RE: gary lane, 'the duino elegies', death haiku

i like your 'pure romantic fiction'.
i think it probable that salinger first read rilke
before going overseas. but he could have taken a
norton volume with him (or bought a hogarth press
edition while in england). reading outside of one's
room or a library heightens the experience of reading.
 and i can imagine no more stringent test of a writer
than whose reader is reading in the midst of wartime.
it's fitting, perhaps, that salinger's first book
format publication was his story 'the hang of it' in
'the kit book for soldiers, sailors and marines'.
kim
 

<daniel.yocum@Peterson.af.mil> wrote:
> Maybe it's pure romantic fiction but I picture a
> copy of Rilke's poetry in
> his combat blouse as he's jeeping throughout Europe
> with visions of dead
> comrades, interrogation sessions and tours of
> concentration camps being
> fused in digestible sense. When I was in the
> military with reading
> material in my pockets, the material seemed to
> change with my external
> environment, ringing true or hollow depending on the
> author.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kim Johnson [mailto:haikux2@yahoo.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, September 25, 2002 3:10 PM
> To: bananafish@roughdraft.org
> Subject: RE: gary lane, 'the duino elegies', death
> haiku
>
>
>
> --- Yocum Daniel GS 21 CES/CEOE
> <daniel.yocum@Peterson.af.mil> wrote:
> > Maybe Salinger associates Rilke with profound pain
> > and strong emotional
> > memory of death since he discovered him in Europe
> > during his recuperation
> > from battle fatigue(as far as my limited
> knowledge)
> > so when He wrote
> > Bananafish, that was the poetry he associated
> > strongly with his depression
> > or broken faculties after the war. From the
> little
> > I know about literary
> > criticism, which is nothing, it seems to me the
> > pschological motivation for
> > Seymour's sucide might have changed with
> Salinger's
> > changing world view or
> > rather his exposure to eastern thought. But
> > apparently from the post today
> > he never forgot Rilke's inspirational influnce
> > conscious or otherwise.
> >
> >
> daniel,
>
> i very much like your post.
> i'm not sure if it is known exactly when salinger
> discovered rilke's work. rilke is mentioned by name
> in 'the stranger' which dates, i think, from 1945.
> and
> it is a fact that norton publishing company in
> america
> started to publish a slew of rilke books starting in
> 1938 all the way through '47 or '48 (this included
> the
> celebrated leishman & spender translation of 'the
> duino elegies' in 1939). i can't help but think that
> jds eagerly sought out each new norton book as it
> appeared during those ten years. and if one can
> trust
> a bookseller on abebooks.com, salinger enrolled in a
> writing course in the spring of '39 at columbia from
> the poet charles hanson towne--the dealer has an
> inscribed book by towne ('an april song') to jds
> with
> reference to that course; i'm guessing a poetry
> writing class (though it's not specified). it is
> known that during the war salinger bombarded louise
> bogan with poems for possible publication in 'the
> new
> yorker'. as i said in my other post, the motif of
> poetry is very strong in salinger's work and
> continues
> to be such even as the eastern influences accrue
> over
> the years. and of course the very fact that he
> makes
> his central character, seymour glass, in addition to
> being a blue-striped unicorn and ringd

ng
> enlightened
> man, a poet of the first rank.
>
> kim
>
>
>
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Received on Wed Sep 25 18:38:40 2002