Subject: Re: Hamilton Obituary
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Tue Jan 08 2002 - 16:05:58 GMT
'... I think it's ironic that Salinger is so centrally linked
to Hamilton ... the better known writer obscuring the work
of the lesser known ...'
Not just ironic, I think, but truly terrible.
I haven't read him (I try not to read anyone) but I
presume my horror is the kind of thing Bloom meant
by the anxiety of influence.
It seems that most of us infected with the lust to write
were first exposed through one, maybe two, seminal
artists - artists whose overarching influence we spend the rest
of our lives trying to escape.
As for so many others of the Thirties generation, for me,
it was Ernie Hemingway, but I suppose each wave has its
own man.
It's like growing out of a happy home, though. If you
haven't enjoyed its stimulation as a child you'll recognise yourself,
obscurely, as much deprived. And if you don't check out sooner
or later, at least emotionally, you'll never achieve man- or woman-
hood.
Same with a writer. It's pathetic to see on Heming-L,
for instance, all the gifted people who can only channel
their emotional & literary aspirations through the second-
hand eyes of a burnt out drunk, dead now these forty years.
If only they'd lived in Paris in the Twenties ... known Ezra
& Scott ... run with Mike & Cohn through the streets of
Pamplona ... sipped their pernod in a cave in the Guadalajara
... slept with Martha ....
Ah. If only....
But doesn't something much the same go on right here
in our own cosy little bananapool?
When I read all these pastiches of Holden as an old
boy, the alternative lives of Seymour, the fantasised
agonies in the Garden of Cornish....
I think. Come on, chaps. Get a life. Switch on
the processor & let's see what YOU are made of.
Without reference to Pencey or merrygorounds
or sweet little girls or my-oh-my chickensoup swamis.
Scottie B.
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