Shining my shoes for the fat lady

“I subbed for Walt a few times when he was in a cast—remember when he was in that cast? Anyway, I started bitching one night before the broadcast. Seymour’d told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. 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. I don’t think I missed more than just a couple of times. 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.”

–J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

Like many young and bookish people suffering from a sort of diffuse angst, I read Catcher in the Rye along about middle school. At that time, Holden Caulfield resonated with me powerfully and hypocrisy, once given a name, became the worst sin I could think of. Salinger’s novel ran on a sustained irony in a way that I hadn’t yet discovered writing could, and scratched this terrible itch for an echo chamber for my own adolescent sarcasm that had been absent from the stodgier pockets of the American literary canon I’d been frequenting in all my teenage nerdiness. In retrospect, it was probably my first encounter with postmodernism, a love affair destined to endure for decades.

It wasn’t until some years later that I read Franny and Zooey and, if you haven’t read it yet, I should warn you that I came dangerously close to revealing what I regard as the book’s climax by citing the above passage. I don’t want to do that, because I want you to read it. But I should warn you: not much happens in Franny and Zooey. Franny Glass has a Caulfield-worthy nervous breakdown and comes home from college to mope on the couch for a few days. Her older brother Zooey talks her through it. In the part of the novel I’ve shared with you, Zooey remembers his time on “Wise Child”, a radio quiz program that, over the years, featured each of the brilliant Glass children as contestants (including the eldest, Seymour, who later committed suicide and with whose death the family continues to grapple). It’s a book with a great deal to say about failure and quitting and why hypocrisy and pretension still rankle but there’s a tenderness to it that, to my mind, is absent from Catcher in the Rye.

After I read Franny and Zooey, shining my shoes for the Fat Lady became a sort of covenant for me. “Sure, you’re smarter than a lot of people out there, and you think about things harder, and you struggle to withhold judgment and probably always will,” Seymour’s mandate to Zooey (and, as it turns out, to Franny as well) seemed to say. “But that doesn’t absolve you of living in the world; moreover, it gives you a huge responsibility to be what those other people maybe can’t or at least won’t, but delight in believing that you can and will.”

Since I first imagined her, the Fat Lady has taken on many incarnations. Sometimes she’s a member of my family; sometimes, she’s one of my students or a random person I desire, for one reason or another, to unburden of some notion I consider benighted. Other times I’ve found her in the vague administrative process I’ve had to play along with in order to secure myself the privilege of making a living off of being smart.

Now that I’ve had the time and leisure to give postmodernism a bit more thought, Salinger’s Fat Lady seems to me a harbinger of the post-postmodernism I long for these days and catch occasional glimpses of in contemporary art, music, film, literature. Yes, morality and perception are relative. Yes, truth is socially constructed. Yes, everything is inherently meaningless, and everybody’s a hypocrite, if you want. We’ve been telling ourselves this story since the mid 20^th century; it’s no longer a revelation for thinking people, but instead a boring ‘fact’ of our times. But here’s the thing: you still have to live in the world. This is what Salinger’s Zooey seems to get – what Seymour knew, but couldn’t put into practice. And it’s what Salinger seems to have understood, better and more fully in Franny and Zooey than in Catcher in the Rye: that irony, cynicism and self-referentiality are among the many tools at our disposal for expressing how we relate to the world, but as an ethos they are largely adolescent and empty.

This morning, for the first time since reading Franny and Zooey at age, oh, I dunno, 22, I woke up thinking I had made a conscious decision not to shine my shoes for the Fat Lady. Presented with the option of not turning in the annual review my university requires of its faculty, I decided to skip it. I chose to forego the bureaucratic task of describing my scholarly and professional efforts to my peers and supervisors so that they would see that I’ve worked hard this year, and know that I’m determined to behave like Every Inch The Professional, even though at this time no one is demanding that of me other than me. Instead, I woke up having decided to pursue this new thing I’m calling “good enough is good enough”. This is something academics have an extraordinarily hard time actually believing. But faced with the recent setback in my career as a scholar, as well as the physical, emotional and spiritual challenges of becoming a mother, it's something I very desperately need to wrap my head around for my own well-being and for that of my growing family.

It won't be easy because in a sense, I think I’ve come perilously close to becoming my own Fat Lady (now, in my eighth month of pregnancy, I am a literal fat lady of sorts). At very least, I’ve started conjuring her where she doesn’t belong. I’ve been misapprehending what she wants and needs from me. Little by little I’ve conflated the Fat Lady and the pursuit of perfection demanded by my academic career, which has robbed me of the belief, deep down, that good enough is good enough.

I will always, always shine my shoes for the Fat Lady. But from now on I will try harder to remember that she loves me.