to the dismay: Mrs. Thurber, in her graceful and understated introduction to this posthumous collection, defends her husband against the charge of “bitterness and disillusion.” But stories like “The Future, If Any, of Comedy Or, Where Do We Not-Go from Here?” and “Afternoon of a Playwright” do display, by way of monologue in the ungainly disguise of dialogue, an irritation with the present state of things so inclusive as to be pointless. Television, psychoanalysis, the Bomb, the deterioration of grammar, the morbidity of contemporary literature—these were just a few of Thurber’s terminal pet peeves. The writer who had produced
Fables for Our Time
and
The Last Flower
out of the thirties
had become, by the end of the fifties, one more indignant senior citizen penning complaints about the universal decay of virtue.

The only oasis, in the dreadful world of post-midnight forebodings into which he had been plunged, is the Columbus, Ohio, of his boyhood, which he continued to remember “as fondly and sharply as a man on a sinking ship might remember his prairie home.” In
Credos and Curios
, for a few pages entitled “Return of the Native,” his prose regains the crisp lucidity and glistening bias of
The Thurber Album
. Then the murky verbosity closes in again.

However,
Credos and Curios
should be cherished by every Thurberite for the seven random tributes he wrote, between 1938 and 1960, to seven artistic colleagues—Mary Petty, Elliott Nugent, and five writers. His acute and sympathetic remarks on Scott Fitzgerald remind us that Thurber, too, was one of the curiously compact literary generation that came to birth in the twenties and whose passing has left the literary stage so strikingly empty. His affectionate memories of John McNulty and E. B. White, two friends who in their different ways achieved the literary tranquility that eluded Thurber, better capture the spirit of
New Yorker
bonhomie than all
The Years With Ross
. His generous appreciation of Robert Benchley is most welcome of all, especially when taken as an antidote to the oddly curt paragraph with which
The New Yorker
noted the death, in 1949, of this remarkable artist. For if Thurber, whose international celebrity made him seem to loom unduly over the other American humorists of his vintage, is to be measured against his peers, the first name we strike is Benchley’s. The surprising thing about Benchley is that he remains rereadable. His writings were so ephemeral they seem to defy being outdated; their utterly casual and innocent surface airily resists corrosion. It is doubtful how much of Thurber will weather so well.