Re: The Inverted Forest

Responses below:

Aaron Sommers wrote:

> Jim I don't know where you get the autobiographical theme a la Salinger and
> Ford. JDS is a well known teetotaler...

Eh, a difference on that one point doesn't invalidate other similarities :).
I'm not saying, though, that Ford IS Salinger, but that it's _tempting_ to read
Ford as Salinger, and that may have contributed to Salinger not republishing the
work. Salinger lets us a little too deeply into his head, it's a bit too real.

> Seymour is a classic lunatic. One who carries out a premeditated (what
> suicide isn't?) murder during a vacation, spending his days and nights not
> cavorting with his beautiful wife but playing the piano in the Ocean Room.
> Waht's this business about being too happy? Reminds me of Buddy in SAI...

I think this is a real good example of the problems Salinger created by
appropriating this old story into a new set of stories. The b-fish story is
pretty fixed, and the Glass stories aren't fluid enough to fit it in. It
crashes through them like a bull in a china shop. Like I said in my last
e-mail, this may be the point, though.

> Ford says it's due to 'The Brain', the reason why he won't go back to
> Corrine. Those memories of his mother that gave him nightmares and all that
> anguish. I really like how Salinger givs us Robert to narrate the story.
> Salinger's strength as a writer-and it's a BIG one- is narration. He does it
> again in "The Inverted Forest". Robert warns C early on. He even describes
> what kind of poet he is, one that is functioning under the dead-weight of
> beauty. So he can't live with anything but...
>
> Until Ford drinks and then loses his sense of taste, sells out, marries a
> slut and there you have it another stop on Salinger's boulevard of broken
> dreams.

Yeah...I'd forgotten about that. When Ford first met C., he told her he'd never
tasted alcohol, but by the end of the story he's virtually a drunk.

Pretty interesting comment about women over 30 in Salinger too.

Waner the publisher being the storyteller...I wonder what to do with that.
There seems to be a dichotomy here between storytelling and poetry, and real
artists work in the latter. Given Waner's comments to C. in the middle of the
story, I want to pull back and ask myself...is the whole thing designed to show
how Waner was right about Ford from the beginning? Makes me remember Buddy's
warnings, or qualifications, about his stories about Seymour.

Jim

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Received on Tue Mar 18 21:36:49 2003