Re: leonard's missing beard/will's absence

I've not shaved off my beard but when I think of Leonard Woolf, I
wonder how much he had to do with keeping rocks out of Virginia's
pockets...but I'm not drowning in my own river, not yet, just working
to help 70 or so survivors of my writing classes present winning
portfolios and trying to help my wife and her family deal with my
ailing father-in-law. I'm really touched with the posts noting my
absence but I'm still here, I swear!

BTW, Die Zeit, a German weekly newspaper interviewed me for a cute
little story by Heike Faller on impossible things to want for Xmas.
Here's the translated version (for the original German consult Rilke
and the 21 Nov issue of Die Zeit, page 59:

I couldn't forget Seymour Glass after I had read about him or should
I say: after I met him. I don't think about him often but he has
stayed in my phantasy like a good ghost. A thin boy with wiry dark
hair who grew up as the oldest of seven precocious children on the
Upper West Side in New York City. It is one of his many sweet traits
that he would read stories to his little siblings at sleeptime. His
sister (check?) Franny would later and in another story claim that
she could actually remember being read to by her adult brother when
she was still a baby. This may sound hard to believe but it acurately
describes the hypnotic powers with which the stories of JD Salinger
enter the deeper layers of their readers' brains. And then they stay.
You read them at age 16 (or so) and may forget the exact storyline,
but you do remember the characters: Melancholic Wunderkinder,
childish Mystics, who don't fear death and would die for their little
sisters. So present are they in their readers' minds that it can
acutally happen that two of them walk through a city and all of a
sudden one says: »The guy over their looks like Seymour«, the other
one responding that he just thought exactly the same.
        Seymour - besides The Catcher in the Rye - is the character,
Salinger described most obsessively. Aged 12 he throw a stone into a
little girls face »because she looked so beautiful sitting there in
the middle of the driveway«, at 16 he entered College, got his PhD at
21, wrote supposedly 184 unpublished poems (claims his little brother
Buddy in Raise High ....). And at age 31 - driving to Florida -
poured all his tenderness and poetic talent in a nickname for his
wife; he called her »Miss Intellectual Vagabond of the Yeer 1984«. A
couple of pages later he lies down next to her and shoots a bullet
through his right temple.
        He is greatly missed. J.D. Salinger has only published four
books, that are as thin and wonderful and sometimes kitschy as his
characters and for a long time I thought this was all I was ever
going to hear of them. Until one evening you find yourself typing
their names into an Internet Search Engine and end up in a networks
of people who spend part of their lives discussing Salingers
characters. If you follow the threads you learn that there is a
possibility of reuninion: Through the 22 stories which JD Salinger as
a young author has published in different magazines. Supposedly some
of them are not very good, which may be the reason why Salinger has
been preventing their publication for decades. But you can buy them
as the Complete Uncollected Stories of JD Salinger over alibris.com
in the Internet, 107 pages, stapled, »slightly sunned« in some cases,
and with a inscription and for a mininmum of 474 Dollars.
        Is it worth it? Or could a re-union with the Glass family
(meeting them in their infant stages as an adult) be disappointing?
        Dr. Will Hochman, an English Professor at the Souther
Connecticut State University had had a chance to look at the
unpublished stories a couple of years ago at the Firestone Library in
Princeton when whe wrote his dissertation on JD Salinger and he
writes in an E-Mail: (my english): »I was allowed to read the stories
on a tape, and - sitting in a room alone with Salingers letters and
stories, reading into my dictaphone, I found it hard to stay on even
keel«.
        Oddly enough he writes at the end of his mail, that he had
lost the little tapes in a NYC cab only last week. He didn't try very
hard to get them back, he said. He claims that this has to do with
the fact that he was tired of his own voice reading the stories. Or
maybe he has learned from JD Salinger, the master of absence, that
these tapes (like all things we really want) are more important,
while we miss them - we miss them more than anything else.

*****;)will

-- 
	Will Hochman
Associate Professor of English
Southern Connecticut State University
501 Crescent St, New Haven, CT 06515
203 392 5024
http://www.southernct.edu/~hochman/willz.html
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