Subject: touching
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Thu Jun 14 2001 - 03:37:37 GMT
Suzanne remarks: '... Bessie. I don't want to read the book
again, sorry to say ...’
This greatly reassures me that I’m not, as I feared, the only
one-eyed citizen in this kingdom of the blind.
In the whole menagerie, Bessie is certainly the Glass who grates
most raspingly on my nerves. The others may be unengaging
inventions but at least have a certain originality - whilst Bessie
is straight from Central Casting. That endless, elephantine dialogue
about chicken soup (how cliché is it possible to get?) & Bessie’s
mock-huffy ‘young man’ inserted from time to time to indicate
ill-concealed but profound tenderness ... Who else was it written
for but Fay Bainter, dragged from her latest manifestation as
the roly-poly, bustling, American Mom - only this time togged
out in a hair net & butt-filled kimono. How repellent.
Yes, it’s all those ‘young man’s that finally turn my stomach.
It’s so precisely the wrong phrase for what Salinger was presumably
trying to convey & so precisely the right one if he were going for
the Hollywood version of Mom-With-Grown-Up-Son. Brisk,
bustling tough on the outside, tooth-loosening, jaw-clenching
carmel on the inside.
Sentimentality reaches its zenith (nadir?), of course, in those
allusions to Dublin shawlies, deposed Balkan queens, retired
courtesans &, best of all, those terrific legs which end in
‘extraordinary small feet’ & are surmounted, naturally, by
‘enormous blue eyes’. Jesus.
In checking out the references, I went back to the story this morning
& was stunned to see just HOW long it is. I remembered it as
tedious, of course, but thought McCarthy et al were being a bit
extreme in calling it interminable. They were right, though.
With its wearisome pages of instruction, its long, long unrelieved
paragraphs, its stifling reminders of Glass uniqueness, it goes on
forever & ever & ever, amen. As, no doubt, the silly young
woman in the room next door would have it.
Scottie B.
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