Franny and Zooey: List 1

The rest were standing around in hatless, smoky little groups of twos and threes and fours inside the heated waiting room, talking in voices that, almost without exception, sounded collegiately dogmatic, as though each young man, in his strident, conversational turn, was clearing up, once and for all, some highly controversial issue, one that the outside, non-matriculating world had been bungling, provocatively or not, for centuries.

The rest were standing around in hatless, smoky little groups of twos and threes and fours inside the heated waiting room, talking in voices that, almost without exception, sounded collegiately dogmatic, as though each young man, in his strident, conversational turn, was clearing up, once and for all, some highly controversial issue, one that the outside, non-matriculating world had been bungling, provocatively or not, for centuries.

The rest were standing around in hatless, smoky little groups of twos and threes and fours inside the heated waiting room, talking in voices that, almost without exception, sounded collegiately dogmatic, as though each young man, in his strident, conversational turn, was clearing up, once and for all, some highly controversial issue, one that the outside, non-matriculating world had been bungling, provocatively or not, for centuries.

Incidentally I’ve taken your advice and resorted to the dictionary a lot lately, so if it cramps my style your to blame.

“Delicate Adonis is dying, Cytherea, what shall we do? Beat your breasts, maidens, and rend your tunics.”

I hate you when your being hopelessly super-male and retiscent (sp.?). Not really hate you but am constitutionally against strong, silent men.

P.S. Daddy got his X-rays back from the hospital and we’re all so relieved. Its a growth but it isn’t malignent.

Lane, who knew Sorenson only slightly but had a vague, categorical aversion to his face and manner, put away his letter and said that he didn’t know but that he thought he’d understood most of it.

Lane, who knew Sorenson only slightly but had a vague, categorical aversion to his face and manner, put away his letter and said that he didn’t know but that he thought he’d understood most of it.

His voice carried with a minimum of vitality, as though he had come over to speak to Lane out of boredom or restiveness, not for any sort of human discourse.

Lane spotted her immediately, and despite whatever it was he was trying to do with his face, his arm that shot up into the air was the whole truth. Franny saw it, and him, and waved extravagantly back.

Sometimes it was hell to conceal her impatience over the male of the species’ general ineptness, and Lane’s in particular.

When the drinks had first been served to them, ten or fifteen minutes earlier, Lane had sampled his, then sat back and briefly looked around the room with an almost palpable sense of well-being at finding himself (he must have been sure no one could dispute) in the right place with an unimpeachably right-looking girl—a girl who was not only extraordinarily pretty but, so much the better, not too categorically cashmere sweater and flannel skirt.

When the drinks had first been served to them, ten or fifteen minutes earlier, Lane had sampled his, then sat back and briefly looked around the room with an almost palpable sense of well-being at finding himself (he must have been sure no one could dispute) in the right place with an unimpeachably right-looking girl—a girl who was not only extraordinarily pretty but, so much the better, not too categorically cashmere sweater and flannel skirt.

But by some old, standing arrangement with her psyche, she elected to feel guilty for having seen it, caught it, and sentenced herself to listen to Lane’s ensuing conversation with a special semblance of absorption.

But by some old, standing arrangement with her psyche, she elected to feel guilty for having seen it, caught it, and sentenced herself to listen to Lane’s ensuing conversation with a special semblance of absorption.

He was slouched rhetorically forward, toward Franny, his receptive audience, a supporting forearm on either side of his Martini.

Apparently her self-imposed sentence of unadulterated good-listenership had been fully served.

Then, as though he had suddenly become exhausted—or, rather, depleted by the demands made on him by a world greedy for the fruit of his intellect—he began to massage the side of his face with the flat of his hand, removing, with unconscious crassness, a bit of sleep from one eye.

He reflected, looking a trifle morose.

“As a matter of fact, I don’t think there’ve been any really incisive jobs done on him in the last—”

Where I go, the English Department has about ten little section men running around ruining things for people, and they’re all so brilliant they can hardly open their mouths—pardon the contradiction. I mean if you get into an argument with them, all they do is get this terribly benign expression on their—

Quite probably, he resented and feared any signs of detachment in a girl he was seriously dating.

She smiled at Lane—in a sense, genuinely—and at that moment a smile in return might at least have mitigated to some small extent certain events that were to follow, but Lane was busy affecting a brand of detachment of his own, and chose not to smile back.

“I’m just so sick of pedants and conceited little tearer-downers I could scream.”

“Let’s not talk about it,” she said, almost listlessly, squashing her cigarette stub in the ashtray.

I mean do you have to be a goddam bohemian type, or dead, for Chrissake, to be a real poet?

The ones you’re talking about don’t leave a single, solitary thing beautiful. All that maybe the slightly better ones do is sort of get inside your head and leave something there, but just because they do, just because they know how to leave something, it doesn’t have to be a poem, for heaven’s sake. It may just be some kind of terribly fascinating, syntaxy droppings—excuse the expression.

He looked over at the sheared-raccoon coat, which lay somewhat askew over the back of Franny’s vacant chair—the same coat that had excited him at the station, by virtue of his singular familiarity with it—and he examined it now with all but unqualified disaffection.

The ladies’ room at Sickler’s was almost as large as the dining room proper, and, in a special sense, appeared to be hardly less commodious.

She stood for a moment—rather as though it were a rendezvous point of some kind—in the middle of the tiled floor.

She cried without trying to suppress any of the noisier manifestations of grief and confusion, with all the convulsive throat sounds that a hysterical child makes when the breath is trying to get up through a partly closed epiglottis.

Her face tear-streaked but quite expressionless, almost vacuous, she picked up her handbag from the floor, opened it, and took out the small pea-green clothbound book.

“Oh. I remember....Listen, don’t hate me because I can’t remember some person immediately. Especially when they look like everybody else, and talk and dress and act like everybody else.” Franny made her voice stop. It sounded to her cavilling...

There’s an unwritten law that people in a certain social or financial bracket can name-drop as much as they like just as long as they say something terribly disparaging about the person as soon as they’ve dropped his name—that he’s a bastard or a nymphomaniac or takes dope all the time, or something horrible.

The waiter, who was not a young man, seemed to look for an instant at her pallor and damp brow, then bowed and left.

His voice sounded sympathetic, kind, in spite of some perverse attempt to make it sound matter-of-fact.

I mean it starts out with this peasant—the pilgrim—wanting to find out what it means in the Bible when it says you should pray incessantly. You know. Without stopping. In Thessalonians or someplace. So he starts out walking all over Russia, looking for somebody who can tell him how to pray incessantly.

Anyway, so the pilgrim learns how to pray the way these very mystical persons say you should—I mean he keeps at it till he’s perfected it and everything.

She broke off. Lane was shifting restively in his chair, and there was an expression on his face—a matter of raised eyebrows, chiefly—that she knew very well.