Re: a corrective from Yasna Polyana


Subject: Re: a corrective from Yasna Polyana
From: Scout Thompson (one38@one38.org)
Date: Sat Sep 16 2000 - 18:05:58 GMT


I don't agree with Scotties logic in the
"Hemingways posthumous stories were bad, therefore,
Salingers posthumous stories will be bad" argument.

Clearly, Salinger intends his work to be published
after his death- he is writing exclusively for the
posthumous publication of his work. To assume that
the work will be on par with some half finished
memoirs, journal entries and sketches pasted together
by some money hungry publisher is absurd. Haven't
you heard of the filing system?

As for Tolstoy; Salinger may not be Tolstoy, but why
would he have to be- he's JD Salinger. Its like saying
Hawkins is no Einstein... :)

-s

Scottie Bowman wrote:
>
> Many thanks to Scout for finding us this civilised
> & satisfying interview. Margaret Salinger came across
> - to my no very great surprise - as cool, intelligent
> & sympathetic. And she was well served by an interviewer
> who sounded both reasonable & informed.
>
> Whilst he declared himself frankly 'for' her father, time
> & again I could hear my own reponses chiming in sympathy
> with hers - even before she had uttered them. Whether
> listening to her partiality for the 'Esme' story or her scorn
> for the marble heads who scutter round 'protecting' the privacy
> of the old eejit - I could only give a soft cheer.
>
> I could also understand the daughter of such a humourless,
> self-infatuated clown advocating celibacy for certain types
> of person.
>
> But any comparison with Tolstoy is, of course, absurd.
> As someone has pointed out, when all those thousands
> turned out for his funeral, rather few had even heard
> of War & Peace or Anna Karenina or The Cossacks or
> Resurrection or.... For them, he was the great, holy,
> crackpot Count Lev who organised food centres for
> the starving, worked alongside his own peasants, & had
> often been threatened with banishment for his battles
> against the established injustices of the state. And the rest.
> A man profoundly engaged in the world - all his life.
> Can you imagine? The greatest literary genius of
> the past hundred years (& he was just as compulsive
> as any writer) yet he often saw his books as unworthy
> interruptions of his proper work for his fellow creatures.
> What he did NOT do was retire to some cabin on one
> of his estates to study his umbilicus & whittle exquisite
> little studies of effete Muscovites.
>
> He remained married to the same woman for fifty years,
> a woman who bore him nine children & transcribed &
> typed as many as four or five versions of his great books.
> They fought like cats - often over situations of sexual
> jealousy which they both suffered into their seventies.
> (The children, I may say, remembered their father as
> vividly for his fun & teasing, affectionate warmth as for
> his crazy obsessions. And none of them wrote War &
> Families or Life with Father.)
>
> Leo was a mensch. For Chrissake. Don't talk me about
> Salinger.
>
> As for all those unpublished masterpieces. The long-awaited
> opus is a recurrent phenomenon - especially in the world of
> American letters. Most recently, who was it? - Brodky? I'm old
> enough to remember how, after 1941, we kept being promised
> great & unimaginable wonders from the desk of Ernest Hemingway.
> It was all going to be about '.... the sea & the earth & the air...'
> & God knows what. And after twenty years, look what we got:
> one short, (OK, terrific) book of malicious memoirs, one failed
> war-novel, one labouredly pretentious fable - & a great load of
> embarrassing dross.
>
> Don't hold your breath, chaps.
>
> Scottie B.
>
> -
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