Re: He shall Purify the sons of Eli...
Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Tue, 03 Mar 1998 08:58:32 -0500
> I keep asking & KEEP asking & no one answers me. What did
> Jerome Salinger mean - speaking through Buddy - when he said
> all his instincts were for a lower-middle-class resistance to Cubism
> in writing ?
Don't get fancy.
That's what I take it to mean.
Hemingway said it a little differently: "If I started to write more
elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found
that could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start
with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written."
Salinger was writing (as Buddy) in a time that had its own fads -- Zen
being one, Abstract Expressionism being another -- and I interpret his
advices as something like, get back to business and say what you want to
say without getting artsy.
--tim