Thursday, July 28, 2011

Eleven Georges That Don’t Add Up To Much: A Study in Capitalist Fundamentals

The Big Clock, by Kenneth Fearing, is not what it appears to be.  It is a murder mystery where both the reader and the main character know who the murderer is early in the novel.  The Big Clock should be a novel of suspense as George Stroud leads the internal investigation for the mystery man, but the edgy mood of anticipation is abandoned exactly in the heat of the action, when the Janoth Building is being searched floor to floor, room by room.  This element of suspense is dramatically increased in the first film adaptation of The Big Clock (1948) and also in No Way Out (1987), which is set very successfully in the Pentagon.  The novel The Big Clock is ineffective in its suspense.  Fearing also experiments, half-heartedly it seems, with multiple narrators to no great purpose; the various perspectives mostly serve to reinforce the viewpoint of George Stroud whose eleven chapters overshadow the other characters.  In addition to these problems with the novel, an intelligent and ironic man leading an investigation to find himself should be quite philosophically arousing, but it really isn’t.  It’s possible The Big Clock just isn’t a very good book.  Is it really more than pulp fiction?  Why would a writer want the suspense in his own novel to fail?  It doesn’t add up.  However, if the artistic choices of the writer are taken seriously, The Big Clock presents a bureaucratic and capitalistic system which produces banality, absurdity, and intellectual mediocrity in the lives of all those who march off to work, under the inexorable authority of the big clock, and this banality is authentically mirrored in the text itself.       
The motif of the big clock drives all human affairs in the novel.  It is the organizing principle of life itself, in the city and in the suburbs.  From the first pages of the novel, it is clear that human beings are completely organized by work and time, time and work: “…this gigantic watch that fixes order and establishes the pattern for chaos itself, it has never changed, it will never change, or be changed.”(p. 15)  Fearing blends the Roman god of Janus with the major news corporation of Janoth Enterprises in Manhattan.  Though Janoth is a kind of deity for those who toil there, there are other gods that are even bigger, such as Jennett-Donohoe which is lurking nearby, ready for a takeover.  The service demanded by this god of beginnings and transitions in modern life is both all-consuming and deeply unimpressive: “…I arrived at the Janoth Building, looming like an eternal stone deity among a forest of its fellows.  It seemed to prefer human sacrifices, of the flesh and of the spirit, over any other token of devotion.  Daily, we freely made them.”(p. 18)  Janoth should be an important place to work because its magazines directly shape American thought and culture, but it does not inspire any devotion or love.  Instead its workers must sacrifice time, idealism, virtue, and their lives day by day.  Earl Janoth has assembled the best writers and pays them well, but the nature of mass journalism is presented as intellectually numbing and even absurd.  The angle of a story is more important than the story itself; selling the story is more important than investigative journalism.  In the Crimeways editorial discussion early in the novel, the story of Funded Individuals has the most traction for the editorial staff.  It is the next big thing.  Funded Individuals is the incomplete idea, yet currently running program, to incorporate gifted people through investment.  It is a combination of capitalism and a Utopian dream to get rid of poverty by eventually making everyone a millionaire.  The absurdity of Funded Individuals is that no one seems to understand how this poverty Ponzi scheme will actually work, but it still goes forward.  The psychological condition of the participants is noted by George Stroud III in the discussion: “Tony Watson took the ball, speaking in abrupt, nervous rushes and occasionally halting altogether for a moment of profound anguish.  It seemed to me his neurasthenia could have shown more improvement, if not a complete cure, for the four or five thousand dollars he had spent on psychoanalysis.”(p. 24)  Another colleague is described as having “a slight, steady aura of confusion.”(p. 30)  The Crimeways staff is also not particularly interested in crime.  They may be working for Personalities in this human ant farm tomorrow.  Fearing presents a world where otherwise talented people gradually become empty suits with talking points, and people with real ideas and values develop nervous disorders.  Irony and absurdity abound in the Fearing novel, yet the product of the editorial discussion is quite real for the American public: “What we decided in this room, more than a million of our fellow-citizens would read three months from now, and what they read they would accept as final.”(p. 27)  A sense of purpose or greater meaning has long been absent for George Stroud and the others in their professional lives.  Their work is a means to an end: the acquisition of money, which leads to the need to acquire more money.  This is the pragmatic choice to make as one continues as a participant in the dehumanizing rat race: “But we were not insane.”(p. 27)  George maintains an ironic detachment; he keeps a chilling sanity.  George is both aware and complicit in the dehumanizing process of work in a capitalistic bureaucracy selling information and spin.  The only other option presented is jumping out of a window: “Down the hall, in Sydney’s office, there was a window out of which an almost forgotten editor had long ago jumped…Just picked up his notes and walked down the corridor to his own room, opened the window, and then stepped out.”(p. 27)        
George Stroud also knows how to pick himself up after a day of selling his soul.  The real meaning of life is not to be found at work, though George takes his job seriously enough.  What really makes George Stroud tick?  Like Don Draper in Mad Men, George Stroud appears happiest just prior to committing adultery, when the cocktails are flowing fast late into the night.  These moments of escape are the philosophical occasions when George seems to be most existentially gratified.  He enters into mystery: “But it would be a very rousing thing to spend an evening with this blonde mystery that certainly ought to be solved.”(p. 38)  The many Georges of different times start to talk to each other at the moment of truth: “…I realized I had been having an imaginary argument with a shadow of George Stroud standing just in back of the black nimbus she had become.  All the other Strouds seemed to saying was: Why not?  As the timekeeper, Janus looks forward and backward, and so does George in these crucial moments of unity with himself.  Adultery and alcohol create the small meaning in George’s void of a life.  Of course, philandering means that he has to tell lies to his wife, but lying is what George does best.  George Stroud is not indifferent to Georgette, and he seems to genuinely like his daughter who enjoys his stories at breakfast (if he makes it home).  Georgette and Georgia and George are tied together, by name and economics, and George takes his responsibilities as a provider seriously.  Lying is just a necessary part of the arrangement.  It is important for George to make as many memories as he possibly can before the room is needed at 12:00 noon.  George arrives late in the afternoon at Janoth, but he is apparently safe after his affair with Pauline Delos: “Everything was the same as it had always been.  Everything was all right.  I hadn’t done anything.  No one had.”(p.42)  This statement is absurd and illogical, but it makes perfect sense to anyone who has worked. 
There are other attempted escapes from the drudgery of work in The Big Clock.  When he is slumming, George’s favorite haunt is Gil’s Bar, a drinking establishment which figures prominently in the investigation for the man who was with Pauline on the night of the murder.  Gil’s Bar is a setting seen from more than one point of view, and the bar is a junkyard of sorts, cluttered with random objects and assorted memorabilia.  When people play the game at Gil’s, asking for a particular object, he tracks down the item, from steamrollers to pink elephants and Poe’s Raven.  Gil then provides an historical connection between the object and his own family history.  These historical connections are tenuous, random, and absurd.  The attempts to find any meaning in human history may be just as random and absurd as Gil’s intellectual burlesque at the bar, but we go through the motions for a drink.  The entire nature of Gil’s game is one of plausible lying, which the owner does better the drunker he is.  George likes the game because he knows it well.  When sent by George Stroud to investigate Gil’s, Ed Orlin finds the entire scene ludicrous: “It was fantastic.  I didn’t see how I’d ever get anything out of this fellow.  He was an idiot.”(. 102)   
The most developed alternative to the world of capitalism and bureaucracy at Janoth is the motif of art and painting in the novel.  Two paintings by the fictional artist Louise Patterson figure prominently in the action.  The first painting, found by George and Pauline Delos in an antique shop, is called Study in Fundamentals.  It presents a basic economic exchange: “The canvas showed two hands, one giving and the other receiving a coin.  That was all.  It conveyed the whole feeling, meaning, and drama of money.”(p. 50)  Pauline immediately calls it The Temptation of Judas.  George sees the same imprint of the biblical traitor as well; the disciple who betrayed Jesus is somehow embodied in the basic economic exchange.  With minimalist efficiency, capitalism is presented as a betrayal of our humanity; human relationships are reduced to economic exchanges.  Art is by no means a successful escape in The Big Clock, but it the voice of reason and irony that can capture the human problem.  Art is the strongest place of conviction in the novel, and the author suggests that capitalism is a betrayal of Christianity.  Art shows how deeply human beings are caught in the economic dilemmas of existence.  George Stroud mounts a strange defense of Judas in the antique shop: “On the spur of the moment I decided, and told her, that Judas must have been a born conformist, a naturally common-sense, rubber stamp sort of fellow who rose far above himself when he became involved with a group of people who were hardly in society, let alone a profitable business.”(p. 53)  Christianity was not a profitable business in the beginning, and Judas was the modern conformist who made the religion get into the black by betraying Jesus. 
The second painting by Louise Patterson, Study in Fury, presents the other side of the human economic relationship.  The dialectic of commerce is replaced by the binary relationship that leads to violence.  This painting hangs in George Stroud’s office: “I had bought it at the Lewis Galleries, the profiles of two faces, showing only the brow eyes, nose, lips, and chin of each.  They confronted each other, distinctly Pattersonian.  One of them showed an avaricious, the other a skeptical leer.”(p. 97)  Sex, money, and power seem to define the human drama of the painting.  This painting is a potential commentary on the murder of Pauline Delos.  In the novel, Pauline and Earl Janoth seem to be the two most prominent combatants in fury.  Rather than being a powerful and impressive man, Janoth is presented as a cog in the machine, like anybody else.  He is no Janus: “Who was he?  Only another medium-sized wheel in the big clock.”(p. 114)  The fury of Janoth and Pauline is aroused with mutual accusations of homosexual conduct.  Janoth’s special friendship with Steve Hagens is not invisible to Pauline, and this accusation turns the dialectic of fury to one of violence.  Steve Hagens seems to be the character best suited to corporate life as presented by Kenneth Fearing.  He is the Machiavellian master of the shadowy hallways and boring intrigues of Janoth Enterprises, and he keeps his eyes on the prize, even during the murder investigation: “By God, he would have to be watched like a hawk and nursed every moment.”(p. 81)  Keeping Janoth out of prison and Janoth Enterprises out of the clutches of its competitors is an act of love by Steve, his sublimated erotic fulfillment.  Fearing presents a homosexual character as the real master of corporate bureaucracy in the modern age.     
The greatest moment of suspense in The Big Clock is not between Janoth and Stroud, nor is the battle of wits between Hagen and Stroud the central climax of fury.  The moments of suspense between these characters are extremely successful in the two films, but Fearing goes in a different direction.  The great moment of the novel is between Louise Patterson and George Stroud in his office under the painting Study in Fury.  The painter knows that George Stroud is the man who was with Pauline Delos the night of her murder, and George Stroud knows that she knows.  In a dialectic of both commerce and calmly negotiated fury, George and Louise reach a mutual understanding.  He won’t destroy Study in Fundamentals if she won’t reveal his identity.  The irony of this moment is that it corrupts Louise Patterson through a moment of perverse integrity for George Stroud.  It might cost him his freedom as evidence in his own trial, but George could never bring himself to destroy the work of his favorite artist: “The big clock didn’t like pictures, much.  I did.  This particular picture it had tossed into the dustbin.  I had saved it from oblivion, myself.  Why should I throw it back?”(p. 114)  It is a moment , however small, where Judas chooses a different path: “What would it get me to conform?”(p. 114)  Far from being an idealist on the other side of the arrangement, Louise Patterson is the most openly cynical character in the novel.  She is loud and speaks without a filter.  She casts a keen eye on all the capitalist Judases around her.  Patterson goes to identify Stroud for the money, like Judas with the Romans, but she gets a better deal to stay quiet under her own painting: “It would take something to stay in the same room with a murderer.  And at the same time remember that dignity paid, at least in public.”(p. 161)  The irony deepens as the capitalist critique Study in Fundamentals skyrockets in value because of a murder investigation.  The murder, the investigation, the merger, and the suicide of Janoth become secondary to an ironic awakening between George Stroud and Louise Patterson.  It is a moment where the liar maintains his integrity by protecting art, and the artist participates as a capitalist Judas by remaining silent.  Fearing doesn’t suggest a real way out of the work world of byzantine bureaucracy, mass media, and dehumanizing capitalism.  The irony and the art collecting will have to be enough for George Stroud XII to survive the promotion that is surely coming for him with Jeanette-Donohoe.  As Janoth falls to the street, Stroud is headed to the top floor

Monday, July 18, 2011

From the Dinghy to the Couch: Trauma, Neurosis, and the Transcendent in the Art of J.D. Salinger


“Dear God, life is hell.”(NS, p. 105)

One of Ernest Hemingway’s motifs for writing, especially short stories, was that of the iceberg in the deep ocean.  The narrator doesn’t have to talk about what’s under the water for the unknown depths to be felt and experienced by the reader, both dimly and powerfully.  The writer should instead focus on the numerous details of the iceberg above the water line.  From the first story to the last in Nine Stories, by J.D. Salinger, there is much that is unknown about the memorable and neurotic characters encountered by the reader.  The most important details about the characters may be omitted, such as their name, or exactly why a character commits suicide unexpectedly at the end of a story, but this doesn’t prevent the reader from sensing, and feeling, the great depth of a character’s problems or woundedness.  However, the overlapping characters in Nine Stories (1953) and Franny and Zooey (1961) can also help to articulate the enigmatic themes of Nine Stories through the presentation of the brilliant and disturbed family unit, the Jewish-Irish Catholic Glass family of Franny and Zooey.  Using both texts, the reader may explore under the water line.  Walt, Boo Boo, Seymour, and potentially Buddy Glass (though he is unnamed in the short story collection) are all introduced in Nine Stories.  Salinger’s highly intelligent, sometimes genius, characters include both children and adults, and their dilemmas are often incompletely presented, though powerfully registered.  Taken together, Nine Stories and Franny and Zooey highlight the failure of human intelligence alone to solve personal problems and heal psychological scars, from both warfare and ordinary family life.  There is a kind of intellectual and spiritual unlearning that is presented in both works that allows the transcendent to break into human reality and redeem the awakened characters and reader, like the secret, wordless answer to a Zen koan that is finally understood.       
The writer and his characters are very much creatures of New York City.  Though Franny and Zooey begins in New Haven just prior to the Harvard-Yale game, the novel otherwise takes place exclusively in the east side apartment of the Glass family.  Not every story in Nine Stories is set in New York City, but many of the stories present New York characters, even if they are far from New York in the actual events of the story.  The intelligent and neurotic characters of J.D. Salinger are natural candidates for the New York City psychiatrist’s couch (as are all New Yorkers really), and Franny spends the entire second half of the book on the couch itself after her breakdown at Sickler’s Restaurant.  The terms of her cure are debated by her brother and mother, Zooey and Bessie Glass.  Franny isn’t on the psychiatrist’s couch, but she might as well be, just like the boy genius Teddy who is being studied by professionals at the end of the short story collection. 
Neurotic Adults and Brilliant Children Together
The neurotic element of Salinger characters comes through vividly in his writing.  The strange and unexplained personal behaviors are the tip of the iceberg that is described in great detail by the writer.  Zooey Glass spends sixty-one pages of Franny and Zooey soaking in the bathtub.  During this time, he smokes constantly (his movements are described in precise detail), and Zooey rereads in the tub a four year old letter from his brother Buddy, and apparently not for the first time.  A sense of repetitive behavior is present in both works, and Franny’s breakdown is coincident with her constant use of the Jesus Prayer.  The sense of neurotic repetition also comes through in the behavior of the short story characters, such as young Charles repeating the riddle about the walls in “For Esme-With Love and Squalor.”  The riddle might have something to do with his dead parents, and, then again, it might not.  Salinger’s characters seem to be in each other’s space, inside another’s walls, closer than the intimate eighteen inches of New York City.  Zooey’s mother shares the bathroom with her son for nineteen claustrophobic pages, and this isn’t the first time for this kind of strange intimacy in the Glass family. 
The first main character of Nine Stories is Seymour Glass, whose character and suicide still loom large in Franny and Zooey as his two youngest siblings attempt to find their way as adults many years after his suicide.  Even before the strange behavior of Seymour on the beach with Sybil Carpenter, the concern of his wife and her mother for Seymour comes through in their catty, chatty phone call.  The wife’s family has solicited the advice of a psychiatrist to get to the root of Seymour’s strange behaviors: “’He told him everything…The trees.  That business with the window.  Those horrible things he said to Granny about her plans for passing.  What he did with all those lovely pictures from Bermuda.’”(NS, p. 6)  Seymour has some kind of psychological disorder manifest in persistent, odd behavior, though the exact psychological category is never named, or diagnosed by a professional.  When the reader finally meets Seymour, he is utterly charming and refreshing, though clearly strange as advertised by his wife and mother-in-law.  By this point, the reader has just as many concerns about the languorous Muriel and her narrow-minded mother.  When they talk about Seymour, they reveal much about themselves as they constantly interrupt each other.  The mother and daughter appear to know each other very well, and to be completely disconnected at the same time.  In the narrative itself, Seymour’s wife is unnamed; she is simply “the girl,” though her mother calls her by her first name of Muriel.  The actual girl in the story is called, formally, by her full name, Sybil Carpenter.  Age doesn’t seem to make a person an adult, and actual children are oftentimes more mature than the adult characters in Nine Stories, and nearly always more interesting.  Salinger puts children and adults together in their dilemmas, and the assumed hierarchy of age and wisdom is often removed.  Sybil literally is out of bounds at the hotel when she goes to see Seymour on the beach.  Her parents are nowhere in sight as the little girl wanders down the beach to talk to a strange man in a bathrobe.  Their interaction is both tender and disturbing.  There is an eccentric zone of intimacy with children and adults that comes up in many of the stories.  Odd or non-existent boundaries mark both the dialogue and the physical interaction of adults and children: “’Sybil,’ he said.  ‘you’re looking fine.  It’s good to see you.  Tell me about yourself.’  He reached in front of him and took both of Sybil’s ankles in his hands.  ‘I’m Capricon,’ he said.  ‘What are you?’” (NS, p. 12)  On one level, childhood seems like a great place to be, both for the kids and the adults.  But there are disconcerting elements between adults and children in Nine Stories.  On another level, Salinger seems to be saying that lines between adults and children are artificial at best; that both have the same problems, especially during traumatic events like war.  He also might be suggesting just how or when human traumas are first inflicted.  Adult neurosis has its roots in childhood.    
Inattentive parenting abounds in Nine Stories.  The mother Eloise in Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut is a strange parent, even before she is completely intoxicated.
“’Can I have this?’ Ramona asked, taking a burned match out of the ashtray.
May I have this.  Yes.  Stay out of the street, please.”(NS, p. 27)
Eloise looks and sounds like a parent.  She is attentive to her child’s grammar, but she is completely disconnected from what her child is actually saying and doing, much like Muriel and her mother in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”  As Eloise and Mary Jane reminisce about their past over bottomless highballs and infinitely streaming cigarettes, the most important issue for Eloise is the loss of her true love, Walt (no last name), in World War II.  This is Walt Glass of the Glass family whose full identity is only fully corroborated in an author’s footnote in the second book eight years later: “In order of age, Walt and Waker come after Boo Boo.  Walt had been dead just over ten years.  He was killed in a freakish explosion while he was with the Army of Occupation in Japan.”(FZ, p. 53)  Eloise has never shared her past love for Walt, and her ubiquitous grief , with her husband, and this story introduces the element of loss and trauma as the first knot of neurotic behavior in the human psyche.  “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut” provides a kind of code that can be followed in the other stories.  Though her daughter Ramona doesn’t seem to be a genius (like the precocious Esme or Teddy in later stories), she experiments with human relationships through her imaginary friend Jimmy Jimmereeno.  Jimmy is always with Ramona, though he is invisible.  Jimmy goes everywhere with Ramona, and the young girl even makes room for her in her bed when she goes to sleep.  Before the story is over, she also experiments with death itself by having Jimmy be killed by a car in the street.  Even after his death, she makes room for the dead boy in her bed; a repetitive behavior has clearly been established.  The space needed for the dead boy’s imaginary body parallels the still unoccupied space or wound in her mother’s psyche for dead Walt’s memory.  That Ramona has figured out her mother’s true source of pain is unlikely, but her imitation shows that she would understand by the equivalents she has experimented with in her own imagination.  Poor Uncle Wiggly” was the refrain that funny Walt used to say when something painful happened.  Like the bananafish, Uncle Wiggily isn’t real, but he is an antidote for actual grief, when it happens in real life.  “The Laughing Man” and “Just Before The War With The Eskimos” also have imaginary and childlike approximations for human grief.  The fictional Laughing Man must die when John Gedsudski’s actual romance with Mary Hudson comes to a breakup.  The serial story must end, just like the innocence of childhood.  A fictitious war with the Eskimos is briefly referenced by a young man who wasn’t able to fight in the real war in “Just Before The War With The Eskimos.”  Though he avoids the actual fighting, he spends the entire story walking around the apartment with a bleeding finger in need of some medical attention.  The wounds of Salinger’s characters may be both obvious and deeply hidden, even from the character.  The collection ends ominously with young Teddy talking frankly about death in the Vedantic spiritual tradition as a young girl, possibly his sister, falls to her apparent death in an empty swimming pool on a cruise ship (as predicted by the boy genius moments before).   
Parallel grief between children and adults is also presented in “Down at the Dinghy.”  Boo Boo is identified in the short story as the sister of Seymour Glass.  There is an unidentified problem in the story, which has to do with something said by Sandra the maid.  Boo Boo’s son Lionel is upset, and he refuses to leave the dinghy tied at the dock.  Along with this present situation, the boy’s penchant for running away is discussed during the story: “He’s been hitting the road ever since he was two.  But never very hard.  I think the farthest he ever got –in the city—at least—was to the Mall in Central Park.”(NS, p. 78)  The repetitive behavior for Lionel is running away.  He is experimenting with disappearing from his family.  Based on previous stories, the reader may wonder who has disappeared in his life.  Has he lost his father?  Did he die in the war?  Is Boo Boo alone now in raising her son?  The dialogue between Lionel and his mother is whimsical and heartwarming.  The mother is more than adept at entering a child’s world; in fact, she jumps at the chance to engage his imagination.  She takes on an imaginary nautical identity when she addresses her son: “’It is I,’ Boo Boo said.  ‘Vice-Admiral Tannenbaum.  Nee Glass.  Come to inspect the stermaphors.’”(NS, p. 80)  It is important to note that the imaginary role taken on by the mother is one of authority—of an admiral over an ordinary sailor.  If her authority is genuine, she potentially has the power to order her son to leave his dinghy and return to the house: “’Many people think I’m not an admiral…I’m almost never tempted to discuss my rank with people.  Especially with little boys who don’t even look at me when I talk to them.  I’d be drummed out of the bloomin’ service.’” (NS, p. 81)  However, the mother establishes her rank by performing various bugle calls “kazoo style.”  With her nautical authority established, the sensitive and imaginative mother can get to the heart of the matter with her son: “’I’ll tell you what I’ll do, though…If you tell me why you’re running away, I’ll blow every secret bugle call for you I know.  All right?’”(NS, p. 82)  The boy is thoroughly disarmed by his mother and eventually reveals the trigger event for his permanent station on the dinghy.  His father isn’t dead or missing—he’s Jewish: “’Sandra told Mrs. Snell—that Daddy’s a big—sloppy—kike.’”(NS, p. 86)  Anti-Semitism doesn’t seem like a very big problem in the Salinger cosmos, especially with such a resourceful mother who can make a kite out of ordinary intolerance and hatred.  This seems to be a very sweet moment of parenting in a Salinger story, but the disturbing event is yet to happen: “The better to look at him, Boo Boo pushed her son slightly away from her.   Then she put a wild hand inside the seat of his trousers, startling the boy considerably, but almost immediately withdrew it and decorously tucked in his shirt for him.”(p. 86)  The end of the story presents the parent as the one with the significant problem, and the story ends with this strange note of violation or inappropriate intimacy by a “wild hand.”  Just when things are going so well, the reader is suddenly awakened to the character who has the big problem.  So what happened to Boo Boo Glass?  The evidence in Nine Stories is that the deaths of two of her brothers happened to Boo Boo.
The Crowded Genius of the Glass Family
In Franny and Zooey, all of the Glass children, including Boo Boo, are presented as more than intelligent as children; they are geniuses, child prodigies who have all been on a radio quiz show, at one time or another, from 1927-1943.  They are national celebrities as children, but their intelligence may be an obstacle to having a happy life.  Seymour is the greatest genius of the family, but he ends his life vacationing in Florida.  In Franny and Zooey, Bessie Glass laments the intelligence of her children: “’I don’t know what good it is to know so much and be so smart as whips and all if it doesn’t make you happy.’”(FZ, p. 118)  Bessie has lost two of her sons in a short amount of time, and this kind of grief was experienced by so many parents and siblings in the 1940s.  Bessie’s own stoicism has failed her, and her concern for Franny as the next tragic genius to be in emotional difficulty is genuine: “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’s eyes alone could report these facts, with an eloquence and a seeming passion for detail that neither her children nor any of her surviving children could bear to look at, let alone take in…”(p. 90)  Trauma from death is deeply present in both works by Salinger, but so is love in highly unconventional and unorthodox forms.  Before the author (Buddy Glass/J.D. Salinger) removes himself to the third person, he declares that Franny and Zooey actually falls in the genre of romance.  It is a love story: “I say that my current offering isn’t a mystical story, or a religiously mystifying story, at all.  I say it’s a compound, or multiple, love story, pure and complicated.”(FZ, p. 49)  This presents Franny and Zooey as the couple in love, and there are strange hints about this impossible union in the descriptions of the apartment itself: “Mr. Glass’s perhaps most inspired coup as a decorator was manifest just behind and above the couch where young Franny Glass was now sleeping.  There, in almost incestuously close juxtaposition, seven scrapbooks of newspaper and magazine clippings had been bracketed, at the bindings, directly into the plaster.”(FZ, p.121) 
A companion story to this declaration about Franny and Zooey is perhaps the most memorable effort in Nine Stories: “For Esme—With Love and Squalor.”  Love is declared in the title itself: for a teenage English girl who catches the narrator’s eye when he sees her sing in a choir in England.  The trauma of loss is most direct in this story.  Esme and her brother Charles have lost both of their parents, and all they have is each other, just like Franny and Zooey in the otherwise emptied Glass apartment.  But the precocious and brilliant Esme is more than happy to include the narrator in the happy family, even though he is married: “Are you very deeply in love with your wife?  Or am I being too personal?” (p. 95)  Their conversation is intimate, playful, witty, inappropriate (based on their ages), unforgettable, and simply delightful.  One could even argue that it is licit and appropriate under the circumstances of war; both characters have been through enough to have earned the strange intimacy.  Perhaps Salinger is saying that you take love and affection anywhere you can get it during wartime, or in this difficult lifetime in general.  Has war eroded appropriate boundaries?  Or is Salinger not particularly interested in maintaining them?  Though Salinger was not averse to romance with a woman who was thirty-seven years his junior in real life (Joyce Maynard), the narrator writer and the English girl part chastely with promises to write a short story and a letter respectively.  They say goodbye: “It was a strangely emotional moment for me.”(NS, p. 103)  Though their love is non-physical, the story itself seems to be a direct issue of their real experience of love.  For his part in their love story, Zooey chastely chooses to help his sister through her present crisis as best he can as a mentor.  It becomes clear that Buddy Glass, the reclusive writer of the Glass family, played just this loving role for him during his own rite of passage to adulthood.     
Art and Religion: Teddy and the Fat Lady
As mentioned earlier, Buddy Glass, the reclusive writer who doesn’t even have a telephone in upper New York state (not New Hampshire), makes a brief appearance in the first person in Franny and Zooey.  During this appearance, he directly equates himself, by implication, with J.D. Salinger as Zooey reads the four-year old letter from his brother: “The style of the letter, I’m told, bears a considerably more than passing resemblance to the style, or written mannerisms, of this narrator, and the general reader will no doubt jump to the heady conclusion that the writer of the letter and I are one and the same person.  Jump he will, and, I’m afraid,  jump he should.  We will, however, leave this Buddy Glass in the third person from here on in.  At least, I see no good reason for taking him out of it.”(FZ, p. 50)  Three of the stories in Nine Stories are told from the first person.  The first is “The Laughing Man,” followed by “For Esme—With Love and Squalor.”  The last story in the first person is “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period.”  The middle story is told from the point of view of an actual writer who is currently stationed in England during the war.  But the other two are from the point of view of a boy, then a young man, finding their way in the world.  Using the rubric established in Franny and Zooey to identify Buddy Glass, the argument can be made that the narrator of “The Laughing Man” is the same person as the narrator of “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period,” as well as “For Esme—With Love and Squalor.”  The style and written mannerisms are very similar in their whimsical thinking, a shared neurotic and obsessive sense of detail, and their blending of real and imaginary people and events.  Of course, they are also both written by J.D. Salinger.  All three stories in the first person emphasize creativity, both written and visual, and the world of the imagination is presented as both the means of escape and the best way to cope with the traumas of real life.  Art is the genuine adulthood of childhood.  In his letter to Zooey, Buddy the writer encourages Zooey to find meaning in his life through acting, instead of the academic career that his mother encourages: “Enough.  Act, Zachary Martin Glass, when and where you want to, since you fell you must, but do it with all you might.  If you do anything at all beautiful on stage, anything nameless and joy-making, anything above and beyond the call of theatrical ingenuity, S. and I will both rent tuxedos and rhinestone hats and solemnly come around with bouquets of snapdragons.”(p. 69)  Art seems to be the best way to remember S. (Seymour), and avoid his fate.  Despite her breakdown, Franny’s interest and vocation as a young college student is also theater and acting, and the implication of her recovery at the end is that she will return to the stage, where she belongs—where God wants her to be.  To be an artist is to be a co-creator with God.  Both Nine Stories and Franny and Zooey end with spiritual explorations, and declarations, from both Eastern and Western religious traditions respectively.
On a small scale, this religious exploration of both East and West is cryptically addressed by the narrator in “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” when he decides to no longer write obsessive letters to a nun: “I am giving Sister Irma her freedom to follow her own destiny.  Everybody is a nun.”(NS, p. 164)  Everybody has an important religious destiny, whether they realize it or not—whether they pursue it or not.  What this means is perhaps more clear when Zooey explains to Franny (while pretending to be Buddy on the phone) Seymour’s theories about the Fat Lady.  The Fat Lady was an imaginary woman who probably had real cancer.  The Fat Lady listened to the quiz show “It’s A Wise Child” to hear from the Glass children.  Though it was a radio show, Seymour encouraged the youngest Glass siblings to shine their shoes for the Fat Lady.  As adults, the Fat Lady teaching is a catalyst for Franny and Zooey to acknowledge God in their most humble relationships with all other human beings; she is a bridge between the transcendent and the ordinary.  Franny and Zooey reveals the immanent God in the here and now, just as the boy genius Teddy points to the transcendent reality that is all around us in the last story of Nine Stories.  Everyone is the Fat Lady, Zooey explains to the sister he loves: “But I’ll tell you a terrible secret—Are you listening to me?  There isn’t anyone that isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady…Don’t you know that goddam secret yet?  And don’t you know—listen to me, now—don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is?...Ah, buddy.  Ah, buddy.  It’s Christ himself.  Christ himself, buddy.”(FZ, p. 202)  The incarnate God is among us, Seymour and Zooey remind those dearest to them.  Everyone is a nun.  The trauma of war and ordinary life may break the strongest among us, but the damaged places in our lives can be like cathedrals that still stand in the cities, after the battle is over, and the armies go home.  The psyches of Salinger characters can also be peacefully redeemed and illuminated, like stained glass windows, when the light of creativity and love hits them just right.             




Works Cited List

J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey, (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1961).
J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories, (New York: Bantam Books, 1953).