re: hunting hat
Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Wed, 11 Mar 1998 11:24:38 -0500
> I've been reading "The Inverted Forest" and will present "J.D. Salinger's
> 'Musifesto': Class Reversal and Creativity in the 'The Inverted Forest'"
> at a scholarly conference on thursday so beware, this is section man
> stuff...but in addition to seeing Ray Ford as a poet-antecedant to
> Seymour, there's also a good deal in the story about hats...here's a
> quote:
Well ... thanks to a kind fellow who provided me with a copy of "The
Inverted Forest," I've read through it several times and am astonished at
how Ray Ford is a kind of Inverted Seymour. I think about Seymour a lot.
(Part of my imagination plays "what if?" games, and I often wonder what the
Glass saga would be like if Seymour *hadn't* killed himself, and
occasionally it has occurred to me that he might have ended up as some
version of Ray Ford.)
> "a man just can't reach the kind of poetry Fords reaching and still keep
> intact the normal male ability to spot a fine hat-straightener"
Sure -- this is gloriously parallel to the "finding a good horse" parable.
There are so many of these little tidbits -- which tell us more about the
author as author (as opposed to what kind of private person the author is;
I'm referring specifically to how he approaches his task as author) -- in
Salinger, particularly in the later Glass works.
> Holden's hat, as we know is turned around (as holden is?) and in the case
> of TIF, Ray Ford's inability to recognize how hats are worn signals his
> withdrawal into an inverted forest where imagination is all that matters.
>
> Personally, I love hats and always consider them not just clothing, but
> part of my tude, will
There is a lovely intro to the paperback anthology of John Cheever's
collected work that talks about how those stories transport us back (and
here I'm paraphrasing, because I can't find the %$^%$ book!) to a time when
men wore hats and every corner cigar store seemed to have a baseball game
playing on the radio.
I too love my hats. On the other hand (with a credit to my brother, for a
comment he made), I have a reasonably new story called "The Man Who Could
Not Wear Hats," half based on the shape of the character's head, the other
half based on what was in his head.
By the way, my favorite "what if you could go back in time?" scenario
definitely would be the New York of 1946-1955, where the men wore hats, the
Dodgers were in Brooklyn, every taxi driver cracked wise, and there was
always a chance of finding E.B. White or Salinger in one week's issue of
The New Yorker.
--tim