Re: Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes

Pasha Paterson (gpaterso@richmond.edu)
Wed, 22 Sep 1999 13:24:08 -0400 

Wow.  A multiple quotation.  And they say nobody edits replies.  <grin>

At 03:38 09/22/99 -0700, Laughing Man wrote:
> Excuse my poor knowledge of English expressions, but is Pretty Mouth and 
> Green My Eyes a saying of some sort? I’ve just looked at it as the stand 
> alone title, not as stand alone expression. The reason I ask is that P J 
> Harvey is singing that phrase in on of her songs.

I've often wondered why we don't get any more of the poem than that strange
little couplet:

Rose my color is and white;
Pretty mouth and green my eyes.

I've tried (with several other people, including my students AND my
teachers) to speculate what the rest of the poem might have been like.
Could it even be a translation of one of the mysterious poems Seymour gave
to Muriel?  The fragment we get is saturated with colors, but none of them
appear to play significant roles in any other stories (no blue, no yellow,
etc).  It may seem silly to some, perhaps even cheesy, but I really like
the sound of these lines, the way the words fit together, the steady meter,
and all that.

I also have to wonder which came first -- the title or the story.  If the
story came first, I have to wonder what JDS was trying to do in this little
bit of verse, if anything.  It almost seems like he came up with a
good-sounding title and wrote a story around it.

At 08:58 09/22/99 -0700, Bruce (citycabn@gateway.net) wrote:
> I always thought it rather interesting that Pretty Mouth... was published in
> The New Yorker the *exact* week of The Catcher's publication (and Paul
> Kennedy's birth).  Can't imagine a more  un-Catcher-like story.

I can imagine "Pretty Mouth" as a description of what was going on in some
unmentioned room across the courtyard from Holden as he sat waiting for
Sunny in his hotel room.  In a way, this isn't an "un-Catcher-like story"
at all, since Holden goes through the same emotional conflicts that Arthur
(check me) suffers through on the other end of the phone.  If Jane
Gallagher had stayed with Holden, and then betrayed him like this -- which
I don't think she would have, given his descriptions of her -- then Holden
would have completely lost faith in the world.  As it is, he's pretty
shaken up when he hears those stories about her from Stradlater.  It is
interesting, though, that while writing about such a sympathetic character
as Holden, JDS was also writing a nasty, vicious, defeatist story like
"Pretty Mouth".


_________________________________________________

  Pasha Paterson          gpaterso@richmond.edu
  Owner/Designer/Operator, The Digital Dustbin:
  http://www.student.richmond.edu/~gpaterso/
_________________________________________________