Poppa [was Re: who's Seymour?]


Subject: Poppa [was Re: who's Seymour?]
From: Cecilia Baader (ceciliaann@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Jun 18 2000 - 20:29:26 GMT


>"JJ Flikweert" <jjf@HASKONING.nl> wrote:
>
>Maybe my assumption that Salinger's characters could only be
>derived from real life examples (within or outside the author himself)
>was just caused by disbelief that it would be possible to create such
>characters.

This falls under the category of interesting synchronicities. I was reading
a book on the airplane ride home today (more on that later) called _Ernest
Hemingway on Writing_. The book is an excellent collection of Hemingway
quotes from various letters, novels, manuscripts, etc., that deal with the
subject of the craft of writing. On page five, I found the following quote
from an unpublished manuscript:

          "When you first start writing stories in the first person
     if the stories are made so real that people believe them the people
     reading them nearly always thing the stories really happened to
     you. That is natural because while you were making them up you had
     to make them happen to the person who was telling them. If you do
     this successfully enough you make the person who is reading them
     believe that the things happened to him too. If you can do this
     you are beginning to get what you are trying for which is to make
     the story so real beyond any reality that it will become a part of
     the reader's experience and a part of his memory."

For how can a book not have huge parts of a writer in it? It is impossible
to speculate on it any further. Certain authors whose lives have been
mapped out by diaries, like Woolf for instance, still have that certain
inner self that populates the books that cannot be traced to a life
experience. It is he, and he is showing it to you in all of his terrible
facets.

When he writes out his guts and leaves the entrails there for all to see,
there is a certain degree of Truth that we will recognize and say to
ourselves, that is him, that is this part of him, that is that part of him.
But what we need to understand is that all of it, all of it is him.

There's a Salinger quote, I think from the Betty Eppes interview, where she
begins to ask him a question or two about Catcher. He replies something to
the effect (and I'm probably horribly misquoting him) that it's all in the
book. Do not question me further.

What better answer can there be?

>And I may start reading Dostoyevski.

Oh, JJ. Do. Don't let yourself be afraid, either. You will never regret
it once you have finished.

Regards,
Cecilia.
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