Seymour - a Malediction


Subject: Seymour - a Malediction
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Fri Mar 17 2000 - 04:14:15 EST


    I don't suffer from Jim's print bulimia - Count Leo,
    single-handed, will keep me going for the foreseeable
    future - but I thought I'd better revisit Seymour & stop
    chancing my arm on something I hadn't read for a couple
    of decades.

    Well, Reader, I sure didn't marry him.

    An impression I'd retained from the past was very powerfully
    reinforced: bafflement that the writer of the Catcher
    & Esme could have gone on to produce this stuff.
    It feels as if he had regressed to a wholly different
    sensibility: as if someone with a clean, faultless 'ear' had
    quite lost it & embarked on an experiment in style that went
    disastrously wrong - yet plowed on regardless, hoping
    for the best in the face of mounting casualties. It offers
    one explanation for the subsequent years of silence:
    that having started down into this one way maze
    he never found the escape route back to base.

    In Seymour, he seems almost to be trying for that
    mock-augustan, mock-urbane manner of the New Yorker
    Talk of the Town coloumn. (Incidentally, who invented
    this? E.B.White?) Those multiple qualifiers, that ornate,
    heavy footed, jokey-James voice ...
    
    Are you all really sitting there with ungrated nerves?

    The contrast with Tolstoy is vivid. The Russian -
    using deceptively plain means - confines himself to
    the ordinary & illuminates its extaordinariness. Salinger
    by starting out with a contrived & extraordinary character
    winds up with a folly whose only interest is his very grotesqueness
    & who, finally, says nothing about the human condition.

    Scottie B.

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