Re: through a Glass darkly
Brendan McKennedy (suburbantourist@hotmail.com)
Sun, 18 Jan 1998 20:53:26 -0800 (PST)
> The New York that Mr Salvaggio portrays is indeed a
> stressful one - but it's not quite the privileged environment
> of good schools & glamorous jobs which most of Salinger's
> characters enjoy. I can't offhand recall any of his protagonists
> seriously worried about finding work, or having enough money
> or being unattractive or having to face a wasting illness.
> Their troubles are the troubles of the greatly favoured.
I have to disagree, not with your syntax but with your sentiment, mostly
based on "Pretty Mouth" and "Uncle Wiggly". Salinger's characters are
very well-off, and have great jobs, but they are so caught up in these
jobs and glamourous lives that they have forgotten how to exist as human
beings, and terrible, very serious, mental illness ensues.
I wonder, do you have the same impression of Fitzgerald? In Gatsby, he
portrayed the same loss of humanity through superficial importance. The
main differences between Gatsby and "Pretty Mouth" is that in Gatsby, we
have the fortunate eye of a less-fortunate, grounded Midwesterner who
judges the characters for us, whereas in "Pretty Mouth" we must deduce
for ourselves that being Privileged is a very dangerous curse. The
other difference is that we know little about Salinger's life--which
means that he wasn't infamously rich--while we know that Fitzgerald was
an extremely privileged person who lived--and published--the exact sort
of life that he condemns in Gatsby.
Brendan
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