Subject: hush, hush, whisper who dares? Kwistofer Wobbin is saying his prayers
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Tue Jul 17 2001 - 14:22:00 GMT
'... that's even more of a reason,' writes Will, 'not to post
directions on how to personally hurt someone ...'
His daughter has, of course, already written witheringly
about the self-appointed Salinger protectors who suffer
so delicately on his behalf, forever reproaching all those
unfeeling critics & diving forward like kamikaze heroes
to bar the path into his hilltop fastness.
Yet can there ever have been a more efficiently advertised
recluse in the history of American letters? I can't count
the number of times I've been given instructions how
to find his place - always up to the second last crossroads,
whereupon the prick-teasing informant wags his finger
& gives me a solemn lecture on my prurience in even thinking
of intruding on the great man's privacy.
I need hardly say I'd no more be caught skulking around
Cornish than walking up the hundred yards to our local
chapel here where, last week, the bones of St Therèse
were on display. (Indeed, there might be a certain similarity
of experience.) But it's not from any lack of hospitability
on Jerry's part. I wonder sometimes he doesn't issue excursion
tickets in Grand Central - or wherever it is one takes
the puffer to New Hampshire. So far as I've read, there
used be no great crowds of mooners around Ketchum
during Hemingway's last days, & most of your other
illustrious writers seem to get on with the work without
this endless, blaring publicity that anyone truly committed
to obscurity could have dispersed long ago with nothing
more than a few unobstrusive murmurs.
I must say I'm turning into Sarah Morril's latest fan.
What a pleasant & bracing change from the more
familiar, tactful sighings of adoration that Salinger's
admirers have made their specialty. Vigah of opinion
& vigah of expression. That's the stuff to give the troops.
In the words of that grand old Scots song, : 'She's the maid
for me ....'
Scottie B.
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