Re: intelligence of the author vs. intelligence of the characters

From: Kim Johnson <haikux2@yahoo.com>
Date: Mon Aug 26 2002 - 19:47:15 EDT

--- Jim Rovira <jrovira@drew.edu> wrote:
> So I guess the real question is, "Can a 'smart'
> author create a 'genius'
> character?"
>

when 'time' magazine was harassing salinger in the
early '60s for a cover article, i think they dug up
his iq test from grade school or some such time. i
don't recall the exact number but it was circa 115.

>
> There are ways of getting around this. A smart
> author can research. Plus, you
> don't even have to really directly depict the
> character. We have oodles of
> descriptions of Seymour's poetry, for example, but
> only four lines of poetry --
> and they're supposed to be juvenalia.

jim,
i think you're referring to the john keats poem. but
salinger also quotes seymour's death poem. twice. once
in 'zooey' where he gives the entire poem in english.
once he refers to it in 'seymour: an intoduction'
where he then says seymour wrote it in japanese and
buddy gives a prose paraphrase. any which way one
dices it--'the little girl on the plane/who turned her
doll's head around/to look at me'--it doesn't strike
me as poetry of the superlative level. though buddy
goes on and on about seymour's poems, i confess i
never totally believed these were the poems of one of
the few indispensable american poets.
 
> It's much easier to describe a genius, Wordsworthian
> level poet than to write
> his poetry :).

i secretly believe that the 184 poems are in existence
up there in cornish. salinger seems to have wanted to
be a poet, in addition to a dramatist, in the early
stages of his writing career. but i certainly don't
think the poems, IF they exist, are at the genius
level of the poets salinger professes to love: rilke,
keats, blake, coleridge, rimbaud, lorca & some others
from that list of writers
.
kim

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Received on Mon Aug 26 19:47:17 2002

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