a thought

Scottie Bowman (bowman@mail.indigo.ie)
Sun, 09 Aug 1998 16:02:06 +0000 

	The September issue of Vanity Fair hasn't yet reached this part 
	of the world so I've had to make do with an article in today's 
	Observer reporting all the excitement whipped up by Joyce Maynard's 
	revelations.

	There's one apparently fairly recent photograph of Salinger 
	unloading a supermarket trolley for his wife - & another of 
	Miss Maynard.  JD, wearing a casual shirt very much like my own, 
	looks eminently reasonable, not angry, not frightened, not startled, 
	just preoccupied handing over the packages & getting on with life 
	generally.  Joyce, on the other hand, is pictured staring 
	exophthalmically at the camera as tense & neurotic as you'd expect 
	any poor woman to be with the personal history she ascribes 
	to herself.  On these appearances, certainly, it's a no-contest win 
	for our hero.

	At the same time, I'm pretty sure we shall all come to accept 
	the essential truth of what she reports.  And quite a number will 
	be disjointed to think such lofty thoughts & writing could proceed 
	from such mean roots.  I think I can already hear the apologists 
	& rationalisers switching on their grindstones in preparation for 
	axe sharpening.  The woman is a fantasist, or a money grubber or 
	a scorned lover ....or whatever...   Or these little foibles are 
	just what you'd expect from a man of genius & regardless of 
	his personal struggles with the ego his message remains as true 
	as the Christian message remains pure after all the Borgia Popes ... 
	or whatever...

	But what about another possibility.  Maybe Salinger is simply 
	an entertainer.  Maybe that's what all artists are.  Some people 
	are good at telling stories, others at building model cathedrals 
	out of matchsticks.  They're simply knacks.  No special merit 
	should be ascribed to their possessors.  Are we all quite sure 
	that the artists we call great are not simply those who have managed 
	to sell us the loftier sounding ideas ?  We're flattered - as apes 
	would be - to think ourselves in touch with the transcendental.  
	But maybe there's no such thing as the transcendental.  Maybe that's 
	all just warm muffins for consumption by gullible adolescents.  
	The irridescence of a soap bubble is charming.  But the bubble lasts 
	no more than a second or two & cannot carry the smallest weight.  
	Maybe there really is nowhere other than that darkling plain where 
	ignorant armies clash by night.

	In which case we shouldn't feel the need to apologise for an old 
	vaudeville man who has some funny ideas about his diet & 
	a weakness for impressionable young women.

	Scottie B.