Franny and Zooey
I first read J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey in college, about twenty years ago, and have kept that same copy ever since, there on my bookshelf next to two other Salinger volumes, The Catcher in the Rye and Nine Stories. In recently scanning those book spines as I regularly do, my eye landed on Franny and Zooey, and I recalled that it had a lot to do with another book—this one allegedly nonfiction—called The Way of a Pilgrim—and I decided that it—or both—would make for an interesting blog post, given their spiritual themes. Plus this was during my birthday staycation week and I wanted something fun to read.
Franny and Zooey did not disappoint. Every word was a delight. It was also obvious to me—perhaps more so than upon my first reading—that this book was Salinger’s way of processing and expressing what he’d learned up to then—he was in his mid-thirties when writing it—about the religious life. I will obviously go into more detail about that, but first I’ll provide some biographical info about Salinger.
J.D. stands for Jerome David, and he was born in Manhattan, New York, on January 1, 1919. He attended public schools on the West Side of Manhattan until 1932, when his family (he had one older sister) moved to Park Avenue, and Salinger enrolled at a nearby private school, where he proved to be a mediocre student but demonstrated an innate talent for drama. His father, a Jewish purveyor of Kosher cheese, opposed the idea of his son becoming an actor and enrolled young Jerry at Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania. Salinger began writing stories there "under the covers [at night], with the aid of a flashlight.” He graduated in 1936 and that same year matriculated as a freshman at New York University, only to drop out the following spring.
In 1938, Salinger also attended Ursinus College in Pennsylvania, but he only lasted one semester. In 1939, he took a writing class at the Columbia University School of General Studies in Manhattan. His teacher, longtime editor of Story magazine, Whit Burnett, would later say that Salinger did not distinguish himself in the class until a few weeks before the end of the second semester, at which point "he suddenly came to life" and completed three stories.
Salinger was drafted into the army in 1942, several months after the U.S. entered World War II. He saw combat with the 12th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division, and was present at Utah Beach on D-Day, in the Battle of the Bulge, and in the Battle of Hürtgen Forest. He was assigned to a counter-intelligence unit known as the Ritchie Boys, in which he used his proficiency in French and German to interrogate prisoners of war. Salinger earned the rank of Staff Sergeant and served in five campaigns. He also continued to write while serving in the army, publishing several stories in slick magazines such as Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post. After Germany’s defeat, he was hospitalized for a few weeks for combat stress reaction and later told his daughter: "You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live.”
From the start of his writing life, Salinger had regularly submitted stories and poems to The New Yorker magazine, all of which were rejected—although they were going to publish one and then Pearl Harbor happened, rendering the story’s plot line irrelevant to the changing times—until 1946, when New Yorker editor William Maxwell saw promise in the story that would eventually be titled, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” After Salinger, then 28 years old, spent a year revising the story with editors, it was published in the January 31st, 1948 issue. Later deemed "the story that would permanently change his standing in the literary community,” “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” was met with immediate acclaim. It was the first of Salinger’s stories to center on a member of the Glass family—in this case, the oldest of the seven precocious Glass children, Seymour, a World War II combat veteran recently discharged from an army hospital. Salinger would continue to write about these siblings, including Franny and Zooey, the youngest two, in six future stories. The book Franny and Zooey references Seymour’s suicide multiple times as a formative event for the young Glasses. “Bananafish” ends with him shooting himself in the head.
In 1951, Salinger’s most well-known work—The Catcher in the Rye—was published by Little, Brown and Company. Detailing 16-year-old Holden Caulfield's experiences in New York City after his fourth expulsion and departure from an elite prep school, the novel garnered mixed reviews initially. But within two months of its publication, Catcher had been reprinted eight times, and it spent 30 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list.
In 1953, his short story collection, Nine Stories, was published and wound up being another financial success for Salinger. It’s interesting to note that he refused to allow publishers of the collection to depict his characters in dust jacket illustrations, lest readers form preconceived notions of them. Here, here! I much prefer to imagine a character for myself, based on the writer’s description; and Salinger provides many compelling details to work with on this front. He describes Zooey Glass, for instance, as “surpassingly handsome, even spectacularly so… His face had been just barely saved from too-handsomeness, not to say gorgeousness, by virtue of one ear’s protruding slightly more than the other… But what was undiminishable, and a joy of a kind forever, was an authentic spirit superimposed over his entire face—especially at the eyes, where it was often as arresting as a Harlequin mask, and, on occasion, much more confounding.”
The more popular Salinger’s books became, the more he receded from public view. He moved from New York City to Cornish, New Hampshire, in 1953, and between then and 1960, he only published four stories. Fun fact: In W. P. Kinsella's 1982 novel, Shoeless Joe, which would be adapted for cinema as Field of Dreams, the main character "kidnaps" the reclusive Salinger to take him to a baseball game. But due to fears of Salinger suing them, filmmakers replaced his character with the fictional Terence Mann (played by a fabulous and wonderful James Earl Jones). This probably won’t win me any cool points, but Field of Dreams is one of my favorite movies. I watched it on VHS many, many times growing up. First of all: baseball. Second of all: time travel. It’s also got lots of juicy family drama stuff and a corn field that tells you what to do with your life and later serves as a portal to heaven for dead White Sox players. And Ray Liotta. What’s not to love?
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In February of 1955, at 36 years old, Salinger got married for a second time (the first time being when he was fresh out of combat; that union only lasted eight months), and in December of 1955 his first child, Margaret, was born, followed four years later by a son, Matthew. Such a lifestyle would not have been possible for Salinger had he remained an adherent of Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, which he’d become an adherent of in 1952, after several years of practicing Zen Buddhism and then reading The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (a copy of which I just purchased for myself). Ramakrishna’s Hinduism advocated celibacy for those seeking enlightenment, and detachment from human responsibilities such as family. Margaret Salinger wrote in her memoir Dream Catcher that due to her father espousing this branch of Hinduism, her parents would not have married or had children if he hadn’t also read the teachings of Lahiri Mahasaya, a guru of Paramahansa Yogananda (author of Autobiography of a Yogi), which brought the possibility of enlightenment to those following the path of the “householder,” or married person with children. Salinger and his wife, Claire Douglas, were initiated into the path of Kriya yoga in the summer of 1955. His interest in various spiritual paths is quite evident in Franny and Zooey, and why I’m going to talk about the book today—which isn’t, as I mistakenly said at the end of last week’s show, a novel, but a volume containing a short story and a novella. The story “Franny” was first published in The New Yorker in January of 1955, and apparently certain aspects of it were based on Salinger’s relationship with his wife, who also owned a copy of The Way of a Pilgrim, which features prominently in the story and its accompanying novella, Zooey.
Salinger’s wife Claire grew frustrated with his always-changing religious beliefs, which she thought provided a distraction for him from the suffering he endured as a writer. After abandoning Kriya yoga, he tried Dianetics (the forerunner of Scientology), but according to Claire was quickly disenchanted with it. This foray was followed by an adherence to a number of other spiritual, medical, and nutritional belief systems, including Christian Science, homeopathy, acupuncture, macrobiotics, and a fascination with American clairvoyant Edgar Cayce, who claimed to channel from his higher self while in a trance-like state. In the mid-1960s, Salinger was drawn to Sufi mysticism through the writer and thinker Idries Shah's seminal work The Sufis (which I also just purchased a copy of).
After the book publication of Franny and Zooey in 1961 and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, in 1963, Salinger published only one other thing, a novella called Hapworth 16, 1924—which I’d never heard of before reading his Wikipedia page in preparation for this episode. It’s written in the form of a long letter by seven-year-old Seymour Glass to his parents from summer camp. Published as the bulk of a New Yorker issue in 1965, it was universally panned by critics.
In September of 1966, Salinger’s wife initiated a separation after becoming, according to Margaret, “a virtual prisoner,” due to J.D.’s isolating her more and more from friends and relatives. Their divorce was finalized on October 3, 1967, with Claire getting custody of the kids. J.D. remained close to his family, though; he built a new house for himself across the road and visited frequently. He married again in 1988, to a nurse and quilt maker 40 years his junior, Colleen O’Neill. He’d also dated several other young women before her—including 18-year-old Joyce Maynard, an actress, who would go on to say of their 9-month relationship, “I was groomed to be the sexual partner of a narcissist who nearly derailed my life.” Salinger and Colleen, however, remained married until he died, on January 27th, 2010, at the age of 91. He perished of natural causes at his home in New Hampshire. Though he’d had nothing published in the latter 45 years of his life, he’d continued to write through most of them. After his death, Salinger’s widow and son began preparing what he’d written for publication, announcing in 2019 that it would all be shared at some point, but it was a major undertaking and would require more time. According to his daughter, Salinger had a detailed filing system for his unpublished manuscripts, which suggests he did want them to eventually see the light of day. "A red mark meant, if I die before I finish my work, publish this 'as is.’ Blue meant publish but edit first, and so on.” A neighbor said that Salinger once told him he had written fifteen unpublished novels. I’d be happy to read at least one of them. If it’s even half as pleasurable an experience as reading The Catcher in the Rye or Franny and Zooey, I’d consider it worth my time.
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New Yorker magazine staff journalist Janet Malcolm said in 2001 that the Zooey section of Franny and Zooey "is arguably Salinger's masterpiece... Rereading it and its companion piece 'Franny' is no less rewarding than rereading The Great Gatsby.” I would need to reread Gatsby to say with certainty that I agree with Malcolm’s comparison, but I can definitely assert that Salinger’s book was a true delight to read for a second time, having first done so as a college undergrad. I was most struck by his compelling descriptive passages and the relentlessly brutal humor of his dialogue. It’s an effortless read. The pages flew by.
As I mentioned earlier, I chose to write about Franny and Zooey because of its religious themes. The basic plot is that Franny Glass is having a spiritual, existential breakdown that was triggered by her reading a book called The Way of a Pilgrim. Twenty-year-old Franny is the youngest of seven siblings (though one of them died by suicide about seven years prior), and in her troubled state she leaves college and goes to her parents’ house in Manhattan, where she remains couch-ridden and refuses any food her worried mother offers her. Her older brother Zooey (25) lives in his parent’s apartment, too, and essentially ends up having a come-to-Jesus (quite literally) with Franny, who seems to snap out of her religious funk. It might not sound all that compelling when broadly summarized, but God is definitely in the details where this book is concerned.
We first meet Franny at a train station in an unspecified college town, where she's arriving from another unspecified college town (she probably attends Wellesley) to spend a football weekend—it’s the Yale game—with her boyfriend, Lane. He immediately notices a “small pea-green clothbound book” in her hand and asks her about it. Franny shrugs it off as nothing—actually, she says it’s “just something”—and stuffs it in her purse. Franny and Lane go to a fancy downtown restaurant for lunch, and it quickly becomes clear that she is not doing well psychologically. Lane prattles on about an English essay he recently received high marks on and how his professor thinks he should submit it for publication somewhere. He acts like the essay is nothing special but he’s obviously quite proud of it. Franny is more interested in talking about how disillusioned she’s become with her own professors, sounding much like another Salinger character, Holden Caulfield, in basically calling them all phonies. She is pale and sweaty and seems agitated, distracted. She drinks a martini and smokes a cigarette with shaky fingers. Lane repeatedly asks her if she’s okay, and eventually she excuses herself and goes to the bathroom, where she sits in a stall and sobs for a full five minutes. Then she lifts the little green book from her purse and places it on her knees, “as if that were the best of all places for a small pea-green clothbound book to be.” After another beat, she briefly but firmly presses the book to her chest before returning it to her purse and heading back out to the table.
Over the course of her continued conversation with Lane, who eats frog legs and repeatedly asks Franny why she isn’t touching her chicken sandwich, we learn that she has quit the Theater Department at school because she is “sick of ego,” including her own. She is disgusted by and ashamed of her own desire for applause and recognition, and of “not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I’m sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.” Lane eventually asks her about the little green book again, and after a couple evasive answers she tells him it’s The Way of a Pilgrim, which her Religion Survey professor recommended she read. Written by an anonymous Russian peasant in the 1800s, it is said peasant’s first-person account of his quest to find out what the Bible means when it talks about praying incessantly. He walks all over Russia looking for people who can explain it to him. One of the teachers he encounters tells the pilgrim about a book called the Philokalia, “which apparently was written by a group of terribly advanced monks who sort of advocated this really incredible method of praying.”
The method of praying in question is the Jesus Prayer, which goes, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” That’s it. The trick, though, is to say it all day long, every day. The pilgrim starts by mouthing the prayer and after awhile it gets synchronized with his heartbeats and he is, indeed, praying without cease. Then he starts teaching others how to do it. He continues walking around Russian, teaching others and continuing to deepen his own practice based on what he learns from the people he encounters. Franny tells Lane that what she finds especially “marvelous” about the whole thing is that “you don’t even have to have faith in what you’re doing… You don’t even have to think about what you’re saying… All you have to have in the beginning is quantity. Then, later on, it becomes quality by itself. On its own power or something.” She compares this approach to the Jesus Prayer to how the Nembutsu sects of Buddhism repeat ‘Namu Amida Butsu’ over and over again—or “Praises to the Buddha”—and to how Hindus meditate on Om, with the exact same result. The result being, essentially, seeing God.
Franny never does touch her chicken sandwich and ends up fainting on her way back to the bathroom, excusing herself again because she feels “funny.” When she comes to five minutes later in the manager’s office, where Lane and the bartender have carried her, Lane decides that she needs rest and will not be going to the football game. He leaves to get her some water and call a cab. Franny lies very still and gazes up at the ceiling, her lips “forming soundless words, and they continued to move.”
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So of course I had to read The Way of a Pilgrim. Written in the simple language of a parable or myth, it doesn’t take long for the eponymous narrator to encounter the teacher whose message will remain with him, guiding him in introject form and appearing to him in dreams for the rest of his journey. This starets—or spiritual director in the Eastern Orthodox Church—teaches the pilgrim the Jesus Prayer—“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me”—saying, “If one makes a habit of this supplication, one will experience great comfort and a need to repeat this prayer unceasingly, so that eventually one will not be able to live without it and the prayer will flow of its own accord.” Sure enough, this winds up being the case for our humble hero, who finds that his days are filled with joy, thanks to his new habit. “Each person I encountered seemed dearer to me, as if all were filled with love for me.” This notion reminds of what Zooey says to Franny about everyone being the Fat Lady. More on that later.
And of course I gave the prayer a whirl. I used a simple technique the pilgrim describes. “Concentrating my mind in the heart by visualizing it in my mind, I inhaled saying, ‘Lord Jesus Christ,’ and then exhaled saying, ‘Have mercy on me.’” I didn’t actually say the words out loud—it felt strange enough just to think them—but I found their rhythm to be quite satisfying when timed with the breath. Since the exhale is typically longer than the inhale I like that the exhale phrase, “have mercy on me,” contains one more syllable than the inhale phrase, “Lord Jesus Christ.” Synching up the second part of the prayer with the exhale also lends that request for mercy a sigh-like quality. You can try it yourself to feel the difference. Try inhaling while thinking “Have mercy on me,” and then try exhaling while thinking it. For me, thinking on the inhale lends it a fearful, begging quality, while thinking it on the exhale feels like a trusting surrender.
But overall it just feels weird to pray in this way, using this kind of language. First of all, there’s the “Lord Jesus Christ” bit. I guess I’m realizing that I just don’t like the idea of having a Lord, or any entity to whom I am beholden or of whom I must make requests. And second of all, why do I need his mercy? I could understand needing it—if I believed in him that way—while in a moment of suffering. But I’m not always suffering, thank goodness, and to request mercy in moments of relative ease feels somehow like an admission of sin, or like borrowing trouble—suggestive that I will need said mercy very soon. In the brighter, lighter moments of life, this prayer feels like a wet blanket. Not something I want to repeat incessantly.
In the blog post I wrote a few weeks ago on aging, I mentioned Psalm 138, which Kathleen Dowling Singh quotes in her book The Grace In Aging. “I thank you for the wonder of my being.” I like saying that to myself when feeling good about life, and I’ve also found it a worthy practice to say when feeling bad about it, although I cannot always muster such gratitude, in which case a little “have mercy on me” does feel more appropriate.
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The latter titular character, Zooey, is Franny’s older brother—twenty-five to her twenty—and we first meet him, he’s in the bathtub, smoking a cigarette and reading a long letter whose many pages are so creased and delicate he’s obviously read them multiple times before. Set in 1955 shortly after the plot line of the story “Franny,” Zooey the novella takes place in the in the Glass family apartment in New York City's Upper East Side. Buddy Glass—the second born of the seven Glass children, is actually the narrator, though he himself is not present for any of the scenes. He makes himself known in the beginning, but thereafter the narration reads like classic third-person limited. As if perched on Zooey’s shoulder, we the readers are able to see the letter he’s holding, and read it along with him. It was written four years prior, on March 18th, 1951, by Buddy Glass, on the three-year anniversary of Seymour Glass’s suicide, an event that obviously rocked the family and that Buddy coped with by rarely coming home anymore and focusing on his teaching career. He is sorry for not being around, and sorry for the way he and Seymour moulded the minds of Zooey and his younger sister Franny when they were kids. The early home-education that Buddy and Seymour enforced consisted of the Upanishads, the Diamond Sutra, Meister Eckhart, and “all our other old loves.”
Just in case you’re not familiar, the Upanishads are the most recent part of the Vedas, the oldest scriptures of Hinduism, and they deal with meditation, philosophy, consciousness and ontological knowledge. The Diamond Sutra is one of the most influential Mahayana Buddhist sutras in East Asia, and it is particularly prominent within the Zen tradition, along with the Heart Sutra. I very recently heard Zen priest Edward Espe Brown talk for a full fifteen minutes about one little passage from the Diamond Sutra that says, “Out of nowhere, the mind comes forth.” And as for Meister Eckhart, you may recall from a previous blog post that he was a 13th and 14th century German Catholic theologian, philosopher, and mystic who is quoted more than any other spiritual figure in Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy. So as children, Franny and Zooey’s oldest two brothers made them read Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian texts, and the phrase “all our other old loves” implies the curriculum included other religions, too. Buddy writes in his letter to Zooey that he and Seymour “thought it would be wonderfully constructive to at least tell you as much as we knew about the men—the saints, the arhats, the bodhisattvas, the jivanmuktas—who know something about [the state of pure consciousness—satori]. That is, we wanted you both to know who and what Jesus and Gautama and Lao-tse and Shankaracharya and Hui-neng and Sri Ramakrishna, etc., were before you knew too much or anything about Homer or Shakespeare or even Blake or Whitman, let alone George Washington and his cherry tree or the definition of a peninsula or how to parse a sentence.”
Given my own natural interest in the more mystical aspects of religion, I can appreciate Buddy and Seymour’s stance. But that phrase “we wanted you to know” is problematic, and it makes the eldest Glass sons no better than any other teachers who think they know what children should be learning. And Zooey claims, in a later conversation with his mother, that all he and Franny ultimately did learn was how to be “freaks.” He says, “I can’t even sit down to a [damn] meal, to this day, without first saying the Four Great Vows under my breath, and I’ll lay any odds on you that Franny can’t, either.” Then he has to tell his confounded mother, much to his chagrin, what the Four Great Vows are: “However innumerable begins are, I vow to save them; however inexhaustible the passions are, I vow to extinguish them; however immeasurable the Dharmas are, I vow to master them; however incomparable the Buddha-truth is, I vow to attain it.” He follows them up with a sardonic “Yay team. I know I can do it. Just put me in, coach.”
This conversation between Zooey and his mother, Bessie, takes place in the bathroom. Zooey is still in the tub for part of it because his mother insists on coming in, despite his seemingly heartless insistence for her to go away. (But by the end of the book we see that he does in fact have a heart.) He pulls the curtain to hide himself while they talk. Bessie is terribly worried about Franny, who has come home from college in a state of existential disarray and will not eat or get off the couch. Along with having read The Way of a Pilgrim, Franny has now also read its sequel, The Pilgrim Continues His Way. Zooey informs his mother that Franny got both books out of Seymour and Buddy’s old room, where they’ve been sitting on Seymour’s desk for as long as he can remember. He tells his mother what the books are about—the sequel being “mostly a dissertation in dialogue form on the why’s and wherefores of the Jesus Prayer. The pilgrim, a professor, a monk, and some sort of hermit all meet and hash over things.” Zooey explains that the whole point of repeating the prayer is to make it become an automatic thing that happens in the center of the heart, right along with the heartbeat, and then you apparently "enter into the so-called reality of things”—what Franny called “seeing God.”
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The bathroom scene between Zooey and Bessie not only sets the stage for the living room scene between Zooey and Franny, but also makes it very clear to readers what kind of person we’re dealing with in Zooey Glass. He’s as intelligent and acid-tongued as he is physically attractive—a know-it-all, essentially, but he really does seem to know everything about everything, including—and perhaps most of all—how to push people’s buttons. He can be downright cruel, but he’s so freakin’ funny about it that you can’t help but like him. He’s viscous towards his mother, repeatedly demanding that she leave him to have the rest of his bath in peace, and then, when she returns after he’s done bathing and is now dressing and grooming himself, he resumes making the same demand. He exudes annoyance and disrespect and pretty much makes fun of everything his mother says. Thing is, Bessie doesn’t seem to care. She acts like she doesn’t even hear him telling her to leave. So in the next scene, when Franny is begging Zooey to shut up because his words are so distressing to her, and he also seems deaf to her pleas, we see that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
And what is it about his words that are so distressing? Well, he blatantly criticizes not only his sister’s approach to religion, but also her approach to nervous breakdowns, calling both of them “tenth rate” and “sloppy.” He says that the way she’s going about doing the Jesus Prayer gives him the “willies.” When he questions her motives for doing it, Franny explodes. She is dismayed that he wouldn’t give her more credit and know that she herself questions her motives and worries that she’s “as egotistical and self-seeking as everybody else. If anything, I’m more so!” Even though what she’s going for isn’t money, prestige, or fame, but enlightenment and peace, she makes an interesting point that she is still being covetous in trying to attain a certain state of consciousness by repeating the prayer. And if you think about it, Jesus didn’t set out on his miracle-working, gospel-preaching path in order to attain satori or nirvana or the Christian equivalent, and neither was that the Buddha’s goal when he sat under the bodhi tree for 49 days. He sat because he felt like that was the only thing to do that made sense, given what he’d come to realize about suffering. So praying or meditating for anything, or with some particular goal in mind—whether it be a promotion at work or union with God—is inherently ego-based behavior, rooted in a fundamental dissatisfaction with the way things currently are, and the fear that if they don’t improve, we will be unbearably miserable.
Meanwhile, real religion could be happening right under our noses. Or in the case of Zooey Glass, a few stories below on a Manhattan sidewalk. Somewhere in the course of spiritually eviscerating his poor sobbing, starving sister, Zooey stands at the living room window and from that vantage witnesses a cute scene between a young girl and her dachshund. “Damn it, there are nice things in the world,” he says, “and I mean nice things. We’re all such morons to get so sidetracked. Always, always, always referring every thing that happens right back to our lousy little egos.” He goes on to say that “it would take Christ himself to decide what’s ego and what isn’t.” And he poses the question to Franny, “What about your beloved Epictetus? Or your beloved Emily Dickinson? You want your Emily, every time she has an urge to write a poem, to just sit down and say a prayer till her nasty, egotistical urge goes away?” Zooey concludes that Dickinson and anyone else you might consider a master of their given craft are using their “true egos,” while “half the nastiness in the world” can be attributed to people who aren’t doing that, to people who use their “false egos,” if you will. Which essentially means they’re forcing themselves to walk a path that isn’t really theirs. “Scratch an incompetent college professor,” Zooey says, “and half the time you find a displaced first-class automobile mechanic or a [damn] stonemason.”
In his talk of true and false egos, Zooey seems to be insinuating that Franny isn’t using her true ego in saying the Jesus Prayer, which is probably why it’s having such a negative affect on her—well, that, and, according to Zooey, she doesn’t understand Jesus. He says that her lack of understanding started back to childhood, when she was ten years old and decided she didn’t like Jesus because of how he went into a synagogue and threw tables and idols everywhere, which she said was “very rude, very Unnecessary,” and because of how he said that a human being was more valuable than a chicken. JC says this in Matthew 6:26, as part of the Sermon on the Mount: “Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither / do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly / Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?” Taken out of context, to me it sounds like Jesus is implying that we humans aren’t much better than air fowl, but evidently he’s saying the opposite, a sentiment that reflects the anthropocentrism—or people-centered bias—found in other parts of the New and Old Testaments. So I can understand why young Franny was turned off by that particular gospel verse, or, to use Zooey’s words, “that’s why little Franny quits the Bible cold and goes straight to Buddha, who doesn’t discriminate against all those nice fowls of the air.” He accuses her of being “constitutionally unable to love or understand any son of God who says that any human being is more valuable to God than any soft, helpless Easter chick.”
And now, in order to practice her Jesus Prayer, Franny has cast Christ as someone more palatable for her, as “St. Francis and Seymour and Heidi’s grandfather all wrapped up in one.” And that’s what’s giving Zooey the willies. He admonishes her to only say the prayer if she can actually say it to Jesus as he was, and not as she wishes he’d been. He does cut her a little slack, though, and acknowledges that most people—ninety-eight percent of the Christian world, to be exact—aren’t actually praying to Jesus when they pray to Jesus. They insist, in short, on making Jesus more lovable. Which is really funny when you think about it. Here’s a guy whose primary teaching was literally “Love one another,” and yet he’s deemed not lovable enough. Definitely not white enough, right? So we just depict him as a white guy. Problem solved! If only we’d taken the same tack as Salinger and forbade the visual depiction of any Bible characters, lest readers form preconceived notions of them.
Furthermore, why anyone would want to conceive of Jesus in any way other than exactly how he was is beyond Zooey’s comprehension. “He’s only the most intelligent man in the Bible, that’s all! Who besides Jesus really knew which end was up? Nobody. Not Moses. Don’t tell me Moses. He was a nice man, and he kept in beautiful touch with God, and all that—but that's exactly the point. He had to keep in touch. Jesus realized there is no separation from God.” And I’ll add: he definitely wasn’t saying the Jesus Prayer incessantly in order to “keep in touch.” “But most of all,” Zooey says, “above everything else, who in the Bible besides Jesus knew—knew—that we’re carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we’re all too stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look?” He ends his living room lecture to Franny—who is beyond upset, face-down catatonic after a fit of weeping and unanswered pleading—by reminding her that the one and only purpose of saying the Jesus Prayer is so that it might endow you with Christ Consciousness. It is not a tool for creating “some little cozy, holier-than-thou trysting place with some sticky, adorable divine personage who’ll take you in his arms and relieve you of all your duties.”
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Franny and Zooey ends with—you guessed it—another conversation. This one happens over a phone, and as readers we only have access to Franny’s end of the line, which is in her parents’ bedroom. After pretending to be their older brother Buddy for awhile, Zooey admits, when Franny catches on it’s him, that he is indeed Zooey, and he proceeds to talk more about the Jesus Prayer. He tells Franny to keep on doing it if she wants to, ’cause it’s “a [damn] nice prayer,” but if it’s religion she’s after, then she should just look around herself. He refers to the chicken soup their mother has been offering her as “consecrated”: “How in hell are you going to recognize a legitimate holy man when you see one if you don’t even know a cup of consecrated chicken soup when it’s right in front of your nose?”
If mansplaining had been a term in 1955, Zooey Glass would have been the king of it. God bless him. And to top it all off, he tells Franny what to do with her life. He tells her to be an actress again, that it’s the only “religious” thing she can do now. And indeed she’d better do it now, because “You’re lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddam phenomenal world.” (Zooey himself, by the way, is an actor, and in the letter he read at the beginning of the story, Buddy had admonished him to act, if that is what he preferred over getting his PhD—but to do so “with all your might.”) Recounting a memory he had of going on “It’s a Wise Child” for about the fifth time—that was a radio show that all seven of the Glass children repeatedly appeared on, consistently wowing the audience with their precociousness—Zooey shares a story about Seymour telling him to shine his shoes before going onstage. (If you’re just tuning in, Seymour was the oldest brother who died by suicide seven years prior.) Zooey thought it was ridiculous to shine his shoes for such a moronic audience, especially when they couldn’t even see his feet. But Seymour kept insisting (insistence, apparently, being a Glass family trait), and told Zooey to shine them for the “Fat Lady.” He never explained who the Fat Lady was, but Zooey could tell by his brother’s expression—what he describes to Franny as “a very Seymour look on his face”—that the Fat Lady was important, and so he shined his shoes every time he went on the air after that.
Turns out Seymour told Franny to do the same thing when she was a contestant on “It’s a Wise Child.” He told her to shine her shoes for the Fat Lady. And Franny’s vision of the Fat Lady turns out to be very similar to Zooey’s: a sweaty, fly-swatting woman who sits on her porch all day long with her radio blasting, and she probably has cancer. Then Zooey delivers the punchline of the whole book, what he calls “a terrible secret”: Everybody is Seymour’s Fat Lady, and Seymour’s Fat Lady is actually Christ Himself, and therefore everybody is Christ Himself. Even the phony poets and incompetent professors, and the idiotic audience members and soup-serving mothers and everyone else Franny judges.
The Jesus Prayer really changes, doesn’t it, when you think of Christ in that way? “Lord Fat Lady, have mercy on me.”
To shine your shoes for the Fat Lady, as Seymour Glass exhorted his youngest two siblings to do when they were kids and he was already an adult, means to give your all to whatever you’re doing, to whomever you’re encountering, because all of it is holy. In espousing this perspective Franny and Zooey reminds me of The Divine Milieu, by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, which I wrote about in my most recent blog post. Just as his brother Buddy once told him to “act with all your might,” Zooey now tells Franny to do the same, because he believes that in doing so, she will be the best, truest Franny she can be. And as Teilhard said, we can only “see God,” as Franny claims to so strongly desire—or be united with God—once we have learned how to be—that is, to be ourselves as completely as possible.
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I’m going to leave you with a passage from The Way of a Pilgrim—the book that triggered Franny’s existential crack-up and the subsequent tough-love talking-to she gets from her brother Zooey, wise beyond his twenty-five years. This is something the pilgrim says to one of the many seekers he meets on his quest to perfect his ceaseless repetition of the Jesus Prayer: “The fact is that we are removed from our own real self, and we have little desire to confront that self. Instead, we run from any encounter with our real self, choosing small trifles over the truth. Then we try to convince ourselves that we’d be more than glad to live the spiritual life and take up praying, but there’s never enough time for it, because all the cares and worries of our lives take up all our time. And yet, what is more important: the redemptive eternal life of the soul, or the short-lived life of the body, which we spend so much time attending to? It is this, which I spoke of, that leads people either to good judgment or to stupidity.”
What he says about our believing we don’t have time enough for prayer—which in my mind I translate to “meditation”—is worth contemplating. If you yourself have been wanting to start a meditation practice but just can’t find the time, I’m here to tell you: you will never “find” the time. You have to make the time. You have to stop believing the voice in your head that says that X,Y, and Z are more “important.” And it’s so true when you think about it, that so much of what we do, as the pilgrim says, is a way of “attending to” the body, which, no matter what we do, will ultimately fail us. So here’s to making the time for attending to the soul or spirit, not only through prayer or meditation, but through doing everything with “all our might,” to quote Buddy Glass, and by using our “true egos,” to quote Zooey, thereby divinising our every activity, as Teilhard de Chardin would say.
