J.D. Salinger's "Franny"

Where I first read Salinger, and his monumental addition to young, existential dissatisfaction.

Hey.

I’ve managed, in the small spaces of free time, to do some recreational reading. It’s been entirely J.D. Salinger. This probably won’t be the only post discussing a story of his.

Thank you to everyone who is still on my mailing list, even if you haven’t read Salinger, or if literature isn’t your “thing” (if we suppose, for a second, that “things” are real.) Seeing each of you on the list motivates me to continue writing these, and they are very fulfilling.

There’s so much to say about each of Salinger’s stories, a lot of which I haven’t gotten to here. Hopefully, this post makes a new Salinger fan out of you. For short-story enthusiasts, I recommend Nine Stories — if you read it, let me know!

(Here’s a random song recommendation from an album I’ve decided was my favorite of all time last year. I found it on CD for 5 dollars today.)

Again, thanks!
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In high school, I read Catcher in the Rye outside of class, and each day, Holden Caulfield’s diction became my own internal speaking voice. The first I encountered it, there was a mound of copies organized on top of a mobile projector stand — all stamped with the high-school return address — in my English class. I flipped to the first page, and it’s opening paragraph (which might remain the most endlessly quotable introduction of all time, adjacent to “It was the best of times …”) was almost immediately chiseled into my memory. It was the first I’d ever had a physical reaction to a passage of literature — and the first I’d ever been let down at the mention that those books weren’t in my class curriculum. A few days later, either from the school’s library or from that classroom directly, I stole a copy, and it’s still in my room, disheveled from a thousand teenage hands before mine.

There was a manner immediately recognizable in Holden, as several literary scholars and angsty, disillusioned, middle-class kids would similarly identify. It was definitely a breath of fresh, relatable air, before spending the rest of the class half-paying attention to Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies.

It was also the first time, if I’m remembering correctly, I ventured to read a real piece of literature on my own. My immediate draw wasn’t to a peripheral knowledge of the plot or story — I had no idea what it was about, and had I, I might not have picked it up. I remember being drawn (naively) into its accrual of mystery and enigma after learning it was the book that “killed John Lennon,” only years prior being an unstoppable Beatles fan and, in that respect, a warden of music history. It was the irrational basis for the demise of one of the greatest figures in popular history — or, so I believed — and neglecting to open it, even if to look for traces of reason in Chapman’s alibi (which there was none), would shine a skeptical light on the repertoire of my Lennon-knowledge. I’m exaggerating a bit.

I had no idea what to think about it — being completely unfamiliar with how to read literature, and with what mind to approach it. As a 14-year-old, I imagine most of it went over my head, but maybe like a child captivated by an intensely colorful thriller, it was Salinger’s use of realist, first-person, slang-laden dialogue that dragged my consciousness over the beginner’s threshold of reading.

Almost ten years later (and now as an English major), I’ve found myself in possession of almost every one of Salinger’s published works (the only exception being Three Early Stories, which should be arriving this Monday.) Just as music arrives at incidentally precise moments to express exactly the complexion of life, Salinger’s writing has become a monumentally important touchstone to my development as a reader and a writer. 

I’d picked up a second-hand copy of Franny and Zooey from my library in August, and it lasted up until the very first week of school. With zero knowledge of the story (and a lingering memory of Catcher), it’s become one of my favorite short stories of all time. It is one of the only stories I’ve since gone back and read a second time (normally I feel an anxiety to catch up on classic, “required” readings.) Sticking with the themes in Catcher of adolescent disillusionment, Salinger — in forty-three and a quarter pages — creates one of the most compelling scenes about the exhaustion of adolescent loneliness, purposelessness, authenticity, and the dread of identity.

I use “adolescent” here with diminishing meaning — Franny Glass, at the time of “Franny” is a college-aged person whose story begins from her boyfriend’s perspective: Lane, reading her hopelessly devoted letter to him from the train platform of his college town. The letter is full of insecurity, characteristic of a female protagonist enamored with her deeply detached and nonchalant boyfriend. She loathes her relaxed, un-academic writing voice and instead, defers to his scrutiny:

“Incidentally I’ve taken your advice and resorted to the dictionary a lot lately, so if it cramps my style your [an intentional misspelling] to blame. Anyway I just got your beautiful letter and I love you to pieces, distraction, etc., and can hardly wait for the weekend [...] Do you love me? You didn’t say once in your horrible letter. I hate you when your being hopelessly super-male and retiscent (sp.?). Not really hate you but am constitutionally against strong, silent men. Not that you aren’t strong but you know what I mean [...]

P.P.S. I sound so unintelligent and dimwitted when I write to you. Why? I give you permission to analyze it. Let’s just try to have a marvelous time this weekend. I mean not try to analyze everything to death for once, if possible, especially me. I love you.”

Before we meet Franny, we are struck with her double-consciousness about her relationship. She — even in a letter — dutifully accepts being the intellectually inferior of the two, but still incorporates some obvious hints at dissatisfaction with Lane’s pompousness. Here, both central conflicts materialize within the letter: that of Franny with herself, and Franny with society — both of which are impediments in her life, similarly to Holden.

Her reason for visiting is to accompany him to the school’s football game (an event also mentioned in Catcher as the mecca of youthful congregations.) Almost immediately after he retrieves her from the station, Lane exhibits a highbrow disinterestedness. After Franny coyly dismisses a book she’s keeping under her arm from questioning, their greeting ends with:

“Oh, it’s lovely to see you!” Franny said as the cab moved off. “I’ve missed you.” The words were no sooner out than she realized that she didn’t mean them at all. Again with guilt, she took Lane’s hand and tightly, warmly laced fingers with him.

The majority of the story takes place at Sickler’s, a local restaurant where Lane’s genre mix: the aristocracy of undergrad English (Lane proves himself a part of this crowd by flaunting an essay on Flaubert.) Slowly through their dialogue, Franny unravels her agitation with society through personal, uncertain meditations on conformity and identity:

“It’s everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so — I don’t know — not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and — sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you’re conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different way.” She stopped. She shook her head briefly, her face quite white, and for just a fractional moment she felt her forehead with her hand — less, it seemed, to find out whether she was perspiring than to check to see, as if she were her own parent, whether she had a fever. “I feel so funny,” she said. “I think I’m going crazy. Maybe I’m already crazy.” 

Here begins Franny’s nervous breakdown that continues into Zooey. She — like Holden — is experiencing an abrasion with the faulty occupation of life, in particular, the shallow undercurrents to the mechanics of personality. There exists a gap between Franny — who can, with porcelain vision, see through it — and everyone else, whose motivations are determined by ego. That space between Franny and society, throughout the text, becomes too difficult to reconcile. At the pit’s bottom is Franny’s sharpening self-awareness and authenticity, and across from it, a world’s population who reject the decency and sensibility to understand themselves.

Lane, all the while, hardly makes any indication of his being attentive to her rant. At its conclusion, he says:

“No, I mean you’ve been talking for a half hour as though you’re the only person in the world that’s got any goddamn sense, any critical ability […] That ever occur to you? You know, you haven’t exactly reached the ripe, old — [...] You think you’re a genius?”

Franny took her hand down from her head. “Aw, Lane. Please. Don’t do that to me.”

“I’m not doing any—”

“All I know is I’m losing my mind,” Franny said. “I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting—it is, it is. I don’t care what anybody says.”

We learn in several ways that Lane is the last remaining strand that bridges Franny and the world she’s disillusioned by. He is the final, inadequate, self-important thread that momentarily secures her to a pathetic reality. However, her instinct to sever that attachment continues to intensify throughout their conversation. While it might be thematically satisfying for Franny to cut the rope, it presents her an even more debilitating dilemma of loneliness and existential terror: breaking that connection would solidify her suspicions of identity and leave her hopelessly detached from the world.

It would, though, afford her a unique mark of power. While she is at the bidding of Lane’s perceived intellect for the beginning of the story, her reclamation arc begins when she finally introduces the book she’s brought with her (which, again, Lane feigns interest in.) It’s a “small, pea-green clothbound book” called Way of the Pilgrim, as Franny, at first, cautiously describes:

“I don’t know. It’s peculiar. I mean it’s primarily a religious book. In a way, I suppose you could say it’s terribly fanatical, but in a way it isn’t. I mean it starts out with this peasant — the pilgrim — wanting to find out what it means in the Bible when it says you should pray incessantly. You know. Without stopping. In Thessalonians or someplace. So he starts out walking all over Russia, looking for somebody who can tell him how to pray incessantly. And what you should say if you do.”

In the few pages she takes to explain the premise of the book to an uninterested Lane is the conversational blossoming of her agency. In steering the conversation towards her actual interests — and not being merely the captivated damsel to which Lane courts with his unimpressive academic sophistry — she begins the severing process. She goes on to explain the power of the Jesus Prayer — a meditative practice meant to reinforce one’s silent relationship with God — and reveals an in-depth knowledge of Eastern religious philosophy (as we learn in the other Glass stories, a popular topic in the family.)

Like Franny, J.D. Salinger would similarly find strength in religious philosophy, particularly in Buddhism, which his son Matthew Salinger notes in a Penguin Books interview:

“I said writing was the core of his life, but spirituality was every bit as much, and he studied it, immersed himself in it, for decades and decades [...] He studied Jewish mysticism, he studied Islamic mysticism, he studied Catholic mysticism, it was always the mystical wing of religions that he was drawn to — that one-on-one relationship. It's in everything he wrote, and it's in everything that is unpublished also. It's who he was, just as much as being a writer.”

Also like Franny, Salinger would wrestle with ego. Weary from being a famous writer, he removed himself entirely from the public eye, rarely appearing to the press, and moving to Cornish, New Hampshire in 1953, remaining there until his death in 2013.

After Franny’s exposition about God (and after Lane’s ignoring her), she collapses, and wakes up on the couch in the manager’s office. They cancel their plans to go to the game and, after assuring himself Franny is ok, Lane propositions her for sex, and leaves her to find some water. She, silently to herself, recites the Jesus prayer.

Despite Franny struggling with the inequities and inadequacies of existence — and maybe not coming to an official resolution — she is one of the strongest characters I’ve ever read: both in depth of character, and the resilience she demonstrates in the face of untangling the remoteness of life. Despite believing herself as the intellectual inferior, Salinger makes her the superior in the end by disbelieving the phoniness of high-brow academics, including her boyfriend, and travelling the extra thousands of miles to resolve and release her own ego.

There is, however, a nuance to Franny’s trajectory towards “enlightenment.” It also acts as a tool of separation from those whose egos are tightly coiled around their sense of self — which, safely, is most people. In Zooey, she returns home to New York, suffering from a neurosis induced by the feeling of artificiality.

So far, I’ve read Catcher, Franny and Zooey and Nine Stories (a compilation of short-stories which are just as depthful.) There are plenty of things still to be said about “Franny” on it’s own, and twice as much when it expands into Zooey, and maybe thrice as much when taking the other stories about the Glass family into account. 

In the same interview, Matthew Salinger confirms a trove of unpublished stories by his father, with the aim of releasing them within the next couple years, with possible expansions to the Glass family story. Before then, there is plenty to read, and re-read.