Subject: Re: where is thy sting?
From: citycabn (citycabn@gateway.net)
Date: Fri Sep 29 2000 - 15:44:58 GMT
will wrote:
>the horrific sense of underlying
>dissolution that Scottie describes is not Ford's dying, but his
>living without poetry and grace! Maybe in the same way, killing
>Seymour is grace. As Scottie imagines:
>
> "That that fatal, self-conscious theatricality turns
> them from figures of potential tragedy silently confronting
> the awful propositions of life - into gabby cases of delayed
> adolescence."
>
>Sometimes it may be easy to think that Salinger's readers are
>delaying adolescence.
I confess I don't understand your segue from Ford to Seymour to Scottie's
quote. I do like the statement re Ray Ford. Not sure what you mean by
"killing Seymour is grace."
I find it interesting to contemplate that Salinger might have conceived
Seymour *before* Ford (see Yagoda's book re The New Yorker which places a
letter re APDFB in January of '47), and that these two poets were mixed
together in Salinger's imagination. A JDS of '47, just out of the war,
hospitalized, married in a madness, a published short story writer, though
only one story in his beloved New Yorker, but really what he was was a
frustrated poet. (All those returned poems from Louise Bogan.) I'd go out
on a limb and say JDS started as a story writer and switched to poems and
wanted to be a poet, a Rilke, a Blake, a fill-in-the-blank, all rolled into
one and well, there was no true Muse. Only a German Nazi (thank you,
Peggy), who turned out to be anything but a muse, and after that JDS fled
adult sexuality, and sought muses/soul mates/landsmen in 18 year old girls
whose sexuality and minds wouldn't challenge him. Seymour and Ray Ford are
two of a kind *at this point in '47*, with Ford choosing drink and Bunny,
Seymour *of APDFB* choosing a Muriel and a gun. But the Seymour of the
later stories, as I've argued before, isn't the same Seymour of APDFB.
Granted, the Glass Seymour ends up in Florida in that room. But he isn't
that shell-shocked veteran of WWII who is in a state of disintegration. The
Glass Seymour for the last three years of his life enjoys the supreme
satisfaction of penning those 184 poems he's been waiting for. (Those poems
are his 'Duino Elegies'.) I don't think those are hyperbolic statements re
Seymour in 'Seymour: an Intro.' (The litany of he was a great many things
to a great many people while he lived....) I think Buddy believes them, I
think Salinger believes them, I think Salinger wants his readers to believe
them. Salinger obviously is having trouble getting the Seymour of
'Hapworth', 'Raise High', the ghost cameo in 'Zooey', and mostly in 'S: an
Intro.', into that Florida hotelroom he imagined way back in '47 when *that
earlier* Seymour was a just a stand-in for one Jerry Salinger, recently out
of the Army and a nightmare marriage.
Buddy skirts the issue with the statement in 'S: an Intro', "--the details
of his suicide, and I don't expect to be ready to do that, at the rate I'm
going, for several more years." He sort of painted himself into a corner
with APDFB, by starting there, (drops another Seymour hint in 'Dinghy' who
is still the APDFB Seymour, and well, in 1955 after penning 'Franny' (which
is as didactic as 'Teddy' and follows logically, and does not announce
anything new ), JDS unwittingly re-imagines another family, another Seymour,
(and not this embryonic one of APDFB Seymour, and a Walt in 'Uncle Wiggily'
and a Boo Boo and Webb in 'Dinghy'). "Raise High" is the real origin of
the Glass family, the real beginning of Seymour we have come to know and
love (yikes, I said that), and the inability to fit together the jigsaw
puzzle which includes APDFB is part of the problem, and I venture has led to
some writing blocks JDS might or might not admit to.
Last word for today: I find it *very* interesting reading JDS's remarks
regarding poetry and poets throughout his works. I once said I didn't think
Vedanta or Zen or Homeopathy was the key to the Glasses. I honestly think
*poetry* is the key--if one can say there is a key--to the works of
Salinger. And I don't mean Hallmark poetry.
--Blathering Bruce
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