Subject: Re: Hapworth Revisited
From: Tim O'Connor (oconnort@nyu.edu)
Date: Sat Dec 30 2000 - 15:51:14 GMT
On Sat, Dec 30, 2000 at 06:26:59PM +0000, Scottie Bowman wrote:
> What strikes me is how rarely list members express a personal
> response to the story. There seems to be a slightly hang-dog
> evasiveness.
I've said it evasively, I guess, at least in part because it's only my
opinion and is not to be taken as gospel by anyone who happens upon
what I've said. I don't appreciate the story and I don't like it. I
don't find it amusing; I don't even share a complete appreciation of
the reading list. I agree with Updike that it is a preview of what
could have been a dreadful downward spiral. In order for "Hapworth" to
work, there has to be a strong, willing suspension of disbelief,
stronger than to view any movie and to believe in the process of
cinema. It doesn't work for me perhaps because I can't suspend my
disbelief. I, unlike you, actually enjoy "Seymour: An Introduction,"
and revel, in my own way, in the mannerisms and locutions. Because
"Seymour," in its own way, is a blueprint, even if, as Buddy worries,
it fails in its mission. I don't mind the digressions, the swipes at
"infidels," or the rambling nature of the narrative. Because despite
what you might at first think, there is a narrative at work there. I
find no such object buried in "Hapworth," and that spoils it for me.
I don't want to think about what might happen to come next from the
pen of the author of "Hapworth," because it gives me the shivers to
imagine. To much time contemplating one's navel turns one into a ball
of wax, and "Hapworth," for me, is such a ball of wax. It might have
intellectual qualities that are worth discussing, but it's not for me,
personally. I am inclined to leave it to others to dissect and
discuss.
> Given the circumstances, any of us could have been Holden
> or the Sergeant. But who ever encountered a family of Glasses?
> They tell us virtually nothing about our own common humanity.
> They're a fantasy representing various facets of his own personality
> contructed by a rich, clever, Upper East Side boy - treasured
> throughout his life, I suspect, for his uniqueness, his giftedness,
> his fastidiousness, his charisma, & so on - & who long ago retreated,
> literally & metaphorically, into an increasingly barren, increasingly
> solipsistic fantasy of his own particularity.
I'd like to disagree with you on this, but I won't -- at least in part
because I don't find any evidence in either direction. I'd like to
think that he might have found a way out of the vortex. I'd like to
think that the treasure-trove of manuscripts contains material that
goes back to the tangible, the concrete, the "any of us" world that we
got in postwar Salinger. I don't know one way or the other. I don't
have enough evidence to say "yea" or "nay."
> Does anyone after the age of sixteen - when most of us give up
> the fantasy of being that special, that royal, that love child of genius
> - really give one damn about Seymour Glass or any of his precious
> siblings?
I do when it is a circumstance of one sibling trying to show us
another sibling -- or just telling us a story about another sibling.
When Seymour takes the narrative helm, it just about destroys it for
me. Buddy's attempt, in "Seymour," to show us a portrait of his
brother, that's compelling FOR ME. (I don't mean to suggest that it
should be so for every reader.) I like the Glasses the more they are
like my fellow humans, or my fellow New Yorkers, or my fellow homo
sapiens. I like them less when they are like Teddy.
> What a pity Salinger never seems to have found - or perhaps was
> never able to love - a Norah Barnacle who could have laughed
> at him, told him to catch himself on, kept him gratefully rooted
> in the good soil. And maybe turned him into a contender for
> the Joyce Cup.
There's an idea with wings. A Nora would have helped a lot -- though
toward the end I don't think anyone could have convinced JJ to move
away from his own magnum opus of strange mannerisms. (I always
enjoyed the possibly fake snippet of dialog between Joyce and his
brother. Stanislaus suggested that Joyce make it more readable,
because it was impossible to comprehend Finnegans Wake. And in the
tale, Joyce says, "I spent my life writing it. They can spend their
lives reading it." True tale or not, I don't know. But it makes me
chuckle.)
OK, so now I have marked myself as a Hapworth infidel....
--tim
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