J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [144]
Collapsing under the encroaching weight of her physical deterioration, Franny is carried to the restaurant office, unconscious. When she begins to revive, readers are left with the story’s final scene, presented as a fading image and rendered without narrative comment:
Alone, Franny lay quite still, looking at the ceiling. Her lips began to move, forming soundless words, and they continued to move.5
As Franny gradually vanishes into the power of the Jesus Prayer, she inches toward a spiritual state. Yet she is not presented as completely heroic or selfless, or as having attained holiness. Her use of the Jesus Prayer is accompanied by a lack of conscious input that riddles it with flaws.* Her newfound perception is loveless. It produces its own snobbery. It is no less derisive of others than Lane’s ridiculing of those he considers intellectually inferior. Franny’s condemnation of Lane’s attitudes is truth, but her spirituality contains a contempt that threatens to overwhelm its benefits.
Attempting to pray without ceasing by synchronizing the Jesus Prayer with her heartbeat, Franny is overtaken by the mantra and dislodged from the conventional world, the only world she has ever known. Franny’s crisis, therefore, is that she cannot live in two worlds at the same time. It is a dilemma markedly similar to the struggle that confounded Salinger himself, torn between the social world around him and the spiritual hermitage of pure art.†
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When “Franny” appeared in The New Yorker on January 29, 1955, it caused a sensation, becoming an instant favorite of critics and a fashionable topic of conversation among readers. Not only did Salinger once again receive more mail than he had for any previous short story, but “Franny” garnered The New Yorker more mail than it had received for any other story in its history. It appeared that in the eyes of the public, J. D. Salinger could do no wrong. Unfortunately, although Salinger went out of his way to avoid the mistakes he had made in “Teddy” and constructed Franny’s character to be so compelling and natural that it lacks any hint of sermonizing, the story was even less well understood.
The 1950s produced a scholarly backlash against spirituality that caused readers and academics to embrace any interpretation other than the one Salinger had intended. Many readers construed the story as a condemnation of contemporary academia. Others viewed it as Franny’s transition into adulthood. Some even believed Lane Coutell to be the true protagonist. Nearly universal was the misconception that Franny was pregnant.
The New Yorker’s editors themselves believed Franny was pregnant. When Salinger found out, he made several changes in the hope of removing the assumption. But he was torn. Delivering a clear-cut message defied his philosophy of writing. He had too much respect for readers to remove their personal analysis. On December 20, 1954, he wrote to Gus Lobrano of his impasse, telling the editor that he himself did not believe that Franny was pregnant but it was not for him to know or decide. The reader alone was worthy of that conclusion. And though Salinger cringed at the thought that readers might view the story through the lens of Franny’s pregnancy, he refused to defile the confidence he held with them. After making several substantial changes to the text of “Franny,” he reconsidered and finally decided to insert but two lines and to take his chances. He added “Too goddam long between drinks. To put it crassly,” and hoped that readers would understand it as a reference to the time between sexual encounters rather than menstrual periods.6 It was a gamble that Salinger lost and that he regretted.*
Franny’s attraction to the mantra of the Jesus Prayer was a reflection of Salinger’s own interest in Eastern philosophies and of his complaint that American culture frustrates spirituality. Salinger