a sense of proportion
Scottie Bowman (bowman@mail.indigo.ie)
Mon, 13 Jul 1998 11:37:52 +0000
Camille tells us she feels almost as much an alien in 1950s
New York as she does in 1600s London. This is very understandable.
It derives from what we psychiatrists call the Antipodean
Strangeness Factor which renders its victims uneasy in any culture
based more than 200 miles north of Sydney.
JD, on the other hand feels much closer to the adolescents of 40
years ago than to their parents. Yet I have to say that to a young
man in London in 1957, when it came to shared experiences,
the bootlegger of 1920 seemed no more remote than the teenager
from Upper East Side New York. I could feel my heart turn over
for both of them. I had been just as idealistically obsessed with
my own Daisy as I'd been enraged by the posturings of my elders.
And along with Matt I have to ask what standards of reading
& judgement could seriously place Holden at the very pinnacle
of all Western literary endeavour ?
Scottie B.