J. D. Salinger: "Everybody's Favorite"

THE ATLANTIC

BY ALFRED KAZIN

THE publication of his two well-known stories from the New Yorker in book form, Franny and zooey (Little, Brown), brings home the fact that, for one reason or another, J. D. Salinger now figures in American writing as a special case. After all, there are not many writers who could bring out a book composed of two stories — both of which have already been read and argued over and analyzed to death by that enormous public of sophisticated people which radiates from the New Yorker to every English Department in the land. Yet Salinger’s fascination for this public is so great that, although he has refused this book to every book club, it may yet sell as if it were being pushed by book clubs. Since 1953, when The Catcher in the Rye was reprinted as a paperback, it has become the favorite American novel on the required or suggested reading lists of American colleges and secondary schools, and it has sold well over a million and a half copies. No less unusual is the fact that the New Yorker — which, if it did not originate, certainly brought to perfection the kind of tight, allusive, ironic story with which Salinger’s earlier stories (reprinted in Nine Stories, 1953) felt so much at home — published in “Zooey” (41,130 words) the longest story it had ever published, and a story for which the New Yorker obviously felt personal affection and some particular intellectual sympathy.

In one form or another, as a fellow novelist commented unlovingly, Salinger is “everybody’s favorite.” He is certainly a favorite of the New Yorker, which in 1959 published another long story around the Glass family called “Seymour: An Introduction” (almost 30,000 words), and thus gave the impression of stretching and remaking itself to Salinger’s latest stories, which have been appearing, like visits from outer space, at twoyear intervals. But above all, he is a favorite with that audience of students, student intellectuals, instructors, and generally literary, sensitive, and sophisticated young people who respond to him with a consciousness that he speaks for them and virtually to them, in a language that is peculiarly honest and their own, with a vision of things that captures their most secret judgments of the world. The only thing that Salinger does not do for this audience is to meet with them. Holden Caulfield said in The Catcher in the Rye that “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.” It is well for him that all the people in this country who now regard J. D. Salinger as a “terrific friend” do not call him up and reach him.

A fundamental reason for Salinger’s appeal (like that of Hemingway in the short stories that made him famous) is that he has exciting professional mastery of a peculiarly charged and dramatic medium, the American short story. At a time when so much American fiction has been discursive in tone, careless in language, lacking in edge and force — when else would it have been possible for crudities like the Beat novelists to be taken seriously? — Salinger has done an honest and stimulating professional job in a medium which, when it is expertly handled, projects emotion like a cry from the stage and in form can be as intense as a lyric poem. A short story which is not handled with necessary concentration and wit is like a play which does not engage its audience; a story does not exist unless it hits its mark with terrific impact. It is a constant projection of meanings at an audience, and it is a performance minutely made up of the only possible language, as a poem is. In America, at least, where, on the whole, the best stories are the most professional stories and so are published in the most famous magazines, second-rate stories belong in the same limbo with unsuccessful musical comedies; unless you hit the bull’s-eye, you don’t score.

This does not mean that the best-known stories are first-rate pieces of literature any more than that so many triumphant musical comedies are additions to the world’s drama; it means only that a story has communicated itself with entire vividness to its editor and its audience. The profundity that may exist in a short story by Chekhov or Tolstoy also depends upon the author’s immediate success in conveying his purpose. Even in the medieval tale, which Tolstoy in his greatest stories seems to recapture in tone and spirit, the final comment on human existence follows from the deliberate artlessness of tone that the author has managed to capture like a speech in a play.

WHAT makes Salinger’s stories particularly exciting is his intense, his almost compulsive need to fill in each inch of his canvas, each moment of his scene. Many great novels owe their grandeur to a leisurely sense of suggestion, to the imitation of life as a boundless road or flowing river, to the very relaxation of that intensity which Poe thought was the aesthetic perfection of a poem or a story. But whatever the professional superficiality of the short story in American hands, which have molded and polished it so as to reach, dazzle, and on occasion deceive the reader, a writer like Salinger, by working so hard to keep his tiny scene alive, keeps everything humming.

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. Ours is a society complicated with many appliances, and Salinger always tells you what his characters are doing with each of their hands. In one long stretch of “Zooey,” he describes that young man sitting in a bathtub, reading a long letter from his brother, and smoking; he manages to describe every exertion made and every sensation felt in that bathtub by the young man whose knees made “dry islands.” Then the young man’s mother comes into the bathroom; he draws the shower curtains around the tub, she rearranges the medicine cabinet, and while they talk (in full), everything they do is described. Everything, that is, within Salinger’s purpose in getting at such detail, which is not the loose, shuffling catalogue of the old-fashioned naturalists, who had the illusion of reproducing the whole world, but the tension of a dramatist or theater director making a fuss about a character’s walking just so.

For Salinger, the expert performer and director (brother Buddy Glass, who is supposed to be narrating “Zooey,” speaks of “directing” it and calls the story itself a “prose home movie”), gesture is the essence of the medium. A short story does not offer room enough for the development of character; it can present only character itself, by gesture. And Salinger is remarkable, I would say he is almost frenetically proficient, in getting us, at the opening of “Franny,” to see college boys waiting on a train platform to greet their dates arriving for a big football weekend. They rush out to the train, “most of them giving the impression of having at least three lighted cigarettes in each hand.” He knows exactly how Franny Glass would be greeted by Lane Coutell: “It was a station-platform kiss — spontaneous enough to begin with, but rather inhibited in the followthrough, and with something of a foreheadbumping aspect.”

And even better is his description of the boy at a good restaurant, taking a first sip of his Martini and then looking “around the room with an almost palpable sense of well-being at finding himself (he must have been sure no one could dispute) in the right place with an unimpeachably right-looking girl.” Salinger knows how to prepare us with this gesture for the later insensitivity of a boy who is exactly one of those elaborately up-to-date and anxiously sophisticated people whom Franny Glass, pure in heart, must learn to tolerate, and even to love, in what she regards as an unbearably shallow culture.

But apart from this, which is the theme of Franny and zooey, the gesture itself is recognized by the reader not only as a compliment to himself but as a sign that Salinger is working all the time, not merely working to get the reader to see, but working to make his scene itself hum with life and creative observation. I don’t know how much this appearance of intensity on the part of Salinger, of constant as well as full coverage, is due to New Yorker editorial nudging, since its famous alertness to repetitions of words and vagueness of diction tends to give an external look of freshness and movement to prose. Salinger not only works very hard indeed over each story, but he obviously writes to and for some particular editorial mind he identifies with the New Yorker; look up the stories he used to write for the Saturday Evening Post and Cosmopolitan, and you will see that just as married people get to look alike by reproducing each other’s facial expressions, so a story by Salinger and a passage of commentary in the New Yorker now tend to resemble each other.

But whatever the enormous influence of any magazine on those who write regularly for it, Salinger’s emphasis of certain words and syllables in American speech and his own compulsiveness in bearing down hard on certain details (almost as if he wanted to make the furniture, like the gestures of certain people, tell everything about the people who use them) do give his stories the intensity of observation that is fundamental to his success. Lane Coutell, sitting in that restaurant with Franny and talking about a college paper on Flaubert he is horribly well satisfied with, says, “I think the emphasis I put on why he was so neurotically attached to the mot juste wasn’t too bad. I mean in the light of what we know today. Not just psychoanalysis and all that crap, but certainly to a certain extent. You know what I mean. I’m no Freudian man or anything like that, but certain things you can’t just pass over as capital F Freudian and let them go at that. I mean to a certain extent I think I was perfectly justified to point out that none of the really good boys — Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Shakespeare, for Chrissake — were such goddam word-squeezers. They just wrote. Know what I mean?" What strikes me about this mimicry is not merely that it is so clever, but that it is also so relentless. In everything that this sophisticated ass, Lane Coutell, says, one recognizes that he is and will be wrong. Salinger disapproves of him in the deepest possible way: he is a spiritual enemy.

Of course, it is a vision of things that lies behind Salinger’s expert manner. There is always one behind every manner. The language of fiction, whatever it may accomplish as representation, ultimately conveys an author’s intimation of things; makes us hear, not in a statement, but in the ensemble of his realized efforts, his quintessential commentary on the nature of existence. However, the more deliberate the language of the writer, as it must be in a short story, the more the writer must convey his judgment of things in one highlighted dramatic action, as is done on the stage.

At the end of “Franny,” the young girl collapses in the ladies’ room of the restaurant where she has been lunching with her cool boy friend. This conveys her spiritual desperation in his company, for Lane typifies a society where “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 — sadmaking.” Her brother Zooey (Zachary Glass), at the end of the long second story, calls her up from another telephone number in the same apartment and somehow reaches to the heart of her problem and gives her peace by reminding her that the “Fat Lady” they used to picture somnolently listening to them when they were quiz kids on the radio — the ugly, lazy, even disgustinglooking Fat Lady, who more and more typifies unattractive and selfish humanity in our day — can be loved after all, for she, too, is Jesus Christ.

IN EACH story, the climax bears a burden of meaning that it would not have to bear in a novel; besides being stagy, the stories are related in a way that connects both of them into a single chronicle. This, to quote the title of a little religious pamphlet often mentioned in it, might be called “The Way of a Pilgrim.” Both Franny and Zooey Glass are, indeed, pilgrims seeking their way in a society typified by the Fat Lady, and even by Lane Coutell’s meaningless patter of sophistication. No wonder Franny cries out to her unhearing escort: “I’m sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.” The Glasses (mother Irish, father Jewish) are exvaudevillians whose children were all, as infant prodigies, performers on a radio quiz program called It’s a Wise Child. Now, though engaged in normally sophisticated enterprises (Franny goes to a fashionable women’s college, Zooey is a television actor. Buddy a college instructor), they have retained their intellectual precocity — and, indeed, their precocious charm — and have translated, as it were, their awareness of themselves as special beings into a conviction that they alone can do justice to their search for the true way.

The eldest and most brilliant of the children, Seymour, shot himself in 1948 while on his honeymoon in Florida; this was the climax of Salinger’s perhaps most famous story, “A Perfect Day For Banana Fish.” And it is from Seymour’s old room in the Glass apartment that Zooey calls up his sister, Franny, on a phone that is normally never used, that is still listed in the name of Seymour Glass, and that has been kept up by Buddy (who does not want a phone in his own country retreat) and by Zooey in order to perpetuate Seymour’s name and to symbolize his continuing influence on them as a teacher and guide. It is from reading over again, in Seymour’s old room, various religious sayings from the world’s literature that Seymour had copied out on a piece of beaverboard nailed to the back of a door that Zooey is inspired to make the phone call to Franny that ends with the revelation that the horrible Fat Lady is really Jesus Christ.

This final episode, both in the cuteness of its invention and in the cuteness of speech so often attributed to Seymour, who is regarded in his own family as a kind of guru, or sage, helps us to understand Salinger’s wide popularity. I am sorry to have to use the word “cute"’ in respect to Salinger, 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.

Holden Caulfield is also cute in The Catcher in the Rye, cute in his little-boy suffering for his dead brother, Allie, and cute in his tenderness for his sister. “Old Phoebe.” But we expect that boys of that age may be cute — that is, consciously appealing and consciously clever. To be these things is almost their only resource in a world where parents and schoolmasters have all the power and the experience. Cuteness, for an adolescent, is to turn the normal self-pity of children, which arises from their relative weakness, into a relative advantage vis-à-vis the adult world. It becomes a role boys can play in the absence of other advantages, and The Catcher in the Rye is so full of Holden’s cute speech and cute innocence and cute lovingness for his own family that one must be an absolute monster not to like it.

And on a higher level, but with the same conscious winsomeness, the same conscious mournfulness and intellectual loneliness and lovingness (though not for his wife), Seymour Glass is cute when he sits on the beach with a little girl telling her a parable of “banana fish” — ordinarylooking fish when “they swim into a hole where there’s a lot of bananas,” but “after that they’re so fat they can’t get out of the hole again. . . . They die.” His wife, meanwhile busy in their room on the long-distance phone to her mother in New York, makes it abundantly clear in the hilariously accurate cadences and substance of her conversation why her husband finds it more natural to talk to a four-year-old girl on the beach than to her. Among other things, Seymour expects not to be understood outside the Glass family. But agonizing as this situation is, the brilliantly entertaining texture of “A Perfect Day For Banana Fish” depends on Seymour Glass’s conscious cleverness as well as on his conscious suffering — even his conscious cleverness about the suffering of “ordinary-looking” fish who get so bloated eating too many bananas in a “hole” they shouldn’t have been attracted to in the first place.

In the same way, not only does the entertaining surface of Franny and Zooey depend on the conscious appealingness and youthfulness and generosity and sensitivity of Seymour’s brother and sister, but Salinger himself, in describing these two, so obviously feels such boundless affection for them that you finally get the sense of all these child prodigies and child entertainers being tied round and round with veils of self-love in a culture which they — and Salinger — just despise, Despise, above all, for its intellectual pretentiousness. Yet this is the society, typified by the Fat Lady (symbolically, they pictured her as their audience), whom they must now force themselves to think of as Jesus Christ, and whom, as Christ Himself, they can now at last learn to love.

For myself, I must confess that the spiritual transformation that so many people associate with the very sight of the word “love” on the printed page does not move me as it should. In what has been considered Salinger’s best story, “For Esmé — with Love and Squalor,” Sergeant X in the American Army of Occupation in Germany is saved from a hopeless breakdown by the beautiful magnanimity and remembrance of an aristocratic young English girl. We are prepared for this climax or visitation by an earlier scene in which the sergeant comes upon a book by Goebbels in which a Nazi woman had written, “Dear God, life is hell.” Under this, persuaded at last of his common suffering even with a Nazi, X writes down, from The Brothers Karamazov: “Fathers and teachers, I ponder ‘What is hell?’ I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”

But the love that Father Zossima in Dostoevsky’s novel speaks for is surely love for the world, for God’s creation itself, for all that precedes us and supports us, that will outlast us and that alone helps us to explain ourselves to ourselves. It is the love that D. H. Lawrence, another religious novelist, spoke of as “the sympathetic bond” and that in one form or another lies behind all the great novels as a primary interest in everyone and everything alive with us on this common earth. The love that Salinger’s horribly precocious Glass characters speak of is love for certain people only — forgiveness is for the rest; finally, through Seymour Glass’s indoctrination of his brothers and sister in so many different (and pretentiously assembled) religious teachings, it is love of certain ideas. So what is ultimate in their love is the love of their own moral and intellectual excellence, of their chastity and purity in a world full of banana fish swollen with too much food. It is the love that they have for themselves as an idea.

The worst they can say about our society is that they are too sensitive to live in it. They are the special case in whose name society is condemned. And what makes them so is that they are young, precocious, sensitive, different. In Salinger’s work, the two estates — the world and the cutely sensitive young — never really touch at all. Holden Caulfield condemns parents and schools because he knows that they are incapable of understanding him; Zooey and Franny and Buddy (like Seymour before them) know that the great mass of prosperous spiritual savages in our society will never understand them.

This may be true, but to think so can lead to a violation of art. Huckleberry Finn, so often cited as a parallel to the hero of The Catcher in the Rye, was two years younger than Holden, but the reason he was not afraid of an adult’s world is that he had respect for it. He had never even seen very much of it until he got on that raft with a runaway Negro slave he came to love and was able to save. It was still all God’s creation, and inspired him with wonder. But Holden and, even more, the Glass children are beaten before they start; beaten in order not to start. They do not trust anything or anyone but themselves and their great idea. And what troubles me about this is not what it reflects of their theology but what it does to Salinger’s art.

FRANK O’CONNOR once said of this special métier, the short story, that it is “the art form that deals with the individual when there is no longer a society to absorb him, and when he is compelled to exist, as it were, by his own inner light.” This is the condition on which Salinger’s work rests, and I should be sorry to seem unsympathetic toward it. It is an American fact, as one can see from the relative lack in our literature of the ripe and fully developed social novel in which the individual and society are in concrete and constant relationship with each other. But whatever this lack, which in one sense is as marked in the novels of Scott Fitzgerald as it is in Salinger’s emphasis upon the short story, it is a fact that when Fitzgerald describes a character’s voice, it is because he really loves — in the creative sense, is fully interested in — this character. When Salinger describes a character’s voice, it is to tell us that the man is a phony. He has, to borrow a phrase from his own work, a “categorical aversion” to whole classes and types of our society. The “sympathetic bond” that Lawrence spoke of has been broken. People stink in our nostrils. We are mad with captious observation of one another. As a friend of mine once said about the novels of Mary McCarthy, trying to say with absolute justice what it was that shocked her so much in them, “The heroine is always right and everyone else is wrong.” Salinger is a far more accomplished and objective writer of fiction than Mary McCarthy, but I would say that in his work the Glass children alone are right and everyone else is wrong.

And it is finally this condition, not just the famous alienation of Americans from a society like our own, that explains the popularity of Salinger’s work. Salinger’s vast public, I am convinced, is based not merely on the vast number of young people who recognize their emotional problems in his fiction and their frustrated rebellions in the sophisticated language he manipulates so skillfully. It is based perhaps even more on the vast numbers who have been released by our society to think of themselves as endlessly sensitive, spiritually alone, gifted, and whose suffering lies in the narrowing of their consciousness to themselves, in the withdrawal of their curiosity from a society which they think they understand all too well, in the drying up of their hope, their trust, and their wonder at the great world itself. The worst of American sophistication today is that it is so bored, so full of categorical aversion to things that writers should never take for granted and never close their eyes to.

The fact that Salinger’s work is particularly directed against the “well fed sun-burned” people at the summer theater, at the “section men” in colleges parroting the latest fashionable literary formulas, at the “three-martini” men — this, indeed, is what is wrong. He hates them. They are no longer people, but symbols, like the Fat Lady. No wonder that Zooey tells his sister: Love them, love them all, love them anyway! But the problem is not one of spiritual pride or of guilt; it is that in the tearing of the “sympathetic bond” it is not love that goes, but the deepest possibilities of literary art.