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ZOOEY
THE facts at hand presumably speak for themselves, but a trifle more vulgarly, I suspect, than facts even usually do. As a counterbalance, then, we begin with that everfresh and exciting odium: the author's formal introduction. The one I have in mind not only is wordy and earnest beyond my wildest dreams but is, to boot, rather excruciatingly personal. If, with the right kind of luck, it comes off, it should be comparable in effect to a compulsory guided tour through the engine room, with myself, as guide, leading the way in an old one-piece Jantzen bathing suit.
To get straight to the worst, what I'm about to offer isn't really a short story at all but a sort of prose home movie, and those who have seen the footage have strongly advised me against nurturing any elaborate distribution plans for it. The dissenting group, it's my privilege and headache to divulge, consists of the three featured players themselves, two female, one male. We'll take the leading lady first, who, I believe, would prefer to be briefly described as a languid, sophisticated type. She feels that things might have gone along well enough if I'd just done
boy will be seen reading an exceedingly lengthy letter (which will be reprinted here in full, I can safely promise) sent to him by his eldest living brother, Buddy Glass. The style of the letter, I'm told, bears a considerably more than passing resemblance to the style, or written mannerisms, of this narrator, and the general reader will no doubt jump to the heady conclusion that the writer of the letter and I are one and the same person. Jump he will, and, I'm afraid, jump he should. We will, however, leave this Buddy Glass in the third person from here on in. At least, I see no good reason to take him out of it.
TEN-THIRTY on a Monday morning in November of 1955, Zooey Glass, a young man of twenty-five, was seated in a very full bath, reading a four-year-old letter. It was an almost endless-looking letter, typewritten on several pages of second-sheet yellow paper, and he was having some little trouble keeping it propped up against the two dry islands of his knees. At his right, a dampish-looking cigarette was balanced on the edge of the built-in enamel soapcatch, and evidently it was burning well enough, for every now and then he picked it off and took a drag or two, without quite having to look up from his letter. His ashes invariably fell into the tub water, either straightway or down one of the letter pages. He seemed unaware of the messiness of the arrangement. He did seem aware, though, if only just, that the heat of the water was beginning to have a dehydrating effect on him. The longer he sat reading--or re-reading--the more often and the less absently he used the back of his wrist to blot his forehead and upper lip.
In Zooey, be assured early, we are dealing with the complex, the overlapping, the cloven, and at least two dossier-like paragraphs ought to be got in right here. To start with, he was a small young man, and extremely slight of body. From the rear--particularly where his vertebrae were visible--he might almost have passed for one of those needy metropolitan children who are sent out every summer to endowed camps to be fattened and sunned. Close up, either full-face or in profile, he was surpassingly handsome, even spectacularly so. His eldest sister (who modestly prefers to be identified here as a Tuckahoe homemaker) has asked me to describe him as looking like "the blue-eyed Jewish-Irish Mohican scout who died in your arms at the roulette table at Monte Carlo." A more general and surely less parochial view was that 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. I myself hold a very different opinion from either of these. I submit that Zooey's face was close to being a wholly beautiful face. As such, it was of course vulnerable to the same variety of glibly undaunted and usually specious evaluations that any legitimate art object is. I think it just remains to be said that any one of a hundred everyday menaces--a car accident, a head cold, a lie before breakfast--could have disfigured or coarsened his bounteous good looks in a day or a second. But what was undiminishable, and, as already so flatly suggested, a joy of a kind forever, was an authentic esprit 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.
By profession, Zooey was an actor, a leading man, in television, and had been for a little more than three years. He was, in fact, as "sought after" (and, according to vague second-hand reports that reached his family, as highly paid) as a young leading man in television perhaps can be who isn't at the same time a Hollywood or Broadway star with a ready-made national reputation. But possibly either of these statements, without elaboration, can lead to an overly clear-cut line of conjecture. As it happened, Zooey had made a formal and serious debut as a public performer at the age of seven. He was the second youngest of what had originally been seven brothers and sisters*--five boys and two girls--all of whom, at rather conveniently spaced intervals during childhood, had been heard regularly on a network radio program, a children's quiz show called "It's a Wise Child." An age difference of almost eighteen years between the eldest of the Glass children, Seymour, and the youngest, Franny, had helped very considerably to allow the family to reserve a kind of dynastic seating arrangement at the "Wise Child" microphones, which lasted just over sixteen years--from 1927 well into 1943, a span of years connecting the Charleston and B-17 Eras. (All this data, I think, is to some degree relevant.) For all the gaps and years between their individual heydays on the program, it may be said (with few, and no really important, reservations) that all seven of the children had managed to answer over the air a prodigious number of alternately deadly-bookish and deadly-cute questions--sent in by listeners--with a freshness, an aplomb, that was considered unique in commercial radio.
* The aesthetic evil of a footnote seems in order just here, I'm afraid. In all that follows, only the two youngest of the seven children will be directly seen or heard. The remaining five, however, the senior five, will be stalking in and out of the plot with considerable frequency, like so many Banquo's ghosts. The reader, then, may care to know at the outset that in 1955 the eldest of the Glass children, Seymour, had been dead almost seven years. He committed suicide while vacationing in Florida with his wife. If alive, he would have been thirty-eight in 1955. The second-eldest child, Buddy, was what is 'known in campus-catalogue parlance as "writer-in-residence" at a girls' junior college in upper New York State. He lived alone, in a small, unwinterized, unelectrified house about a quarter of a mile away from a rather popular ski-run. The next-eldest of the children, Boo Boo, was married and the mother of three children. In November, 1955, she was travelling in Europe with her husband and all three of their children. In order of age, the twins, Walt and Waker, come after Boo Boo. Walt had been dead just over ten years. He was killed in a freakish explosion while he was with the Army of Occupation in Japan. Waker, his junior by some twelve minutes, was a Roman Catholic priest, and in November, 1955, he was in Ecuador, attending a Jesuit conference of some kind.
Public response to the children was often hot and never tepid. In general, listeners were divided into two, curiously restive camps: those who held that the Glasses were a bunch of insufferably "superior" little bastards that should have been drowned or gassed at birth, and those who held that they were bona-fide underage wits and savants, of an uncommon, if unenviable, order. At this writing (1957), there are former listeners to "It's a Wise Child" who remember, with basically astonishing accuracy, many of the individual performances of each of the seven children. In this same thinning but still oddly coterielike group, the consensus is that, of all the Glass children, the eldest boy, Seymour, back in the late twenties and early thirties, had been the "best" to hear, the most consistently "rewarding." After Seymour, Zooey, the youngest boy in the family, is generally placed second in order of preference, or appeal. And since we have a singularly workaday interest in Zooey here, it may be appended that, as an ex-panelist on "It's a Wise Child," he had one almanaclike distinction among (or over) his brothers and sisters. Off and on,
during their broadcasting years, all seven of the children had been fair game for the kind of child psychologist or professional educator who takes a special interest in extra-precocious children. In this cause, or service, Zooey had been, of all the Glasses, hands down, the most voraciously examined, interviewed, and poked at. Very notably, with no exceptions that I know of, his experiences in the apparently divergent fields of clinical, social, and newsstand psychology had been costly for him, as though the places where he was examined had been uniformly alive with either highly contagious traumas or just plain old-fashioned germs. For example, in 1942 (with the everlasting disapproval of his two eldest brothers, both of whom were in the Army at the time) he had been tested by one research group alone, in Boston, on five separate occasions. (He was twelve during most of the sessions, and it's possible that the train rides--ten of them--held some attraction for him, at least in the beginning.) The main purpose of the five tests, one gathered, was to isolate and study, if possible, the source of Zooey's precocious wit and fancy. At the end of the fifth test, the subject was sent home to New York with three or four aspirins in an engraved envelope for his sniffles, which turned out to be bronchial pneumonia. Some six weeks later, a long-distance call came through from Boston at eleven-thirty at night, with much dropping of small coins in an ordinary pay phone, and an unidentified voice--with no intention, presumably, of sounding pedantically waggish--informed Mr. and Mrs. Glass that their son Zooey, at twelve, had an English vocabulary on an exact par with Mary Baker Eddy's, if he could be urged to use it.
To resume: The long, typewritten, four-year-old letter that Zooey had checked into the bathtub with, on this Monday morning in November, 1955, had obviously been taken out of its envelope and unfolded and refolded on too many private occasions during the four years, so that now it not only had an over-all unappetit-lich appearance but was actually torn in several places, mostly along the creases. The author of the letter, as stated earlier, was Zooey's eldest living brother, Buddy. The letter itself was virtually endless in length, overwritten, teaching, repetitious, opinionated, remonstrative, condescending, embarrassing--and filled, to a surfeit, with affection. In short, it was exactly the kind of letter that a recipient, whether he wants to or not, carries around for some time in his hip pocket. And that professional writers of a type love to reproduce verbatim:
1851
dear zooey,
I've just finished decoding a long letter that came from Mother this morning, all about you and General Eisenhower's smile and small boys in the Daily News who fall down elevator shafts and when am I going to have my phone in New York taken out and get one installed up here in the country, where I really need it. Surely the only woman in the world who can write a letter in invisible italics. Dear Bessie. I get five hundred words of copy from her like clockwork every three months on the subject of my poor old private phone and how stupid it is to pay Good Money every month for something nobody's ever even around to use any more. Which is really a big fat lie. When I'm in town, I invariably sit talking by the hour with my old friend Yama, the God of Death, and a private phone's a must for our little chats. Anyway, please tell her I haven't changed my mind. I love that old phone with a passion. It was the only really private property 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 fact is, if you want to know, I can't help thinking you'd make a damn site better-adjusted actor if Seymour and I hadn't thrown in the Upanishads and the Diamond Sutra and Eckhart and all our other old loves with the rest of your recommended home reading when you were small. By rights, an actor should travel fairly light. When we were kids, S. and I once had a beautiful lunch with John Barrymore. He was bright as hell, and full of lore, but he wasn't burdened down with any of the cumbersome luggage of a too formal education. I mention this because I was talking to a rather pompous Orientalist over the weekend, and at one point, during a very deep, metaphysical lull in the conversation, I told him I had a little brother who once got over an unhappy love affair by trying to translate the Mundaka Upanishad into classical Greek. (He laughed uproariously--you know the way Orientalists laugh.)
I wish to God I had some idea what will happen to you as an actor. You're a born one, certainly. Even our Bessie knows that. And surely you and Franny are the only beauties in the family. But where will you act? Have you thought about it? The movies? If so, I'm scared stiff that if ever you gain any weight you'll be as victimized as the next young actor into contributing to the reliable Hollywood amalgam of
prizefighter and mystic, gunman and underprivileged child, cowhand and Man's Conscience, and the rest. Will you be content with that standard box-office schmalz? Or will you dream of something a little more cosmic--zum Beispiel, playing Pierre or Andrey in a Technicolor production of War and Peace, with stunning battlefield scenes, and all the nuances of characterization left out (on the ground that they're novel-istic and unphotogenic), and Anna Magnani daringly cast as Natasha (just to keep the production classy and Honest), and gorgeous incidental music by Dmitri Popkin, and all the male leads intermittently rippling their jaw muscles to show they're under great emotional stress, and a World Premiere at the Winter Garden, under floodlights, with Molotov and Milton Berle and Governor Dewey introducing the celebrities as they come into the theatre. (By celebrities I mean, of course, old Tolstoy-lovers--Senator Dirksen, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Gayelord Hauser, Georgie Jessel, Charles of the Ritz.) How does that sound? And if you go into the theatre, will you have any illusions about that? Have you ever seen a really beautiful production of, say, The Cherry Orchard? Don't say you have. Nobody has. You may have seen "inspired" productions, "competent" productions, but never anything beautiful. Never one where Chekhov's talent is matched, nuance for nuance, idiosyncrasy for idiosyncrasy, by every soul onstage. You worry hell out of me, Zooey. Forgive the pessimism, if not the sonority. But I know how much you demand from a thing, you little bastard. And I've had the hellish experience of sitting next to you at the theatre. I can so clearly see you demanding something from the performing arts that just isn't residual there. For heaven's sake, be careful.
Granted I'm off today. I keep a good neurotic's calendar, and it's three years, to the day, since Seymour killed himself. Did I ever tell you what happened when I went down to Florida to bring back the body? I wept like a slob on the plane for five solid hours. Carefully adjusting my veil from time to time so that no one across the aisle could see me--I had a seat to myself, thank God. About five minutes before the plane landed, I became aware of people talking in the seat behind me. A woman was saying, with all of Back Bay Boston and most of Harvard Square in her voice, "... and the next morning, mind you, they took a pint of pus out of that lovely young body of hers." That's all I remember hearing, but when I got off the plane a few minutes later and the Bereaved Widow came toward me all in Bergdorf Goodman black, I had the Wrong Expression on my face. I was grinning. Which is exactly the way I feel today, for no really good reason. Against my better judgment, I feel certain that somewhere very near here--the first house down the road, maybe--there's a good poet dying, but also somewhere very near here somebody's having a hilarious pint of pus taken from her lovely young body, and I can't be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.
Franny and Zooey Page 4