#franny and zooey

— J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

— J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

Of course, too, I knew for certain when I was your age that I’d never be forced to teach, that if my Muses failed to provide for me, I’d go grind lenses somewhere, like Booker T. Washington. In any particular sense, though, I don’t think I have any academic regrets. On especially black days I sometimes tell myself that if I’d loaded up with degrees when I was able, I might not now be teaching anything quite so collegiate and hopeless as Advanced Writing 24-A. But that’s probably bunk. The cards are stacked (quite properly, I imagine) against all professional aesthetes, and no doubt we all deserve the dark, wordy, academic deaths we all sooner or later die.

“All right,” Franny said wearily. “France.” She took a cigarette out of the pack on the table. “It isn’t just Wally. It could be a girl, for goodness’ sake. I mean if he were a girl—somebody in my dorm, for example—he’d have been painting scenery in some stock company all summer. Or bicycled through Wales. Or taken an apartment in New York and worked for a magazine or an advertising company. It’s everybody, I mean. 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. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you’re conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different way.”

Lane himself lit a cigarette as the train pulled in. Then, like so many people, who, perhaps, ought to be issued only a very probational pass to meet trains, he tried to empty his face of all expression that might quite simply, perhaps even beautifully, reveal how he felt about the arriving person.

The voice at the other end came through again. “I remember about the fifth time I ever went on ‘Wise Child.’ I subbed for Walt a few times when he was in a cast—remember when he was in that cast? Anyway, I started bitching one night before the broadcast. Seymour’d told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn’t going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn’t see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but he had a very Seymour look on his face, and so I did it. He never did tell me who the Fat Lady was, but I shined my shoes for the Fat Lady every time I ever went on the air again—all the years you and I were on the program together, if you remember. I don’t think I missed more than just a couple of times. This terribly clear, clear picture of the Fat Lady formed in my mind. I had her sitting on this porch all day, swatting flies, with her radio going full-blast from morning till night. I figured the heat was terrible, and she probably had cancer, and—I don’t know. Anyway, it seemed goddam clear why Seymour wanted me to shine my shoes when I went on the air. It made sense.”

Franny was standing. She had taken her hand away from her face to hold the phone with two hands. “He told me, too,” she said into the phone. “He told me to be funny for the Fat Lady, once.” She released one hand from the phone and placed it, very briefly, on the crown of her head, then went back to holding the phone with both hands. “I didn’t ever picture her on a porch, but with very—you know—very thick legs, very veiny. I had her in an awful wicker chair. She had cancer, too, though, and she had the radio going full-blast all day! Mine did, too!”

Zooey broke off. He stared over at Franny’s prostrate, face-down position on the

couch, and heard, probably for the first time, the only partly stifled sounds of anguish coming from her. In an instant, he turned pale—pale with anxiety for Franny’s condition, and pale, presumably, because failure had suddenly filled the room with its invariably sickening smell. The color of his pallor, however, was a curiously basic white —unmixed, that is, with the greens and yellows of guilt or abject contrition. It was very like the standard bloodlessness in the face of a small boy who loves animals to distraction, all animals, and who has just seen his favorite, bunny-loving sister’s expression as she opened the box containing his birthday present to her—a freshly caught young cobra, with a red ribbon tied in an awkward bow around its neck.

“It’s exactly like this damned ulcer I picked up. Do you know why I have it? Or at least nine-tenths of the reason I have it? Because when I’m not thinking properly, I let my feelings about television and everything else get personal. I do exactly the same thing you do, and I’m old enough to know better.”

“It was the worst of all in class, though,” she said with decision. “That was the worst. What happened was, I got the idea in my head—and I could not get it out—that college was just one more dopey, inane place in the world dedicated to piling up treasure on earth and everything. I mean treasure is treasure, for heaven’s sake. What’s the difference whether the treasure is money, or property, or even culture, or even just plain knowledge? It all seemed like exactly the same thing to me, if you take off the wrapping—and it still does! Sometimes I think that knowledge—when it’s knowledge for knowledge’s sake, anyway—is the worst of all. The least excusable, certainly.” Nervously, and without any real need whatever, Franny pushed back her hair with one hand. “I don’t think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while—just once in a while—there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn’t, it’s just a disgusting waste of time! But there never is! You never even hear any hints dropped on a campus that wisdom is supposed to be the goal of knowledge. You hardly ever even hear the word ‘wisdom’ mentioned! Do you want to hear something funny? Do you want to hear something really funny? In almost four years of college—and this is the absolute truth —in almost four years of college, the only time I can remember ever even hearing the expression 'wise man’ being used was in my freshman year, in Political Science! And you know how it was used? It was used in reference to some nice old poopy elder statesman who’d made a fortune in the stock market and then gone to Washington to be an adviser to President Roosevelt. Honestly, now! Four years of college, almost! I’m not saying that happens to everybody, but I just get so upset when I think about it I could die.” She broke off, and apparently became re-dedicated to serving Bloomberg’s interests. Her lips now had very little more color in them than her face. They were also, very faintly, chapped.

He gave the snowman a shake. “It probably wasn’t anything you couldn’t watch while you were cutting your toenails, but at least you didn’t feel like slinking home from the studio after rehearsals. It was fresh enough, at least, and it was his own, it wasn’t part of a hackneyed trend in scripts. I wish to hell he’d go home and fill up again. I wish to hell every-body’d go home. I’m sick to death of being the heavy in everybody’s life. God, you should see Hess and LeSage when they’re talking about a new show. Or a new anything. They’re as happy as pigs till I show up. I feel like those dismal bastards Seymour’s beloved Chuang-tzu warned everybody against. ‘Beware when the socalled sagely men come limping into sight.’” He sat still, watching the snowflakes swirl. “I could happily lie down and die sometimes,” he said.

“You told me that bit last night. I don’t want any unfresh reminiscences this morning, buddy,” Zooey said, and resumed looking out of the window. “In the first place, you’re way off when you start railing at things and people instead of at yourself. We both are. I do the same goddam thing about television—I’m aware of that. But it’s wrong. It’s us. I keep telling you that. Why are you so damned dense about it?”

“I’m not so damned dense about it, but you keep—”

“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.” More than a trifle grimly, he brought his cigar to his mouth and dragged on it, but it had gone out. “On top of everything else,” he said immediately, “we’ve got ‘Wise Child’ complexes. We’ve never really got off the goddam air. Not one of us. We don’t talk, we hold forth. We don’t converse, we expound. At least I do. The minute I’m in a room with somebody who has the usual number of ears, I either turn into a goddam seer or a human hatpin. The Prince of Bores. Last night, for instance. Down at the San Remo. I kept praying that Hess wouldn’t tell me the plot of his new script. I knew damn well he had one. I knew damn well I wasn’t going to get out of the place without a new script to take home. But I kept praying he’d spare me from an oral preview. He’s not stupid. He knows it’s impossible for me to keep my mouth shut.” Zooey suddenly, sharply, turned around, without taking his foot off the window seat, and picked up, snatched up, a match folder that was on his mother’s writing table. He turned back to  the window and the view of the school roof and put his cigar into his mouth again—but at once took it out. “Damn him, anyway,” he said. “He’s so stupid it breaks your heart. He’s like everybody else in television. And Hollywood. And Broadway. He thinks everything sentimental is tender, everything brutal is a slice of realism, and everything that runs into physical violence is a legitimate climax to something that isn’t even—”

“Did you tell him that?”

“Certainly I told him that! I just got through telling you I can’t keep my mouth shut. Certainly I told him that! I left him sitting there wishing he was dead. Or one of us was dead— I hope to hell it was me. Anyway, it was a true San Remo exit.” Zooey took down his foot from the window seat. He turned around, looking both tense and agitated, and pulled out the straight chair at his mother’s writing table and sat down.

Franny gazed thoughtfully at his white broadcloth back. Her lips, however, were still silently forming words. “Why do you go, then?” she asked. “If you feel that way.”

“Why do I go?” Zooey said, without looking around. “I go mostly because I’m tired as hell of getting up furious in the morning and going to bed furious at night. I go because I sit in judgment on every poor, ulcerous bastard I know. Which in itself doesn’t bother me too much. At least, I judge straight from the colon when I judge, and I know that I’ll pay like hell for any judgment I mete out, sooner or later, one way or another. That doesn’t bother me so much. But there’s something—Jesus God—there’s something I do to people’s morale downtown that I can’t stand to watch much longer. I can tell you exactly what I do. I make everybody feel that he doesn’t really want to do any good work but that he just wants to get work done that will be thought good by everyone he knows—the critics, the sponsors, the public, even his children’s schoolteacher. That’s what I do. That’s the worst I do.” He frowned in the direction of the school roof; then, with his fingertips, pressed some perspiration away from his forehead. He turned, abruptly, toward Franny when he heard her say something. “What?” he said. “I can’t hear you.”

“Nothing. I said ‘Oh, God.’”

Zooey didn’t answer her. “My God,” he said, still looking at the sheet music on the stand. “Who took this out?” The sheet music was entitled “You Needn’t Be So Mean, Baby.” It was about forty years old. A sepia reproduction of Mr. and Mrs. Glass was featured on the cover. Mr. Glass was wearing a top hat and tails, and so was Mrs. Glass. They were smiling rather brilliantly at the camera, both of them leaning forward on their evening canes, feet wide apart.

“What is it?” Franny asked. “I can’t see.”

“Bessie and Les. ‘You Needn’t Be So Mean, Baby.’”

“Oh.” Franny giggled. “Les was Reminiscing last night. For my benefit. He thinks I have a stomachache. He took out every single sheet of music in the whole bench.”

“I’d be interested to know just how in hell we ever landed in this goddam jungle, all the way from 'You Needn’t Be So Mean, Baby.’ You figure it out.”

The room had a single, a southern, exposure. A four-story private school for girls stood directly across the side street—a stolid and rather aloofly anonymous-looking building that rarely came alive till about three-thirty in the afternoon, when public-school children from Third and Second Avenues came to play jacks or stoop-ball on its stone steps. The Glasses had a fifth-story apartment, a story higher than the school building, and at this hour the sun was shining over the school roof and through the Glasses’ naked living-room windows. Sunshine was very unkind to the room. Not only were the furnishings old, intrinsically unlovely, and clotted with memory and sentiment, but the room itself in past years had served as the arena for countless hockey and football (tackle as well as “touch”) games, and there was scarcely a leg on any piece of furniture that wasn’t badly nicked or marred. There were scars much nearer to eye level, too, from a rather awesome variety of airborne objects—beanbags, baseballs, marbles, skate keys, soap erasers, and even, on one well-marked occasion in the early nineteen-thirties, a flying headless porcelain doll. Sunshine, however, was perhaps most particularly unkind to the carpet. It had originally been a port-red color—and by lamplight, at least, still was—but it now featured a number of rather pancreas-shaped faded spots, unsentimental mementos, all, of a series of household pets. The sun at this hour shone as far, as deep, as mercilessly into the room as the television set, striking it squarely in its unblinking cyclopean eye.

Mrs. Glass, who did some of her most inspired, most perpendicular thinking on the threshold of linen closets, had bedded down her youngest child on the couch between pink percale sheets, and covered her with a pale-blue cashmere afghan. Franny now lay sleeping on her left side, facing into the back of the couch and the wall, her chin just grazing one of the several toss pillows all around her. Her mouth was closed, but only just. Her right hand, however, on the coverlet, was not merely closed but shut tight; the fingers were clenched, the thumb tucked in—it was as though, at twenty, she had checked back into the mute, fisty defenses of the nursery. And here at the couch, it should be mentioned, the sun, for all its ungraciousness to the rest of the room, was behaving beautifully. It shone full on Franny’s hair, which was jet-black and very prettily cut, and had been washed three times in as many days. Sunshine, in fact, bathed the entire afghan, and the play of warm, brilliant light in the pale-blue wool was in itself well worth beholding.

As always, my passes at omniscience are absurd, but you, of all people, should be polite to the part of me that comes out merely clever. Years ago, in my earliest and pastiest days as a would-be writer, I once read a new story aloud to S. and Boo Boo. When I was finished, Boo Boo said flatly (but looking over at Seymour) that the story was “too clever.” S. shook his head, beaming away at me, and said cleverness was my permanent affliction, my wooden leg, and that it was in the worst possible taste to draw the group’s attention to it. As one limping man to another, old Zooey, let’s be courteous and kind to each other.