Subject: Re: complex list (Beam me down, Scottie!)
From: Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Date: Sun Mar 26 2000 - 08:39:29 EST
At 11:34 PM +0000 on 3/25/2000, Scottie wrote:
> A party in 68 Highfield Road, Rathgar, Dublin in the autumn
> of 1951. The decidedly pissed Seamus Kelly, then literary
> editor of the Irish Times, is discussing an acquaintance whose
> taste in writing he had hitherto dismissed as totally risible.
> 'I said to him: ''Go on. Name me one short story of
> the last ten years that you liked.'''
> 'What he say?'
> 'You know what he said? He said: ''A Perfect Day for
> Bananafish.'''
> 'That's not bad.'
> 'It's bloody good. I didn't think he was capable.'
[and]
> This was the first time I ever heard the title & for the life
> of me I can't think how people in Dublin could have read it
> in 1951 (I'm sure of the date) unless in what were then pretty
> rare copies of the New Yorker.
Given that he put it in context ("I didn't think he was capable")
suggests that he was familiar with Salinger previously, perhaps for
some reason with his entire body of work to that point. In fact
(given that Salinger was published only in slick magazines before the
NY'er), your man in Dublin may have been the ur-scrounger of
libraries, the way we today go hunting for Hapworth: Imagine the
notion, Patient Zero of Salinger-tracking!
It's just a notion, but not implausible. Of course, he may have been
an inveterate reader of the Saturday Evening Post and Colliers, too.
Thanks for that insight ... it's an intriguing one, that's for certain.
--tim
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