[In the following essay, McIntyre explores the role of religion in Franny and Zooey, concluding that Salinger's concern is not with society, but with spiritual matters.]

The publication of Franny and Zooey in hard-back has whipped up a critical farrago. Instead of manifesting an understanding, either by way of sympathy or intelligence, current critical opinion tends to regard these latter-day pieces as static emblems of a static art: they don't go any place. Although Little, Brown & Co. is asking four dollars for the two short stories, one would look in vain for an introduction or critical preface. But this does not surprise in view of the mixed reception. Which Salinger himself anticipated. In his "formal introduction" to "Zooey" he confesses: "People are already shaking their heads over me, and any immediate further professional use on my part of the word 'God,' except as a familiar, healthy American expletive, will be taken—or, rather, confirmed—as the very worst kind of name-dropping and a sure sign that I'm going straight to the dogs. Which is, of course, something to give any normal fainthearted man, and particularly writing man, pause. And it does. But only pause. For a point of objection, however eloquent, is only good as it is applicable." In view of the declaration, I am just naive enough to believe that presumption favors the author.

The critic's first task, it seems to me, is to understand the fictional organization of any literary structure. Then he should be able to determine theme. As a gesture in the direction of supererogation, the informed critic can finally evaluate theme, the controlling insight, by considering its social reference. But he cannot really begin with a social reference and still remain true to the process of literary criticism, which is basically an exercise in understanding. I would like to mention three critical opinions on Salinger's recent work, which seem to invert the process of criticism. Putting it baldly, recent criticism distrusts Salinger's work because it seems to be unsocial, a-social, anti-social. Time's cover story on Salinger (September 15) allows the inference that for understanding one must identify Salinger's own isolation with the literary subject or theme of his writings. I think this implicit yet extra-literary identification of the man's private life and his public work underlies a spurious social criticism.

Writing on "Zooey" in his American Moderns Maxwell Geismar concludes: "Nowhere in this whole literary scene is there a genuine parent, or perhaps a genuine child. The true existence of the 'glass' family is indeed on the perennial radio program of the Wise Child. And perhaps the almost compulsive naturalism of 'things' in 'Zooey' is the writer's unconscious attempt to substitute a material solidity of furnishings for the missing social, economic, and psychological bases of his craft. Very likely these stories represent the writer's search, too, for his lost origins." Alfred Kazin's article in the August Atlantic [1961] summarizes the Glass children's relation to society: "The worst they can say about our society is that they are too sensitive to live in it. They are the special case in whose name society is condemned. And what makes them so is that they are young, precocious, sensitive, different. In Salinger's work, the two estates—the world and the cutely sensitive young—never really touch at all. Holden Caulfield condemns parents and schools because he knows that they are incapable of understanding him; Zooey and Franny and Buddy (like Seymour before them) know that the great mass of prosperous spiritual savages in our society will never understand them. This may be true, but to think so can lead to a violation of art." Finally, John Updike in the New York Times Book Review (September 17, 1961) admits to some "hard words": "Of course, the Glasses condemn the world only to condescend to it, to forgive it, in the end. Yet the pettishness of the condemnation diminishes the gallantry of the condescension." Despite their rhetorical urbanity, these three judgments fail to make their point, because they miss the point.

An attentive reading of Salinger's work would disclose that the social reference is not primary. Then why make it so? Mr. Updike acknowledges "Salinger's conviction that our inner lives greatly matter"; yet he is curiously petulant about "an impossible radiance of personal beauty and intelligence," which particularly characterizes Franny and Zooey. Perhaps to readers more familiar with Spenser and Donne this rhetorical commonplace seems hackneyed, wherein physical beauty signifies a more important radiance, the interior beauty of spirit. To my knowledge no Salinger reviewer has commented on his perception of the spiritual—I do not say supernatural—but psychic beauty. Commentators either get preoccupied with Salinger's psychic ugliness (mental disease in any form), or they get involved in his use of four-letter-words. Indeed, for all of Salinger's attention to physical beauty and physical detail, his imagination exhibits no sensual or sensuous suggestion. This, another characteristic of Renaissance language, allows his prose to remain vivid yet detached, unencumbered by a contemporary passion.

Most of all, this has to be said about the "material solidity of furnishings," which Mr. Geismar apparently misunderstands. They are not solids. Or, to put it another way, Salinger's use of furnishings is phenomenal; the only existence material things have is the name he gives them, for their materiality does not at all impress him. Look at his Whitmanesque catalogues; he goes through them with the ease of water and the speed of light: nothing sticks. And he assures us that the medicine cabinet contains "quite a good deal more." Contrary to what you might hope, there is no clutter here, as he indicates when we see Zooey putting "his undried razor in its place." Even the overflow of books in Seymour and Buddy's old room "had been piled in stacks on the floor." Bessie tells us that the apartment is being painted, but this intrusion does not persuade us of any domestic confusion. Salinger is not at all preoccupied with Dinglichkeit—a philosophy of things—just the opposite; for things tend to dissolve when confronted with either beauty or spirit. When we see Franny, for example, resting on the living room couch, the sun, "for all its ungraciousness to the rest of the room," renders her ethereal. Quite simply, the rest of the room disappears.

This way of making solids volatilize indicates and, indeed, proceeds from an interior spirit or attitude towards things. I have no intention of persuading Mr. Updike of this interiority, since he has already convinced himself that "'Zooey' is just too long; there are too many cigarettes, too many goddams, too much verbal ado about not quite enough." Yet, watch Bessie, and Zooey too, handle a cigarette. There is nothing fanatical, desperate, self-conscious in their use; putting it another way, the cigarette is never used for itself. If it goes out—get another one. Salinger seems to use the cigarette as a device, locating his people in an external order. But you'll also notice that of the innumerable things which surround these people, they use very few of them. Over the telephone Zooey reveals to Franny the basis of this attitude: "You can say the Jesus Prayer from now till doomsday, but if you don't realize that the only thing that counts in the religious life is detachment, I don't see how you'll ever even move an inch. Detachment, buddy, and only detachment. Desirelessness." The literary realization of this detachment, desirelessness, occasions the so-called static quality of Salinger's narrative art.

If you were to indicate schematically the degrees of detachment which Salinger dramatizes in "Zooey"—and I use "Zooey" because it puts the crisis of "Franny" into its spiritual perspective—you might come up with something like this: Zooey has it; Bessie has all she needs; and Franny needs it. As far as Zooey is concerned, I would just point out his extraordinary self-detachment. After Bessie leaves "the chapel," we next see Zooey shaving: "And before that he had managed to dry himself in front of a fulllength mirror without so much as glancing into it." No Narcissus he! And Salinger specifies this. Later, Zooey curtly but emphatically admonishes his mother when she starts admiring his back. Bessie, we are sure, is quite human, more recognizable perhaps than her children. She is burdened with neither their beauty nor their intelligence. But she bears within herself a wisdom earned in suffering and communicated in love. And it is Bessie who focuses conflict in "Zooey" by telling her youngest son, "You don't love, really." For this insight Zooey wonders in gratitude. It's true, but he's doing the best he can according to his own vision. Moreover, Bessie points up the qualitative difference between her outlook and her son's, when she admits: "It just so happens, young man, that I don't consider your little sister in exactly the same light that I do the Lord. I may be peculiar, but I don't happen to. I don't happen to see any comparison whatsoever between the Lord and a run-down, over-wrought little college girl that's been reading too many religious books and all like that!" Precisely because Zooey is trying to see the Lord in others he finds it difficult to love. Bessie does not suspect this, but Zooey keeps his peace.

The exchange between Franny and her older brother reveals the peculiar kind of suffering these highly sensitive young adults must endure. What distresses Franny? "It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so—I don't know—not wrong. . . . But just so tiny and meaningless and—sad-making." Zooey echoes her more affirmatively, "Always, always referring every goddam thing that happens right back to our lousy little egos." Without equivocation and without cowardice both of them see this malaise clearly. Yet, Zooey has had more experience with the Lane Coutells, and Professor Tuppers, and Dick Hesses. With relentless knowledge and love he tries to console Franny. How does one acquire the detachment necessary to love the fraud, the vainglorious, the imperious?

If this is the crucial question—an interior question, demanding an interior answer—it is amazing the degree of drama Salinger can give it. He finds the answer in the Presence of Christ. And this, by phone, Zooey communicates to his sister in the celebrated Fat Lady speech. It's at this point that Mr. Kazin wonders what Salinger's theology is doing to his art. Because he does not pretend to any theological competence, however, he doesn't answer his own query. Rather, he talks about the "sympathetic bond" between a writer and his society that makes art possible. For Salinger, the primary "sympathetic bond" exists between each of his Glass-children and the personal immanence of the transcendent God. This is the burden of their exceptional intelligence. When this relationship is firmed—either by the Jesus Prayer or by Zen—the person possesses a completeness that allows him to communicate.

This is what Zooey is after, a degree of self-possession in and through Christ, which will enable him to love, eventually, with a love that is Christ's. Although (as Bessie reminds us) he may not have been brought up as a Catholic, he knows that he cannot create his own love. For the power to love is a gift, something that is given; it's a grace, which no degree of self-sufficiency can produce. That's why he can be so concerned about the relationship between God's grace and the power of belief when talking about psychoanalysts. Philosophy tells us that it is man's destiny to receive continuously being and goodness from God. Zooey lives in that consciousness, and this is "the idea" he has to get across to Franny.

Rebel though he may against this responsibility imposed by Seymour and Buddy's education—"We're freaks, the two of us, Franny and I"—he accepts the embarrassment as well as the encumbrance. For neither he nor Franny entertain delusions about the effect their "freakish education" has on people, and people close to them, Bev and Bess, LeSage and Hess. Since personal integrity precludes condescension or compromise, Zooey admonishes Franny, "If you've had a freakish education, at least use it, use it." Humility, reverence, and honesty allow them to accept their situation, but Zooey's speech on the personal reality of the personal Jesus indicates that Christ alone can mediate between them and their society. So he tells Franny: "If you're going to say the Jesus Prayer, at least say it to Jesus, and not to St. Francis and Seymour and Heidi's grandfather all wrapped up in one. Keep him in mind if you say it, and him only, and him as he was and not as you'd like him to have been." Then, she might become "God's actress."

It is this conviction, chosen from the encyclopedic riches forced on him by his elder brothers, which Zooey now wants to impress upon Franny. It enables him to distinguish for her the person and his manner (Professor Tupper), her prayer and her behavior ("this Camille routine"), her universe and God's universe ("he has the final say about what's ego and what isn't"). These clarifications of a truly Wise Child, when once learned, will bring simplicity into the soul.

Apropos of this clarity, Zooey tells Franny: "But what I don't like—and what I don't think either Seymour or Buddy would like, either, as a matter of fact—is the way you talk about these people. I mean you don't just despise what they represent—you despise them. It's too damn personal, Franny. I mean it." Again, he pleads for self-detachment, enabling one to distinguish clearly according to the old ascetical axiom, Love the sinner but not the sin. In this context, Mr. Kazin's final declaration seems quite anomalous: "The fact that Salinger's work is particularly directed against the 'well fed sun-burned' people at the summer theater, at the 'section men' in colleges parroting the latest fashionable literary formulas, at the 'three-martini' men—this, indeed, is what is wrong. He hates them. They are no longer people, but symbols, like the Fat Lady." Perhaps we could quote with profit Zooey's theological perspective: "You're constitutionally unable to love or understand any son of God who says a human being, any human being—even a Professor Tupper—is more valuable to God than any soft, helpless Easter chick." Perhaps Mr. Kazin wishes to subordinate theology to art. Salinger doesn't hate anybody, but he does despise social or intellectual pretentiousness: it smudges. And this artifice he may catch up in a symbol or emblem; but a symbol is not a person, and you can love only a person. To verify this love you must take "a cup of consecrated chicken soup when it's right in front of your nose."

That's what's behind the "no-knowledge" theme. Knowledge for its own sake is liable to become a thing, an it, treasure. Far more important "to be with God." A personal God who is God and not just a name or a symbol. This danger Zooey averts from Franny, for she is just liable in her "tenth-rate nervous breakdown" to substitute some image or construct or name for the Presence of God. So, Buddy's letter introduces us to Seymour's advice "that all legitimate religious study must lead to unlearning the differences, the illusory differences." Here he argues for metaphysics or Aristotle's "first philosophy." But he puts it in an existential context, reminiscent of Gabriel Marcel's distinction between being and having. Salinger opts for being. Which is a doing. And it's much more difficult to do, when you are continually receiving—grace, goodness, love. Otherwise, you become acquisitive: "As a matter of simple logic, there's no difference at all, that I can see, between the man who's greedy for material treasure—or even intellectual treasure—and the man who's greedy for spiritual treasure. As you say, treasure's treasure." Detachment, therefore, from the it of self introduces to the soul the simplicity of being, for wisdom demands a commensurate growth in virtue as well as knowledge.

Metaphysically speaking, the contemporary ugly, whether expressed by vulgarity, hypocrisy, or dishonesty, is nonbeing. For it comes from something that is not fundamentally real. Zooey talks about this: "In my opinion, if you really want to know, half the nastiness in the world is stirred up by people who aren't using their true egos. Take your Professor Tupper. From what you say about him, anyway, I'd lay almost any odds that this thing he's using, the thing you think is his ego, isn't his ego at all but some other, much dirtier, much less basic faculty." Franny and Zooey appeals for a basic, personal integrity, which renders motive transparent, with the transparency of glass.

In his Theology and Modern Literature . . . Amos Wilder observes that modern art demands of man a metanoia, a conversion of mind and heart, a revision of value and motive: "Such art represents a demand, even a rebuke. It sees through us. Much of the scandal of such work lies in its implicit deflation of generally accepted ideals." Through the Wise Child, Salinger makes such a demand: Change your life! Professor Wilder continues: "It is this feature of modern art which makes men blind with rage. It is like disparaging a man's mother country. The best modern art exposes people." And Salinger exposes. But is it really to vilify, to despise, contemn? Would Mr. Kazin, for example, oblige us to love what is essentially false? One, moreover, might wish that Mr. Updike were more accurate in his use of language. For, Salinger mentions neither forgiveness nor condescension: only God can forgive, and Christ mediates. To say, therefore, that "Salinger loves the Glasses more than God loves them" offends language.

Some metaphysical or theological structure along these lines organizes Salinger's literary materials. His primary concern regards the individual's spiritual life, that real relationship between the person and the active Presence of God. Zooey has no qualms at all about calling the bathroom "the chapel": God is everywhere. But more important, God Is. Especially in the Person of Christ, "the most unimitative master," who "realized there is no separation from God." For Zooey, this defines the uniqueness of Christ: that "Jesus knew—knew—that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we're all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look"! His fierce conclusion: "You have to be a son of God to know that kind of stuff."

Being. Being a son of God. That's what Zooey puts to Franny, and that's what Salinger proposes to us. Does this religious perspective undermine society? Does it really follow that "Salinger's new stories raise a question about the course of an uncommon talent"? Does Christ really have no reference to society? Confuse your logical and ontological priorities, and you'll come up with the wrong answer. Christ's love for all men is at once personal and collective. We know, moreover, that He has loved us first. This same love He communicates to us "that we may be one" in His society. Indeed, His is the "sympathetic bond" that binds all men, and any other deludes.

These are some of the things I wish someone had said at the publication of Franny and Zooey. That Salinger has rendered more explicit the vision and motive only inchoative in The Catcher in the Rye. That the perfection of a perfectibilist society depends on the interior perfection given to each by God. That the power to love one another presupposes a detachment from self and other treasure. And that the wisdom of the world, as St. Paul tells us, is foolishness to God, who communicates His wisdom to the little ones. And that one must become, in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, as Christ tells us, a Wise Child. In a literary way, Mr. Salinger makes us conscious not only of his religious sensibility, but more particularly of the tension which exists between "the Kingdom of God is here"! and "the day of the Lord approaches." In doing this, he defines the very purpose of society.