Writing on the Wall by Mary McCarthy Read Free Book Online

way”—headmasters, philanthropists, roommates, teachers of history and English, football coaches, girls who like the Lunts. They cannot help the way they are, the way they talk: they are obeying a law of species—even the pimping elevator operator, the greedy prostitute, the bisexual teacher of English who makes an approach to Holden in the dark.
    It is not anybody’s fault if just about everybody is excluded from the club in the long run—everybody but Ring Lardner, Thomas Hardy, Gatsby, Isak Dinesen, and Holden’s little sister, Phoebe. In fact it is a pretty sad situation, and there is a real adolescent sadness and lonely desperation in The Catcher in the Rye; the passages where Holden, drunk and wild with grief, wanders like an errant pinball through New York at night are very good.
    But did Salinger sympathize with Holden or vice versa? Stephen Dedalus in a similar situation met Mr. Bloom, but the only “good” person Holden meets is his little sister—himself in miniature or in glory, riding a big brown horse on a carousel and reaching for the gold ring. There is something false and sentimental here. Holden is supposed to be an outsider in his school, in the middle-class world, but he is really an insider with the track all to himself.
    And now, ten years after The Catcher in the Rye we have Franny and Zooey. The book has been a best seller since before publication.
    Again the theme is the good people against the stupid phonies, and the good is still all in the family, like the shares in a family-owned “closed” corporation. The heroes are or were seven children (two are dead), the wonderful Glass kids of a radio quiz show called “It’s a Wise Child,” half-Jewish, half-Irish, whose parents were a team of vaudevillians. These prodigies, nationally known and the subjects of many psychological studies, are now grown up: one is a writer-in-residence in a girls’ junior college; one is a Jesuit priest; one is a housewife; one is a television actor (Zooey); and one is a student (Franny). They are all geniuses, but the greatest genius of them all was Seymour, who committed suicide on vacation in an early story of Salinger’s called “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Unlike the average genius, the Glass kids are good guys; they love each other and their parents and their cat and their goldfish, and they are expert phony-detectors. The dead sage Seymour has initiated them into Zen and other mystical cults.
    During the course of the story, Franny has a little nervous breakdown, brought on by reading a small green religious book titled The Way of a Pilgrim, relating the quest for prayer of a simple Russian peasant. She is cured by her brother Zooey in two short séances between his professional television appointments; he recognizes the book (it was in Seymour’s library, of course) and, on his own inspiration, without help from their older brother Buddy or from the Jesuit, teaches her that Jesus, whom she has been sweating to find via the Jesus Prayer, is not some fishy guru but just the Fat Lady in the audience, plain ordinary humanity with varicose veins, the you and me the performer has to reach if the show is going to click.
    This democratic commercial is “sincere” in the style of an advertising man’s necktie. The Jesus Zooey sells his sister is the old Bruce Barton Jesus—the word made flesh, Madison Avenue style. The Fat Lady is not quite everybody, despite Zooey’s fast sales patter. She is the kind of everybody the wonderful Glass kids tolerantly accept. Jesus may be a television sponsor or a housewife or a television playwright or your Mother and Dad, but He (he?) cannot be an intellectual like Franny’s horrible boy friend, Lane, who has written a paper on Flaubert and talks about Flaubert’s “testicularity,” or like his friend Wally, who, as Franny says plaintively, “looks like somebody who spent the summer in Italy or someplace.”
    These fakes and phonies are the outsiders who