Re: and the winner is ...

RESPONSES EMBEDDED WITHIN
 Kevin Carter <kevvsan@attbi.com> wrote:
 

First, of all, his analysis of Seymour's life doesn't seem satisfactory.
Much of what I've thought about Seymour, as a sort of bodhisattva figure,
seemed to be negated by Alsen's perspective.

right. (i strongly disagree with alsen's take on seymour.) alsen sees seymour as a failed spiritual seeker. in his new book, 'a reader's guide to j.d. salinger', he states that he sees no contradiction between the 'seymour' character in 'bananafish' and the other stories. that the 'bananafish' seymour is simply a logical characterization of the end-result of seymour's decline over the last six years of his life.

if you look closely at alsen's chronology of seymour's life (there is one in 'composite novel' and an expanded one in 'reader's guide') you find him creating a fictive chronology. one that fits his theory of seymour as case study of attempting to live the spiritual life, hitting a dead end, and falling apart. for example, alsen says that in 1941 seymour starts drinking quite a bit (this because s. says he'd need more than one drink to talk about the charlotte incident with a shrink). alsen says that s. attempted suicide in '41 (the diary remark re scars on wrists--though no date is given, alsen simply assumes (misreads?) that it happened right before s. met muriel). alsen categorically states that s. spent the last three years of his life in an army psychiatric hospital (and that buddy visited him there!). this is concoted from the statement in 'bananafish' that it was a crime to let seymour out of the hospital and buddy's remark in 'seymour--an intro' which reads as foll
 ows:

"Since early in 1948, I've been sitting--my family thinks literally--on a loose-leaf notebook inhabited by a hundred and eighty-four short poems that my brother wrote during the last three years of his life, both in and out of the Army, but mostly in, well in."

alsen interprets "during the last three years of his life, both in and out of the Army, but mostly in, well in" as meaning being locked up, i.e., "well in". this is quite a stretch. granted, we don't know much about the last years of seymour's life. but the two things we *do* know about the last three years alsen either omits and disputes buddy.

alsen omits the crucial fact that during the last three years of seymour's life seymour wrote the 184 poems that will rank him with the 3 or 4 nearly indispensable american poets we've had. there is no mention of writing these poems in either the chronology or text of alsen's two books. so IF alsen's interpretation is correct, then seymour wrote all of the poems while locked in a looney bin (and instead of writing gibberish as holderlin did after *his* breakdown, seymour pens these exquisite 184 poems). (this is cheap, but i might mention that in the chronology alsen has s. writing the keats poem at age 11; it was actually 8.) the other item i referred to above--alsen overruling buddy's knowledge of facts re seymour's life--is the date of the suicide. alsen goes to great lengths to show the date of the suicide was friday, march 19th. he comes up with a friday from internal evidence in 'bananafish'. and, after consulting a perpetual calendar, he finds march 18th (buddy
 's clearly stated date of the suicide (from his letter to zooey)) is a thursday, he incredibly decides to declare the date of the suicide as Friday, March 19th, 1948. apart from the audacity to do this, alsen fails to recall that 'bananafish' was published in january 1948; so it's fairly absurd for him to contest the date of the suicide (since march is after january; and especially since salinger himself re-dates the suicide to march 18th after *he* knowingly published 'bananafish' in january.)

Also, I'm wondering what people thought about Buddy's claim that Seymour
wrote the "Hapworth" letter. I had always seen this as either Salinger's
striking back at the critics with his portrayal of an unrealistically
precocious youth in response to their claims about his work or, simply, a
portrayal of just how gifted young Seymour was. Perhaps the thought had
loomed at the back of my mind that Buddy could have drafted the letter, but
I wasn't prepared to take his claim at face value without additional
analysis.

i take buddy at his word that the letter was written by seymour, at age 7. (though i wholeheartedly wish salinger had NOT published the letter: it defies suspension of disbelief, it is artistically a mess, and i don't care for much of the characterization of seymour.) alsen in 'composite novel' builds some of the structure of his interpretation upon his belief that it is NOT seymour's letter, but the letter of the 46-year-old buddy impersonating seymour. i disagree. period.

i might add: i did like many of jim's comments in his email which followed kevin's.

and to end this way-too-long reply, i hope daniel's muse is back and soon posting.

kim

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Received on Sun Mar 16 14:29:35 2003