Re: Plot Plot Plot?

Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Tue, 23 Dec 1997 12:36:48 -0500 

Will said:

> DAve, I think plot is easier to discuss on a list but you are right to
> look at those word gems more closely...I'm often amazed with how mr.
> salinger finds a modifier that would be awkward and wrong in 99 out of 100
> sentences but he seems to know exactly when a wonderfully emotional and
> insightfully inserted modifier works...almost to perfection!  Thanks for
> making the fine point ab out language, will

It is impossible for me to go to any place of transportation (airport,
train, bus depot) and not recall the fine line in "Franny" that some people
should be permitted only a probationary pass to meet a train, because they
try to adopt a neutral expression.  Recently I got off a plane and went
through this myself, where I tried hard to adopt a stony face but
unfortunately I think I was grinning like a fool.

It's lines like that -- the narrator's throwaway remarks -- that make
Salinger stories so memorable.  That and the dialogue, of course.  The
perfect pitch that catches the italics that appear in only one syllable of
a long word.

Those inflections (in my opinion more than in Holden's narrative voice) are
what make Salinger as easy to parody as Hemingway.  For example, in A
Moveable Feast, Hemingway asks his wife if she wants to leave Paris to go
skiing, and the dialogue between them (in what is nominally a memoir) is
written in pure Hemingway, in the sense of "And then we'll get a bottle of
the good wine that is sold at a fine price in the store where you do not
tell your name."  "We'll get two bottles."  "We'll get two bottles and we
will eat and drink too, letting the good red wine warm us in ways we do not
understand."

Salinger's brilliance is in catching the sound of the times, without
seeming inordinately dated.  "Just Before the War with the Eskimos," for
example, could happen today, with a few changes of words and an updating of
what cabs cost.  And the image of the butler serving dinner from cans of
tennis balls ... that always makes me crack up out loud.

I regret that I'm writing this from a place where I have access to no
Hemingway or Salinger books, so I had to rely on paraphrase.

Just in general, to everyone on the list: what phrasing is, for you, the
absolute sound of Salinger's narrative voice?  What about a line of
dialogue?

For narrative, I'm kind of partial to the Franny line about meeting trains,
and for dialogue I love the business in "Bananafish" between Muriel and her
mother, when they talk about the dress they had looked at, and the woman
wearing it "was all hips."  It summed up, for me, an incredible range of
remarks I've heard between women when the subject is shopping.  (A sport
for which I have no skill or interest, I hasten to add.)

--tim