Salinger (22 page)

The plot to “Franny” is simple. Lane Coutell, a full-of-himself Ivy League English major, is having lunch with his girlfriend Franny Glass, Seymour’s younger sister, in a
restaurant named Sickler’s in the town where he goes to college. Over lunch, Franny, clearly disturbed for reasons that are not obvious, tells Lane that she is sick of dealing with all of the
“pedants and conceited little tearer-downers” she encounters at her college, that she hates her professors who call themselves poets when they are not “real” poets, and that
what she actually wishes she could do in her life right now is “meet somebody I could respect.” Upset, Franny rushes to the bathroom, locks herself in a
stall,
and has an episode that some readers believed indicated that she was pregnant, others that she was cracking up. Leaning forward and hugging herself, she breaks down and cries “for fully five
minutes.”

At last, she composes herself and returns to the table. Then Lane zeros in on a book she is carrying,
The Way of a Pilgrim.
Franny tells him the book, written by a Russian peasant,
argues that, if one says “incessantly,” over and over, something called the Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me,” the prayer goes), one can finally “get
to see God.” As Franny talks about the Jesus Prayer, Lane ignores her, making comments about his frog’s legs and garlic. Eventually Franny stands, walks to the bar, and faints.

The story ends with Franny lying on a sofa in the manager’s office. There, Lane tells her he is taking her to a boardinghouse where he’s lined up a room for her so she can get some
rest that afternoon and he can sneak up into her room that night. “You know how long it’s been?” Lane says, a reference to the last time they had sex. “When was that Friday
night? Way the hell early last month, wasn’t it?” He’s obviously bothered by this. “That’s no good. Too goddam long between drinks. To put it crassly.” Going to
get a taxi, Lane leaves Franny on the sofa. “Alone,” Salinger wrote, “Franny lay quite still, looking at the ceiling. Her lips began to move, forming soundless words, and they
continued to move.” Then the truly disturbing subtext of the story becomes apparent. After Franny has spilled out her innermost thoughts to Lane, after she has had what amounts to a nervous
breakdown, after she has fainted in the restaurant bar, Lane still cares only about himself—and having sex with her that evening, whether she wants to or not.

Like
The Catcher in the Rye,
“Franny” is an indictment. What Salinger is attacking is not specific, but general, even societal. Franny hates
insincere people and phonies, yet she is forced to deal with them at college. Even worse, she is dating one, and for that she has no one to blame but herself. Maybe, but in the course of the story
she never accepts responsibility for her failure to break up with him. Instead, “Franny” seems to imply that, because the world is full of phonies, all one can do is retreat from it
into some form of religion. In Franny’s case, she seeks solace in the Jesus Prayer. Ultimately, however, even religion is not enough. As she tries to cope with her life by clinging to
religion, Franny slips deeper into mental distress, until she is barely able to hold on to her sanity. In
The Catcher in the Rye,
Holden ends up in a mental institution. In
“Franny,” she ends up in an unfamiliar room babbling a prayer to herself, unsure of where she is and where she is going next.

Salinger was still swept up in the wave of attention resulting from the publication of “Franny” when on February 17, 1955 in Barnard, Vermont, he married Claire
Douglas, who, many critics would argue in the future, was actually the inspiration for the fictional character Franny. (To be accurate, the name Frances Glass was inspired by a young woman named
Frances whom Salinger had dated at Ursinus College and with who he had continued to correspond over the years. Not long before Salinger wrote “Franny,” Frances had married a man with
the surname Glassmoyer to make her married name Frances Glassmoyer,
news about which she had written to Salinger.) On his marriage certificate to Claire, Salinger stated
that this was his first marriage.

Following the wedding, Salinger did something he had rarely done. He threw a party. In attendance were Salinger’s mother, who was proud of her son, as any mother would be; Salinger’s
sister Doris, who was a two-time divorcée herself and a buyer for Bloomingdale’s; and Claire’s first husband, who clearly did not hold the failure of their marriage against his
ex-wife. Soon after the party, town members held a community meeting at which Salinger was elected town hargreave, a title given to the town’s most recently married man. The town hargreave
was supposed to gather up the area farmers’ pigs if they got loose. Salinger did not find the humor in the Cornish locals’ gesture. Then again, he did not have, nor would he ever have,
a keen sense of humor. Serious and aloof, Salinger was so wrapped up in his life, he was usually unable to step back and laugh at himself, or at others.

There were random exceptions. “One afternoon I was up at Columbia University,” says Dorothy Ferrell, who was then married to James T. Ferrell for the second time. “I knew Whit
Burnett because James knew him. I was in the Butler Library and I ran into Whit who had this young man with him. He told me who he was and I said, ‘Oh, you’re the young man who wrote
The Catcher in the Rye.
’ And he said, ‘Yes, I am.’ And I said, ‘You’re Mr. Salinger, J. D. What does the ‘J. D.’ stand for?’ Then he smiled
at me and said, ‘Juvenile Delinquent.’ I laughed. I thought he was a funny and quick-witted young man.”

1

After they were married, the Salingers settled into their life in Cornish. Almost from the start this isolated rural existence was hard to adapt
to for a young woman as energetic and vivacious as Claire was. In June, the newlyweds were visited by S. J. Perelman, who later described the Salingers’ spread as being their own
“private mountaintop overlooking five states.” While he was there, though, Perelman sensed Claire’s unease. “It’s anybody’s guess how long his wife—young,
passably pretty—will want to endure the solitude,” Perelman wrote at the time. “Jerry, in all justice, looked better than I’ve ever seen him, so evidently he’s
flourishing under matrimony or over it.”

As they acclimated themselves to married life, the Salingers often went to town meetings and movie screenings put on by the film society of Dartmouth College, located nearby. They also visited
neighbors such as Learned Hand, a nationally renowned judge who
lived in Boston but who had a summer home in Cornish. Salinger and Hand formed a close friendship; in fact,
Salinger came to admire Hand so much he decided the judge was a “true Karma yogi.”

Despite this activity, Salinger still devoted himself to his writing. Building on the success of “Franny,” he decided to write another long story about a member of the Glass family.
During the spring and summer of 1955, secluded in Cornish and happy in his new marriage, Salinger labored on a piece—he came to call it “Raise High the Roof Beam,
Carpenters”—that ended up being the length of a novella. He worked with a determination rare among writers, even professionals who grind out book after book. Up at six-thirty or seven
each morning, he would eat a quick breakfast, then retire to a cement-block bunker behind his house that he had built to use as an office in which to write.

There, pausing only to eat lunch, which he packed in the morning and brought with him from the house, Salinger worked from the early morning until dinnertime. Many nights, he returned to the
bunker after dinner. Eventually, Salinger installed a telephone in the bunker but instructed Claire and others to disturb him only—and he did mean
only
—in an absolute
emergency. In this setting Salinger took his novella through draft after draft, endlessly rewriting the prose until it had the smooth, flawless surface that had come to be associated with his
fiction.

Salinger worked on “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” until early July when the
New Yorker
bought it for publication. That, of course, was a blessing, since Salinger had
reached the point where he
could not imagine publishing his fiction in any other magazine. It was also a curse since, in order for the
New Yorker
to publish the
piece, Salinger had to edit it down to a manageable length. Even though the magazine gave him more editorial space than any other magazine would have, the
New Yorker
still had limits.

Throughout the summer and on into the fall, Salinger labored over “Raise.” During this time, he began to work more closely with William Shawn. The two would soon end up being best
friends. “Mr. Shawn was a wonderful man,” says Mary Kierstead, Shawn’s secretary. “Writers thought it was a privilege to have him as an editor. He could change a sentence
with a comma or with one word. He was always on the writer’s side. He was courteous and pleasant and he was great fun to talk to. He wasn’t extremely witty, but just to be able to
listen to him talk about any subject, one felt honored. Salinger thought Mr. Shawn was a marvelous editor and, God knows, Mr. Shawn helped Salinger with his stories. Shawn could take a whole messy
book and turn it into something brilliant. He had that kind of relationship with Salinger—very, very close. When Salinger came to New York, they worked in Mr. Shawn’s office at his
desk, which was a big table. They were always very amicable with one another.”

Others also observed their author-editor relationship. “When he first came to the magazine, Salinger worked with Gus Lobrano, but Shawn took over,” says Roger Angell, who arrived at
the
New Yorker
around this time. “After that, Salinger didn’t work with anyone but Shawn. When I came to the fiction department, none of the editors in the department dealt
with Salinger—only Shawn. The stories
weren’t even shown around in the fiction department for opinion as everyone else’s were. That was the deal Shawn had
with Salinger. For his part, Shawn was a great editor—a great, great editor. He was an especially good fiction editor, but he edited almost nobody exclusively. The only other fiction writer
he edited by himself was Perelman. This was true because as the editor of the magazine he read everything. His hand was on every part of the magazine. He read everything two or three times before
it appeared. He edited a great deal of the magazine line by line. It’s beyond comprehension how he could do this on a week-to-week basis but he did.”

Finally, Shawn and Salinger arrived at an acceptable version of “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” which appeared in the magazine on November 19, 1955.

“What directly follows,” Buddy Glass says near the beginning of “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” “is an account of a wedding day in
1942.” The wedding in question is that of Seymour Glass, the oldest of the seven children born to Les and Bessie (Gallagher) Glass, “retired Pantages Circuit vaudevillians.” The
children after Seymour, according to the story, were Buddy, a writer whose resemblance to Salinger seems obvious; twins Walt and Waker, the latter having become a conscientious objector during the
war and then a priest, the former having joined the Army only to be killed “in an unspeakably absurd GI accident in late autumn of 1945, in Japan”; Boo Boo, a sister who,
chronologically, fell between the twins and
Buddy; Zooey, the youngest brother, who would become a successful actor probably because of his superior intelligence and
strikingly beautiful face; and Franny, the baby. All of the Glass children, at one time or another, had appeared on a popular radio quiz program called
It’s a Wise Child.
Going on
the show under the pseudonym Black, the children made a tremendous amount of money for the family over the years.

The plot to “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” is not complicated. Because the Glass family is either stationed around the world for the war or stuck in Los Angeles for
It’s a Wise Child,
Buddy is the only Glass who can represent the clan at the wedding of Seymour to his fiancée Muriel. However, after he travels to New York from Georgia,
where he is stationed in the Army (as Salinger himself was), Buddy gets to the church just in time to learn, as does everyone else who has assembled for the event, that Seymour has gotten cold feet
and backed out. What follows is an odd sequence of events that ends with Buddy arriving at Seymour’s apartment accompanied by members of the bride’s wedding party including the matron
of honor, who is especially hostile toward him. Eventually, after drinks, someone puts in a call to the bride’s house only to discover that Seymour and Muriel eloped after all. With this, all
of the guests head out for the wedding reception, leaving Buddy, who has gone into a bedroom and fallen asleep, in his apartment alone. When he awakes, he walks into the living room and sees the
empty glasses the guests have left behind. Finally, he spots a cigar end. “I still think that cigar end should have been forwarded on to Seymour,” Buddy says at the story’s
conclusion, “the usual run of wedding gifts being what it is. Just the cigar, in a small, nice box. Possibly with a blank sheet of paper enclosed, by way of
explanation.”