Subject: Re: Garcon! One straitjacket for the road!!!
From: Tim O'Connor (oconnort@nyu.edu)
Date: Sun Dec 31 2000 - 13:30:20 GMT
On Sun, Dec 31, 2000 at 12:19:42PM -0500, Jive Monkey wrote:
> ps do you secretly want to scream "Digression!!!" at him for writing
> hapworth?
I have said here, before, that I enjoy digressions. But I don't
consider "Hapworth" a digression or a story full of digressions.
Rather, I see it as a story that doesn't work -- consider the way,
say, you reacted to "The Inverted Forest," a story that works
significantly better than "Hapworth" does.
It's Salinger's business to write whatever makes him happy, sure.
But that doesn't mean his readers will automatically thrill to what
they read.
It's every writer's business to follow that internal voice and write
what he has to write. Sometimes writers will find an audience for
that work. Sometimes not. Sometimes it will take a long time (think:
Herman Melville) for readers to catch up to what a writer was doing
or thinking in his time.
Whatever Salinger has stowed away in his safe, it is what it is; let
us hope he doesn't "fuss" (his term) with it any more, and let it
survive to see publication one day when the timing is right. Some of
us are bound to be grateful to see even unworkable material; some of
us will be delighted to read anything; some of us will wait to hear
word-of-mouth. It's like any other writer's life work.
The most important thing, if the voice is in the writer's head, is to
get it all down on paper while it's still fresh. We can all sort the
rest of it out later on. People can take sides, form camps, sort
themselves into sections of opinions, whatever. There's not much more
we can speculate until word trickles out of Cornish to the unwashed
masses of us down here. <grin>
--tim o'connor
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