Re: new book by Lillian Ross

patrick flaherty (pfkw@email.msn.com)
Tue, 21 Jul 1998 15:11:23 -0400 

-----Original Message-----
From: Camille Scaysbrook <verona_beach@geocities.com>
To: bananafish@lists.nyu.edu <bananafish@lists.nyu.edu>
Date: Monday, July 20, 1998 9:19 PM
Subject: Re: new book by Lillian Ross


>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

I did not know that Salinger's son was an actor.  What has he played in?

Patrick
>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