Subject: Re: Seymour
oconnort@nyu.edu
Date: Wed Feb 12 1997 - 01:13:28 GMT
> tim, nice research on the hemingway/salinger nexus...I do have the
> letter's text (if it's the same one--i think jds wrote several and my
> source is the princeton library's rare books collection of story archives)
> and thought it was fawning but salinger seemed to imply that hemingway had
> taken an interest in the younger writer...anything more on that? will
JDS *was* fawning all over the "heroic" writer, it's true. (I don't
mean that to sound ironic. I am a tremendous admirer of Hemingway.)
And you may be right about the source of that letter. I have a folder
of them (all for research purposes, of course), and don't recall the
source of each. A lot came from Princeton.
>From what I remember in a Hemingway biography, JDS showed a few story
manuscripts to Hemingway, and Hemingway is quoted as saying, "He has
a hell of a talent." Of course, I don't know who he said that to, and
I've always been curious about why, during the rest of his life,
Hemingway didn't say a single word about Salinger in any of his
published letters.
You'd think that anyone as competitive as Hemingway would have had some
reaction to the success of Catcher in the Rye. Especially since in
Catcher, Holden says some unflattering things about A Farewell to Arms.
I don't know of any connection between them after that Paris meeting.
A shame, too -- it could have been interesting!
I harvested a lot of material at Princeton and a couple of other
libraries ... but that was before Salinger went back and copyrighted
everything in sight. I don't know if it's possible anymore to acquire
copies of the library material. It was, as Holden might have said, a
crumby deal for researchers.
--tim o'connor
P.S. I think a couple of people mentioned bouncing mail. There is one
subscriber address on the list that is no longer valid, and when you
send mail to the list, that one address bounces the message back to you.
The rest of the subscribers get the mail.
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