Subject: Updike and the Scholes
From: Paul Miller (phm@midsouth.rr.com)
Date: Sun Apr 02 2000 - 10:02:52 EDT
This is an old reply to Updike's review of F&Z sent to the editor at the NY
Times back in 61. Mr. Updike answers it as well. I have read Updike's
original review of F&Z, but had not seen this exchange so thought some of
you may not have seen it.
October 8, 1961
Letters to the Editor
o the Editor: Please allow us to correct some of the misstatements of fact
and misleading implications in John Updike's review of "Franny and Zooey" by
J.D. Salinger.
The first Glass story was neither "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" (as
Mr. Updike calls it on page 1) nor "Hoist High the Roof Beam, Carpenters"
(as he calls it on page 52) but "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," which
appeared in The New Yorker in 1948 and was later collected in "Nine
Stories."
Mr. Updike says on page 1 that "Franny never mentions any brothers." On page
28 of "Franny and Zooey" Franny says, "It was just that I would've been
ashamed if, say, anybody I respected -- my brothers for example - - came and
heard me deliver some of the lines I had to say." This is important because
in "Zooey" it develops that Zooey and Buddy had been at one of her
performances and had heard her with approval and admiration.
Mr. Updike implies on page 1 that Mr. Salinger carelessly allows two
versions of Franny's acquisition of her little religious book to stand in
the two stories. But it is made perfectly clear in "Zooey" (100, 101) that
she did not tell Lane Coutell the truth; indeed, who would expect Franny to
have told the insensitive Coutell the truth in the first place? Her lie in
"Franny" is quite in keeping with her other furtive attempts to keep the
true nature of her spiritual crisis from her date.
We make no attempt to quarrel here with Mr. Updike's hostile critical
appraisal of "Franny and Zooey." But we ask in all sincerity whether so many
obvious errors in such a short review do not cast serious doubts on Mr.
Updike's thoroughness and critical balance.
Joan and Robert Scholes
Charlottesville, Va.
A Reply
To the Editor:
I regret unconsciously transmuting "Raise" into "Hoist" and overlooking
Franny's parenthetical reference to brothers, and I thank Mr. and Mrs.
Scholes for their corrections.
I did not overlook, however, the passage on pages 100-101, concerning the
source of the Pilgrim book, but it seemed to me to point up rather than
clear up the awkwardness. Why should Franny lie about so trivial a matter?
Because, the Scholeses say, Lane Coutell is "insensitive." But was she also
lying about the gold- plated swizzle stick in the minute past, or about the
contents of the book in the next minute? Is her mood, in this section of the
story, in fact furtive and secretive? Does Zooey, in announcing to Bessie
that Franny lied, offer a hint of explanation? Is there, in the relevant
paragraph in "Franny," any suggestion that she is lying? In all cases, No.
In "Franny" she is telling the casual truth about the book coming from the
library, in "Zooey" she has lied about it because the author has had second
thoughts; just as in "Franny" her father has recently got X-rays back from
the hospital showing a nonmalignant growth and "we're all so relieved"
whereas in "Zooey," two days later, this thread is utterly dissolved, and
Les Glass' health is never mentioned.
I did not think, writing for a limited space, that these discrepancies were
worth the number of words needed to describe them fully. They clearly do not
matter much to Salinger, for he could fiddle them away easily enough. He
chooses to let them stand, I suspect, because his instinct tells him that
the Glass saga has gone beyond the possibility of rigorous coherence, and it
must be judged and enjoyed part by part
. As to "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," I thought the context made clear
that by "Glass pieces" I meant the three long stories that have followed
upon the invention of the Glass family -- the seven brilliant children, the
vaudevillian parents. "It's a Wise Child," the brother as author, and the
rest of it. This occurred in the opening paragraphs of "Raise High the Roof
Beam, Carpenters," which was printed in The New Yorker, Nov. 19, 1955. True
enough, the suicide tersely portrayed in "Bananafish" would appear to be
seminal; and in assembling the Glass family, Salinger scavenged a few
incidents and some names -- Seymour, Boo Boo, Walt -- from the stories of
"Nine Stories," but this does not really integrate "Down at the Dinghy" or
"Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" into his "narrative series * * * about a
family of settlers in twentieth-century New York, the Glasses." Mr. and Mrs.
Scholes no doubt are acquainted with the rather strained and surprising
section of "Seymour: An Introduction" in which Buddy/Salinger disowns "A
Perfect Day for Bananafish" as having been written on an old defective
typewriter.
I should be sorry to believe that even the most ardent Salingerite could
honestly regard my review as hostile. I did not mean it to be so and, on
rereading it, do not find it so.
Paul
daumier@salinger.org
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