[In the following essay, Fiedler discusses the defining characteristics of Salinger's novella.]

I am not sure why I have liked so much less this time through a story which moved me so deeply when I first read it in The New Yorker four or five years ago. I mean, of course, "Zooey," to which "Franny" is finally an appendage, like the long explanatory footnote on pages 52 and 53, the author's apologetic statement on the jacket, the pretentiously modest dedication: all the gimmicks, in short, which conceal neither from him nor from us the fact that he has not yet made of essentially novelistic material the novel it wants to become.

It was, I guess, the novel which "Zooey," along with a handful of earlier stories, seemed to promise to which I responded with initial enthusiasm: the fat chronicle of the Glass family which might have caught once and for all the pathos and silliness of middle-class, middle-brow intellectual aspiration—the sad and foolish dream that certain families, largely Jewish, dreamed for their children listening to the Quiz Kids perform on the radio two long decades ago. For the sake of that novel, Salinger seemed at the point of making a new start, of breaking through certain bad habits picked up along the way from Good Housekeeping to The New Yorker. Certainly in "Zooey" Salinger had begun untypically to specify the times and circumstances of his characters; to furnish patiently the rooms through which they moved; to eschew slickness and sentimentality and easy jokes in favor of a style almost inept enough to guarantee honesty; to venture beyond an evocation of adolescent self-pity and adolescent concern with sex titillating chiefly to adolescents themselves.

But there is, as yet, no novel—only "Zooey," well-leaded and in hard-covers, flanked by apologies and new promises, but still unfulfilled: and it is this, I suppose, which has left me baffled and a little disappointed. In a magazine, Salinger's documentation seemed not quite so irrelevant, his furnishings not quite so disproportionate to the events they frame, the awkwardness of his writing not quite so much a tic of embarassment or a posture of false modesty.

"Franny" itself, which I had not read before, seems to me an eminently satisfactory piece of reportage, turned in as evidence (at the demonstration trial of the generations, in which it is not clear who is the plaintiff, who the defendant) by a middle-aged eavesdropper on station-platforms and at restaurants where the Ivy League young ritually prepare for watching games and getting laid. It is, at least, scarcely ever cute, like much of "Zooey" and all of the mere apparatus which with it ekes out a book; and it ends ambiguously before its author, whose resolutions are often disasters, can manage to be either sentimental or sage. In "Franny" for once Salinger demonstrates that he can write of adolescence without disappearing into it; but "Franny," alas, is completed by "Zooey," which itself completes nothing.

We have been, I begin slowly to understand, living through a revolution in taste, a radical transformation of the widest American literary audience from one in which women predominate to one in which adolescents make up the majority. Controlling the market (it is, for instance, largely to reach them that the more expensive paperbacks were invented and marketed in new ways by new generations of editors scarcely older than themselves), they control also the mode. And the mode demands, in lieu of the teen-age novelists who somehow refuse to appear, Teen-age Impersonators, among whom one might list, say, Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, even William Burroughs—certainly the Salinger who wrote Catcher in the Rye and invented Holden Caulfield, a figure emulated by the young themselves, though not by all the young.

Each of the Impersonators I have mentioned speaks only for a portion of our youth: hip or beat or square, straight or queer or undecided. No one writes for all, but inevitably takes his stand: with those who "turn on" or those who do not, with those who write papers on Kierkegaard and Flaubert or those who scrawl on the walls of saloons "Ez for Pres." Salinger, of course, speaks for the cleanest, politest, best-dressed, best-fed and best-read among the disaffected (and who is not disaffected?) young; not junkies or faggots, not even upper-bohemians, his protagonists travel a road bounded on one end by school and on the other by home. They have families and teachers rather than lovers or friends; and their crises are likely to be defined in terms of whether or not to go back for the second semester to Vassar or Princeton, to Dana Hall or St. Mark's. Their angst is improbably cued by such questions as: "Does my date for the Harvard Weekend really understand what poetry is?" or "Is it possible that my English instructor hates literature after all?"

I do not mean by reduction to mock the concerns of Salinger's characters; they cannot, in any case, be reduced, and I should mock myself making fun of them. For better or for worse, a significant number of sensitive young Americans live in a world in which the classroom and the football game provide customary arenas for anguish and joy, love and death; and to that world, Salinger has been more faithful than it perhaps deserves. Which is why in the end he is a comic novelist or nothing. If the Temple Drake of Faulkner's Sanctuary stands as the classic portrait of a co-ed in the 'twenties, the Franny of Salinger's Glass stories bids to become her equivalent for the 'fifties, and the decline in terror and intensity from one to the other, the descent toward middle-brow bathos is the fault not of Salinger but of the times. Temple's revolt was against vestigial Puritanism and obscelesent chivalry and her weapons were booze and sex; Franny's is against literature and the New Criticism and her weapon is the "Jesus Prayer."

Certainly, this is fair enough; for, in the thirty years that separate the two Refugees from college, the Culture Religion of Western Europe has replaced Christianity as the orthodox faith for middle-class urban Americans; and the Pastors to whom our hungry sheep look up in vain are Ph.D.'s in Literature and the "section men" who are their acolytes. In a society presided over by this new clergy, to play with Vedanta or Buddhism or even Catholicism, except as these are represented in certain recent poetic texts, i.e., to seek a salvation beyond the reach of art, is considered heresy or madness or some blasphemous compound of both. Franny, at any rate, who will not write the proper papers or go out for the next college play, seems, not only to her elders and her peers, but to herself as well a heretic guilty as charged and therefore self-condemned to what her world calls a "nervous breakdown."

I am less sure this time though than I was the first that Salinger really understands just how splendid and horrifying a joke this all is, but begin to suspect that he has only stumbled on the comic possibilities of his subject in pursuit of a more pathetic theme which has obsessed him ever since the writing of his popular little tear-jerker, "To Esmé with Love and Squalor." It is this theme which lies at the center of Catcher in the Rye and which becomes the main interest if not of "Franny," certainly of the much longer "Zooey." I am referring, of course, to Salinger's presentation of madness as the chief temptation of modern life, especially for the intelligent young; and his conviction that, consequently, the chief heroism possible to us now is the rejection of madness, the decision to be sane. What suicide was for the young Werther or running away from home for Huck Finn, the "nervous breakdown," Salinger urges us to believe, is for the sensitive adolescent of our time. Having been taught, chiefly by the psychoanalysts (who haunt Salinger's books, ambiguous and omnipresent almost as his teachers), that insanity itself lies within the scope of choice, we have been able to make of it a theme for debate, our own to-be-or-not-to-be.

Before the present volume, Salinger had always presented madness as a special temptation of males; perhaps because, in the myth he was elaborating, it is a female image of innocence that, at the last moment, lures his almost-lost protagonists back from the brink of insanity: a little girl typically, pre-pubescent and therefore immune to the world's evil, which, in his work, fully nubile women tend to embody. The series which begins with "Esmé" goes on through "A Perfect Day for Banana-fish," where the girlsavior appears too late to save Seymour, oldest of the Glass family; and reaches an appropriate climax in Catcher in the Rye, where the savior is the little sister and the myth achieves its final form. It is the Orestes-Iphigenia story, we see there, that Salinger all along had been trying to rewrite, the account of a Fury-haunted brother redeemed by his priestess-sister; though Salinger demotes that sister in age, thus downgrading the tone of the legend from tragic to merely pathetic.

In "Zooey," where the brother saves, the sister is redeemed and neither is a child, the myth struggles back toward the tragic dimension; and it is for this, too, perhaps, that I responded so strongly at first to the story, to its implicit declaration of Salinger's resolve to escape what had become for him a trap. Yet though the girl-savior does not operate in "Zooey" to produce the pat Happy Ending of Catcher in the Rye, she floats disconcertingly in and out of its action, a not-quite-irrelevant ghost. It is, for instance, the chance meeting with a four year old girl at the meat counter of a Supermarket that prompts the long letter from his oldest surviving brother, Buddy, which Zooey is reading as his story opens; and in that letter, we are permitted to see at last the haiku found in Seymour's hotel room after his suicide: "The little girl on the plane / Who turned her doll's head around / To look at me."

Buddy, however, released from long silence by his little girl and the memory of Seymour's, has tried to save Zooey, through the mails, by advising him to "act" (Buddy is a teacher of writing, Zooey a T.V. star); and Zooey, trying in turn to save Franny, can only repeat in Buddy's voice and over Seymour's still-listed telephone the same advice. Behind it all, at any rate, is the inevitable little girl, her message echoed and re-echoed through the linked ventriloquist's dummies of the three brothers, who seem sometimes only three versions of the single author, listening faithfully to Esmé down the years.

But "Zooey" is, at last, a fable of reconciliation as well as of salvation; for the saved Franny, we are left to believe, will return perhaps to school, certainly to "acting," as her brothers recommend, not so much for her own sake as for the sake of what Seymour had been accustomed to call, in their Quiz Kid days, the Fat Lady, i.e., the audience out front. But the Fat Lady, Zooey announces as his story ends, is Christ; the mass audience is Christ. It is an appropriate enough theophany for a popular entertainer, for Salinger as well as Zooey, and the cue for a truce with all the world, with bad teachers, mad television producers, bad psychoanalysts, bad everyone.

Finally, like his characters, Salinger is reconciled with everything but sex. The single voice in his novella which advocates marriage is the voice of Bessie Glass, a stage-Irish comic mother married to an off-stage comic Jew; but she raises it in vain in a fictional world where apparently only women marry and where certainly no father appears on the scene. It is to Zooey she speaks, the one son of hers not already killed by marriage like Seymour, or safe in monastic retirement, secular like Buddy's or ecclesiastical like his Jesuit brother Waker's. Zooey, who fears his own body and his mother's touch on it, turns her aside with a quip; though he might well have repeated what he had cried earlier in deep contempt, "That's just sex talking, buddy . . . I know that voice." These words, too, he had addressed to her; since for him men and women alike are "buddy," as if unlike the actual Buddy, he needed no little girl to remind him of what Seymour had once tried to teach them all: that "all legitimate religious study must lead to unlearning . . . the illusory differences between boys and girls . . ."

To unlearn the illusory differences: this is what for Salinger it means to be as a child. And the Glasses, we remember, are in this sense children, holy innocents still at twenty or thirty or forty, Quiz Kids who never made the mistake of growing up, and whose most glorious hours were spent before the microphones on a nation-wide radio program called It's a Wise Child. The notion of the Quiz Kids, with their forced precocity, their meaningless answers to pointless questions faked by station employes as heroes, sages, secret saints of our time is palpably absurd. But Salinger himself ironically qualifies what he seems naively to offer by the unfinished quotation he uses to give his only half-mythical program its name. It is with his collaboration, we remind ourselves, that we are able to say of his hidden saints, when they become insufferably cute or clever or smug, "The little bastards!" Surely, this is Salinger's joke, not just one on him and on his world.