Salinger s Fat Lady

About a year ago or so, I read like everyone did that writer J. D. Salinger died at the age of 91. After 1965, he retired to a village in New Hampshire and refused any contacts with literary or editorial world. For nearly 50 years he didn't give any interviews, published any book or let any intruder trouble his peace in any way. He defended his privacy in court when he needed to.

All sort of scenarios were built about this writer, as nothing can be more defiant than choosing to isolate yourself and no longer provide any front pages on yourself. Did he still write but chose not to publish? And if he didn't, what did he do all this time in his small house in the small village? They say villagers tacitly concocted with the character Salinger and it was a feather on their cap out not to show nosy people which of houses belonged to the writer.

I have to admit from the start that I am among Salinger's many millions of fans. I read his books (also translated into Romanian) several times. And every time it feels as if reading them first. I can't think of any other author giving me this experience. Memory proves to be helpless with his texts. It is subjected to intense excitement, like electric shock and it needs to reset in order to continue functioning at normal parameters.

That's what I recently experienced with Franny and Zooey. It is a sort of final stepping into the limelight of the dysfunctional and genial Glasses characters. The eldest children in the clan withdrew in full glory: Seymour committed suicide in a hotel; Buddy won't pick up his phone. The youngest of the siblings, Franny and Zooey, are trying to save themselves of Seymour's omnipresent ghost and of themselves; of the perfection they were trained into from an early age. But this is a mere common frame. Salinger fills it with an astounding discourse. It is not only words and youthful torments in search of a God to save you and annihilate your ego and excessive criticism. It looks more like a thick wall, build purportedly for the reader and characters of the story to bang their heads hard against. Each manages a getaway and foments their bumps as best as they can.

Franny get a lucidity strike which compromises her date with a guy courting her whom she likes. What looked like a quiet Sunday turns into a psychoanalysis session. Everything seems to be filmed on slow motion. And with boundless cruelty.

Her brother Zooey tries to help her get out of her depression and extends all his armoury of logical, religious and philosophical arguments. Salinger's characters are brilliant and contorted. And don't make a secret out of it. On the contrary, they speak naturally of how they see other, of the impossibility of not related everything to one's own person.

I can't explain it, but reading Franny and Zooey again, Salinger's decision to live half his life in solitude suddenly seemed so natural. After all, the Fat Lady is a sort of ultimate truth he pulls out of the hat, like an illusionist, right at the end of the book. Like an ultimate and absolute truth.

He only shows it for those who feel like getting it: “I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn't going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn't see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady. I didn't know what the hell he was talking about, but he had a very Seymour look on his face, and so I did it. He never did tell me who the Fat Lady was, but I shined my shoes for the Fat Lady every time I ever went on the air again—all the years you and I were on the program together, if you remember. (…) This terribly clear, clear picture of the Fat Lady formed in my mind. I had her sitting on this porch all day, swatting flies, with her radio going full-blast from morning till night. I figured the heat was terrible, and she probably had cancer, and—I don't know. Anyway, it seemed goddam clear why Seymour wanted me to shine my shoes when I went on the air. It made sense.” (Franny and Zooey, Bantam Books, 1961).