Rereadings Read online

  “Why the hell doesn’t he kill himself and be done with it?” Zooey wonders of the absent Buddy. (That Buddy Glass is putting this sentence in Zooey’s mouth didn’t hit me until two readings later, in my junior year of college. I noted the additional complexity in blue.) I trusted Zooey because he was angry. “I’m a twenty-five-year-old freak and she’s a twenty-year-old freak, and both those bastards are responsible.”

  That was where I always stopped underlining. I never marked the last line of the scene, when Zooey makes fun of his mother’s pitch-perfect exit (“In the old radio days, when you were all little and all, you all used to be so—smart and happy and—just lovely. Morning, noon, and night.”), but softly, so that “his voice wouldn’t really reach her down the hall.”

  It did not occur to me until after I had graduated from college that Salinger was entirely serious about the last third of the book, or that Franny and Zooey was intended as something other than a novel. I had always wondered about the little books that Franny carried in her purse, The Way of a Pilgrim and The Pilgrim Continues His Way. Her interest in the religious practice of a thirty-three-year-old Russian peasant with a withered arm who repeats the prayer “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me” until it enters the rhythm of his heart always seemed to me like a precious symptom to which the author had devoted perhaps a little too much attention. What I realized, lying in bed in the basement, was that Franny and Zooey and The Way of a Pilgrim were similar, if not the same book. They were answers to the question of how to live.

  The question interested me because I was twenty-three years old and living in my parents’ basement in West Orange, New Jersey, along with the family dog, an unwashed poodle. Before that, I had been living in Manhattan, in a five-room apartment on East Fourteenth Street between Second and Third Avenues that I shared with five people between the ages of twenty-four and thirty-two. I paid $320 a month for a room with three doors and no windows. It was hot in the winter. The summer was worse. People wandered in and out. The building next door was a residence for the deaf, and at night its tenants would bring their Dominican boyfriends to our stairwell, lean up against the wall, spread their legs, open their mouths, and roll their eyes toward heaven without making a sound. Everyone I knew wore leather jackets and took drugs. Two of my roommates were heroin addicts. I was afraid to put a needle into my arm. Over time, I became afraid of the way I was living.

  When I moved back home, I stopped taking drugs, which made me angrier than I had been before. I was also scared. In the book, Bessie Glass wanted to send Franny to an analyst, like Philly Byrnes.

  “Philly Byrnes,” Zooey answered. “Philly Byrnes is a poor little impotent sweaty guy past forty who’s been sleeping for years with a rosary and a copy of Variety under his pillow.” That wasn’t me either. If there was someone out there with “any crazy, mysterious gratitude for his insight and intelligence,” it wasn’t any psychiatrist I knew. And it wasn’t J. D. Salinger either. I was looking for answers, and the notes I made toward the end of the book at age twenty-four quiver with sardonic disappointment. “‘Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase’ lay on top of ‘Fear and Trembling.’” That was Salinger’s own line. But it seemed like a better description of the weakness of Franny and Zooey than anything I could invent on my own. I noticed that Franny is described as “a first-class beauty,” and I found the description cheap. I marked Zooey’s line to Franny: “How in hell are you going to recognize a legitimate holy man when you see one if you don’t even know a cup of consecrated chicken soup when it’s right in front of your nose?” In the margin I suggested that Starbucks could use this motto on a new line of greeting cards, to be sold at the cash register for a dollar apiece.

  And those were the last words I wrote in my copy of Franny and Zooey. The affair had gone cold.

  Reading the book again, for the first time as a writer, I was amazed by how many perfect moments there are, by how rich and funny and wise it is, by how much and how little I understood, and by the fact that the entire book is only two hundred pages long. I still love the bathroom scene the best. But I also love the end of the book, particularly the moment when Franny announces that she wants to talk to Seymour, the moment of pure emotion that the book has been building toward for almost the entire two hundred pages, and that Salinger, Buddy, and Zooey answer by looking out the window and seeing a little girl in a red tam, with her dachshund wandering on the sidewalk nearby. It’s not Seymour exactly. It’s the little girl from the airplane, or someone like her, a vision of sustaining innocence that will carry us through the harder part of the lesson, Seymour’s Fat Lady, for whose sake Zooey Glass once polished his shoes every night before appearing on the radio. She had thick legs, very veiny, and her radio was always going full blast. She had cancer.

  “There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady” Zooey says. The Fat Lady is Christ. Or forgiveness. There was a time when this sentence didn’t make sense, or didn’t convince me to underline the words or put a check mark or a star in the margin. I’m not saying that the line is unsentimental. There may be higher peaks of wisdom to climb. Still, in the interests of full disclosure, it seems only fair to relate that after I closed the book, I opened it again, got out my fancy new disposable fountain pen, and added a black check mark to the author’s italics. I am still grateful for this book. That is what I mean to say.

  PATRICIA HAMPL

  Relics of Saint Katherine

  The Journal, Letters, and Stories of Katherine Mansfield

  Katherine Mansfield might have been for me, as she probably is for most readers, one of the usual suspects rounded up in the anthologies, represented by her “perfect” short story, “The Garden Party.” She might have surfaced again in biographies of her more celebrated friends—Virginia Woolf, who saw her as a rival, and D. H. Lawrence, who used her as the model for Gudrun in Women in Love. And then she might have receded into that twilight where minor writers refuse to be extinguished entirely, trailing clouds of her “exquisite” sensibility, the unfulfilled promise of her talent excused by her early death.

  Mansfield might have been no more than a filmy background figure had I come to her through her fiction. But I read her Journal and Letters first, documents pulsing with her ardent confusion of art and life, matters I was just beginning to scramble up myself. “I want to work” she confided to her journal,

  … so to live that I work with my hands and my feeling and my brain. I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music. And out of this, the expression of this, I want to be writing. (Though I may write about cabmen. That’s no matter.) But warm, eager, living life—to be rooted in life—to learn, to desire to know, to feel, to think, to act. That is what I want.

  She articulated for me what it was to want to be a writer—and against heavy odds.

  But even the autobiographical intimacy of those forms—journals and letters—doesn’t explain the fascination for Mansfield that developed in my teens and persisted into my twenties. The word “fascination” hardly states the case. For years—in college and graduate school and beyond, through dumb jobs and frequent moves from one crummy apartment to another as I too tried “to be a writer”—home was where I hammered a nail and hung my photograph of Mansfield’s hieratic, consumptive face. My shrine, my saint.

  I read everybody with fierce appetite during those years—Whitman, Woolf, Lawrence, poets beyond count. But I didn’t just read Mansfield. I stalked her. I chased down primary sources, secondary sources, tracking any shred of memory or gossip. When I learned from Frieda Lawrence’s memoir that, during the period when they had lived next door to each other in Cornwall, Mansfield had introduced her to Cuticura soap, I was off to Walgreens, dazzled to find that in 1968 it was still possible to buy the assertive clove-scented bar. A relic.

  I learned from one of Mansfield’s biographers (for a supposedly minor writer, she had quite a few) that she liked to keep “low bowls of bright flowers” on her writing table: I
affected the same. She favored little jackets of “lovely colours and soft velvet materials”: soon my style as well, though my latter-day velvets draped over jeans. Mine was the moist devotion of a cultist, not the frank pleasure of a reader.

  Of course I also read the short stories. I approved the transparency of Mansfield’s prose, the click of her snapshot scenes, her pitch-perfect ear for a volley of dialogue, her descriptive delight in the world. The voice in my favorite stories (“Prelude,” “At the Bay”) combined a cool authority with an unspoken, and therefore all the more convincing, heartache for her lost New Zealand. I knew that her Wellington had hardly been cherished at the time. Like me in St. Paul, she knew she was a provincial, and she longed to escape—and she did, to London in 1908, before she was twenty. But successful nostalgia is bred of regret, and Katherine Mansfield was a great regretter. After her relatively brief wild-thing period, illness turned her into a pondering, sometimes frantic, invalid. Her gleeful escape was twisted into lonely exile.

  Her fiction had a more aloof voice, of course, than the urgent Journal and Letters, but this too was evidence of her particular genius: the ability both to bare her soul and to write works of detached authority. She exposed the membrane between self and work, the porous fiber that transformed a raw girlish ambition and overheated poeticism into the remorseless assurance of fiction.

  Why were there no novels? I wondered briefly, but even this lack turned into virtue: Mansfield was a miniaturist, not a big-sweep writer, and all the finer for that, a noticer of moments and gestures, a tender of oblique details. She fretted about this: “Don’t I live in glimpses only?” she wrote in a letter. But she also understood that her idea of a story’s form was genuinely new, “pure risk” as she said, moving not by plot but by impression and association, episodes beaded on a brief string of time. Her vision was essentially poetic, not narrative, and this enlivened her voice and, for me, her appeal. Her “glimpses” gave her work—the stories as well as the letters—a striking immediacy. For all her intensity, she was not a fainter and swooner. She was modern and proud of it. Her humor was mordant, even unkind. Her lyricism had a squeeze of lemon.

  Mansfield suffered—this too was important to me. She died at thirty-four after enduring years of tuberculosis. Her youthful death hovered everywhere, even in her most rhapsodic flights. No wonder there were no novels. But there was nothing self-destructive about her: her tubercular lungs were bursting to live, live. My saint might die, but extinguish herself? Never. Would Chekhov have killed himself? And Chekhov, I learned from the critics (including Mansfield’s husband and arch promoter, John Middleton Murry), was the writer she most resembled.

  In fact, it seems to me now that she more truly resembled Jean Rhys (Mansfield nailed the “woman alone” theme before Rhys got to it). Even more fundamentally, Colette was her kin. Like Colette, Mansfield had her youthful cabaret period, complete with club performances and lesbian flirtations, and though she wrote of the first generation of urban “free” women, her signature was her sensuous evocations of nature. She wrote from her beloved Cote d’Azur:

  After lunch today, we had a sudden tremendous thunderstorm, the drops of rain were as big as marguerite daisies—the whole sky was violet. I went out the very moment it was over—the sky was all glittering with broken light—the sun a huge splash of silver. The drops were like silver fishes hanging from the tree.

  Had she lived, she might very likely have become an English Colette, an earthier mother-of-us-all than Virginia Woolf.

  Virginia Woolf might write to her sister, in an initial assessment of Mansfield, that she found her “cheap and hard … unscrupulous.” But Mansfield had the keener eye for character, writing to Ottoline Morrell after this first meeting that she sensed in Woolf “the strange trembling, glinting quality of her mind … . She seemed to me to be one of those Dostoevsky women whose ‘innocence’ has been hurt.”

  The Journal and the Letters were suffused with consumptive ecstasy. She saw this in Lawrence: “I recognized his smile—just the least shade too bright … his air of being a touch more vividly alive than other people—the gleam …” Her “work,” as she wrote in the Journal, became a kind of parallel universe, spiritualized, even sacralized, as the clock ran out. She spoke severely of “sinning against art.” This too I revered: the religion of art.

  Keats (dead at twenty-five, also of TB) was her saint. She wrote of him in her journal as of a colleague. Like her, he was a hero-worshiper: he lugged around a portrait of Shakespeare wherever he lived. I perceived in—or created from—this relationship a lineage that lifted Mansfield out of the low-rent housing where she lodged in the anthologists’ rented rooms. Boldly (if privately) I attached her to the great Romantic dynasty, as configured expressly by and for me: Shakespeare Keats → Mansfield. I dragooned her into the firmament.

  And who was going to stop me? It was the early 1970s, and we were supposed to be “discovering” women writers, wedging them into the literary canon any which way. Yet it is strange that I fastened on Mansfield. Virginia Woolf, whose novels I read at the time and admired, did not compel me to buy her brand of face soap. Mansfield was my girl. But then, I didn’t “discover” her. She had been willed to me.

  I must have been about seventeen when Doris Derman turned to me in her majestic old apartment off Summit Avenue in St. Paul and said in response to something I had said and have now entirely forgotten, “That is the sort of observation Katherine Mansfield made.”

  I had never heard of Katherine Mansfield. For a moment I thought Doris was referring to a friend of hers. In any case, Doris Derman, worldly mother of my first boyfriend, was willing to make the introduction. “You may have these,” she said, and walked over to her ceiling-high bookcase (itself an essential prop of the life I hoped to enter: the life of the mind) and handed me two books, one bound in faded orange linen with a yet-more-faded green spine, the other in a sad blue with dull silver lettering. The orange, its title stamped in worn gold, was the Letters; the blue was the Journal.

  It is hard to convey how stunned I was to realize that such personal writings had been published. Stories, novels, poems—these were the stuff of books, weren’t they? But letters, diaries—I wrote them myself; I never imagined they could be “literature.”

  Doris Derman was the first person, aside from teachers, I heard speak with authority about books and writers. But her authority was different; she spoke not from a height but from within the precinct of the initiated. She had opinions, and they were based on nothing but her own taste and whim. This was unheard of in my convent-school world of hierarchy and certainty, where references to authority were … authoritative.

  Living in the same neighborhood, in the same parish (as Catholic St. Paul referenced all civic boundaries), Doris knew my family, knew who I was and from whence I came. But we had never met until her son brought me home. He artlessly confessed to me that his mother had told him before this meeting, “Beware of a girl whose family believes the world is no bigger than Linwood Avenue between Lexington and Oxford.” Our block.

  I was neither hurt nor insulted by this tart dismissal, which, of course, I was not intended to hear. In fact, I approved. It confirmed my own readiness to dismiss St. Paul, which squashed me far more (I later thought) than Katherine Mansfield’s stodgy Wellington had squashed her. But more than that: I was subtly thrilled that Doris had captured us, had summed us up—had written us, in effect. My family did not talk this way, did not think this way The hauteur necessary to make such a remark, the aerial aloofness from, well, from Linwood between Lexington and Oxford, would have given my family nosebleeds. Doris’s cool ability to consign us to the higher world of description—to fiction, really—won me even before I met her.

  I understood that Doris had once “written.” There was the definite sense that as someone who had written, she was in possession of talent, vast sums she held prudently in ethereal escrow. She was a good ten years older than the other mothers in the parish, and dyed he
r hair a blatant, unapologetic blond. She had no interest in school functions. She let her husband handle the grocery shopping and the driving and the dealings with nuns and teachers. He was a gentle man who seemed conscripted to serve her, nervously asking—as he handed her a drink he had mixed in the kitchen while she sat in the shadowy living room, reading—whether she felt all right. Though her husband was Catholic and of course her son was too, she was alluringly non-Catholic. In fact, it appeared she was not religious at all, perhaps an agnostic.

  This was all good, good news.

  I can’t think of Katherine Mansfield without conjuring Doris Derman—not because she entrusted her books to me and set me on the particular literary path (favoring clarity and immediacy, the bittersweet but fundamentally comic point of view) that I still think of as the high road. Not even because she introduced me to the “personal voice” in literature when she handed me Mansfield’s Journal and Letters, thus opening the door to memoir and the essay, forms I came to prize and practice. It’s simply that, over the years, her passion for Mansfield has become more eloquent to me than my own strenuous teen-idol feelings.

  Doris was a teenager when Mansfield died in 1923. She belonged to the generation that had just inherited the short skirts and bold bobbed haircuts that Mansfield, for one, made the daring symbol of the new woman. Doris saw Mansfield as a tantalizing bohemian big sister. She’d been up to no good, and look what happened: sick, alone, exiled, dead. Her slim “oeuvre” was dwarfed by the journals and the passionate correspondence, in which she alternately bemoaned her fate and shored up her courage and ever-dimming hopes with crystalline descriptions of the world about her. They are among the great letters in English literature, fairly compared to the letters of Keats.