In Which Sometimes The Sun Goes Round The Moon

The Strange Case

by VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was written in bed, at Bournemouth on the English Channel, in 1885 in between hemorrhages from the lungs. It was published in January 1886. Dr. Jekyll is a fat, benevolent physician, not without human frailties, who at times by means of a potion projects himself into, or concentrates or precipitates, an evil person of brutal and animal nature taking the name of Hyde, in which character he leads a patchy criminal life of sorts. For a time he is able to revert to his Jekyll personality — there is a down-to-Hyde drug and a back-to-Jekyll drug — but gradually his better nature weakens and finally the back-to-Jekyll potion fails, and he poisons himself when on the verge of exposure. This is the bald plot of the story.

First of all, if you have the Pocket Books edition I have, you will veil the monstrous, abominable, atrocious, criminal, foul, vile, youth-depraving jacket — or better say straitjacket, You will ignore the fact that ham actors under the direction of pork packers have acted in a parody of the book, which parody was then photographed on a film and showed in places called theaters; it seems to me that to call a movie house a theater is the same as to call an undertaker a mortician.

And now comes my main injunction. Please completely forget, disremember, obliterate, unlearn, consign to oblivion any notion you may have had that Jekyll and Hyde is some kind of a mystery story, a detective story, or movie. It is of course quite true that Stevenson's short novel, written in 1885, is one of the ancestors of the modern mystery story. But today's mystery story is the very negation of style, being, at the best, conventional literature. Frankly, I am not one of those college professors who coyly boasts of enjoying detective stories — they are too badly written for my taste and bore me to death. Whereas Stevenson's story is — God bless his pure soul — lame as a detective story. Neither is it a parable nor an allegory, for it would be tasteless as either. It has, however, its own special enchantment if we regard it as a phenomenon of style.

It is not only a good "bogey story,” as Stevenson exclaimed when awakening from a dream in which he had visualized it much in the same way l suppose as magic cerebration had granted Coleridge the vision of the most famous of unfinished poems. It is also, and more importantly, ”a fable that lies nearer to poetry than to ordinary prose fiction,” and therefore belongs to the same order of art as, for instance, Madame Bovary or Dead Souls.

There is a delightful winey taste about this book; in fact, a good deal of old mellow wine is drunk in the story: one recalls the wine that Utterson so comfortably sips. This sparkling and comforting draft is very different from the icy pangs caused by the chameleon liquor, the magic reagent that Jekyll brews in his dusty laboratory. Everything is very appetizingly put. Gabriel John Utterson of Gaunt Street mouths his words most roundly; there is an appetizing tang about the chill morning in London, and there is even a certain richness of tone in the description of the horrible sensations Jekyll undergoes during his hydizations. Stevenson had to rely on style very much in order to perform the trick, in order to master the two main difficulties confronting him: (1) to make the magic potion a plausible drug based on a chemist‘s ingredients and (2) to make Jekyll’s evil side before and after the hydization a believable evil.

The names Jekyll and Hyde are of Scandinavian origin, and I suspect that Stevenson chose them from the same page of an old book on surnames where I looked them up myself. Hyde comes from the Anglo-Saxon hyd, which is the Danish hide, "a haven." And Jekyll comes from the Danish name Jokulle, which means "an icicle." Not knowing these simple derivations one would be apt to find all kinds of symbolic meanings, especially in Hyde, the most obvious being that Hyde is a kind of hiding place for Dr. Jekyll, in whom the jocular doctor and the killer are combined.

Three important points are completely obliterated by the popular notions about this seldom read book:

1. Is Jekyll good? No, he is a composite being, a mixture of good and bad, a preparation consisting of a ninety-nine percent solution of Jekyllite and one percent of Hyde (or hydatid from the Greek “water" which in zoology is a tiny pouch within the body of man and other animals, a pouch containing a limpid fluid with larval tapeworms in it — a delightful arrangement, for the little tapeworms at least. Thus in a sense, Mr. Hyde is Dr. Jekyll’s parasite — but I must warn that Stevenson knew nothing of this when he chose the name.

Jekyll’s morals are poor from the Victorian point of view. He is a hypocritical creature carefully concealing his little sins. He is vindictive, never forgiving Dr. Lanyon with whom he disagrees in scientific matters. He is foolhardy. Hyde is mingled with him, within him. In this mixture of good and bad in Dr. Jekyll the bad can be separated as Hyde, who is a precipitate of pure evil, a precipitate in the chemical sense since something of the composite Jekyll remains behind to wonder in horror at Hyde while Hyde is in action.

2. Jekyll is not really transformed into Hyde but projects a concentrate of pure evil that becomes Hyde, who is smaller than Jekyll, a big man, to indicate the larger amount of good that, Jekyll possesses.

3. There are really three personalities — Jekyll, Hyde, and a third, the Jekyll residue when Hyde takes over.

The situation may be represented visually.

But if you look closely you see that within this big, luminous, pleasantly tweedy Jekyll there are scattered rudiments of evil.

Still if you look closely at Hyde, you will notice that above him floats aghast, but dominating, a residue of Jekyll, a kind of smoke ring, or halo, as if this black concentrated evil had fallen out of the remaining ring of good, but this ring of good still reamins. Hyde still wants to change back to Jekyll. This is the significant point.

It follows that Jekyll’s transformation implies a concentration of evil that already inhabited him rather than a complete metamorphosis. Jekyll is not pure good, Hyde (Jekyll's statement to the contrary) is not pure evil, for just as parts of unacceptable Hyde dwell within acceptable Jekyll, so over Hyde hovers a halo of Jekyll, horrified at his worser half's iniquity.

...

I would like to say a few words about Stevenson's last moments.

As you know by now, I am not one to go heavily for the human interest stuff when speaking of books. Human interest is not in my line, as Vronski used to say. But books have their destiny, according to the Latin tag, and sometimes the destinies of authors follow those of their books. There is old Tolstoy in 1910 abandoning his family to wander away and die in a station master’s room to the rumble of passing trains that had killed Anna Karenin. And there is something in Stevenson's death in 1894 on Samoa, imitating in a curious way the wine theme and the transformation theme of his fantasy. He went down to the cellar to fetch a bottle of his favorite‘ burgundy, uncorked it in the kitchen, and suddenly cried out to his wife: what's the matter with me, what is this strangeness, has my face changed? — and fell on the floor. A blood vessel had burst in his brain and it was all over in a couple of hours.

What, has my face changed? There is a curious thematical link between this last episode in Stevenson's life and the fateful transformations in his most wonderful book.

V.N.'s Chronology of Madame Bovary

First Part

1815 Charles born

1821 Gustave born

1827 Charles begins lessons with village priest (spring)

1828 (spring) confirmation

1831 (spring) is removed from school

1834 (spring) fails in medical exam (father hears of it five years later)

1835 (spring) passes exam, becomes "officier de sante"

1835 (fall) goes to Tostes to practice

1836 (Jan.) marries first wife, Heloise Dubuc

1837 (6th or 7th Jan.) goes to Les Bertaux first time

1837 (early spring) first wife dies

1837 (later in spring) goes to Les Bertaux again

1837 (Sept.) makes proposal to Emma Rouault

1838 (June) wedding

1838 (Sept.) ball

1839 (Sept) no ball (all winter at Tostes)

1840 (Feb.) turkey from Rouault

 

Second Part

1840 (March) Tostes to Yonville, Emma pregnant

1840 (summer) Bertha born

1840 (summer) walk to the nurse's house.

1841 (Feb.) walk to cotton mill

1841 (March) Bertha taken home

1841 (early April) visit to priest

1841 (early May) leaves for Paris

1842 (spring) Rodolphe brings farmboy to be bled

1842 county fair

1842 (winter) affair with Rodolphe

1843 (3rd Sep.) Rodolphe leaves Emma

1843 (4th Sep. Monday) the date fixed for their elopement, see Chap. 12; no other 4th of Sep. falls on Monday in the early forties. Emma falls sick - brain fever.

1843 (17 Oct.) recovery

1844 (June) opera, Leon "after three years of absence"

Third Part

1844 (all year) affair with Leon

1845 (summer) roses

1845 (autumn) Charles with Bertha in garden

1846 (mid-Lent, early March) fancy dress ball

1846 (March) Emma asks Leon for money

1846 (March) Emma dies, aged 26-28

1846 (around end May) Felicite runs off with Theodore, taking all Emma's clothes; Leon marries

1846 (early summer) Charles find Rodolphe's last letter

1846 (winter) Homais getting rid of beggar

1847 (around March) mausoleum

1847 (summer Aug) Charles finds all letters; goes to cemetery, sells horse; meets Rodolphe; dies next day aged 33.

1847 Homais calls Louis Philippa (1830-1848) "one good king"

1848 (Feb.) revolution

1856 (April, Napoleon III is now Emperor) Bertha, aged 15, works in a cotton mill. Three doctors have succeeded one another at Yonville between 1847 and 1856; Homais has just received the Cross of the Legion.

"Mystery Light" - Alice on the Roof (mp3)

In Which We Dance To The Music Of Your Mother

My Only Advice

In every relationship, romantic or otherwise, one of the two people feels slightly closer to the other, if only by a matter of degrees. So it was with Gustave Flaubert and his hypochrondriac, flaky friend Ivan Turgenev. These two barnacles met when Flaubert was 40 and Turgenev was three years older. From the tenor of their conversations, which Flaubert seemed to treasure above all else, we can deduce that their spirits remained substantially youthful. Flaubert's self-professed love of literature was so all-encompassing it almost crowded out other parts of himself; Turgenev shared his friend's basic interest but saw the underlying reality for what it was. (Turgenev called his friend, "the only man in existence really devoted to literature.")

Turgenev would visit Flaubert at his retreat in Croisset in the summer, or in Paris during the winter season. Many of the hours they passed together consisted of Flaubert reading his novels or plays aloud, a difficult task even for one of his most central admirers. The written correspondence between the two in the 1860s leaves the mortal plane behind; it can be classified as the first bubbles of modernity to enter the universe.

March 1863

My dear Turgenev,

Your letter was most kind and you are too modest. For I have just read your latest book. I found your essential qualities in it, and more intense, more rarified than ever.

What I admire above all is the distinguished quality of your art — a wonderful thing. You manage to ring true yet avoid banality, to be sentimental without morbidity, and comic without being at all low. Without looking for high drama, you achieve it none the less by the sheer professionalism of your tragic effects. You seem very casual, but you have great skill, 'the skin of the fox combined with that of the lion', as Montaigne said.

Elena's is a fine story. I like this character, as well as Shubin and all the others. While reading you one says to oneself 'I've experienced that'. Thus I believe that page 51 will be felt with greater intensity by no one than by me. What a psychologist! But I'd need many lines to express all my thoughts on that.

As for your First Love, I understand it all the better for its being the story of one of my closest friends. All old romantics (and I who slept with a dagger under my pillow am one) should be grateful to you for this little story that has so much to say about their youth! What a real live girl Zinochka is.

The creation of women is one of your strong points. They are both ideal and real. They have the attraction of saintliness. But what dominates this work, indeed the whole collection, is the two lines: "I had no bad feelings towards my father. On the contrary he had, so to speak, increased in stature in my eyes." That strikes me as being startlingly profound. Will people pick it up? I don't know. But for me, it is sublime.

Yes, dear colleague, I hope that our relationship will not stand still, and that our mutual sympathy will tum into friendship.

In the meantime, one thousand handshakes from your

Gustave Flaubert

April 1863

My dear colleague,

I don't need, I hope, to tell you how much pleasure your second letter gave me — and more than pleasure! If I didn't reply straightaway, it was because I had to extricate myself from a host of disagreeable little matters that made me ill-humoured and lazy at the same time. These miseries continue, but my conscience will not permit me to delay any longer. I have been counting, and still do, on your indulgence — and above all I want to thank you and shake you by the hand.

I am very glad to have your approval and you should be convinced of it: I well know that an artist and man of goodwill such as yourself reads a host of things between the lines of a book, for which he generously appreciates the author's effort: but it doesn't make any difference. Praise coming from you is worth gold — and I pocket it with pride and gratitude.

Shall we not see each other during the summer? An hour of good, frank conversation is worth a hundred letters. I'm leaving Paris in a week's time to go and settle in Baden. Will you not come there? There are trees there such as I've seen nowhere else — and right on the tops of the mountains. The atmosphere is young and vigorous and it's poetic and gracious at the same time. It does a power of good to your eyes and to your soul. When you sit at the foot of one of these giants, it seems as if you take in some of its sap - and it's good and beneficial. Really, come to Baden, even if it were only for a few days. You will take away with you some wonderful colours for your palette.

Before I leave, you will receive a book by me which has just been published. I am cramming you full — but you are partly to blame.

A thousand friendly greetings, keep well, work well, and come to Baden.

Yours

I. Turgenev

Turgenev,

Cram me full then, dear colleague! I await your book impatiently and I shall read it with delight, I am sure.

I also have had a number of little aggravations just lately. The affinity between us is complete, you see.

I don't think I shall be able to go to Baden, because I shall have several obligations that will disturb my routine this summer. When will you be back? And send me your address.

I shall spend the whole of June or the whole of August in Paris. In any case, we shall see each other next winter.

A thousand very long and very vigorous handshakes from your

Gustave Flaubert

May 1868

My dear friend,

I'm very grateful to you for thinking of writing to me. Your letter gave me much pleasure — for it re-established relations between us and because it showed that you liked my book.

These days every single artist has something of the critic in him.

The artist is very great in you — and you know how much I love and admire it; but I also have a high opinion of the critic and I am very happy to have his approval. I well know that your friendship for me counts for something in all this: but I have the feeling that a master has stood in front of my picture, has looked at it and has nodded his head with an air of satisfaction. Well, I'll say again that this has given me great pleasure.

I was very sorry not to have seen you in Paris — I only stayed there three days, and I regret even more that you are not coming to Baden this year. Your novel has you in harness — that's good — I await it with the greatest impatience — but could you not take a few days rest, to the profit of your friends here? Since the first time I saw you (you know, in a sort of inn on the other bank of the Seine) I have felt a great liking for you — there are few men, particularly French men, with whom I feel so relaxed and at ease and yet at the same time so stimulated. It seems to me that I could talk to you for weeks on end, but then we are a pair of moles burrowing away in the same direction.

All this means that I should be very glad to see you. I'm leaving for Russia in a fortnight's time, but I shan't stay there long, and I shall be back by the end of July — and I shall go to Paris to see my daughter who will probably have made me a grandfather by then. I shall be game enough to come and chase after you even at home — if you are there. Or will you come to Paris? But I must see you.

In the meantime I wish you good fortune. The living, human truth that you pursue indefatigably can only be captured on good days. You have had some - you will have more — and many of them.

Keep well; I also embrace you — and with true friendship.

I. Turgenev

July 1868

My dear Turgenev,

This is simply to remind you of your promise. You were supposed to be in Paris at the end of July or the beginning of August. As for me, I am here, and I await you.

So as to avoid your making unnecessary arrangements, here is my programme: from 30 July (next Thursday) until August I shall be at Saint-Gratien at the Princess Mathilde's. Then I shall return to Paris for two days. I shall then spend another two days at Dieppe at one of my nieces. Then I shall return to Croisset, to get on with my book.

We must spend a few good hours together.

I embrace you wishing you cooler weather than we're having in Paris, and I remain yours

G. Flaubert

August 1868

My dear friend,

I have waited until now to reply to your kind little note, because Iwas still hoping to be able to announce my arrival; but my devilish gout is obstinately refusing to leave me, and I cannot yet contemplate any kind of long journey. It's annoying — but what can I do about it? I shall come as soon as I can; and in the meantime I embrace you and beg you to present my respects to your mother, whom I shall be very happy to meet.

Work hard in the meantime.

I. Turgenev

November 1868

My dear friend,

The cheese has just arrived; I shall take it to Baden with me, and with every mouthful we shall think of Croisset and of the delightful day I spent there. Decidedly I feel that there is a real affinity between the two of us.

If all of your novel is as good as the extracts you read to me, you will have written a masterpiece, I'm telling you.

I don't know if you've read the book I'm sending you; in any case, put it on one of the shelves of your library. 

Present my respects to your mother — and let me embrace you.

Your

I. Turgenev

P. S. My address is: Carlsruhe, poste restante. It would be very kind if you were to send me a photograph of yourself. Here is one of me that looks very forbidding.

P.P.S. Find another title. Sentimental Education is wrong.

January 1869

But I must have news of you, my dear friend. Let's see now — in two words: where are you — and how is the novel going? I am writing to you at Croisset, and perhaps you are in Paris, sniffing out what's new.

In any case, I don't think you'll stay there long.

I have not yet thanked you for the photograph, which makes you look very military and well groomed — but it's you all right — and it's always good to look at it. Why don't you have some good ones taken?

I have often thought of Croisset, and I think to myself that it's a nest to fledge songbirds in. As for me, I have done almost nothing. I have embarked on a task that I find repugnant and I am floundering about sadly in it. There's no going back, but when it's finished, I shall give a great sigh of relief! It's a sort of anthology of literary reminiscences that I promised my publisher; I have never worked in that field and it's not at all amusing. Oh! Two hours of being Sainte-Beuve! I'd like to know if he enjoys it very much.

My best greetings to your honourable mother, who seems to me the best possible of mamas one could imagine, and a good vigorous handshake to you.

Your

I. Turgenev

P. S. I am here for the whole winter because my friends the Viardotl are here. It's not very gay, Carlsruhe, but it's better than its reputation. I shall come to Paris towards the end of March.

My dear friend,

Yes, people have certainly been unfair to you, but this is the time to brace yourself and hurl a masterpiece at the reading public. Your Anthony could be such a projectile. Don't tarry too long over it, that's my refrain. Don't forget that people judge you according to the standards that you yourself have established, and you're bearing the weight of your past. You have energy; el hombre debe ser feroz as the Spanish proverb says — and artists especially. Even if your book has only gripped a dozen people of any worth — then that is enough. You understand I'm saying all this not to console you, but to spur you on.

I have been here for about ten days — and my sole preoccupation is keeping warm. The houses are badly built here, and the iron stoves are useless. You'll see a very little thing by me in the March edition of the Revue des 2 Mondes. It's nothing very much. I'm working on something more 'solid', that is, I'm getting ready to work.

I shall go to Paris before returning to Russia; that will be towards the end of April. I shall stay a good ten days — we shall see each other often.

If you see Mme Sand, give her my regards. Greetings to Du Camp and the Husson family.

I embrace you and wish you courage! You are Flaubert after all.

Your I.T.

April 1870

I was very sorry to hear in your last letter that we shan't see each other this summer, my dear friend. I had counted on a good chance to let myself go with you, before your departure for Russia. But how difficult everything in this life is!

The great sadness I've had this winter has been the death of my closest friend after Bouilhet, a good lad called Jules Duplan who was devoted to me. These two deaths, coming one on top of the other, have overwhelmed me. Add to that the pitiful state of two other friends (not such close friends, it's true, but none the less they were part of my immediate circle). I'm referring to Feydeau's paralysis and the madness of Jules de Goncourt. The loss of Sainte-Beuve, money worries, my novel's lack of success etc., etc. even down to my manservant's rheumatism (the one who looks like Lassouche), everything, as you can see, has conspired to aggravate me. And to do so to no mean extent.

I can easily say that the only good thing to happen to me for a long time was your last visit, which was too short. Why do we live so far away from one another? You are (I think) the only man I enjoy talking to. I can't see that anybody else bothers about art and poetry! The plebiscite, socialism, the International and other such garbage are cluttering up everybody's brains.

I fear I shan't be able to accept your invitation this summer. Here's why. In four or five days' time I shall return to Croisset, where I'm going to write the preface to the volume of Bouilhet's verse straightaway. It will take me two or three months — after which, I shall tackle St Anthony which will be interrupted in October by the rehearsals for Aisse. They will rob me of a good two months. So between now and next New Year I shall have barely six weeks to devote to the good hermit. I would like to spend not more than two years on that fellow. So you see how pressed for time I am. I must get on with that work, as quickly as possible, as I'm already starting to feel I've had enough of it. I have consumed too many books, one on top of the other — but it was in order to make myself numb to my personal sorrows.

Send me your news when you're at home in Russia — and think of me often, because I often think of you, and I embrace you, ex imo

G. Flaubert

My mother was, as they say, very touched by your kind regards.

"Tic Tac Tic" - Elli et Jacno (mp3)

"Bien Plus Fort" - Elli et Jacno (mp3)

In Which Happiness Is A Solid And Joy Is A Liquid

The Consumption of J.D. Salinger

by ELIZABETH GUMPORT

J.D. Salinger provokes the personal turn. When we write about his work, we write about him, his private life – or our own. What is public becomes private; criticism creeps towards memoir. Salinger is the JFK assassination, Salinger is 9/11: where were you when you read The Catcher in the Rye? Aleksandar Hemon was in Sarajevo, Aimee Bender in Southern California. Both of them were teenagers, as were Joshua Ferris’s waiter and Adam Gopnik’s son. Joanna Smith Rakoff was working for his agent in New York, where she answered letters from fans who wrote in with their own Salinger stories.

I was on my couch. The book had once belonged to my father, and on its cover was a partial peace sign, which at the time I thought was part of the design. Later I realized my father had drawn it himself. (I think I am not alone when I say I remember Salinger’s stories as books, as encounters with physical objects. Their content seems embodied in their bindings: Franny and Zooey’s green border, Nine Stories in blue and orange. Salinger himself selected the precise shade of white Little, Brown used for his covers.)

When my mom saw me reading Catcher, she reminisced for a while, and then she asked me: why didn’t Holden just eat something? If he had just had a snack he would have felt fine. Who isn’t crabby when he’s dehydrated? It’s a good point, one both real and fictional people would do well to remember, and one that is particularly relevant in the case of dirty realism: everyone feels lousy when they are hungry or hungover. A headache is not a philosophy of the world. Unless, possibly, that world belongs to Salinger, whose fiction is full of finicky eaters. Holden is hardly unusual: Franny picks at her chicken sandwich, and when the narrator of “For Esmé – With Love and Squalor” offers Esmé a piece of his cinnamon toast, she declines, saying “‘I eat like a bird, actually.’” The narrator himself takes only a single bite.

Although Salinger’s characters are not terribly interested in eating food, it does intrigue them for other reasons. In “Just Before The War With The Eskimos,” Selena’s brother presses a chicken sandwich upon Ginnie, who hides it in her coat. When she leaves their apartment, she takes the sandwich out to throw away – but then returns it to her pocket. “A few years before,” Salinger writes, “it had taken her three days to dispose of the Easter chick she had found dead on the sawdust at the bottom of her wastebasket.”

Salinger’s characters ignore meals and preserve dead chicks because, as Aleksandar Hemon points out in “The Importance of Wax and Olives,” Salinger’s characters are interested in objects only insofar as they are useless. The title of Hemon’s essay comes “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” in which Sybil asks Seymour if he likes wax and olives. He says yes: “Olives and wax. I never go any place without ‘em.” What unites olives and wax is their worthlessness: they are pure objects, pre-commodities, neither candle nor garnish. They are just things, things that serve no purpose, like a sandwich you will never eat. The hotel room where Seymour kills himself smells of “new calfskin luggage and nail-lacquer remover” – the odor of officious practicality, of objects bought and used.

In “Seymour: An Introduction,” Buddy reports that his brother admired the kind of poet whose “real forte is knowing a good persimmon or good crab or good mosquito bite on a good arm when he sees one.” Buddy’s analysis serves equally well as a description of Salinger, and of his relationship to objects, or at least the relationship towards which he aspired. His ideal is a kind of categorical imperative of objecthood, Kant’s second formulation applied to Easter chicks. Objects ought to be treated not as means to an ends but ends in themselves. A persimmon, an olive, an arm or the arch of a foot, like Sybil’s, which Seymour kisses: what counts is things as they are, the very pieces of the world.

Buddy’s account also goes a long way towards explaining what it is that makes Salinger’s writing so good. Salinger is acutely aware that we exist in the world – in cities, in apartments, in bodies that rub up against couches and church pews and cabs and other bodies in those cabs – and he is a master of capturing what it feels like, literally feels like, to live.

In Zooey, Seymour’s letter is not just summarized but described: it is a packet of yellow paper, its pages wet with bathwater. It is a real thing Zooey can hold in his hands, like Esmé’s father’s watch, or the red tissue paper that reminds the young Comanche of the Laughing Man’s poppy-petal mask. The richness of Salinger’s fiction comes from his attention to objects, to the physical stuff of life, and from his understanding that the words that describe these things are things themselves. Words are their meanings and more than that: they are themselves, and in Salinger’s hands they are beautiful.

Yet if it is in his treatment of the physical world that Salinger excels, it is also where he eventually gets in trouble. On the New Yorker website, Salinger’s stories are available in their original format, columns of prose bracketed by advertisements for sunscreen and department stores. The offerings are refined, luxury tempered by good taste: madras bathing suits and foundation from Helena Rubinstein for the lady, Yardley shaving cream for “the man who won’t settle for average.”

Unlike wax and olives, these items are valued for reasons beyond themselves. Yardley shaving cream is used to shave one’s face – and to mark oneself as a man who will not settle for average. This is what Hemon calls its “spiritual essence,” which is required for “a commodity to enter the market and attain a value as a thing alienated from human labor.” A commodity, Hemon writes, “cannot be an empty thing... It has to fulfill a need that is not merely material — it must have a spiritual essence that responds to a spiritual need... To possess, to own that essence, that ineffable quality of a commodity that differentiates it from other commodities, one has to buy the thing that contains it, which makes one different from those who buy other commodities. Consumption spiritualizes and individualizes the consumer, as he or she enters a web of imaginary relations between human beings and the world.”

The man who buys Yardley’s shaving cream violates the categorical imperative of objecthood, but so does anyone who values anything for any reason beyond it. Zooey says it himself: “treasure’s treasure,” even when that treasure is spiritual. Disgusted by all the savages, with their phoniness and “unskilled laughter” and consumerism and self-serving ambition that mistakes itself for the pursuit of knowledge and knowledge that does not even pretend to be wisdom, Salinger’s characters devote themselves to that final item totally and explicitly. What they want is spiritual enlightenment, and it turns out that to achieve enlightenment all they have to do is look for it everywhere.

Thus Salinger himself not only betrays his own injunction but commands it. Everything you do ought to be done the service of self-perfection. The smallest action ends in enlightenment: this is what it means to shine your shoes for the Fat Lady.

This is also what tempers the soaring generosity of Zooey, what cuts against Zooey’s – and Salinger’s – overwhelming, aching belief in other human beings. Do you not lose sight of the person himself when all you can see when you look at him is Christ? When, more to the point, all you want to see is Christ? It seems you must: people and objects are valued not for themselves but because for the person seeking wisdom they contain it. Every object is holy, every gesture a genuflection, every person the Fat Lady, and in every Fat Lady is Christ Himself. No longer is anything useless; instead, everything has the same use, including food. “How in hell are you going to recognize a legitimate holy man when you see one,” Zooey asks Franny, “if you don’t even know a consecrated cup of chicken soup when it’s right in front of your nose?”

To a fan, Salinger’s fiction is that “consecrated cup of chicken soup.” He nourishes his reader’s hunger to understand and to be understood, to feel as if Salinger had him in mind when he wrote the way Bessie had Franny in mind when she cooked. To each reader, Salinger says spiritual satisfaction can be achieved through what Joan Didion summarizes as tolerating “television writers and section men” and “looking for Christ in one's date for the Yale game.”

These are what Didion calls Salinger’s “instructions for living,” whose simplicity is the source of their appeal. To ask someone to endure a date is not to ask very much. Ultimately, Didion concludes, Salinger’s books are but “self-help copy. . . Positive Thinking for the upper middle classes, as Double Your Energy and Live Without Fatigue for Sarah Lawrence girls.” We need not change our lives, they tell us, or even necessarily our behavior. All that is required is a good attitude. Enlightenment is as easy as heating up a can of Campbell’s.

If Franny and Zooey is an instruction manual, one of its rules is that it should be read as such. Everything in Salinger’s world has its use, including books: compare Lane’s interest in Madame Bovary with Franny’s in The Way of a Pilgrim. He wants an A, while she wants enlightenment, and it is her way of reading that Salinger celebrates. If Franny is our model reader, what she teaches us is that reading for self-improvement, self-enrichment, self-abasement, self-whatever – reading for the self – is the height of nobility.

She treats The Way of a Pilgrim the way Didion says we treat Franny and Zooey, which is in fact the way many of us do treat Franny and Zooey: as something that can be applied to our own lives, and can change them. Reading for private instruction is not misreading but reading rightly – reading in the manner of Franny. It is for this reason that our first encounters with Salinger loom so large in our memories: his are books about taking books personally.

My father’s copy of The Catcher In The Rye is an artifact, now, so delicate as to be unreadable. Still, I keep it, and if this is taking things personally I will say that is perhaps the way some things should be taken. In fact, part of me is sad that I no longer take Salinger as personally as my younger self took him, and sad that I am a stranger to that girl and the people she once loved.

Elizabeth Gumport is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Baltimore. She last wrote in these pages about Wild Things.

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