Re: Your Amazon.com order (#0226-3353936-425551) (fwd)
William Hochman (wh14@is9.nyu.edu)
Thu, 02 Dec 1999 19:00:00 -0500 (EST)
I don't think JDS is playing cat and mouse with his readers and believe
the Alexander book to be falacious.
With no William Shawn to deflect criticim like Michiko Kakutani's in the
NY Times our man may have felt the need to retreat back into his
seclusion.
It does make sense for Hapworth, in my opinion, to become a book since it
is more on the Glass family and advances a nexus between literature and
religion while Seymour's withdrawal from camp hapworth may ironically
parallel a fellow in New Hampshire we all don't know.
Hapworth alludes to and uses a Blakean sense of childhood power, while
collapsing god seeking and writing to the point where one must consider
text as a go-between for spritual understanding.
"Would to God a simple letter were less fraught with the burdens of superb
written construction" wrote Seymour in Hapworth...To avoid the profanity
of society, young Seymour uses Blakean wisdom to see beyond people to the
texts he could join. I think not publishing Hapworth is a damn sad thing
because it's got some beautiful things to say but I don't deny the
listening is hard going...sort of like bananafish swimming upstream to
spawn, will