Re: Teddy = parts of Seymour ?
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@hotpop.com)
Sat, 25 Sep 1999 15:08:46 +1000
Sonny wrote:
> > see that that could be a problem. However, I think this is not so
> far from
> > what I was saying the other day - that Salinger knows our tendency
> to dig
> > for autobiography, to dig for meaning - and he plays with it.
>
> Yeah, but that comes into the picture after the unexpected success of
> Catcher, as you well go on to point out about the early work, as has
> well been commented about even in the early reviews.
No, I think I'd put an earlier date on it than that. As far back as `To
Esme: With Love and Squalor', in which Salinger's narrator is a short story
writer, a soldier who fought in the Hurtgen Forest and even shares
Salinger's army number. I'm not saying readers were intitially expected to
see the story as autobiographical, but delving into things even slightly
and all evidence would point to it. Besides, one of the implicit themes of
the story is biography vs. assumed biography - even the notion of calling
the narrator Sergeant X makes us ask `whose identity is being protected?
That of the narrator or that of Salinger himself? Therefore I think it
would be wrong to say that Salinger's selfconscious toying with
autobiography was not begun
but merely exacerbated by Catcher's success.
Camille
verona_beach@hotpop.com