Re: a confused response to a bunch of posts

Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Sat, 08 Aug 1998 11:39:47 -0500 

> Aw, hell...I knew I should have gotten the hell off this list before I
> found out that Salinger was Humbert Humbert.  But about this Maynard
> thing...it seems we're selectively believing what she says.  We don't
> believe the pizza thing, but we enthusiastically dig the two hidden
> novels idea...  However, I'll have to agree with the novels thing.  I
> think that Salinger merely stopped publishing, not writing.  I think he
> was just sick and tired of his own admiring bog.

Gee, don't bail out yet!

I don't know that Humbert Humbert is the best description -- as Sonny said,
humans are often weak about temptations of the flesh, and we don't really
know what went on; one-sided accounts are often tricky.  There was a
biography of Edward Hopper that was published a couple of years ago, and it
was big and authoritative, but it turns out that a large part of the book
was drawn from the journals kept by Jo Hopper, Edward's wife.  They had a
strange relationship.  She had a lifelong sense of persecution (quite a bit
of it justified, because she was ignored as a painter because she was
Hopper's wife, and because she was a woman in a time when women were not
considered capable of being serious painters), and she directed much of her
hostility toward her husband.  To read the biography, you would think he
was a monster.  But a little outside research showed a significant number
of people who knew them and who utterly dispute the picture of him she
created in her journals.

As far as the pizza thing, I can imagine that.  There's no reason to think
that Salinger is above the kind of strange eating disorders that afflict so
many of us!

> Yeah, why didn't he just get a pen name?  Or is Salinger his pen name?
> Never mind.  I guess he just didn't expect a frenzy when he published
> Catcher, and after that it would have been too late to camouflauge any
> of the other stories with a pen name.

I think that's pretty accurate.  He just left the country when Catcher was
published, and seems to have been startled by the success.  Anyway, the
Hamilton book and the letters that didn't make it into the Hamilton book
show us that he had as much naked ambition as any young writer, and that he
picked up quick techniques to get his work published in places like the
Saturday Evening Post and Colliers.  I'd say his advice was drawn from
life.  But sure, he went through quite a strange conversion between the
youth who wrote work for Story and the more mature person who published in
the New Yorker.  By the time he was publishing in the New Yorker, he seems
to have matured both personally and professionally, and that seems to be
when his odd habits began.

At least to the extent that we can see from the outside world.

I hope you stay on the list (ditto for anyone else who feels that the
topics have taken a strange turn).  Everyone we admire has the proverbial
clay feet if we look at them closely enough.  If you loved his work before,
then you'll probably continue to love it.

--tim o'connor