Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger Read Free Book Online Page B

Seymour and I ever had in Bessie's entire kibbutz. It's also essential to my inner harmony to see Seymour's listing in the goddam phone book every year. I like to browse through the G's confidently. Be a good boy and pass that message along for me. Not quite word for word, but nicely. Be kinder to Bessie, Zooey, when you can. I don't think I mean because she's our mother, but because she's weary. You will after you're thirty or so, when everybody slows down a little (even you, maybe), but try harder now. It isn't enough to treat her with the doting brutality of an apache dancer toward his partner--which she understands, incidentally, whether you think so or not. You forget that she thrives on sentimentality almost as much as Les does.
     
        My telephone problems aside, Bessie's current letter is really a Zooey letter. I'm to write and tell you that you have your Whole Life Before You and that it's Criminal if you don't go after your Ph.D. before you go in for the actor's life in a big way. She doesn't say what she'd like you to get the Ph.D. in, but I assume Math rather than Greek, you dirty little bookworm. At any rate, I gather that she wants you to have something to Fall Back On if for some reason the acting career doesn't work out. Which may be very sound, and probably is, but I don't feel like coming right out and saying so. It happens to be one of those days when I see everybody in the family, including myself, through the wrong end of a telescope. I actually had to struggle at the mailbox this morning to know who Bessie was when I saw her name on the return address of the envelope. For one good enough reason, Advanced Writing 24-A loaded me up with thirty-eight short stories to drag tearfully home for the weekend. Thirty-seven of them will be about a shy, reclusive Pennsylvania Dutch lesbian who Wants To Write, told first-person by a lecherous hired hand. In dialect.
     
        I take it for granted you know that for all the years I've been moving my literary whore's cubicle from college to college, I still don't have even a B.A. It seems a century ago, but I think there were two reasons, originally, why I didn't take a degree. (Just kindly sit still. This is the first time I've written to you in years.) One, I was a proper snob in college, as only an old Wise Child alumnus and future lifetime English-major can be, and I didn't want any degrees if all the ill-read literates and radio announcers and pedagogical dummies I knew had them by the peck. And, two, Seymour had his Ph.D. at an age when most young Americans are just getting out of high school, and since it was too late for me to catch up with him in style, I wasn't having any. Of course, too, I knew for certain when I was your age that I'd never be forced to teach, that if my Muses failed to provide for me, I'd go grind lenses somewhere, like Booker T. Washington. In any particular sense, though, I don't think I have any academic regrets. On especially black days I sometimes tell myself that if I'd loaded up with degrees when I was able, I might not now be teaching anything quite so collegiate and hopeless as Advanced Writing 24-A. But that's probably bunk. The cards are stacked (quite properly, I imagine) against all professional aesthetes, and no doubt we all deserve the dark, wordy, academic deaths we all sooner or later die.
     
        I do think your case is a lot different from mine. Anyway, I don't think I'm really on Bessie's side. If it's Security you want, or that Bessie wants for you, your M.A. will at least always qualify you to pass out logarithm tables at any dreary boys' prep school in the country, and most colleges. On the other hand, your beautiful Greek will do you almost no good at all on any good-size campus unless you have a Ph.D., living as we do in a brass-hat, brass-mortarboard world. (Of course, you can always move to Athens. Sunny old Athens.) But the more I think of it, the more I think to hell with more degrees for you. The