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Show MADELYN CANNON STEWART SILVER 292 Madelyn had reconciled her personal goals, and felt compas sion and soul satisfaction. Brian had spent the summer of 1961 working at Yellowstone before he was to return to Harvard for his second Park; just year, Harold and Madelyn drove up to get him. Harold, always busy, flew back to Denver, while Madelyn and Brian drove home together. Brian shared with his mother his reading, his classes at Harvard, and his thoughts, for he had begun to philosophical, ethical, and religious dimensions which explore extended beyond those of the Silver household in Denver. Brian had apparently performed impressively in a creative writing class at Harvard and had been accepted into an exclusive semi nar taught by Albert J. Guerard, a prominent modernist critic and somewhat less successful psychological novelist. With Guerard, Brian had studied such writers as Flaubert, Faulkner, Nathanial West, Graham Greene, and John Hawkes. In his Yellowstone summer he had read extensively in Freud and Ernest Jones, and was wrestling with exis Freud's biographer, tentialism. Brian had sent to Madelyn The Stranger by Albert Camus and The Bystander by Brian's mentor, Albert Guerard. Camus had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. Madelyn told Brian she was uncomfortable with the adulterous theme of the books she had received and read. The Stranger was the story of and a man who was sleeping with an actress older than he, Madelyn responded by reflecting, "despite Camus was living in traditional North African society, and The Stranger refused to was mourn the death of his mother," did Brian think this acceptable behavior? She told him she was puzzled as to why he tradition was attracted to the book. The Bystander, in the same as Camus, was about an expatriate's affair in France with an moth aging actress he had long admired. Brian explained to his er that he was learning from his studies how to capture reality through a first person narrative. He was also benefiting from reading of the uncertainties and absurdities that concerned "modern" peoples. After his mother's death Brian realized the cruel irony of giv her these particular books when, at the time, he was simply ing |
