He didn’t get an answer. Only the sound of a nose being rather violently blown.
“Well, I do, it happens. Matthew, Chapter Six. I remember it very clearly, buddy. I even remember where I was. I was back in my room putting some friction tape on my goddam hockey stick, and you banged in—all in an uproar, with the Bible wide open. You didn’t like Jesus any more, and you wanted to know if you could call Seymour at his Army camp and tell him all about it. And you know why you didn’t like Jesus any more? I’ll tell you. Because, one, you didn’t approve of his going into the synagogue and throwing all the tables and idols all over the place. That was very rude, very Unnecessary. You were sure that Solomon or somebody wouldn’t have done anything like that. And the other thing you disapproved of—the thing you had the Bible open to—was the lines ‘Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them.’ That was all right. That was lovely. That you approved of. But, when Jesus says in the same breath, ‘Are ye not much better than they?’—ah, that’s where little Franny gets off. That’s where little Franny quits the Bible cold and goes straight to Buddha, who doesn’t discriminate against all those nice fowls of the air. All those sweet, lovely chickens and geese that we used to keep up at the Lake. And don’t tell me again that you were ten years old. Your age has nothing to do with what I’m talking about. There are no big changes between ten and twenty—or ten and eighty, for that matter. You still can’t love a Jesus as much as you’d like to who did and said a couple of things he was at least reported to have said or done—and you know it. You’re constitutionally unable to love or understand any son of God who throws tables around. And you’re constitutionally unable to love or understand any son of God who says a human being, any human being—even a Professor Tupper—is more valuable to God than any soft, helpless Easter chick.”
Franny was now facing directly into the sound of Zooey’s voice, sitting bolt upright, a wad of Kleenex clenched in one hand. Bloomberg was no longer in her lap. “I suppose you can,” she said, shrilling.
“It’s beside the point whether I can or not. But, yes, as a matter of fact, I can. I don’t feel like going into it, but at least I’ve never tried, consciously or otherwise, to turn Jesus into St. Francis of Assisi to make him more ‘lovable’—which is exactly what ninety-eight per cent of the Christian world has always insisted on doing. Not that it’s to my credit. I don’t happen to be attracted to the St. Francis of Assisi type. But you are. And, in my opinion, that’s one of the reasons why you’re having this little nervous breakdown. And especially the reason why you’re having it at home. This place is made to order for you. The service is good, and there’s plenty of hot and cold running ghosts. What could be more convenient? You can say your prayer here and roll Jesus and St. Francis and Seymour and Heidi’s grandfather all in one.” Zooey’s voice stopped, very briefly. “Can’t you see that? Can’t you see how unclearly, how sloppily, you’re looking at things? My God, there’s absolutely nothing tenth-rate about you, and yet you’re up to your neck at this minute in tenth-rate thinking. Not only is the way you’re going at your prayer tenth-rate religion but, whether you know it or not, you’re having a tenth-rate nervous breakdown. I’ve seen a couple of real breakdowns, and the people who had them didn’t bother to pick and choose the place they—”
“Just stop it, Zooey! Just stop it!” Franny said, sobbing.
“I will, in a minute, in just a minute. Why are you breaking down, incidentally? I mean if you’re able to go into a collapse with all your might, why can’t you use the same energy to stay well and busy? All right, so I’m being unreasonable. I’m being very unreasonable now. But, my God, how you try what little patience I was born with I You take a look around your college campus, and the world, and politics, and one season of summer stock, and you listen to the conversation of a b
unch of nitwit college students, and you decide that everything’s ego, ego, ego, and the only intelligent thing for a girl to do is to lie around and shave her head and say the Jesus Prayer and beg God for a little mystical experience that’ll make her nice and happy.”
Franny shrieked, “Will you shut up, please?”
“In just a second, in just a second. You keep talking about ego. My God, it would take Christ himself to decide what’s ego and what isn’t. This is God’s universe, buddy, not yours, and he has the final say about what’s ego and what isn’t. What about your beloved Epictetus? Or your beloved Emily Dickinson? You want your Emily, every time she has an urge to write a poem, to just sit down and say a prayer till her nasty, egotistical urge goes away? No, of course you don’t! But you’d like your friend Professor Tupper’s ego taken away from him. That’s different. And maybe it is. Maybe it is. But don’t go screaming about egos in general. In my opinion, if you really want to know, half the nastiness in the world is stirred up by people who aren’t using their true egos. Take your Professor Tupper. From what you say about him, anyway, I’d lay almost any odds that this thing he’s using, the thing you think is his ego, isn’t his ego at all but some other, much dirtier, much less basic faculty. My God, you’ve been around schools long enough to know the score. Scratch an incompetent schoolteacher—or, for that matter, college professor—and half the time you find a displaced first-class automobile mechanic or a goddam stonemason. Take LeSage, for instance—my friend, my employer, my Rose of Madison Avenue. You think it was his ego that got him into television? Like hell it was I He has no ego any more—if ever he had one. He’s split it up into hobbies. He has at least three hobbies that I know of—and they all have to do with a big, ten-thousand-dollar workroom in his basement, full of power tools and vises and God knows what else. Nobody who’s really using his ego, his real ego, has any time for any goddam hobbies.” Zooey suddenly broke off. He was still lying with his eyes closed and his fingers laced, quite tightly, across his chest, his shirt-front. But he now ground his face into a deliberately pained expression—a form, apparently, of self-criticism. “Hobbies,” he said. “How did I get off onto hobbies?” He lay still for a moment.
Franny’s sobs, no more than partly muffled by a satin pillow, made the only sound in the room. Bloomberg was now sitting under the piano, on an island of sunshine, rather picturesquely washing his face.
“Always the heavy,” Zooey said, a trifle too matter-of-factly. “No matter what I say, I sound as though I’m undermining your Jesus Prayer. And I’m not, God damn it. All I am is against why and how and where you’re using it. I’d like to be convinced—I’d love to be convinced—that you’re not using it as a substitute for doing whatever the hell your duty is in life, or just your daily duty. Worse than that, though, I can’t see—I swear to God I can’t—how you can pray to a Jesus you don’t even understand. And what’s really inexcusable, considering that you’ve been funnel-fed on just about the same amount of religious philosophy that I have—what’s really inexcusable is that you don’t try to understand him. There’d be some excuse for it if you were either a very simple person, like the pilgrim, or a very goddam desperate person—but you’re not simple, buddy, and you’re not that damned desperate.” Just then, for the first time since he had lain down, Zooey, with his eyes still shut, compressed his lips—very much, as a matter of parenthetical fact, in the habitual style of his mother. “God almighty, Franny,” he said. “If you’re going to say the Jesus Prayer, at least say it to Jesus, and not to St. Francis and Seymour and Heidi’s grandfather all wrapped up in one. Keep him in mind if you say it, and him only, and him as he was and not as you’d like him to have been. You don’t face any facts. This same damned attitude of not facing facts is what got you into this messy state of mind in the first place, and it can’t possibly get you out of it.”
Zooey abruptly placed his hands over his now quite damp face, left them there for an instant, then removed them. He refolded them. His voice picked up again, almost perfectly conversational in tone. “The part that stumps me, really stumps me, is that I can’t see why anybody—unless he was a child, or an angel, or a lucky simpleton like the pilgrim—would even want to say the prayer to a Jesus who was the least bit different from the way he looks and sounds in the New Testament. My God! He’s only the most intelligent man in the Bible, that’s all! Who isn’t he head and shoulders over? Who? Both Testaments are full of pundits, prophets, disciples, favorite sons, Solomons, Isaiahs, Davids, Pauls—but, my God, who besides Jesus really knew which end was up? Nobody. Not Moses. Don’t tell me Moses. He was a nice man, and he kept in beautiful touch with his God, and all that—but that’s exactly the point. He had to keep in touch. Jesus realized there is no separation from God.” Zooey here clapped his hands together—only once, and not loud, and very probably in spite of himself. His hands were refolded across his chest almost, as it were, before the clap was out. “Oh, my God, what a mind!” he said. “Who else, for example, would have kept his mouth shut when Pilate asked for an explanation? Not Solomon. Don’t say Solomon. Solomon would have had a few pithy words for the occasion. I’m not sure Socrates wouldn’t have, for that matter. Crito, or somebody, would have managed to pull him aside just long enough to get a couple of well-chosen words for the record. But most of all, above everything else, who in the Bible besides Jesus knew—knew—that we’re carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we’re all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look? You have to be a son of God to know that kind of stuff. Why don’t you think of these things? I mean it, Franny, I’m being serious. When you don’t see Jesus for exactly what he was, you miss the whole point of the Jesus Prayer. If you don’t understand Jesus, you can’t understand his prayer—you don’t get the prayer at all, you just get some kind of organized cant. Jesus was a supreme adept, by God, on a terribly important mission. This was no St. Francis, with enough time to knock out a few canticles, or to preach to the birds, or to do any of the other endearing things so close to Franny Glass’s heart. I’m being serious now, God damn it. How can you miss seeing that? If God had wanted somebody with St. Francis’s consistently winning personality for the job in the New Testament, he’d’ve picked him, you can be sure. As it was, he picked the best, the smartest, the most loving, the least sentimental, the most unimitative master he could possibly have picked. And when you miss seeing that, I swear to you, you’re missing the whole point of the Jesus Prayer. The Jesus Prayer has one aim, and one aim only. To endow the person who says it with Christ-Consciousness. Not to set up some little cozy, holier-than-thou trysting place with some sticky, adorable divine personage who’ll take you in his arms and relieve you of all your duties and make all your nasty Weltschmerzen and Professor Tuppers go away and never come back. And by God, if you have intelligence enough to see that—and you do—and yet you refuse to see it, then you’re misusing the prayer, you’re using it to ask for a world full of dolls and saints and no Professor Tuppers.” He suddenly sat up, shot forward, with an almost calisthenic-like swiftness, to look at Franny. His shirt was, in the familiar phrase, wringing wet. “If Jesus had intended the prayer to be used for—”
Zooey broke off. He stared over at Franny’s prostrate, face-down position on the couch, and heard, probably for the first time, the only partly stifled sounds of anguish coming from her. In an instant, he turned pale—pale with anxiety for Franny’s condition, and pale, presumably, because failure had suddenly filled the room with its invariably sickening smell. The color of his pallor, however, was a curiously basic white—unmixed, that is, with the greens and yellows of guilt or abject contrition. It was very like the standard bloodlessness in the face of a small boy who loves animals to distraction, all animals, and who has just seen his favorite, bunny-loving sister’s expression as she opened the box containing his birthday present to her—a freshly caught young cobra, with a red ribbon tied in an awkward bow around its neck.
He stared at Franny for a full minute, then got to his feet, with a little, uncharacteristically awkward movement of imbalance. He went, very slowly, over to his mother’s writing table, on the other side of the room. And it was clear, on arrival, that he had no idea why he’d gone over to it. He seemed unfamiliar with the things on the table surface—the blotter with his filled-in “o”s, the ashtray with his cigar end in it—and he turned around and looked at Franny again. Her sobbing had let up a bit, or seemed to have, but her body was in the same wretched, prostrate, face-down position. One arm was bent under her, caught under her, in a way that must have been acutely uncomfortable, if not rather painful. Zooey looked away from her, and then, not unbravely, back at her. He wiped his brow briefly with the palm of his hand, put the hand into his hip pocket to dry it, and said, “I’m sorry, Franny. I’m very sorry.” But this formal apology only reactivated, reamplified, Franny’s sobbing. He looked at her, fixedly, for another fifteen or twenty seconds. Then he left the room, via the hall, closing the doors behind him.
The fresh-paint smell was now quite strong just outside the living room. The hall itself had not yet been painted, but newspapers had been strewn the entire length of the hardwood floor, and Zooey’s first step—an indecisive, almost dazed one—left the imprint of his rubber heel on a sports-section photograph of Stan Musial holding up a fourteen-inch brook trout. On his fifth or sixth step, he barely missed colliding with his mother, who had just come out of her bedroom. “I thought you’d gone!” she said. She was carrying two laundered and folded cotton bedspreads. “I thought I heard the front—” She broke off to take in Zooey’s general appearance. “What is that? Prespiration?” she asked. Without waiting for a reply, she took Zooey by the arm and led him—almost swept him, as if he were as light as a broom—into the daylight coming out of her freshly painted bedroom. “It is prespiration.” Her tone couldn’t have held more wonder and censure if Zooey’s pores had been exuding crude oil. “What in the world have you been doing? You just had a bath. What have you been doing?”
“I’m late now, Fatty. C’mon. One side,” Zooey said. A Philadelphia highboy had been moved out into the hall, and, together with Mrs. Glass’s person, it blo
cked Zooey’s passage. “Who put this monstrosity out here?” he said, glancing at it.
“Why are you perspiring like that?” Mrs. Glass demanded, staring first at the shirt, then at him. “Did you talk to Franny? Where’ve you just been? The living room?”
“Yes, yes, the living room. And if I were you, incidentally, I’d go look in there for a second. She’s crying. Or was when I left.” He tapped his mother on the shoulder. “C’mon, now. I mean it. Get out of the—”
“She’s crying? Again? Why? What happened?”
“I don’t know, for Chrissake—I hid her Pooh books. Come on, Bessie, step aside, please. I’m in a hurry.”
Mrs. Glass, still staring at him, let him pass. Then, almost at once, she made for the living room, at a clip that scarcely gave her leave to call back over her shoulder, “Change that shirt, young man!”
If Zooey heard this, he gave no sign. At the far end of the hall, he went into the bedroom he had once shared with his twin brothers, which now, in 1955, was his alone. But he stayed in his room for not more than two minutes. When he came out, he had on the same sweaty shirt. There was, however, a slight but fairly distinct change in his appearance. He had acquired a cigar, and lighted it. And for some reason he had an unfolded white handkerchief draped over his head, possibly to ward off rain, or hail, or brimstone.
He went directly across the hall and into the room his two eldest brothers had shared.
This was the first time in almost seven years that Zooey had, in the ready-made dramatic idiom, “set foot” in Seymour’s and Buddy’s old room. Discounting a totally negligible incident a couple of years earlier, when he had methodically dragged the entire apartment for a mislaid or “stolen” tennis-racket press.
He closed the door behind him as tightly as possible, and with an expression implying that the absence of a key in the lock met with his disapproval. He gave the room itself scarcely a glance, once he was inside it. Instead, he turned around and deliberately faced a sheet of what had once been snow-white beaverboard that was nailed uncompromisingly to the back of the door. It was a mammoth specimen, very nearly as long and as wide as the door itself. One could have believed that its whiteness, smoothness, and expanse had at one time cried out rather plaintively for India ink and block lettering. Certainly not in vain, if so. Every inch of visible surface of the board had been decorated, with four somewhat gorgeous-looking columns of quotations from a variety of the world’s literatures. The lettering was minute, but jet-black and passionately legible, if just a trifle fancy in spots, and without blots or erasures. The workmanship was no less fastidious even at the bottom of the board, near the doorsill, where the two penmen, each in his turn, had obviously lain on their stomachs. No attempt whatever had been made to assign quotations or authors to categories or groups of any kind. So that to read the quotations from top to bottom, column by column, was rather like walking through an emergency station set up in a flood area, where, for example, Pascal had been unribaldly bedded down with Emily Dickinson, and where, so to speak, Baudelaire’s and Thomas a Kempis’s toothbrushes were hanging side by side.
Zooey, standing in just close enough, read the top entry in the left-hand column, then went on reading downward. From his expression, or lack of it, he might have been killing time on a railway platform reading a billboard advertisement for Dr. Scholl’s foot pads.
You have the right to work, but for the work’s sake only. You have no right to the fruits of work. Desire for the fruits of work must never be your motive in working. Never give way to laziness, either.
Perform every action with your heart fixed on the Supreme Lord. Renounce attachment to the fruits. Be even-tempered [underlined by one of the calligraphers] in success and failure; for it is this evenness of temper which is meant by yoga.
Work done with anxiety about results is far inferior to work done without such anxiety, in the calm of self-surrender. Seek refuge in the knowledge of Brahman. They who work selfishly for results are miserable.