>GETTING BACK TO SALINGER.... I have often wondered (as so many of us have) >what ear was at the other end of Holden's monologue. Sometimes I imagine a >befuddled Viennese fellow with beard and spectacles (the perverse part of >me likes to imagine this, someone like Muriel's mother's analyst as I >imagine that man), and sometimes I have imagined (nobody throw anything at >me) it's Seymour, or even Buddy. I'm not throwing this at you, only passing it the way my brother used to pass a basketball to my face with the advice, "THINK FAST." I realize it was only a sort of speculation, but I have a very hard time thinking Holden was giving his story to Seymour or Buddy; I think they would have been so aggravating to him that we would scarecely have gotten through the first couple of chapters. I imagine Seymour sitting on a bar stool next to Holden, nodding his head through the entire story, grinning wildly, loving the whole story, until Holden finally says, "What the hell do you think is so goddam funny?" Buddy, of course, would have launched in with his own take on the story before it ever began, and we would have ended up with "Holden: An Introduction." Don't get me wrong...I love Seymour's character, though I'm not sure I would have found him tolerable in real life...I'm sure some of the writers on the list know what I mean...You've created such a great character, one who does all the work for you, a character of whom you are so proud until you meet someone just like him or her, and you can't stand that incarnation of your lovely brainchild. Buddy I find less tolerable than Seymour, although I'm while his writing frustrates me it also attracts me--it's so audaciously adverse to the stipulations of his contemporaries. Brendan ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com