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

which misled many New Yorker readers into thinking that Franny was pregnant—why else, having left her boy friend at the table, was she shutting herself up in a toilet in the ladies’ room, hanging her head and feeling sick?
    Those readers were not “in” on the fact that Franny was having a mystical experience. Sex, which commonly takes two, not related by blood, is an experience that does not seem to possess erotic interest (phonies do it) for Salinger, and Zooey behind the shower curtain is taboo even to the mother who bore him. He is separated from her, as in a temple, by a veil. The reader, however, is allowed an extended look.
    A great deal of attention is paid too to the rituals of cigarette lighting and of drinking from a glass, as though these oral acts were sacred—epiphanies. In the same way, the family writings are treated by Salinger as sacred scriptures or the droppings of holy birds, to be studied with care by the augurs: letters from Seymour, citations from his diary, a letter from Buddy, a letter from Franny, a letter from Boo Boo, a note written by Boo Boo in soap on a bathroom mirror (the last two are from another story, “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters”).
    These imprints of the Glass collective personality are preserved as though they were Veronica’s veil in a relic case of well-wrought prose. And the eerie thing is, speaking of Veronica’s veil—a popular subject for those paintings in which Christ’s eyes are supposed to follow the spectator with a doubtless reproachful gaze—the reader has the sensation in this latest work of Salinger that the author is sadly watching him or listening to him read. That is, the ordinary relation is reversed, and instead of the reader reading Salinger, Salinger, that Man of Sorrows, is reading the reader.
    At the same time, this quasi-religious volume is full of Broadway humor. The Glass family is like a Jewish family in a radio serial. Everyone is a “character.” Mr. Glass with his tangerine is a character; Mrs. Glass in her hairnet and commodious wrapper with her cups of chicken broth is a character. The shower curtain, scarlet nylon with a design of canary-yellow sharps, clefs, and flats, is a character; the teeming medicine cabinet is a character. Every phonograph, every chair is a character. The family relationship, rough, genial, insulting, is a character.
    In short, every single object possessed by the Glass communal ego is bent on lovably expressing the Glass personality—eccentric, homey, goodhearted. Not unlike Abie’s Irish Rose. And the family is its own best audience. Like Hemingway stooges, they have the disturbing faculty of laughing delightedly or smiling discreetly at each other’s jokes. Again a closed circuit: the Glass family is the Fat Lady, who is Jesus. The mirrored Glass medicine cabinet is Jesus, and Seymour is his prophet.
    Yet below this self-loving barbershop harmony a chord of terror is struck from time to time, like a judgment. Seymour’s suicide suggests that Salinger guesses intermittently or fears intermittently that there may be something wrong somewhere. Why did he kill himself? Because he had married a phony, whom he worshiped for her “simplicity, her terrible honesty”? Or because he was so happy and the Fat Lady’s world was so wonderful?
    Or because he had been lying, his author had been lying, and it was all terrible, and he was a fake?
    October, 1962

Burroughs’ Naked Lunch
    L AST SUMMER AT THE International Writers’ Conference in Edinburgh, I said I thought the national novel, like the nation-state, was dying and that a new kind of novel, based on statelessness, was beginning to be written. This novel had a high, aerial point of view and a plot of perpetual motion. Two experiences, that of exile and that of jet-propelled mass tourism, provided the subject matter for a new kind of story. There is no novel, yet, that I know of, about mass tourism, but somebody will certainly write it. Of the novel