SOURCE: "Search for the Seer" in 7. D. Salinger, Twayne Publishers, 1963, pp. 139-60.

[In the following excerpt, French provides a mixed assessment of Salinger's novella, maintaining that it is "not distinguished art, but a self-improvement tract. "]

In January, 1955,I was employed to hold English classes by the University of Kentucky, where "contemporary literature" usually meant the writings of the Nashville "Fugitives" and their offspring, although some iconoclastic students read that upstart Faulkner. I was surprised, therefore, upon returning for the spring semester to find that a story by J. D. Salinger in the previous week's New Yorker had disturbed even the tranquillity of this bluegrass fastness as it had rocked more pretentiously in-the-swim academies in the fabled East.

True, much of the initial discussion of "Franny" revolved around a question that has greatly distressed the sensation-hating author, "Is Franny pregnant?" Wise heads nodded yes, and certainly her escort's concern about "testicularity" and the length of time between drinks supported the interpretation that she was; but I just couldn't accept the idea, because if this were simply the story of a girl's guilt feelings during a bout of morning sickness, her nervous hysteria and her escort's overbearing insensitivity were reduced to comic-strip simplicity by the story's erotic overtones. Besides, I could not see why any author would want to diminish the impact of the most telling satire on academic life, in a decade which produced many (Mary McCarthy's The Grove of Academe and Randall Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution, to mention the strongest competitors), by turning it into another tragedy of what confession magazines might call "youth's careless raptures."

I didn't think then—nor do I now—that we have to read anything into "Franny." Its distinction is that Salinger meticulously lays all his cards on the table. "Franny" is the story he had been trying to tell for a long time about "the last minutes of girlhood." The title character—the youngest of the Glass family, to whom, with this story, Salinger begins to devote himself exclusively—has been having an intense, physical love affair with Lane Coutell, an undergraduate English major at an unidentified Ivy League college.

She has come down to the Yale game, herself gamely determined to try to keep the affair alive; but her infatuation is wearing off. She has written a passionate, childish letter to Lane, but she confesses during lunch that she had "to strain to write it." She has also quit the theatre to which she has been devoted and has become absorbed in a little book, Way of a Pilgrim, that she heard about in a religion course. The book describes the effort of an unidentified Russian peasant to learn how to obey the injunction in St. Paul's First Epistle to the Thessalonians to "pray without ceasing." Although absorbed in an effort to get the "Jesus prayer" described in the book synchronized with her heartbeat so that it becomes practically a part of her personality, Franny has resolved to try to maintain her relationship with Lane. Salinger even points out that if Lane had at one point during lunch returned Franny's smile, the events that followed might have been mitigated, but "Lane was too busy affecting a brand of detachment of his own, and chose not to smile back." The storm breaks.

Franny has already annoyed Lane by comparing him to English department "section men" who "ruin" authors for others by knocking them—who try to build up their own egos by tearing down the distinguished people they present to the students. Lane replies that she has a "goddam bug." After he refuses to return her smile, her attack intensifies: "I'm so sick of pedants and conceited little tearer-downers I could scream." Lane, however, cannot drop an argument until he has won. Acknowledging that there are "incompetent people in all walks of life," he argues that two of Franny's instructors are poets; but she denies even this. They publish poetry, she admits; but instead of leaving behind "something beautiful," they leave only "some kind of terribly fascinating, syntaxy droppings."

Franny is finally prodded into launching forth upon her latest enthusiasm, the Way of a Pilgrim. She neglects her meal as she attempts to rouse Lane's interest in this account of the spiritual life, but he is engrossed in eating frogs' legs. Up to this time, Salinger has relied upon intrusive authorial comments to condition the reader's attitude towards Lane, but he now employs the far more effective device of allowing Lane to break into Franny's joyous account of sharing the pilgrim's adventures with comments showing that he is not touched, interested, or even really listening ("Sounds interesting, you don't want your butter, do you?"). Finally, when Franny runs down, Lane asks, "You actually believe that stuff, or what?". Shortly afterwards Franny faints, and Lane once again does become unselfishly attentive. The point of the fainting is one that Salinger also makes in The Catcher in the Rye—people are so preoccupied with their own concerns that they fail to notice that others are getting desperately wrought up until something physically conspicuous happens.

Lane's fault is not really his obsession with a paper he is writing about Flaubert, for his enthusiasm is another example of the kind that Franny feels about her little book. The two young people's behavior differs more in degree than in kind: Lane is self-consciously diffident; Franny is childishly enthusiastic. Just as Holden in Catcher exhibits the same "phoniness" he criticizes in others, Franny displays the same absorption in a single idea that upsets her in others. Lane is certainly more like Franny than he is like the "burly-set young man" at the railroad station, "who wanted to know if Lane knew what this bastard Rilke was all about." Lane's shortcoming is not absorption in work but his loving Franny not for herself but for what she does for his ego: before the rupture between them, Lane has "an almost palpable sense of well-being at finding himself. . . in the right place with an unimpeachably right-looking girl." As Franny maintains throughout the conversation, she has given up the stage and has even thought of giving up her major in English because she has become desperately tired of the ego. "I'm sick," she tells Lane, "of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting." She wants to be an anonymous pilgrim.

If her romance with Lane is to survive—if infatuation is to become love—she is going to have either to give up her present notions or to convince Lane to share them. All she sees and hears at the restaurant, however—Lane's eagerness to win arguments, to get big A's, to get somewhere, and his skepticism of her new enthusiasm—further distresses her. She is finally driven into a pathetic attempt to "convert" Lane ("You might like this book . . . It's so simple, I mean"—hardly the argument to impress a man who is still complimenting himself on his complex analysis of Flaubert). Franny explains what she really wants at this critical stage in her development when she says, "I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect." (Holden Caulfield, too, has been searching for the hero that he never finds, and he himself dreams of being such a hero—"a catcher in the rye"—in the only way the person with no specialized abilities can.) She has liked Lane, as she has liked the "poets" at her school, but she "respects" none of them. This world has failed to provide her with a satisfactory hero; thus at the end of the story we find her "forming soundless words," intoning the prayer to Jesus to have "mercy" upon her—alone in a world of hostile egotists.

Perry Frank, who is as sharp a reader as I know, informs me that "Franny" is incomplete without "Zooey," and she is right. The former story leaves the reader with the question of whether Franny can be brought back into this world or whether she will eventually follow her brother Seymour into oblivion. At the time the story first appeared, no one was disturbed by this incompleteness, because "Franny" was read—at least in the colleges where it became inordinately popular—as an attack upon Lane Coutell. The story did more to establish Salinger's reputation in universities than had The Catcher in the Rye, because the "section man" mentality abounds, and many students and even professors—egotistically identifying with Franny—reveled to see it at last get its comeuppance.

In contrast to Miss McCarthy's or Jarrell's novels or even Vladimir Nabokov's delightful Pnin, Salinger's story does seem to have been motivated by principle rather than personal spite; and, despite what critics say, there are still people who teach in colleges because they are attempting to maintain principles. Whatever else "Franny" may be, it is one of the most precise and devastating satires to have been written about a world that is full of pedants eager to display their erudition rather than—as one might hope—pilgrims still seeking to learn. The story is still enormously successful as an isolated satire; but Salinger is not content to be a satirist. Considered in connection with "Zooey," "Franny" becomes simply a prologue to an account of the search for individual salvation. "Zooey" appears to have been written to make people see that what matters is not the negative burlesque of the inflated ego, but the positive conquest of it.

Between the writing of the two stories, however, something had happened to Salinger. Authors often become depressed or exasperated when readers miss subtle points, just as Lane misses the significance of Franny's increasing excitement. The author may then begin to worry about making his meaning so clear that it cannot be missed or mistaken, and his art begins to suffer—as James Joyce's, for example, never did. For John Steinbeck the turning point came with The Wayward Bus and for Faulkner with Intruder in the Dust (both written shortly after the end of World War II); it came for Salinger between "Franny" and "Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters." By the time he published "Zooey" in the New Yorker (May 4, 1957), he was failing to heed the very advice that he had Zooey give his sister, "the stupidity of audiences . . . is none of your business." Despite its tremendously moving conclusion, "Zooey" is a tale in which the author talks too much and shows too little.

If "Zooey" were altogether what it is in part—the story of Franny's recovery, with her brother's inspired aid, from the breakdown she has suffered in the earlier story—we could unashamedly apply to it the hackneyed and critically unfashionable term "beautiful." Franny's breakdown, whatever else it may involve, has partly resulted from her defeat in a collision of egos with Lane. One reason "Franny" is an unusually well-balanced satire is that Franny's absorption in the Jesus prayer appears as egotistical as Lane's in his Flaubert paper. She is as inattentive to his remarks as he is to hers, although she is sorrier about breaking the spell of his self-enchantment by asking for his olive than he is about breaking hers by asking for her butter. Also, although Franny is angry at "all the conceited little tearer-downers," she does a great deal of tearing down of faculty members and fellow students herself.

All of this is pointed out by her brother Zooey in the story which bears his name. He brusquely reminds Franny that she is pampering herself and that she is not going to "recover" until she becomes absorbed in perfecting herself rather than in condemning others. He tries to get this across to her by pointing out that Christ—"the best, the smartest, the most loving, the least sentimental, the most unimitative master"—is not the sentimental St. Francis that Franny has him confused with. He also tells her that "nobody who's really using his ego, his real ego, has any time for any goddam hobbies." He is saying here in a kind of racy, psychoanalytically influenced jargon the same things that William Butler Yeats says near the end of his poem "Among School Children":

Labor is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

Both Zooey's and Yeats's statements are professions of a faith that becoming absorbed in a task—living a role—makes one's work and play indistinguishable; but such talk at first only aggravates Franny's condition. When Zooey, however—at first pretending to be his brother Buddy—calls his sister on Seymour's old phone and tells her the now-famous story of the "fat lady"—sitting out in the audience watching the children on the radio—who is really "Christ himself, Buddy," he conveys to her at last what it means to be "God's actress" and not to "rave and bitch" about the stupidity of audiences. "The artist's only concern," he teaches her, "is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's." This message absorbed, Franny—like Sergeant X in "For Esmé—with Love and Squalor" and Buddy Glass in "Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters"—is able to sleep "as if all of what little or much wisdom there is in the world were suddenly hers."

So far, so good; but, unfortunately, there is much more to "Zooey." The narrator—Buddy Glass—not only has Zooey twice explain to Franny what certainly must be called the "moral" of the story, but he also rubs the reader's nose in it by picturing Zooey, between his own acts, reading a dozen or so quotations from great writers of the past, all of which make the same point he is trying to put across to Franny. Whether Salinger is just working on the Madison Avenue principle that repetition drives a message home or whether he thinks he needs to rally prominent character-witnesses to his support, "Zooey" becomes not so much a unique work of art as a kind of anthology of the wisdom of the past. Zooey even goes to what Salinger has recently been presenting as the highest source of all and reads a passage from what is apparently a diary that Seymour Glass had kept on shirt cardboards.

The invention of Buddy Glass and his "prose home movie" strikes me as Salinger's least felicitous idea, although the "home movie" metaphor is precisely right, because "Zooey," like many home movies, hovers lovingly over those things that mean a great deal to the maker of film and his immediate clique but that simply puzzle and exasperate those who happen to be trapped at a showing. Salinger, of all people, after putting into Holden Caulfield's mouth moving protests against special interest groups banding clannishly together, seems to have become a cultist. As Eliot Fremont-Smith points out, the inaccurate information about his residence that Salinger wrote for the jacket of Franny and Zooey is "a joke that insiders . . . can snicker over." The jacket copy thus becomes part of the Salinger-Glass saga, "and the worth of the saga becomes partly determined by one's appraisal of the joke" [The Village Voice, March 8, 1962].

Certainly "Zooey"—as most reviewers have agreed—is far too long, because Salinger incorporates into the text—and even into a footnote that he calls an "aesthetic evil"—all of the background material about this beloved, imaginary family that must be in his mind if he is to write of them consistently. But the reader needs to know this only if it is directly relevant to the particular crises around which a story centers or if he and the writer share some extraliterary infatuation, like the "saga" with its private jokes.

How many of the purchasers who have made Franny and Zooey a bestseller have read every word of the second story? Many readers who find in the Glass family a sense of community lacking in their own lives do enjoy the long accounts of the family's eccentricities that fill up the opening pages of the story, but such people are likely to grow as impatient with Zooey (and Salinger) as Holden Caulfield does with Antolini when the speechmaking starts. Those, on the other hand, who are reading the stories for the "message" (and surely many reviewers have seized upon it) find the opening pages sluggish. In attempting to provide something for everyone, Salinger fails, I feel, to quite please any except those who now accept undiscriminatingly anything he offers.

Buddy Glass's "home movie," however, needs more than mere judicious cutting to keep the central matter of Franny's recovery from getting lost in the lush background. A more fundamental weakness is that we have no idea whether this recovery is permanent. Since it has, after all, been effected by a talented entertainer, it bears a fishy resemblance to those of a tent revivalist, which may take, but usually don't. We are not sure whether we are reading about the end of a pilgrimage or the upshot of a revival meeting. Is Zooey Glass a cigar-smoking Christ or an ascetic Elmer Gantry?

The permanence of Franny's recovery is especially in doubt since cures do not often last long with the self-indulgent; and, as Eliot Fremont-Smith points out, the world of the Glasses is "the world of the self-indulgent who think they are exceptionally bright when they are only bright. . . in which mannerism is mistaken for charm and problems of morale are rarified into problems of morality." Is this confusion of morale and morality—which leads the Glasses to mistake their vocations with religious callings—simply the character's or is it the author's?

[In his Salinger] Henry Anatole Grunwald attempts to defend the story from earlier attacks by pointing out that Zooey's views are in character and cannot be unhesitatingly attributed to the author. He sees the story as simply the account of the way in which a gifted actor talks his sensitive sister out of a nervous breakdown. If one accepts this theory, however, the reason for the long introduction acquainting us with the family and its problems and for the host of quotations from the wise men of the past becomes obscure. Grunwald's argument that Salinger approaches his characters ironically would have great merit if "Zooey" were the kind of sparse, single-track narrative that "Franny" is; but the host of details showing the family's weaknesses as well as strengths does not seem to have been introduced at all to pass judgment upon them, but only to make them more real. Salinger is indulgent to his dream-children when he implies to the reader, "See, they're not perfect; they've got lovable human failings." The fact that Salinger apparently expects the reader to surmise that Franny is unambiguously cured indicates the tacit assumption that some kind of pact exists between author and reader. What does the reader who has never heard of Salinger (there may be a few) make of "Zooey"? The Catcher in the Rye is the kind of book that attracts us to the author, but "Zooey" is a work to which the author must attract us.

If we do not accept the views expressed in the story as those of the sponsor, the whole thing becomes an astonishingly cynical exploitation of the sentiments of those who still believe somewhat fuzzily, but ardently in the possibility of universal love. Salinger is, of course, famous for his leg-pulls, and even his whole much-publicized "withdrawal" could be designed to keep a thoroughly gulled public from penetrating his cynical mask. If it is, Salinger is one of the most consummate counterfeiters in literary history, one so thoroughly conversant with feelings that he does not share that he is able (as those who employ motivational research would like to be) to exploit the deepest and most troublesome of other peoples' feelings in order to peddle his wares.

If he is such an artist, he should be working on Madison Avenue; and if he has no scruples about exploiting people, it is impossible to see why he isn't. I simply do not believe that the little we do know about Salinger suggests that he is capable of the unnaturally cool detachment that would enable him deliberately to manipulate other peoples' feelings. His slow production and comparatively few successes in creating thoroughly integrated works also suggest that he is not technically a deft enough craftsman to grind out mechanical works that do not mirror his own secret fears and desires. "There are nice things in the world," Zooey tells Franny; and I think that Salinger wishes his stories of the Glass family to be among them. They are most completely explicable as his attempt to share with others the nice world he has invented as a personal refuge from the phony world that threatens to engulf us.

If I find "Zooey" artistically thin, it is not because I feel that the author is simply manipulating words like someone writing a commercial for a deodorant, but—quite the contrary—because I agree with John Updike that in "Zooey," Salinger "robs the reader of the initiative upon which love must be given" and "clinches our suspicion that a lecturer has usurped the writing stand [John Updike, Franny and Zooey, in Salinger: A Critical and Personal Portrait, edited by Henry A. Grunwald, 1962]. The longer I contemplate Franny and Zooey, the more certain I feel that the public has been right in its enthusiastic reception of the book's general "message" about the advisability of improving one's self rather than criticizing others and that the reviewers have been right in their reservations about the craftsmanship of the presentation. In short, Franny and Zooey is not distinguished art, but a self-improvement tract. It belongs on the shelf not beside Scott Fitzgerald, but Emile Coué.