Re: Salinger-related article in Sept/Oct 2002 BOOK magazine

From: Scottie Bowman <rbowman@indigo.ie>
Date: Thu Aug 22 2002 - 14:24:37 EDT

    '... one can't get back to the pure state of reading;
    when one knew nothing about the author (not even
    his picture) ...'

    I couldn't agree more, Kim.

    Yet I wonder is it altogether deplorable that we can't
    enjoy the texts pure & unencrusted with all the biographical
    crap & gossip. The man & the work are, surely, finally
    indivisible. To pretend otherwise is to impose on oneself
    unrealistic strictures.

    When I see that handsome, saturnine face & read about
    the pre-war cafe society dandy, it confirms my assumptions
    about the chap who created the snobbish & privileged Holden
    - & somehow confirms my enjoyment of him. When I read
    War & Peace or Anna K., it pleases me to know that the writer
    was so completely at home in the drawing room & the battlefield.
    Hearing about that impossible, irresistible old aristocrat with the
    tragi-comic marriage & his crazy ideas & his bicycles & his self-taught
    Greek - all go to make up the entity TOLSTOY, of which the books
    are only the main components. They themselves would be the less
    without that extra knowledge & set of associations.

    I don't really think I should be QUITE as moved by a Schubert
    quartet if I didn't know about the unhappiness that informed much
    of his short life. Would Picasso's satyric figures be QUITE as
    exciting without the images of that sunburnt old goat with his arm
    round a twenty year old Parisienne?

    Il y en a plus que contient le texte. (Approx. Valèrie?)

    Scottie B.

-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
Received on Thu Aug 22 14:24:48 2002

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Sun Aug 10 2003 - 20:48:47 EDT