Salinger snippet in this week's chronicle of higher ed
WILL HOCHMAN (hochman@uscolo.edu)
Mon, 11 Jan 1999 18:43:15 -0700 (MST)
In the "Melange" section of the Chronicle of Higher Education (1/8/99) on
page B10, an excerpt from Richard Elman's _Namedropping:Mostly Literary
Memoirs_, our man J.D. Salinger is remembered by the Mostly Literary
author as "another grayer version perhaps of the Central Park camp
counselor who appears in his early stories." Does Elman mistakenly mean
John Gedsudski from "The Laughing Man" (which is not really an early story
and it is the only appearance of such a camp counselor)???
Elman asked "Jerry" (the incidents of their meetings were the result of
their kids going to the same school in lake placid) about writing and says
JDS said he was writing all the time and didn't seem to mind talking about
his writing...but when Elman pressed about a book,
"'My book?' His voice was low, confident, and confidential, from the
driver's seat of his Jaguar sedan where he sat behind the wheel.
'Richard,' he said, 'it's really nice not to have to publish anything
until the work is completed...and that's real nice, Richard.'"
I'm not sure what to make of this report except that it echoes other
reported conversations about Salinger talking about his writing and
not publishing, and that Elman is too wellknown a lit crit to down play
this unless he thought it was not much to begin with...
will