Subject: Re: What are people reading?
From: Tim O'Connor (oconnort@nyu.edu)
Date: Fri Feb 04 2000 - 18:36:26 EST
On Fri, Feb 04, 2000 at 10:09:22AM -0800, citycabn wrote:
> > Old Joe Mitchell did a Salinger of
> >his own; after he published in the 1960s in the New Yorker, he went
> >something like 30 years of coming to the office and confronting what
> >is presumed to be writer's block, after a very prolific career. I've
> >often wondered if he and Salinger might have bumped into each other
> >-- and that Mitchell would have been able to write a devastatingly
> >insightful profile of Salinger, if given the chance.
>
> Am I to infer you suspect JDS, like Mitchell, actually had/has writer's
> block (and not a publishing block) or do I misread?
I wouldn't be surprised if he had some block somewhere there (especially
if the feedback from Hapworth were bloody), but I was generically
referring to his long period of silence when he was nominally going in
to work each day.
If a man has a nervous breakdown, as Salinger possibly did after the
war, then is it not possible that he could have another, triggered by
... anything? Rejection by the public. Rejection by his family.
Rejection by friends like William Maxwell. Hell, it could have been
because of a plugged-up toilet. As one whose nerves are not steel and
concrete, I speak as one who thinks a blocked sewage line is as
enervating as a blocked emotion.
Mostly, though, I think of the two ghostly souls bumping into each other
in the old narrow NYer hallways.
--tim
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