I am Franny!!! / We love Bill

Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Thu, 16 Jul 1998 11:34:41 +1000

> And now on to a somewhat relevant posting (just for fun) may I ask whom
do
> most of you associate best with in the Salinger novels? (Just
wondering...I
> hope I do not get all Holden answers...but I imagine he is the easiest to
> associate with since his character is so alive and colorful)

Funny you should ask that, because I read `Franny' the other day for the
first time in quite a long while. Apart from being struck with the fact
that it's probably one of the best constructed short stories of the English
language, I realised - `My God - I AM FRANNY!!!' I guess it comes from
having once been an actor and also being at a Uni which, like any other, is
full of self important ramblings about things they barely understand
themselves. That story really touched me the last time I read it; it's
definitely a story I had to grow into, I read it originally straight after
TCIR but I think I understand it much better as a 20 year old uni student
than a 16 year old schoolgirl.
 
> Oh and Patrick...Billy, well, he is a mystery, that is one thing that
keeps
> him alive. 

Ah, no, no .... I've been in this argument so many times. There's so many
things that keeps Shakespeare alive, and the fact that he is an enigma is
merely a function of this fascination - after all, Marlowe was probably
even more of an enigma but far less people know about him. I don't see it
as the *one* thing at all. I've said before there's no one I am more sure
was a true honest to God genius than Shakespeare. I classify writers into
two categories - one, writers whose magic occurs in the lines (I would put
Nabokov into this category) and two, those whose magic occurs mainly
between the lines, some indefinable magic than no one else than a genius
could have subconsciously put there (Salinger is a good example of that).
Shakespeare is about the only one who has totally successfully married
these two magics together; he taps into the human psyche so effectively
that sometimes it's hard to remember that 400 years separate us and
Falstaff or Hamlet, because even today we all know someone like them. We
love Bill because he was a genius, but even more so because he was so
endearingly human.

Camille 
verona_beach@geocities.com
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