Re: friends of Ernie

Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Sun, 11 Oct 1998 18:47:07 -0500 

At 6:04 PM -0400 on 10/11/98, you wrote:

> I found Soldier's Home deeply moving. I'm not quite sure if it's one of his
> better known short stories but the way that Krebbs tells his mother he
>doesn't
> love her and then as she starts to cry, gives in and says it even though he
> doesn't mean it is very reminiscent to me of the inner conflict in Salinger
> characters dealing with their contempt for oblivious people yet their
> desperate need for companionship.

Yes, that story is very disturbing.  Hemingway's own mother, when he was
back from the war and not entirely sure about his prospects for the future,
eventually kicked him out and wrote him a pious note that said, in effect,
a mother's love is like a bank, with deposits and withdrawals made, and
that Hemingway -- through his aimlessness and what she saw as his lack of
morality -- had overdrawn his account.  It was an astonishingly hostile
communication, and so it never surprises me to see unsympathetic mothers in
Hemingway.  (After Hemingway's father committed suicide with a handgun,
Mrs. H. mailed the gun to Ernest -- another indication of her incomparable
sensitivity.)

Myself, I've been mulling over "Fathers and Sons" a lot lately.

I think we often see in Salinger the need in his characters to reach out to
other people but also the compulsion to withdraw from them.  I thought
about this a lot today, because, as I said in an earlier message, I was
heading out for what I had hoped would be a nice walk in the sun, but when
I got to Central Park (near our favorite lagoon and its ducks), there were
the remains of a parade, and the streets were mobbed, and it was
unpleasant, and all my hopes of a bit of peaceful wandering in the sun were
dashed, and I thought of Holden wandering these same streets looking for
something, anything, and feeling the frequent need to back off from
whatever might happen.

They've just cleaned off and rededicated Grand Central Terminal here, where
Holden sleeps on a bench, and it occurred to me that at some point it might
be entertaining to put up some pictures on the list web page -- of the
lagoon, of the waiting room in Grand Central, of the Indian canoe -- for
subscribers who might want to see what Salinger is writing about but who
may not get to NYC any time soon.

At the same time, of course, there are some things that might be better
left to the imagination.  As Horwitz might say, Whaddaya think?

--tim o'connor