Subject: Re: Like More to Wolsey...
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Sun May 21 2000 - 03:08:03 GMT
Forty odd years later & after so much discussion
of the story on this list, I can't be really sure what
my expectations were at that first reading. Also,
being aware of Matt's strictures it's difficult -
for someone like me anyway - not to find oneself
nitpicking reasons to dispute them.
However, after as honest & virginal a rereading
yesterday as I could manage, what struck me was
the disjunction between lack of any kind of menacing
build-up - & the very brief, very sudden explosion
in the last paragraph. There's no question of
the gun being produced in the first act so that
its brooding promise can be fulfilled in the third.
We have no knowledge of Seymour from the later
stories & in this one he's presented as 'just' another
nutter from the war who can't keep his eyes on
the road, engages in slightly condescending,
slightly self-satisfied conversations with unthreatening
little girls & takes infantile shots at inoffensive
bystanders in elevators. I was not tempted to
take him seriously any more than I was his mother-in-law
whose caricatured repetitiveness Salinger drags out
too long. The one real, terrific character is Muriel.
'Calme, luxe et volupte' personified, she knows exactly
where she is with both of them. Muriel's the girl for me.
I gather Matt *does* sense a build up towards a conclusion
which, in being the 'wrong' one, spoils the story.
This presumably is where we differ. I suppose
at the time it seemed to me as not a great deal more
than a typical New Yorker story with a 'twist'
at the end. I gave me a pleasant, rueful smile
& I was not disappointed or thwarted. I wonder
without the hinterland of the Glasses as it was
subsequently revealed would any of us spend
a great deal more time on it than that.
As for what it's 'about', I don't buy any of Matt's
proposed themes. Echoing what I used to say
to Jim Rovira I think it's 'about' this couple
who go to a Florida hotel for a belated honeymoon
just after World War II...
People are bored, I'm sure, with my obsession
with the particularities of a piece of art &
my resistance to symbolism & the hunt for
underlying 'animi' (is that the right word?)
It's an attitude deriving to my work. Like most
young shrinks, on meeting a new patient
I'd find myself automatically - & delightedly -
allotting each one to his particular slot: mother-fixed
compulsive with just a touch of cyclothymia probably
becoming alcoholic ... & so on. But it became evident
this was a largely artificial process without much bearing
on the reality (if one were honest, no one truly
fitted any of the categories) & offered little help
in the actual handling of the case. Rather, it blocked
the path to a proper contact with the individual.
It was a process useful only in impressing boards
of academic examiners.
In similar fashion, I prefer to take pleasure from
the way the paint lies on this particular canvas,
the verisimilitude of this dialogue, the way
that sequence of cords gives me goose pimples -
than try to place the work in the Western Canon
or extract larger sociological or philosophical meanings.
I'm not so much a Luddite as a Goldwynite who prefers
to dial Western Union.
Scottie B.
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