Re: More Chuckles from the Laughing Man

Camille Scaysbrook (c_scaysbrook@yahoo.com)
Tue, 10 Aug 1999 09:57:23 +1000

Steven T. Byrd wrote:
> Fishers,
>
> 	Am I the only who sees the Laughing Man as being a brilliant,
> creative, infernally clever story about the relationship between writers
> and their fiction? Sure there's the lost love angle, and the loss of
> innocence stuff (both of which I love...probably too much), but I think
> Salinger is trying to tell us something about art and creativity here,
> too. The whole story strikes me as the answer that Buddy would give if a
> well meaning psychiatrist ever asked him, "So, why do you write?"
>
> 		-stephen icarust

The Laughing Man has always stood as my favourite 9 Story next to De
Daumier Smith (and ain't I in a minority there!?) and I think this is an
interesting angle on it. When we think of how Salinger often taunts us with
the promise of biography - meeting with, but diverging ever so slightly
from Buddy Glass, placing temptingly real Esmes and Sybils in our path -
but ultimately frustrates our attempts to construe him as a straight
autobiographist. Isn't it appropriate that the writer who hasn't let us
come into his house for thirty years should be the one to tease us so
openly? I've sometimes tried to figure out what's going on in the coach's
life by examining what's going on in the stories - but from all but the
last story you'd need a lot of mumbo-jumbo to justify your `discoveries'.
Is Salinger exhibiting the same impulse, that of our instinct to find the
truth behind the fiction? It's odd that I'd never considered before that
the story is primarily about fiction, the interaction between real life and
fiction, and the betrayal of real life in comparison. Interesting when you
consider that Salinger has basically escaped the Mary Hudsons and headed
clear for the weekly adventure serials in his own life. He uses our
instinct to play with it, especially in stories such as Esme and in the
character of Buddy Glass.

I've always been attracted to real-life stories, but I sometimes surprise
myself with my reactions to them. The favourite books of my youth were (and
still are) Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie series. Yet
only a few years ago I was devastated to find out that some of the
characters were composites of several people. Somehow the knowledge that
the characters had once lived and breathed - no matter how accurately they
were represented in the text - enriched the stories for me. On the other
hand, when I discovered that Katherine Mansfield's `Prelude' was
autobiographical I was very disappointed; somehow it diminished her powers
of imagination, it was much nicer to imagine that she had taken such real
and clever characters from her mind rather than simply observing them from
real life.

Wow, for a simple-ish story there's a lot to examine here!

(P.S. Yes, I DO think Mary Hudson is pregnant! (: The appearance of a baby
carriage seems an almost cinematic way of conveying that fact.)

Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com



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