Enough Salinger Already - Page 2

Like many unprolific authors Salinger has acquired an undeserved reputation for brevity. In fact he is a gasbag, right in there with Thomas Wolfe, sentence for sentence, just fewer sentences. The snobbish qualification "to put it much more horribly than I really want to" is characteristic. He can't think of anything better than "floppy-eared runt" yet he wants to let his reader know, sotto voce, that he isn't really happy with it either. One might object that this is the voice of Buddy Glass, not Salinger himself; but in Franny and Zooey, where he's narrating on his own account, he writes exactly the same way.

Then there's the jumbo list of authorial flaws in the middle of the paragraph. Salinger likes lists. Franny and Zooey has one, of the contents of the Glass family medicine cabinet, that's nearly three times this long and apropos of nothing.

Not having read Salinger in fifteen years I didn't remember how awful, how self-conscious, how snobbish the style is; how full it is of parenthetical throat-clearing, pedantic qualifications, go-nowhere asides, shuck and jive.

Only the Glasses, among the adults in Salinger, get a phoniness pass. As Zooey says to Franny, "Whatever we are, we're not fishy [phony], buddy." This is partly because of their surpassing brilliance, which, like most surpassing brilliance in literature, we have to take mostly on faith; and partly because they're more like overgrown child prodigies than actual adults. (All the Glasses appeared as children on a quiz show called "It's a Wise Child." Wisdom...children...get it?) But the Glasses, like Holden, are all potential, no achievement; all faith and no good works. What do they amount to as adults? Buddy, a literature professor at a cow college. Franny, a student and aspiring actress prone to fainting spells when near vulgarity. Zooey, a television actor. Boo Boo, a Tuckahoe housewife. Walt, dead in the war; Waker, a Jesuit priest. And finally Seymour himself, a suicide at 31. (He leaves 184 double haikus, and they are brilliant, masterly, Buddy tells us so. He can't actually print any of them, though, legal matter you understand. The trouble with having a literary genius as a character is that you can't show much of his ouevre, beyond the occasional letter or piece of juvenalia, without being a literary genius yourself.)

And what sort of wisdom do these Wise Children impart to us? I yield the floor to Zooey, who finally snaps his sister Franny out of her religious mania with this:

"But I'll tell you a terrible secret — Are you listening to me? There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. That includes your Professor Tupper, buddy. And all his goddam cousins by the dozens. There isn't anyone anywhere that isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. Don't you know that? 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."

All of a sudden we're not supposed to feel superior any more. We're supposed to feel humble, because Christ is in us and of us. There's something cheap about this sort of fake wisdom, something tawdry, meretricious, something...what's the word I'm looking for? Phony. That's it.

Article Author: Aaron Haspel

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