Re: Seymour: the signature Salinger spice
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Fri, 25 Sep 1998 15:43:48 +1000
> Though I don't remember Buddy explaining how "certain elements of
> Seymour were sort of transformed and fitted on to Teddy,"
Does anyone have a copy handy? My copy is floating at the moment so I can't
offer one. I think it's around the part where Buddy's trying to describe
himself and Seymour physically, because he explains that while Teddy does
not resemble Seymour, certain elements of Seymour have sort of been
strained and distilled into Teddy's persona.
> Seymour and Teddy are two
> versions of the same story.
Yeah - that's sort of what I meant. But if we take the fact that Buddy (not
Salinger per se) wrote Teddy, I wonder if Bananafish represents the real
situation, and Teddy Buddy's transformation of this story into `fiction' ?
I've compared it to similar things of mine (i.e. things that I've sort of
based on real life but not exactly) and found the correlation pretty much
the same - elements embellished and made more grandiose (for example, why
set it on a beach? Why not set it on a boat? That sort of thought process),
certain things making themselves heard from the back of the writer's mind,
and so on. Teddy is basically a more didactic version of the events of
Bananafish - which is interesting because I think it's part of Buddy's
process of rationalising the incident -
> You order a piece of the triple chocolate cake, and Teddy
> explains to you how bread, eggs, water and chocolate are like apples,
> and how you don't want any, really.
I guess that's why I was never really fond of the story (: Which made me
extra interested when Buddy mentioned that he believed it was a `totally
unsuccessful' story. It's got a sort of impenetrable veneer to it (the
character of Teddy especially) which is sort of unenticing in a way that
the Seymour stories aren't at all. It's quite interesting if you
contemplate that as a progression on Buddy's part - pretty soon he gives up
on `fictional' renderings of his family's stories (and what's to say *all*
of the Nine Stories aren't `based' on incidents of the Glass family) and
decides to tell the story, plain and simple.
Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
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