Subject: Re: John Romano
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Wed Oct 17 2001 - 03:25:17 GMT
We could go on slicing this forever.
So far as I understand them, Cecilia/Romano seem
to be saying that when Phoebe draws her brother up
short by challenging him: all right, to identify one item
in the human universe that ISN’T phoney, one item that
WILL meet his exacting standards – he fails, thereby revealing
how unconsidered & hollow are his own grand, holier-than-thou
judgements.
But we are not, apparently, to mind this: no one can be expected
to hold up under such a scrutiny. We may be all ugly failures but
– as at least the clear-eyed & the pure in heart understand – we are
all also, au fond, truly innocent, stained only by the society that
has grown up around us & in which we ourselves have grown.
Cecilia anticipates being called sentimental. Well, maybe not
sentimental, Cec, but this sounds to me like the noble savage togged out
in a nice new pair of jeans. Or maybe just bushy-tailed Amuhrr’can
CanDo.
I wonder does it reflect Cecilia’s Popish training & my Calvinist one?
I not only believe in original sin, it seems only too obvious to me that
there’s something Terribly Wrong With The Whole Shebang.
(It’s the reality all great writers have made themselves confront & none
of them that I can think of, from Homer to Hemingway, ever found
much grounds for optimism.)
It was this insight, surely, that damned nearly did for Holden. I’m not
at all confident he ever came out of that sanitorium. Seymour certainly
never left the hotel. And one glimpse of those ravaged old features
explains why someone else has never left Cornish.
For me, it’s the crazed, hilarious gallantry in the face of the ever
lengthening shadows of despair that makes the Catcher so moving
& precious. This is the way it is. The singing of hymns & the humming
of Oms that the Glasses go in for sound as banal & futile as the endless
replays of Little House on the Prairie that we’re told Salinger himself
uses to blank out the knowledge that he – like Sergeant X – once found
so intolerable.
Obviously – like Gatsby or Huck – you can only produce one Holden
in your life.
Scottie B.
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