Subject: Sentimental Journey (was Re: John Romano)
From: Cecilia Baader (ceciliabaader@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Oct 18 2001 - 14:10:38 GMT
--- Scottie Bowman <rbowman@indigo.ie> wrote:
>
> 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.
Or perhaps simply how flawed his judgement really is. By revealing what
he likes, Holden shows us that his ideas are no different than most
others'. He's been running around the whole time accusing everybody of
phoney sentimentalism, but when you take the sarcasm and the wit out of
what he has to say, couldn't he be accused of the same? He likes kids
and nuns and baseball gloves with poetry and girls who keep their
checkers in the back row.
You might as well say hearts and flowers and puppies.
This doesn't mean that Holden isn't exhibiting a true heart when
conducting his search, it just means that his tastes are just as
influenced by the society that he so abhors as everybody that he's
criticizing. Just look at the books that he likes. He doesn't like The
Atlantic Monthly -- long the biggest defender of the faith against
sentimentalism -- because it's read by his awful history teacher. He
likes Thomas Hardy only because of that Eustacia Vye. (Hubba hubba.)
He can't stand Somerset Maugham but give him a good book of sentimental
stories about Secret Goldfish by D.B. and boy. That's good literature.
(I'm going to get hate mail for this, I know.)
He has an unerring ear for bullsh*t when it's applied to somebody else,
but he can't detect it within himself.
We know that Holden and Huck have a lot in common. In fact, the more
that I look at it, the more that I think that Salinger stuck pretty
closely to the Huck model. I found an e-text of Huckleberry Finn, so
I'm able to quote the passage that is in the forefront of my mind. Here
is Huck, who can take one look at the Duke and the King and know what
big liars they are, but the minute he's confronted with the same kind of
crap in a pretty package, he doesn't know how to approach it. Wow, he
thinks. This is what is supposed to be good, so it must be good, even
if I don't get it (I've quoted quite a lot, simply because the passage
is so funny and fair use allows it):
They had pictures hung on the walls -- mainly Washingtons and
Lafayettes, and battles, and Highland Marys, and one called "Signing the
Declaration." There was some that they called crayons, which one of the
daughters which was dead made her own self when she was only fifteen
years old. They was different from any pictures I ever see before --
blacker, mostly, than is common. One was a woman in a slim black dress,
belted small under the armpits, with bulges like a cabbage in the middle
of the sleeves, and a large black scoop-shovel bonnet with a black veil,
and white slim ankles crossed about with black tape, and very wee black
slippers, like a chisel, and she was leaning pensive on a tombstone on
her right elbow, under a weeping willow, and her other hand hanging down
her side holding a white handkerchief and a reticule, and underneath the
picture it said "Shall I Never See Thee More Alas." Another one was a
young lady with her hair all combed up straight to the top of her head,
and knotted there in front of a comb like a chair-back, and she was
crying into a handkerchief and had a dead bird laying on its back in her
other hand with its heels up, and underneath the picture it said "I
Shall Never Hear Thy Sweet Chirrup More Alas." There was one where a
young lady was at a window looking up at the moon, and tears running
down her cheeks; and she had an open letter in one hand with black
sealing wax showing on one edge of it, and she was mashing a locket with
a chain to it against her mouth, and underneath the picture it said "And
Art Thou Gone Yes Thou Art Gone Alas." These was all nice pictures, I
reckon, but I didn't somehow seem to take to them, because if ever I was
down a little they always give me the fan-tods. Everybody was sorry she
died, because she had laid out a lot more of these pictures to do, and a
body could see by what she had done what they had lost. But I reckoned
that with her disposition she was having a better time in the graveyard.
She was at work on what they said was her greatest picture when she took
sick, and every day and every night it was her prayer to be allowed to
live till she got it done, but she never got the chance. It was a
picture of a young woman in a long white gown, standing on the rail of a
bridge all ready to jump off, with her hair all down her back, and
looking up to the moon, with the tears running down her face, and she
had two arms folded across her breast, and two arms stretched out in
front, and two more reaching up towards the moon -- and the idea was to
see which pair would look best, and then scratch out all the other arms;
but, as I was saying, she died before she got her mind made up, and now
they kept this picture over the head of the bed in her room, and every
time her birthday come they hung flowers on it. Other times it was hid
with a little curtain. The young woman in the picture had a kind of a
nice sweet face, but there was so many arms it made her look too
spidery, seemed to me.
This young girl kept a scrap-book when she was alive, and used to
paste obituaries and accidents and cases of patient suffering in it out
of the Presbyterian Observer, and write poetry after them out of her own
head. It was very good poetry. This is what she wrote about a boy by the
name of Stephen Dowling Bots that fell down a well and was drownded:
ODE TO STEPHEN DOWLING BOTS, DEC'D
And did young Stephen sicken,
And did young Stephen die?
And did the sad hearts thicken,
And did the mourners cry?
No; such was not the fate of
Young Stephen Dowling Bots;
Though sad hearts round him thickened,
'Twas not from sickness' shots.
No whooping-cough did rack his frame,
Nor measles drear with spots;
Not these impaired the sacred name
Of Stephen Dowling Bots.
Despised love struck not with woe
That head of curly knots,
Nor stomach troubles laid him low,
Young Stephen Dowling Bots.
O no. Then list with tearful eye,
Whilst I his fate do tell.
His soul did from this cold world fly
By falling down a well.
They got him out and emptied him;
Alas it was too late;
His spirit was gone for to sport aloft
In the realms of the good and great.
If Emmeline Grangerford could make poetry like that before she was
fourteen, there ain't no telling what she could a done by and by. Buck
said she could rattle off poetry like nothing. She didn't ever have to
stop to think. He said she would slap down a line, and if she couldn't
find anything to rhyme with it would just scratch it out and slap down
another one, and go ahead. She warn't particular; she could write about
anything you choose to give her to write about just so it was sadful.
Every time a man died, or a woman died, or a child died, she would be on
hand with her "tribute" before he was cold. She called them tributes.
The neighbors said it was the doctor first, then Emmeline, then the
undertaker -- the undertaker never got in ahead of Emmeline but once,
and then she hung fire on a rhyme for the dead person's name, which was
Whistler. She warn't ever the same after that; she never complained, but
she kinder pined away and did not live long. Poor thing, many's the time
I made myself go up to the little room that used to be hers and get out
her poor old scrap-book and read in it when her pictures had been
aggravating me and I had soured on her a little. I liked all that
family, dead ones and all, and warn't going to let anything come between
us. Poor Emmeline made poetry about all the dead people when she was
alive, and it didn't seem right that there warn't nobody to make some
about her now she was gone; so I tried to sweat out a verse or two
myself, but I couldn't seem to make it go somehow.
Now, I wonder why that could possibly be? Maybe because it's crap?
It's this passage that made me look more closely at Huck, and see that
he often does the right thing not because he believes that it's right,
but because his heart tells him to. Much like Holden telling that story
to the mother on the train about how great her son is, even though he
thinks the kid is an idiot. His heart's in the right place, and he's
willing to pile it on to make somebody happy. I'm a terrific liar, he
says. I'll say he is. He doesn't even know it when he's lying to
himself.
> But we are not, apparently, to mind this: no one can be expected
> to hold up under such a scrutiny.
Of course that's true, and I think that's the point. Everybody's
flawed, everybody's a phoney, even Holden. So what is the answer? I
don't think that there is one in The Catcher in the Rye, but it seems
like "Zooey" picks up where Holden left off, and his conclusion is,
sure, it's everywhere, and you can either choose to love in spite of it
or expire from your disgust.
> 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.
Oh, bah. That's phrased very prettily, but it doesn't wash. Noble
Savage presupposes a feeling of superiority, and though I'm apt to act
like I'm better than everybody else, it's not so. It's merely an
acknowledgement of the human condition in us all that makes us all
flawed, complex, gorgeous creatures. All of us.
So there.
Regards,
Cecilia.
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