Re: Salinger, Dylan, and more Salinger
Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Wed, 09 Sep 1998 15:58:40 -0400 (EDT)
At 12:43 PM -0600 on 9/9/98, you wrote:
> gracias tim, you make good sense. I do think Mr. Salinger was getting
> some support from his parents and now wonder what Sol thought of his
> "writer" son...
Apoplectic, most likely. Not so thrilled with the choice, I seem to recall
hearing. See the documentary "Wild Man Blues," about Woody Allen, for
another take on this. To this day, Allen's father feels that his son would
have been better off as a pharmacist!
> my dad was a salesman who worried so much about his writer
> son starving that he damn near forced me into his business.
Which also happened to Our Hero (cf., "A Girl I Knew"). Until his father
realized that Boar's Head wasn't going to be his son's vocation....
My father simply thought I was insane. He would have been happier if I had
said I'd decided to be a gravedigger or a professional wrestler.
> The only way
> out for me was to succeed at it and then say no--damn near broke my dad's
> heart on that one and he died before he could truly know I was right to
> get back to more text based realities, and so I wonder now what it was
> like at the Salinger breakfast table in l947...
Probably quite tense and reminiscent of the Hemingway story "Soldier's
Home" -- though the tension in Hemingway was between Krebs and his mother.
And we haven't even considered the other factors with Salinger -- the
postwar stress, the possible psychological fragility, the apparent
transient marriage, none of which would have made home life easy with a
patriarch like Sol Salinger at the head of the table.
> Jerry--eat your cornflakes and then you'd better be at the typewriter by
> 9!
Now, THERE is an intriguing angle I've never considered; think of the
emphasis, as conveyed by Ian Hamilton, of Salinger's striving to be a
*professional* writer. (Hamilton sniffs around this one quite a bit, from
what I recall.)
Nothing wrong with developing a good work ethic, I suggest.
--tim