By Stuart Mitchner

Here are two thoughts about the power outage that occurred around 11 p.m. Monday night as I was writing about Princeton’s role in J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, a first edition of which is among the featured volumes in the upcoming Friends of the Library Book Sale.

First, it gave me an excuse to get out my little booklight and dive at random into Shakespeare, the same refuge I found when Sandy hit. As the power came on I was reading aloud, with requisite angst, the last lines of Shylock’s Act III rant in The Merchant of Venice: “… loss upon loss! the thief gone with so much, and so much to find the thief; and no satisfaction, no revenge: nor no ill luck stirring but what lights on my shoulders; no sighs but of my breathing; no tears but of my shedding.”

Second thought: it could have been worse, if, say, the television had gone dark during the previous night’s NLCS Game 2 after the Giants came back to tie the Cardinals on a wild pitch in the top of the ninth. The outage would have deprived Cardinal fans like myself of the brief stunned transition between dejection and joy as the uncanny Kolten Wong lofts a mighty walk-off home run on the second pitch thrown by Sergio Romo, who looks like he could have been a captain of the guard in Shylock’s Venice.

Baseball, beautiful baseball — it’s October and once again the Cardinals find some magic. What a sight, music to the eyes, the way the crowd in the right field stands seems to rise en masse with the arc of the ball soaring toward them, as if Busch Stadium had turned into a giant concertina being squeezed by a blind street singer with his head in the stars. Then the sight of Kolten Wong hopping and skipping in lunatic glee around the bases to be mobbed by his teammates, who tear off the top of his uniform as if he were a rock star thrown on the mercy of the mosh pit.

Day-to-day following a team with which you feel a lifelong visceral connection, every win gives your spirits a lift and every loss leaves you shaking your head and telling yourself “life goes on.”

Ted Williams in Princeton?

Speaking of baseball, another featured volume at this year’s Book Sale is a first edition of My Turn At Bat, the autobiography of the great Ted Williams, who only played in one World Series. On the unlikely chance that the Splendid Splinter might have found some reason to visit our town with the other celebrities who rode the Dinky to the terminus on University Place, I took a look online and found “Ted Williams connected to Princeton forever …. Called by some the best hitter ever in baseball, he visited Princeton on a regular basis and ended up marrying a Princeton woman.”

I thought the genies of the Net were kidding. Could it be? No, it’s the Princeton in Minnesota, where if you happened to drop in at the Kallas Cafe on the corner of Rum River Drive and First Street in the 1940s, your chances of seeing The Kid were pretty good. Just don’t ask for his autograph.

The Dinky Connection

Writing about Franny and Zooey on the front page of the Sept. 17, 1961 New York Times Book Review, John Updike begins his recap of “Franny” like this: “In the first story, she arrives by train from a Smith-like college to spend the week-end of the Yale game at what must be Princeton.”

There’s no “must be” about it. Though the evidence may be circumstantial, it can be shown beyond the shadow of a dinky doubt that Salinger had Princeton’s station and its platform in mind when he wrote the opening paragraphs of “Franny,” which first appeared in the Jan. 29, 1955 New Yorker and created a sensation, attracting more mail than any work of fiction in the magazine’s history.

Dinky lovers still smarting from the violation of the terminus have good reason to feel a wistful fondness for the opening pages of Franny and Zooey. Salinger prevails and endures among American writers of the last half of the 20th century because of his ability to make everything he touches matter, illuminating a scene or a moment so that it stands for all such scenes and moments. It’s the same way with Salinger in Central Park. He owns it for the ages. It’s his as soon as Holden Caulfield asks the cab driver about the ducks or watches kids ride the carousel, and when Salinger’s readers go there, they’re in his and Holden’s world, just as they’re in his and Franny’s when they get off the Dinky and alight on the platform — except the platform’s not there any more. Never mind, it will always be there in literature because Salinger will always be read.

His readers are, as they say, legion. Like The Catcher in the Rye (1951) ten years before it, Franny and Zooey went right to the top of the New York Times Best-Seller list and held on for 25 weeks. Readers smitten with Holden Caulfield gravitated to anything new by his creator, and whether you read of her in The New Yorker or in the book, Franny was a charmingly vulnerable, perceptive, and wary-of-phonies incarnation of Holden.

The Princeton Connection

Salinger’s stated admiration for Scott Fitzgerald underscores the Princeton connection in “Franny.” Besides more than once acknowledging Fitzgerald as an influence and an inspiration, Salinger suggests as much in his work when Holden admits he was “crazy about The Great Gatsby. Old Gatsby. Old sport. That killed me.”

There’s a prototype for Salinger’s Dinky opening in the episode in Fitzgerald’s Princeton novel This Side of Paradise, where a precursor to Franny, the “blithesome Phyllis,” steps “gayly from the train” only to see her boyfriend and a fellow Princeton student on the platform “arrayed to the last dot like the lurid figures on college posters. They had bought flaring suits with huge peg-top trousers and gigantic padded shoulders. On their heads were rakish college hats, pinned up in front and sporting bright orange-and-black bands, while from their celluloid collars blossomed flaming orange ties. They wore black arm-bands with orange ‘P’s,’ and carried canes flying Princeton pennants, the effect completed by socks and peeping handkerchiefs in the same color motifs.”

In Salinger’s version, the platform is the setting for a no less collegiate opening as Princeton students await the arrival of girlfriends or dates. Franny’s English major boyfriend, Lane, is outside the waiting room rereading her latest letter, after which he endures a brief exchange with a classmate who wants to know “what this bastard Rilke was all about,” a reminder that you’re in the domain of the author of one of the most famous first sentences in American literature, with its reference to “all that David Copperfield kind of crap.”

The style takes a clear turn in Fitzgerald’s direction when the boys, who have been keeping warm in the waiting room, come out to meet the train, “most of them giving the impression of having at least three lighted cigarettes in each hand.” You don’t have to read far in Gatsby or in Fitzgerald’s best stories or the notebook entries in The Crack-Up to find similarly clever word-pictures. A touch that evokes Fitzgerald’s way of expressing the poetry of Gatsby’s devotion to Daisy Buchanan is in Lane’s intimate relationship with Franny’s “sheared raccoon coat,” the sight of which rouses the thought that he’s the only one on the platform “who really knew Franny’s coat” and could remember “that once, in a borrowed car, after kissing Franny for a half hour or so, he had kissed her coat lapel, as though it were a perfectly desirable, organic extension of the person herself.”

A Station-Platform Kiss

Then there’s the moment when Franny and Lane embrace: “She threw her arms around him and kissed him. It was a station-platform kiss — spontaneous enough to begin with, but rather uninhibited in the follow-through, and with somewhat of a forehead-bumping aspect.”

I have no idea how many station-platform kisses have been described in stories and novels through the ages, but this is the one, the exemplar, the common denominator, the ultimate station-platform kiss that puts the Dinky on the literary map, there for all time as part of the Complete Chronicle of the Glass Family that will reportedly see the light between 2015 and 2020.

The Cool Lima Bean

Three decades ago, in the days when libraries still attached cards with the borrowers’ names to the inside back pages of books, I was looking at a book in the stacks of Firestone Library and did a double take: the name written on the card was Matthew Salinger. Like numerous other readers of Franny and Zooey I’d first seen that name on the dedication page with its reference to “Matthew Salinger, age one, urging a luncheon companion to accept a cool lima bean.” It was Salinger’s characteristically playful way of dedicating “this pretty skimpy-looking book” to that “lover of the long shot,” his editor at The New Yorker, William Shawn. Twenty years later Matthew Salinger was a Princeton student. I suppose it could be mere coincidence that his son would end up at the school in the story. Though Matthew didn’t graduate (he transferred to Columbia, earning a degree in art history and drama), you don’t have to be “a lover of the long shot” to figure that he spent plenty of time departing and arriving at the station his father captured for posterity, and isn’t it possible that he’d have been there to meet him on the Dinky at least once?

Finally, in the context of posterity and Salinger and Princeton, the Salinger Mecca for biographers and fans is the archive of manuscripts in the Rare Book and Special Collection department of Firestone Library.