who he ?
Scottie Bowman (bowman@mail.indigo.ie)
Sun, 02 Aug 1998 18:14:04 +0000
JD asks: `Who exactly is Buddy Glass ?'
The only possible answer is also the most trite. Buddy is
J.D.Salinger. As is Seymour, Sergeant X., Bessie, Phoebe,
Sybil....
But when Jerome was being these various characters - suffering
their emotions, walking their walk, feeling the way the words rose
to their mouth & so on - on quite a number of occasions & during
these moments of creative imagination he was almost certainly
possessed at the same time with how it might have been with certain
actual other persons who inhabited or had inhabited his particular
corner of the universe.
So that the hunt for the various possible Sybils is quite a valid
one. In a very high proportion of cases, I believe, the fictional
character is prompted by memory of the actual. Writers vary
in their frankness about all this. Some of the great ones -
Hemingway, Proust, Trollope come to mind - made no attempt
to disguise the fact they had often deliberately aimed at an actual
reproduction. The distortion, the caricaturing, the blending of
traits, is the `creative', individual contribution of the artist.
But I find it very hard to think there is not always some germ cell
from the `real' world.
It's when there's no such germ that you get the cardboard cutout,
the universally applicable, the intractably lifeless character.
Scottie B.