Re: JDS the Poet
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Wed, 17 Feb 1999 21:15:03 +1100
Obviously this is a major stumbling block for anyone who writes of a
fictitious Great Poet; to assume his or her words is to make great
assumptions about oneself as a writer. I quite like the way Nabokov just
dives into it headlong and gives us the entire poem of the genius in `Pale
Fire' - but then again, Nabokov can get away with this by using this to
make us ask ourselves: is John Shade really a genius? Is `Pale Fire' (the
poem) a work of genius? What exactly defines one? Did John Shade really
write it, or did Charles Kinbote, or are they one and the same ...? And so
on. AS Byatt encounters a similar problem in `Possession' but gets around
it by offering sections rather than poems in their entirety (implying that,
if we don't find genius here, it must be in the parts we have not been
offered)
Salinger's use of Muriel's witholding of permission is clearly a literary
device which exempts him from, as you say, having to aspire to write poetry
of the unfathomably great calibre that Seymour's has been built up to be -
a similar device to the one he used in `The Inverted Forest' and to a
smaller extent `The Varoni Brothers' (which admittedly I've never read but
I'd assume that seeing he's a composer it'd be somewhat difficult (: ) As
for whether Salinger is attempting this task, or whether he even *should* -
I don't know. How could anything built up to be as great as Seymour's work
be anything but even the slightest disappointment? You never know though
... in a way it's kind of a metaphor for `our' Seymour vs Salinger's
Seymour. He *knows* Seymour's the greatest poet that ever lived. He just
won't let us know why (:
citycabn wrote:
> Please recall that Buddy gives us *prose synopses* of several of
Seymour's
> last poems, including the suicide poem on the desk blotter in the hotel
> room. I contend it's not that Muriel hasn't given Buddy permission to
> quote the poems. It's that, well (am I being just cruel here?), JDS, at
> least in 1959, wasn't up to writing the poems himself. Writing poetry of
a
> Seymour Glass-level is a daunting task. I mean, if Ray Ford of The
> Inverted Forest is a combination of Coleridge, Blake and Rilke and more,
> whose names do you string together for a Seymour Glass? Which is not to
say
> that JDS has *not* written Seymour's 184 poems (*as Buddy reads them in
that
> notebook*--or even at a slightly lower level of achievement) in the last
> forty years since the publication of S:an I.
Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
@ THE ARTS HOLE http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442
@ THE INVERTED FOREST http://www.angelfire.com/pa/invertedforest