Salinger (23 page)

For a lengthy piece of fiction, little happens in “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.” Instead, Salinger draws out scenes for atmospheric effect while he pays an even greater
amount of attention than usual to character development and voice. In lieu of a plot, Salinger seems most interested in offering long, detailed descriptions of the Glass family, as if the whole
point behind this exercise was to create a family around which he could build a saga, in the same way William Faulkner created a fictional county in Mississippi from which he could spin various
novels and short stories. First with “Franny” and then with “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” Salinger had begun to establish for his audience just who the Glass
family was. What was not clear at this point in 1955 was just how much the Glass family would dominate Salinger’s creative thinking for the next ten years, and beyond.

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On December 10, 1955, at the age of thirty-six, Salinger became a father, when Claire gave birth to a daughter, whom the couple named Margaret
Ann. This meant that Claire had become pregnant a mere handful of weeks after marrying Salinger. She had been pregnant, then, for much of the first year of their marriage. No doubt this must have
been hard on a young woman of twenty-two—having to deal with the traumas inherent in being pregnant at the same time she
was adjusting to her first year of marriage.
What’s more, none of Claire’s problems could have been made easier by the fact that Salinger was unwaveringly protective of the time he spent away from her, locked in his bunker,
writing.

There were other problems too. As an outgrowth of his practice of Zen Buddhism, Salinger had begun to develop a new obsession that would increasingly dominate the way he lived his life: eating
only organically-grown food prepared in special kinds of cooking oils. But if both parties are not interested in eating this kind of food prepared this sort of way—and later it was reported
Claire was
not
—it can lead to trouble. Claire became resentful, as she would later reveal to others, that Salinger expected her to prepare and eat food in a manner she did not find
appealing—a conflict that over the years would end up having a negative effect on their marriage.

In the year after Margaret Ann was born—she would be called Peggy by family and friends—Salinger focused as much attention as he could on being a father. Because Sol Salinger was,
according to Richard Gonder and other friends, an emotionally distant man who did not accept his son for who he was, Salinger made a concerted effort to be a different kind of father, one who would
be proud, doting, accepting. In addition, Salinger had to deal with the reality that now, with the birth of their daughter, his relationship with Claire was different. She was no longer the
virginal teenager she had been when they first met; now she was a mother, which surely affected the way he regarded her. In the midst of all of these personal changes, Salinger continued to write.
In 1956, he began yet another long story about a
member of the Glass family—a piece that would approach the length of “Raise High the Roof Beam,
Carpenters.” This novella would be called “Zooey.”

In 1956, something happened in Salinger’s career that most writers never see. With the appearance here and there in small literary magazines of essays about his fiction,
Salinger looked to become the darling of the academic community, a phenomenon he surely distrusted given his portrayal of the academic world in “Franny.” A character like Lane Coutell,
the ultimate “section” man right out of an Ivy League English department, could not have been more buffoonlike, what with all of his yammering about which literary figure was important
and which was not. Paradoxically, these very “section” men Salinger had parodied in “Franny” started to write about
him.
One particular essay, “J. D.
Salinger: Some Crazy Cliff” by Arthur Heiserman and James E. Miller, Jr., which appeared in the
Western Humanities Review,
epitomized the early academic essays that were beginning to
appear. “It is clear that J. D. Salinger’s
The Catcher in the Rye
belongs to an ancient and honorable tradition, perhaps the most profound in Western fiction,” Heiserman
and Miller wrote, forming a thought that was apparently so deep it took two people to conjure it up. “It is, of course, the tradition of the Quest.” And the essay, as dull and listless
as Salinger’s prose was energetic and full of life, went on from there.

Over the next few years, and on into the 1960s, countless essays such as this one appeared in academic journals all across the country.
Before Salinger knew it, a kind of
Salinger cottage industry had sprung up in the academic community, with scholar upon scholar contributing to a never-ending stream of critical essays published about Salinger’s work.

In March 1956,
Cosmopolitan
decided to reprint “The Inverted Forest” in the magazine’s Diamond Jubilee Issue, even though Salinger had protested to
the editors that he never wanted the story published again. The magazine owned the rights to the piece, however, so the editors could run it with or without his permission. In the issue, on the
first page devoted to the story, the reader saw the word SALINGER spelled out in large, block letters. Then, above the word, a half-page black-and-white freehand drawing of Salinger appeared; his
face, white with dark streaks around his round, soulful eyes, was bright against a black backdrop. At the bottom of the page, the editors ran a brief preface detailing why the story was being
reprinted in their anniversary edition:

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Throughout the end of 1956 and on into 1957, Salinger was hard at work on “Zooey,” which had been bought by the
New Yorker.
He labored on the novella as diligently as he had on any other piece of fiction, keeping himself locked away in his bunker for endless hours at a time. One of the main problems Salinger was having
with “Zooey” was editing it down to a length the
New Yorker
could publish, the same problem he had had with “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.” Cutting his own
work had never been an easy task for Salinger, so on January 2 Katherine White, another editor at the magazine, wrote to him to sympathize with his attempt at shortening the novella. “I
realize what an agonizing process it must be for you,” she wrote, “and I do very much hope that it is going all right and is not taking too much out of you or slowing up too much the
progress of the novel that we all wait for so eagerly.”

By the end of the month, Salinger must have finished enough of the editing to plan a trip to New York City to see Hamish Hamilton
and his wife Yvonne, who were over from
London. Eager to visit with Hamilton, Salinger told him in a letter that he and Claire were bringing Peggy along. They would whisk her down from the hotel in a taxi so Hamilton and Yvonne could see
her. When he traveled to the city, Salinger probably had not finished “Zooey,” for it was some time later, not until May 4, that the novella appeared in the
New Yorker.
When it
did, at a length of 41,130 words, it was the longest piece of fiction ever published in the magazine. It must have thrilled Salinger no end to have set a standard all his own at the magazine he had
loved and admired for so many years.

The narrator of “Zooey,” Buddy Glass, announces at the start of the novella that the reader is about to encounter something that isn’t “really a short story at all but a
sort of prose home movie” about the Glass family. The first significant device Salinger used was the reproduction, in full, as Buddy is happy to point out, of a letter from Buddy to Zooey
that addresses, among other topics, Seymour, Zen and Mahayana Buddhism, religion, and acting. In the letter, which Zooey rereads while he sits in a tub full of water in the bathroom of the Glass
family apartment in the East 70s in New York City, Buddy encourages Zooey to continue to act, a line of business he has pursued successfully for some time. Zooey is interrupted in his bath-taking
by his mother, who, after having her son pull the curtain around the tub so she can’t see him naked, comes into the bathroom to discuss Franny who is, according to the mother,
“determined to have a nervous breakdown.” Ultimately, Zooey dresses so he can go out to talk to Franny, who lies on the sofa unable to function. After
an odd
episode that includes Zooey sneaking into Seymour’s room to phone Franny, pretending to be Buddy, Franny and Zooey finish their conversation by talking about what makes an actor keep on
acting and, by implication, what makes a person keep on living. Once, when Zooey asked Seymour why he—Zooey—should shine his shoes to go on a radio program, Seymour told him that he
should “shine them for the Fat Lady.”

“He never did tell me who the Fat Lady was,” Zooey says to Franny, “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. . . . This terribly clear, clear picture of the Fat Lady formed in my mind. I had her sitting on her porch all day, swatting flies, with her radio
going full blast from morning till night.” Then Zooey speculates who the Fat Lady is. “There isn’t anyone
any
where 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.”

With this, Salinger ends the story, as Franny and Zooey hang the telephone up, and Franny, who had taken the call in a bedroom, lies down on a bed. “For some minutes,” Salinger
wrote, “before she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, she just lay quiet, smiling at the ceiling.”

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On May 21, 1957, Signet, the company that had acquired the paperback rights to
The Catcher in the Rye
and
Nine Stories,
ran an
advertisement in the
New York Times
that compared “Zooey,” which had just been published in the
New Yorker,
with the two books released by
Signet. Obviously the paperback house hoped to help the sales of those books by linking them with “Zooey,” one of the most talked-about pieces of fiction to come out in recent years.
What the publishing company had done might have been acceptable to Salinger had he not believed, as he contended later, that the sale of his two books to Signet—a deal controlled by Little,
Brown, who technically owned the paperback rights—was among the “most unprofitable things” that had happened in his career. Furious, Salinger shot off a telegram to Little, Brown
proclaiming his outrage and anger. Salinger must have gotten more than one letter back from the publishing house’s Ned Brown apologizing for the advertisement, for when Salinger wrote to Ned
Bradford at the company on May 29, he was much more in control of his emotions than he had been when he sent his telegram. In his letter Salinger explained to Bradford the reason he was so mad. It
came down to the simple fact that he felt there was “something very unattractively timely” about his paperback publisher choosing to run an ad in the
Times
at this moment. It
felt unseemly to him.