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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