Re: new book by Lillian Ross
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Tue, 21 Jul 1998 11:08:55 +1000
That's beautiful stuff - it's so nice to have my original perceptions of
Salinger confirmed once in a while. He has become for us the human
ambiguity - we sometimes can't decide exactly who or what he is, so it's
nice to get a bit of the news from the front line, so to speak (even 35
years on)
That's extremely interesting about Shawn's son going to camp - but another
thing that also struck me was that both Shawn's son and Salinger's became
actors, another theme that frequently comes up in the Glass stories. I
sometimes wonder about the parallels in Matthew Salinger's career - what
would someone like Salinger think of his son appearing in Revenge of the
Nerds?
Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
@ THE ARTS HOLE
www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442
THE INVERTED FOREST
www.angelfire.com/pa/invertedforest
> I recently finished a new book by Lillian Ross, HERE BUT NOT HERE,
> which is a memoir about her relationship with The New Yorker editor
> William Shawn. The book is being hotly discussed because it is a
> kind of "kiss and tell" story, but one of the astonishing things
> is how often J.D. Salinger appears as a character.
>
> There is a picture of him cuddling the baby Ross adopted in 1966.
> Salinger also stood as the baby's godfather, along with Shawn; in
> addition, when Ross had been trying to adopt (the baby was from
> Norway), Salinger went to the Norwegian Consulate to attest to
> Ross's character as a prospective mother.
>
> Ross and Shawn, in a moment of daring, had bought a Triumph sports car,
> which they used to escape the city on weekends, and at some point when
> they disposed of it, Salinger bought it from them. (I don't know why
> I find this amusing ... it's enough of a stretch of the imagination to
> consider Shawn at the wheel of a car, and it's wonderful to imagine
> them all thinking of keeping the car in the family, so to speak.)
>
> Finally -- and this is the die-hard reader in me finding something
> delightful -- there is a passage about Shawn's son (the actor and
> writer Wallace Shawn) going off to camp, as a child, in 1962. This
> should sound hauntingly familiar to anyone who has read "Hapworth":
>
> [Shawn] told me how Wallace had packed his violin,
> his typewriter, and an enormous box of books to
> take with him to a summer sports camp.
>
> and:
>
> [Bill Shawn] started telling me about Wallace in
> my first years at the magazine -- about his
> remarkable intelligence as a baby, when Bill kept
> a list of the words in what became a highly unusual
> baby vocabulary [and] about Wallace's volatility
> at the age of seven....
>
> Considering that many of us wonder about the genesis of Seymour
> as a character, and about "Hapworth"'s hyperarticulate Seymour-as-
> child, this book fires the imagination about real-life models.
>
> Salinger was quite often in contact; Ross mentions that he
> periodically came down from New Hampshire to visit, and that
> every time he was in town, the three of them would have dinner.
> She admires his sturdy resistance to publicity, and says, "On the
> human side, Salinger has, among other things, managed to do what
> so many (apparently necessarily) self-centered others have failed
> to do -- that is, to be a solid and responsible parent to his
> children."
>
> I can't help feeling a sense of wonder about the connections
> between what he was writing then and how he was living. At a
> minimum, the book puts to rest the notion that Salinger
> completely walled himself off from the rest of the world, and
> the note about his approach to parenting is lovely, because it
> suggests that the concern for children in his work is more than
> a literary affectation.
>
> It was a nice surprise to stumble upon.
>
> --tim o'connor