BOOKS
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But "Zooey" is, at last, a fable of reconciliation as well as of salva–
tion; 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 ap–
parently 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 J esu it 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 il–
lusory 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.
leslie A. Fiedler
