| Author |
Message |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, February 01, 2010 - 11:30 am: | |
Salinger's safe: I will be in the queue as a reader, waiting for whatever is to be published. Any opinions as to the sort of thing likely to be found? I don't normally speculate but this time I can't help it. |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 02, 2010 - 5:03 pm: | |
It'd be wonderful if he'd left us a lode of first-rate short stories - but US writers have this habit of either agonising over indifferent books for years (Ralph Ellison) or somehow mislaying their "masterpiece" (Capote). I have a feeling Salinger may have had very good reasons for staying mute. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 02, 2010 - 5:15 pm: | |
Salinger's Franny and Zooey reveals a flaw behind the brilliance. It is a great book but - perhaps the problem is that the two main characters lack faults that aren't endearing ... There is a great deal of *charm* in this book, and just a little too much. But still a great book. I keep wondering whether Salinger is capable, in the way that he is in Catcher in the Rye, of being held by a charmless nonentity. In CITR his weakness for 'people who are special' (that is, who belong the to Glass family for example) is invisible, in that Caulfield calls them out. Total phoney's - where he is the biggest. So I find myself forced to think that the posthumous novels and stories may have built in conceptual flaws. But there has to be much which is good too. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 09, 2010 - 10:52 am: | |
Hey Martin, I didn't notice your comment last time. Yes, let's hope that there are collections of short stories. That would be absolutely fantastic. Salinger clearly couldn't stand having anything to do with a publicly led life. Never that mind his stories seem to say otherwise. However, that stubborn reticence doesn't necessarily make him an oddity. You could mention Pynchon, whom I have never read, but the writer who springs to my mind is Wittgenstein. One tiny book published in his life time. The rest posthumous. And of course incomparable. I don't hold the same hopes for Sallinger (who after all wasn't engaged in academia like Wittgenstein). But it doesn't otherwise mean that we will just get eccentric babble. I hope not. Salinger looks like a mystic from the direction of his writings. Where would a mystic go, having begun from the centre of American life ( mean, from Nu Yoik)? |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 09, 2010 - 5:32 pm: | |
There's a lot of mystics in New York!
That looks too flip. What I meant is that such an outlook could flourish there: not only Ginsberg, but -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Everett_Smith
I think the poet Ronald Duncan retreated in a similar way: though a public figure, he stopped commercial publication of his work, so as to escape the pressures (such as they were) of a poetic "career." With Salinger, not even rumours have leaked out about what he was working on, if anything. We could get private masterpieces; or we could find that, without any deadline, he simply strolled and hummed his way down all the days. |
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