Re: Teddy = parts of Seymour ?
Sundeep Dougal (holden@giasdl01.vsnl.net.in)
Sat, 25 Sep 1999 22:30:30 +0530
>I'd put an earlier date on it than that. As far back as `To
> Esme: With Love and Squalor', in which Salinger's narrator is a
short story
Why just that, Camille? Esme is 1950 or so if I remember right whereas
in very many earlier stories autobiographical details are woven in: to
do with being the son of a cheese or ham importer and so on. Even Babe
is loosely autobiographical in earlier stories. I am speaking from
memory, and not records, but could come up with a fair number of
stories like that. I wouldn't have any problems in believing that the
very first story he ever wrote (or words, for that matter) were based
on his own life experience or alluded to some of them. The Hurtgen
forest details crop up even in The Stranger and so on. One of those
truisms, again, not just about our patron saint of Cornish, but almost
about anyone, or at least a whole lot of authors or some of their
work.
I have no problems with any of this. Just that, to my mind, when "an
amateur reader" (one who only reads and runs) reads any of these
stories, it matters not a whit whether any of the stories have an
autobiographical base or not. Unless one already happens to be
interested in an author's personal life, one would see no need to do
any amount of literary sleuthing in his fiction. I would be willing to
wager that out of the millions who have read Catcher, and enjoyed it,
their comprehension or understanding or enjoyment or relating with it
was most certainly not hampered by their not knowing anything about
the alleged influences of Ramakrishna or Buddha or anybody else on its
structure, composition, or early drafts. If anything, reading the
early drafts, in so far as some are available in the Uncollected,
wouldn't really inspire me to read the final book.
> That of the narrator or that of Salinger himself? Therefore I think
it
> would be wrong to say that Salinger's selfconscious toying with
> autobiography was not begun
> but merely exacerbated by Catcher's success.
Sure. I wasn't suggesting that -- just that he wasn't, shall we say,
playing the kind of games in his fiction before that, which gets more
pronounced in S:AI, from what I vaguely remember. Post-Catcher, he had
the confidence, and felt the necessity perhaps, to be more indulgent
with his whims, and frankly not very many really cared one way or the
other about his autobiography before that -- Time or Newsweek
certainly didn't care whether he had a dog or not.
Certainly, it could be argued that jacket-notes by many authors happen
to be equally cute or deceptive about details of their personal lives,
or sometimes significant events of an author's life are interwoven one
way or the other, with or without irony, twists and spins, in later
works. Rushdie is a case in point, to name another talked-about author
recently. I'd submit that post-Catcher, since he was more in the eyes
of the media, and seemed to resent the intrusion into his personal
life...before that it is just material or the theme of a story... and
actually, so it is afterwards too, (though more directly targeted at
some of the criticism to his work which you wouldn't find in early
works...) all of this of course could well be argued as a case in
point for the alleged "Hindu" belief that all is maya, illusory; that
there are oceans of the sea of stories; what is, is. I am quite happy
with the higher pantheism in a nutshell:
What we see is not, and what is not we see
Fiddle we know is diddle; and diddle we take it, is dee.
Sonny