J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [166]
Zooey no more understood why he shined his shoes than Franny understood the Jesus Prayer she recited. In essence they were performing the same prescribed ritual in the hope it would deliver comfort. The beauty of Seymour’s exhortation is that it does not overthrow the Jesus Prayer. It is the Jesus Prayer, the modern-day American version of the pilgrim’s ancient Russian plea to see God more clearly through grace.
Overcome by the joy of understanding, Franny reacts in the same way that Babe Gladwaller and Sergeant X reacted when they received their own revelations: she falls blissfully asleep.
Salinger bared his soul in “Zooey,” exposing the war that raged between his spirit and his ego. The pain of the Glass children, who feel cut off from those around them, was a pain that the author knew well. The struggle to accept others and to recognize the goodness in the world was shared not only by Franny and Zooey but also by the author who gave them life. In “Zooey,” Salinger also shared perhaps his greatest frustration. When despair and loneliness compelled him to seek God through his writings, he found that his work was itself the greatest potential barrier to that communion. Somehow, he would have to discover a way to continue honoring God through his work, while avoiding the material rewards of his labor.
*The name Margaret was probably Claire’s suggestion. It was a traditional name in the Douglas family, who proudly traced their lineage to Henry VIII through his daughter Margaret Tudor and, through her, to the Scottish House of Stuart.
†Margaret Ann’s birth certificate contains an error: the document mistakenly reverses Claire’s middle and first names, renaming her Alison Claire Salinger.
*Here the timing did not cooperate. Salinger’s daughter was due to be born on November 19, the same day as the scheduled publication of “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” by The New Yorker. However, she had her own plans and was overdue by three weeks.
*The spring gushed cool water, even during the summer, and Salinger used it as a kind of makeshift refrigerator, often storing bottles of Coca-Cola in the water, at arm’s reach from the path.
*Salinger was superstitious about his typewriter. He changed it as infrequently as possible and used the same machine to write “Hapworth 16, 1924” as he had The Catcher in the Rye. In fact, he may have changed his typewriter only three times throughout his career, due more to obligation than to choice. His wartime stories were written using an army-issue typewriter different from the one he had used at Park Avenue. This typewriter delighted the author. After returning home from the war, he appears to have purchased one like it, and it was that one he took with him to Cornish. Despite his love of the machine, Salinger never learned how to touch-type and wrote all of his stories using no more than two fingers at a time.
*Born in 1872, Judge Hand was age 84 in 1956.
*Salinger shared billing in Cosmopolitan’s Diamond Jubilee issue with several names greater than his: Winston Churchill, Pearl S. Buck, and Ernest Hemingway were also featured.
*The insincerity of Maxwell’s excuse for the rejection of “Zooey” was awkward for him and Salinger alike. The editor should have remembered that The New Yorker had accepted Salinger’s first contribution, “Slight Rebellion off Madison,” with an appeal for a sequel including Holden Caulfield.
*Swanson’s resemblance to Les Glass, who is described in “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” as “hustling talent for a motion picture studio” in Los Angeles, may—or may not—be coincidental.
*In 1943, a younger, less pliable Salinger had referred to The New Yorker’s demands for the “compression” of “Slight Rebellion off Madison” as its “smug wordage requirements.”
*When chronicling editor-author correspondence, it was common practice at