Franny and Zooey (6 page)

    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.

    Last month, Dean Sheeter (whose name usually transports Franny when I mention it) approached me with his gracious smile and bull whip, and I am now lecturing to the faculty, their wives, and a few oppressively deep-type undergraduates every Friday on Zen and Ma-hayana Buddhism. A feat, I haven't a doubt, that will eventually win me the Eastern Philosophy Chair in Hell. The point is, I'm now on the campus five days a week instead of four, and what with my own work at nights and on weekends, I have almost no time to do any elective thinking. Which is my plaintive way of saying that I do worry about you and Franny when I get a chance, but not nearly so often as I'd like to. What I'm really trying to tell you is. that Bessie's letter had very little to do with my sitting down in a sea of ashtrays to write to you today. She shoots me some priority information about you and Franny every week and I never do anything about it, so it isn't that. What brings this on is something that happened to me at the local supermarket today. (No new paragraph. I'll spare you that.) I was standing at the meat counter, waiting for some rib lamb chops to be cut. A young mother and her little girl were waiting around, too. The little girl was about four, and, to pass the time, she leaned her back against the glass showcase and stared up at my unshaven face. I told her she was about the prettiest little girl I'd seen all day. Which made sense to her; she nodded. I said I'd bet she had a lot of boy friends. I got the same nod again. I asked her how many boy friends she had. She held up two fingers. "Two!" I said. "That's a lot of boy friends. What are their names, sweetheart?" Said she, in a piercing voice, "Bobby and Dorothy." I grabbed my lamb chops and ran. But that's exactly what brought on this letter--much more than Bessie's insistence that I write to you about Ph.D.s and acting. That, and a haiku-style poem I found in the hotel room where Seymour shot himself. It was written in pencil on the desk blotter: "The little girl on the plane/ Who turned her doll's head around/ To look at me." With these two things on my mind, I thought as I was driving home from the supermarket that at long last I could write to you and tell you why S. and I took over your and Franny's education as early and as highhandedly as we did. We've never put it into words for you, and I think it's high time one of us did. But now I'm not so sure I can do it. The little girl at the meat counter is gone, and I can't quite see the polite face of the little doll on the plane. And the old horror of being a professional writer, and the usual stench of words that goes with it, is beginning to drive me out of my seat. It seems terribly important to try, though.

    The age differences in the family always seemed to add unnecessarily and perversely to our problems. Not really between S. and the twins and Boo Boo and me, but between the two twosomes of you and Franny and S. and me. Seymour and I were both adults--he was even long out of college--by the time you and Franny were both able to read. At that stage, we had no real urge even to push our favorite classics at the two of you--not, anyway, with the same gusto that we had at the twins or Boo Boo. We knew there's no keeping a born scholar ignorant, and at heart, I think, we didn't really want to, but we were nervous, even frightened, at the statistics on child pedants and academic weisenheimers who grow up into faculty-recreation-room savants. Much, much more important, though, Seymour had already begun to believe (and I agreed with him, as far as I was able to see the point) that education by any name would smell as sweet, and maybe much sweeter, if it didn't begin with a quest for knowledge at all but with a quest, as Zen would put it, for no-knowledge. Dr. Suzuki says somewhere that to be in a state of pure consciousness--satori--is to be with God before he said, Let there be light. Seymour and I thought it might be a good thing to hold back this light from you and Franny (at least as far as we were able), and all the many lower, more fashionable lighting effects--the arts, sciences, classics, languages--till you were both able at least to conceive of a state of being where the mind knows the source of all light. We thought it would be wonderfully constructive to at least (that is, if our own "limitations" got in the way) tell you as much as we knew about the men--the saints, the arhats, the bodhisattvas, the jivanmuktas--who knew something or everything about this state of being. That is, we wanted you both to know who and what Jesus and Gautama and Lao-tse and Shan-karacharya and Hui-neng and Sri Ramakrishna, etc., were before you knew too much or anything about Homer or Shakespeare or even Blake or Whitman, let alone George Washington and his cherry tree or the definition of a peninsula or how to parse a sentence. That, anyway, was the big idea. Along with all this, I suppose I'm trying to say that I know how bitterly you resent the years when S. and I were regularly conducting home seminars, and the metaphysical sittings in particular. I just hope that one day--preferably when we're both blind drunk--we can talk about it. (Meantime, I can only say that neither Seymour nor I ever had a notion, that far back, that you were going to grow up into an actor. We should have, no doubt, but we didn't. If we had, I feel certain S. would have tried to do something constructive about it. Surely somewhere there must be a special prep course for Nirvana and points East designed strictly for actors, and I think S. would have found it.) The paragraph should close, but I can't stop muttering. You'll wince at what comes next, but come it must. I think you know that I had the best intentions of checking in now and then after S.'s death to see how you and Franny were holding up. You were eighteen, and I didn't worry about you overly. Although I did hear from a gossipy little snip in one of my classes that you had a reputation in your college dorm for going off and sitting in meditation for ten hours at a time, and that made me think. But Franny was thirteen at the time. I simply couldn't move, though. I was afraid to come home. I wasn't afraid you'd both, in tears, take up a position across the room and fire the complete set of Max Mueller's Sacred Books of the East at me, one by one. (Which would have been masochistic ecstasy for me, probably.) But I was afraid of the questions (much more than the accusations) you might both put to me. As I remember very well, I let a whole year go by after the funeral before I came back to New York at all. After that, it was easy enough to come in for birthdays and holidays and be reasonably sure that questions would run to when my next book would be finished and had I done any skiing lately, etc. You've even both been up here on many a weekend in the last couple of years, and though we've talked and talked and talked, we've all agreed not to say a word. Today is the first time I've really wanted to speak up. The deeper I get into this goddam letter, the more I lose the courage of my convictions. But I swear to you that I had a perfectly communicable little vision of truth (lamb-chop division) this afternoon the very instant that child told me her boy friends' names were Bobby and Dorothy. Seymour once said to me--in a crosstown bus, of all places-- that all legitimate religious study must lead to unlearning the differences, the illusory differences, between boys and girls, animals and stones, day and night, heat and cold. That suddenly hit me at the meat counter, and it seemed a matter of life and death to drive home at seventy miles an hour to get a letter off to you. Oh, God, how I wish I'd grabbed a pencil right there in the supermarket and not trusted the roads home. Maybe it's just as well, though. There are times when I think you've forgiven S. more completely than any of us have. Waker once said something very interesting to me on that subject--in fact, I'm merely parroting what he said to me. He said you were the only one who was bitter about S.'s suicide and the only one who really forgave him for it. The rest of us, he said, were outwardly unbitter and inwardly unforgiving. That may be truer than true. How can I know? All I do know for certain is that I had something happy and exciting to tell you--and on just one side of the paper, doublespaced--and I knew when I got home that it was mostly gone, or all gone, and there was nothing left to do but go through the motions. Lecture you on Ph.D.s and the actor's life. How messy, how funny, and how Seymour himself would have smiled and smiled--and probably assured me, and all of us, not to worry about it.