Writing on the Wall

Writing on the Wall by Mary McCarthy Read Free Book Online Page A

Book: Writing on the Wall by Mary McCarthy Read Free Book Online
Authors: Mary McCarthy
Tags: General, Literary Criticism, Essay/s, Literary Collections
ruin everything. Zooey feels the same way. “I hate any kind of so-called creative type who gets on any kind of ship. I don’t give a goddam what his reasons are.” Zooey likes it here. He likes people, as he says, who wear horrible neckties and funny, padded suits, but he does not mind a man who dresses well and owns a two-cabin cruiser so long as he belongs to the real, native, video-viewing America. The wonderful Glass family has three radios, four portable phonographs, and a TV in their wonderful living room, and their wonderful, awesome medicine cabinet in the bathroom is full of sponsored products all of which have been loved by someone in the family.
    The world of insiders, it would appear, has grown infinitely larger and more accommodating as Salinger has “matured.” Where Holden Caulfield’s club excluded just about everybody but his kid sister, Zooey’s and Franny’s secret society includes just about everybody but creative types and students and professors. Here exception is made, obviously, for the Glass family: Seymour, the poet and thinker, Buddy, the writer, and so on. They all have college degrees; the family bookshelves indicate a wide, democratic culture:
Dracula now stood next to Elementary Pali , The Boy Allies at the Somme stood next to Bolts of Melody , The Scarab Murder Case and The Idiot were together, Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase lay on top of Fear and Trembling .
    The Glass family librarian does not discriminate, in keeping with the times, and books are encouraged to “mix.” In Seymour’s old bedroom, however, which is kept as a sort of temple to his memory, quotations, hand-lettered, from a select group of authors are displayed on the door: Marcus Aurelius, Issa, Tolstoy, Ring Lardner, Kafka, St. Francis de Sales, Mu Mon Kwan, etc. This honor roll is extremely institutional.
    The broadening of the admissions policy—which is the text of Zooey’s sermon—is more a propaganda aim, though, than an accomplishment. No doubt the author and his mouthpiece (who is smoking a panatela) would like to spread a message of charity. “Indiscrimination,” as Seymour says in another Salinger story, “...leads to health and a kind of very real, enviable happiness.” But this remark itself exhales an ineffable breath of gentle superiority. The club, for all its pep talks, remains a closed corporation, since the function of the Fat Lady, when you come down to it, is to be what?—an audience for the Glass kids, while the function of the Great Teachers is to act as their coaches and prompters. And who are these wonder kids but Salinger himself, splitting and multiplying like the original amoeba?
    In Hemingway’s work there was hardly anybody but Hemingway in a series of disguises, but at least there was only one Papa per book. To be confronted with the seven faces of Salinger, all wise and lovable and simple, is to gaze into a terrifying narcissus pool. Salinger’s world contains nothing but Salinger, his teachers, and his tolerantly cherished audience—humanity. Outside are the phonies vainly signaling to be let in. They do not have the key, unlike the kids’ Irish mother, Bessie, a home version of the Fat Lady, who keeps invading the bathroom while her handsome son Zooey is in the tub or shaving.
    Sixty-eight pages of “Zooey” are laid in the family bathroom, the “throne” room, the holy-of-holies, the temple of the cult of self-worship. What methodical attention Salinger pays to Zooey’s routines of shaving and bathing and nail-cleaning, as though these were priestly rituals performed by a god on himself. A numinous vapor, an aura, surrounds the mother, seated on the toilet, smoking and soliloquizing, while her son behind the figured shower curtain reads, smokes, bathes, answers. We have the sense of being present at a mystery: ablution, purification, catharsis. It is worth noting that this closet drama has a pendant in a shorter scene in a public toilet in the story “Franny”

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