598
JEREMY LARNER
Glass, or a whole day in the living room fighting with Zooey Glass
via an orgy of significant fidgits. The letters and the fights serve to
reassure them:
You are lunique. Not everyone is a
bird~tover.
When
you go to the Princeton weekend, or to the class where the professor
musses up his hair, or to Miami Beach (or to the office where the
phonies work at phoney jobs), it will be not just an ordinary event in
the life of an ordinary man, but the test of a secret saint.
Seymour, of course, didn't quite make it. He had his one last
great moment with a four-year-old girl and then blew his brains out
in the bedroom of his Miami Beach honeymoon hotel. Thus Seymour
represents the paradox of the most saintly: they are too good for this
world. Seymour is meant to be an emblem of suffering for all of us:
he was so acutely sensitive that he could not go on living. But, para-
doxically, it was just this fatal sensitivity that enabled him to leave
r
behind the vital Salinger message:
"-don't you know who that Fat
Lady really is?
...Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself. Christ
Himself, buddy." And so Zooey must shine his shoes for that radio
show, because the insensitive slob he entertains is really Christ Him-
self. Seymour died that we might have this redemption.
This is a message Daddy can accept. When he was young per–
haps he had some ideals worth fighting and worth living for. But
these soft times are hard, and now, sadly, Daddy is content merely
to lie still as Franny on that fabulous couch in the Glass living room
and-before falling into a deep, dreamless sleep-to smile at the
ceiling. Yes, Daddy knows Seymour personally: the really brilliant kid
in the old frathouse. So brilliant in fact that he couldn't bear to take
any courses. Flunked out, and ended up on skid row, where only the
Special few know that this shabby alcoholic is the wisest man on earth.
One day on his lunch hour Daddy brings his youngest daughter down
to the Bowery. Seymour kneels carefully, takes the little girl and holds
her at arm's length. His eyes sparkle. He stares at his unshined shoes
and sighs a deep deep sigh, mumbles a few words of the Mundaka
Upanishad. He looks up at Daddy, and by the perspiration on Sey–
mour's forehead Daddy senses that Seymour is about to speak. (To
him, Daddy!) "Ah buddy, buddy," says Seymour. "Don't you real–
ize who that Agency is? Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself, buddy."
Tenderly Daddy takes his little daughter in his arms, and trudges
away through the gently falling shit. He is renewed. He will endure.
May the Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on him.
Jeremy larner
