Franny and Zooey, JD Salinger

JD Salinger (1919-2010) has always been my favourite prose stylist. He didn’t write much, and of that, until a couple of years ago I finally caught up with The Catcher in the Rye (1951), I had only owned and read Franny and Zooey (1961) and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963).

Salinger was born in Manhattan to a Lithuanian Jewish father and to a “German, Irish, Scottish” mother, who converted to Judaism. He had one sibling, a sister, 7 years older. He appears to have been raised in relatively affluent circumstances; he went to a private school, and had a couple of goes at starting college before being drafted in 1942 and serving in the US Infantry in Europe and post-war Germany.

His first ambition was probably to have been an actor, which his father opposed (sending him to Poland to experience the supply end of the meat importing business). He began writing while still at school, mostly short stories. He was first published in 1940 – so at age 21 – and the following year had the story “Slight Rebellion off Madison”, in which we first see Holden Caulfield, accepted by The New Yorker. Sadly, Pearl Harbour intervened, and it ended up not being published until 1946.

In 1947, Salinger became an “avid follower of Zen Buddhism” – this is all relevant to this review – and in 1948 The New Yorker published “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”, the first of seven stories in which Salinger establishes the fictional Glass family, retired vaudeville performers, Bessie and Les, with seven children: Seymour, Buddy (who might be the author), Boo Boo (a matron with 3 children of her own by the 1950s), twins Walt and Waker, Zooey, and Franny (Frances); with birth dates spread over about 16 years, from 1917 to 1933; brought up in a family sized fifth floor apartment in Manhattan overlooking a girls school.

“Franny” and “Zooey” originally appeared as separate stories in The New Yorker in 1955 and 1957 respectively. In the former Franny goes on a date, gets ill and faints; and the latter begins a few days later with Zooey in the bath (behind a hastily pulled curtain) discussing a severely depressed Franny with his mother who is sitting beside the bath chain smoking. There is no reason not to consider them as one novella.

All of the Glass children had been, serially over a long period, child prodigies on a radio quiz programme. Zooey has gone on to be a seriously good looking TV actor; Franny, the other good looking, not to say beautiful, sibling, is still at college. One of the twins has died in an accident during the war; Seymour has committed suicide; and Buddy is somewhere uncontactable, still without a degree, but teaching creative writing.

Franny, on her date, was carrying with her a green clothbound book which she says she got from the library but which she has actually taken from (the late) Seymour’s desk, The Way of a Pilgrim. I looked it up, it’s a real book, “a 19th-century Russian work, recounting the narrator’s journey as a mendicant pilgrim while practicing the Jesus Prayer [a repetitive chant, like the Buddhist ‘Om’]” (wiki); and apparently made famous by its centrality to these stories.

I guess the underlying theme is that Seymour and Buddy took idiosyncratic charge of their younger siblings’ education, particularly their reading, and that now he is gone, Seymour is missed. I sadly suspect that the main theme is that the religious is in everything. As Zooey says to Franny in the final, optimistic scene –

“… if it’s the religious life you want, you ought to know right now that you’re missing on every single goddam religious action that’s going on around this house. You don’t even have the sense to drink when somebody brings you a cup of consecrated chicken soup – which is the only kind of chicken soup Bessie ever brings to anybody around this madhouse.”

“Franny” starts with her boyfriend Lane meeting the train bringing Franny from her residential college to spend a weekend away, attending the Yale football game. They start off well enough, but at dinner, Lane gets on Franny’s nerves, is too attentive, too loving; Franny starts picking at him, talks at length about the Way of a Pilgrim, won’t order, appears ill, and eventually faints, coming to in the manager’s office. My suspicion is that she’s pregnant.

Lane .. sat a trifle closer to her and bent down and kissed her, briefly… ‘You’re just going to rest this afternoon. That’s all you’re going to do.’ He stroked her arm for a moment. ‘Then maybe after a while, if you get any decent rest, I can get upstairs somehow. I think there’s a goddam back staircase. I can find out.
Franny didn’t say anything. She looked at the ceiling.
‘You know how long it’s been?’ Lane said. ‘When was that Friday night? Way the hell early last month, wasn’t it?’ He shook his head. ‘That’s no good. Too goddam long between drinks. To put it crassly.’

Lane goes out. Franny begins praying. “Her lips began to move, forming soundless words.”

“Zooey”, which is much longer, is Zooey getting ready to go out, bathing and shaving while discussing Franny with Bessie; then making two attempts to talk Franny out of her depression (I’m clearly wrong about pregnancy), first in the lounge where she’s lying on the couch, then on the way out, ringing her, pretending to be Buddy. And that’s the whole novella. A tour de force of conversation and description.

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JD Salinger, Franny and Zooey, first pub. 1961. 157pp.