Fwd: Dream Catcher: Underlying Theme.


Subject: Fwd: Dream Catcher: Underlying Theme.
From: Will Hochman (hochmanw1@southernct.edu)
Date: Fri Jul 05 2002 - 12:04:05 EDT


John Gilgun is a friend and fine writer. He and I have discussed
Salinger at length. I don't know about the wonderful timing of his
post but I imagine it will support Scottie and Jim's take on Margaret
Salinger's memoir.

I still think the book gives Salinger family insights (and yes, I can
still imagine J.D. Salinger as father to both his real and fictional
families). Sure, Margaret Salinger does some bitching about her
parents and it's questionable...but also relevant and part of what
baby boomers seem to need to do. I just don't read it as right or
wrong. I finished it loving all Salingers and imagining that I know
them better. will

>Date: Fri, 05 Jul 2002 10:27:43 -0400 (EDT)
>From: jgilgun411@aol.com
>Subject: Dream Catcher: Underlying Theme.
>To: crewtonia@egroups.com
>Cc: hochmanw1@southernct.edu
>
>
> So there's this dysfunctional J.D. Salinger family. Lives up in the woods
>in rural New Hampshire. In Cornish actually. The father shuts himself up all
>day to write fiction and the mother, probably as the result of the fact that
>he shuts himself away, is crazy, hysterical, physically abuse to the kids,
>etc. These parents--one the most famous novelist in America at that time and
>the other a woman with a problem (part of the problem being J.D. himself
>according to the daughter, who is writing this book)--must be used in the
>book as the monsters the daughter keeps trying to escape. She must portray
>them as monsters so that she can present her solution to such families: a
>woman (herself) with a cute, cuddly baby and a husband who never hits her or
>even argues with her. Yes, she ends with a husband and "we never argue."
>
> It's what so many of us want and never find--the movie perfect 1950's
>mate. But we end up with that rolled up tube of toothpaste that Candy Cane,
>played by Marilyn Monroe, gets in the movie Some Like It Hot. (She falls in
>love with trombone players.) So after pages and pages of suffering, we get,
>on the last page of the book, what I am guessing is a Barbara Courtland
>ending, though I have never read Barbara Courtland. We get My Blue Heaven:
>"Just Molly and me/And baby makes three/We're happy in my blue heaven, etc."
>But we get it in an Inuit poem. The poem is the last thing one reads in this
>book. It's My Blue Heaven translated into Inuit:
>
> It is so still in the house,
> There is calm in the house
> The snowstorm wails out there
> And the dogs are rolled up with snouts under their tail.
> My little boy is sleeping on the ledge,
> On his back he lies, breathing from his open mouth.
> His little stomach is bulging round--
> Is it strange if I start to cry with joy?
>
> (Anonymous Inuit mother's poem)
>
> The movement of the book, however, seems to point another way. I mean,
>this woman gets degrees from Brandeis (Phi Beta Kappa) and from Oxford
>(M.Phil), goes to Harvard Divinity School and becomes a chaplain, works as a
>mechanic for Boston Electric, is a labor union specialist, does historical
>research, etc. But her book must end this way so that she can "expose" J.D.
>Salinger as a self-deceiving phony who shut himself away from his family to
>write books. He should instead have been the perfect Dad out of a 1950's
>sit-com such as Father Knows Best. You don't have to look only at the
>photographs in the book of J.D. with his infant daughter or read between the
>lines to see that he was Good Daddy sometimes. But Peggy seems to want the
>1950's TV version of the Perfect Dad.
>
> And it doesn't make sense given her intelligence, always evident right
>there on every page of the book. I wonder if an editor asked her to add this
>ending to insure that the book would be a Book of the Month Selection? It is
>a Book of the Month Selection, by the way. The worst thing may be that the
>reader never gets a balanced view of Salinger. He is always Daddy
>Dearist--tightwad, monkish recluse, whatever. Bad bad Daddy, pooh on you!
>Also, though she is all in favor of the Life of the Mind and creativity
>(after all, she wrote this large book) she must condemn both in order to
>bring Daddy to the pillory and place the sign around his neck as he clamped
>in there:
>
> Bad Daddy. B--a-aad!
>
> And in small print under the sign: "Bad also all you jerks who were
>influenced by Holden when you were kids. Holden's bad, too."
>
> Every feminist movement since the American Civil War (and perhaps before)
>fought for a place for women out of the kitchen and nursery and into the
>world. This (phony?) ending to the book puts the woman right back where
>Herkimer Jerk wants her: pregnant in the winter, barefoot in the summer. No
>mind, no spirit, no civil/political rights--just a warm body on a cold night
>when you'd prefer not to sleep with your hound dogs to warm you. A baby
>machine chained to the stove and the sink. Pooh on Peggy. She's as phony as
>Stradlater when you come right down to it.
>I mean, she really is.
>------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>-----------------------------

-- 
	Will Hochman

Associate Professor of English Southern Connecticut State University 501 Crescent St, New Haven, CT 06515 203 392 5024

http://www.southernct.edu/~hochman/willz.html

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