Subject: Re: Alsen's royal pain
From: Tim O'Connor (oconnort@nyu.edu)
Date: Mon Jan 31 2000 - 20:59:44 EST
On Mon, Jan 31, 2000 at 04:33:33PM -0800, citycabn wrote:
> I don't think Seymour switches from one form of yoga to another like so many
> brands of vitamins. I even don't think _he_ would assert he was following
> any particular form of yoga at any particular time. (The idea that he
> married Muriel to advance toward Go! on the Monopoly Board of Enlightenment
> really seems a stretch.)
I'm not positing anything here, but in the last few weeks I've been
shuffling the Glass books and the stories in my bag, reading to and from
work, and I have observations on a number of items, but I've decided to
limit myself to one topic per message. (Besides, I haven't time to do
them all at once.)
There's always been something that bothered me about Seymour and Muriel.
Not only the unlikely pairing (I remain unconvinced of ... something ...
despite Seymour's diary entries.)
I see details like this:
Muriel's little magazine, with the prominent article entitled "Sex is
Fun -- or Hell." I wonder which it is for her -- or if it is either.
*
The bride's family gives Seymour fishy looks in 1942 because he hadn't
"seduced" Muriel by then.
*
The groom presumably spent much time between 1942 and the end of the
war (1945, perhaps as late as '46, depending on military circumstances)
separated from his wife to some extent.
*
In 1948, it's like a second honeymoon (if we accept that the couple
went on a real honeymoon at all after the elopement in 1942, and if we
believe Muriel when she says, in "Bananafish," "This is the first
vacation I've had in years").
*
In 1948, when they've presumably been married six years, much of it
spent apart, they have a hotel room with twin beds. Since when does a
healthy young couple, on their first vacation in years, take a hotel
room with twin beds? (Granted, Muriel complains that they couldn't get
the room they had before the war, but it doesn't sound like the
complaint of a woman who is going to try sleeping with her husband on a
twin bed.) (As an aside, in "Zooey," too, note that we learn during the
painting of the apartment that Bessie and Les also have twin beds.)
*
In "Bananafish," while Muriel is waiting for her call to go through,
we're told she is wearing "her white silk dressing gown, which was all
that she was wearing, except mules -- her rings were in the bathroom."
I know no married women (even those who love to paint their nails), who
take off their wedding bands except for extraordinary reasons.
*
All these details -- and perhaps a couple I've overlooked in "Roofbeam,"
make me wonder exactly what type of relationship Seymour and Muriel
have. There is no reference to their conjugal home (has Muriel been
living with her parents for the duration of the war?) or of any kind
of physical or emotional relations between them in 1948.
Seymour records her imperfections, her quirks, her likes and dislikes,
in his diary in 1942, but they seem like the words of a man trying to
convince himself of something he knows is not true. Trying to be happy.
There's an old Actor's Studio trick when you've got a character you are
creating on stage; if that character is supposed to be happy, and you
cannot summon the sense memory to FEEL that happiness, the fallback is
to force your facial muscles to smile. Doing so, strangely enough,
elicits the feeling of smiling, and helps you create your role more
convincingly. That is what Seymour's diary resembles, as I read it.
The narrative of a man trying to be, as he would say, Happy. But the
entries sound hollow -- all but the one in which he can't make it to the
city to meet her, and instead of pretending to be disappointed, Muriel
lets it lie there, not trying to make excuses or to make Seymour feel
good or bad.
And we know from "Bananafish" that he has had some kind of episode "with
the trees" in a car some time before the trip to Florida, perhaps
causing the couple to be apart even more between the end of the war and
the time of "Bananafish" in 1948.
All this makes me wonder. Sure, she's his "Miss Spiritual Tramp of
1948," and sure, they're on the beach, with Seymour strangely isolated
(think of his answer to Sybil when she asks him where his wife is), and
sure, his diary records notations of joy. But where is his diary on
this trip? Why no mention in "Bananafish" of the poem written by him
on the desk blotter? Why the barren tone, the waste-land feeling, the
sense that he is in exactly the wrong place? Has the handgun nudged the
diary out of the bag during this trip?
In short, what kind of relationship are we witnessing? Or, in
Salingerese, is it a marriage, or a Marriage? Because despite Seymour's
diary observation that married partners are to serve each other, the man
in room 507 does not strike me as being someone married at all, except
as a matter of fact resulting from a marriage ceremony. Indeed, one
can't help wondering if he has yet "seduced" the bride.
Something, like U.S. pennies of recent years, rings absurdly false when
I read about Seymour and Muriel, and think of them sharing a life
together. And I say that not as a flight of fancy; the details above
are enough of an accretion to make me wonder.
Any observations? Dishes to throw in my general direction? Details I
may have missed?
--tim o'connor
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