Subject: olives, Phoebe, roll call, Faulkner & Jennifer
From: citycabn (citycabn@gateway.net)
Date: Thu Jul 27 2000 - 16:16:59 GMT
from _The Catcher_:
"He [Luce] never said hello or anything when he met you. The first thing he
said when he sat down was that he could only stay a couple of minutes. He
said he had a date. Then he ordered a dry Martini. He told the bartender
to make it very dry, and no olive."
Holden had a couple of Scotch and sodas before Luce arrived. (He was
unsuccessful with his order of a Scotch and soda at the Lavender Room.)
Mr. Antolini stuck with highballs at his place.
Didn't meet up with any other olives.
Though I must say the thing that most caught my eye while splashing about
was this paragraph:
"When I got back to D.B.'s room, old Phoebe'd turned the radio on. This
dance music was coming out. She'd turned it low, though, so the maid
wouldn't hear it. You should've seen her. She was sitting smack in the
middle of the bed, outside the covers, with her legs folded like one of
those Yogi guys. She was listening
to the music. She kills me."
***
I've stupidly deleted my inbox and lack the earlier posts. But I recall
mention of JDS & Joyce & Faulkner. All that sent me back to JDS's roll call
of c. 1950, which should have been clearly enunciated to that class at Sarah
Lawrence College: "A writer, when he's asked to discuss his craft, ought to
get up and call out in a loud voice just the *names* of the writers he
*loves*. I love Kafka, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Proust,
O'Casey, Rilke, Lorca, Keats, Rimbaud, Burns, E. Bronte, Jane Austen, Henry
James, Blake, Colderidge. I won't name any living writers. I don't think
it's right."
A rather interesting list. Only one American: James. Think of all the dead
American authors up to 1950 and he mentions just James. Not even
Fitzgerald. Of all the Irish authors, he singles out only O'Casey (who
should have been left out as he lived into the early '60s). So no Joyce or
Yeats. Or.... We meet up with most of the other writers in JDS's texts
(maybe neither Lorca nor Rimbaud?).
Re: Faulkner. Still alive at the time of the class at Sarah Lawrence. But
there is an interesting mention of Faulkner in JDS's tribute to his old
short-story teacher (and first publisher), Whit Burnett. JDS recalls a
class of Burnett's in '39, when Burnett read aloud to the class Faulkner's
story, "That Evening Sun Go Down". JDS tells us Burnett "very deliberately
forebore to perform. He abstained from reading beautifully. It was as if
he had turned himself into a reading lamp, and his voice into paper and
print." And later JDS remarks, "Regretfully, I never got to meet Faulkner,
but I often had it in my head to shoot him a letter telling him about that
unique reading of Mr. Burnett's."
And Jennifer, if I may ask, what is it exactly that you will remember upon
your death bed of Scottie's post?
--Bruce
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