Subject: NYTimes
AndrewCY@aol.com
Date: Thu Feb 20 1997 - 22:08:56 GMT
heres the New York Times Article.....
_________________________________
February 20, 1997
>From J.D. Salinger, a New Dash of Mystery
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
So, at long last, we have news that the famously reclusive J.D. Salinger is
bringing out another book, not a new story, but one called "Hapworth 16,
1924," which appeared in The New Yorker in the 1960s.
Read in retrospect, that story continues -- perhaps even completes -- the
saga of the Glass family, that band of precocious, high-strung whiz kids who
have captivated Salinger fans for four decades. It also stands as a logical,
if disappointing, culmination of Salinger's published work to date.
Why wait three decades to bring out this story in book form? And why choose
the obscure Orchises Press in Alexandria, Va., to publish it? One can only
speculate: that the author wanted to remind his readers of his existence,
that he wanted to achieve a kind of closure by putting his last published
story between book covers, that he wanted readers to reappraise the Glass
family (and by extension his body of work) through a story that, within the
Glass canon, is nothing less than revisionistic.
As with most things connected with Salinger, an air of mystery hovers about
the publication of "Hapworth." His agent has not returned phone calls, and
even bookstores say they do not know exactly when they will have copies of
the book for sale -- this month, perhaps, or March or April. In the meantime,
the story can be found in the June 19, 1965, issue of The New Yorker -- in
the library stacks or on microfilm.
The New Yorker story, a novella really, takes the form of a nearly
interminable letter ostensibly written from summer camp by the 7-year-old
Seymour Glass. It is unlikely to be of any interest to anyone who has not
closely followed the emotional peregrinations of the Glass family over the
years, and for ardent Glass-ites, it is likely to prove a disillusioning, if
perversely fascinating, experience. an experience that will forever change
their perception of Seymour and his siblings.
Like Holden Caulfield, the Glass children are both avatars of adolescent
angst and emblems of Salinger's own alienated stance toward the world.
Bright, gregarious and entertaining (their parents are retired
vaudevillians), the Glasses embody all the magic of their creator's early
stories; they appeal to the reader to identify with their sensitivity, their
braininess, their impatience with phonies, hypocrites and bores.
The Glasses' emotional translucence, their febrile charm, their spiritual
yearning and nausea -- all delivered in the wonderfully idiomatic voice of
cosmopolitan New Yorkese -- initially made them a glamorous mirror of our own
youthful confusions.
Yet there is a darker side to their estrangement as well: a tendency to
condescend to the vulgar masses, a familial self-involvement that borders on
the incestuous and an inability to relate to other people that, in Seymour's
case at least, will have tragic consequences indeed.
Seymour, of course, was the oldest of the Glass children, who in the 1948
short story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" (collected in "Nine Stories") put
a gun to his head and blew his brains out. In that story, Seymour appeared to
be a sweet if somewhat disturbed young man, ill equipped to deal with the
banal, grown-up world represented by his frivolous wife.
In subsequent stories, we learned, largely through the reminiscences of his
brother Buddy -- the family historian and Salinger's alter ego, who actually
purports to have written "Bananafish" and "Raise High the Roof Beam,
Carpenters" (1955) -- that Seymour was regarded as the family saint and
resident mystic.
In "Seymour: An Introduction" (1959), Buddy described his brother as "our
blue-striped unicorn, our double-lensed burning glass, our consultant genius,
or portable conscience, our supercargo and our one full poet."
Seymour was the one who inculcated the younger Glasses in Eastern mysticism
and Western philosophy and preached a Zen-like doctrine of acceptance.
Seymour was the one who said that "all we do our whole lives is go from one
little piece of Holy Ground to the next." Seymour was supposed to be the one
who saw more.
It is something of a shock, then, to meet the Seymour presented in
"Hapworth": an obnoxious child given to angry outbursts. "No single day
passes," this Seymour writes, "that I do not listen to the heartless
indifferences and stupidities passing from the counselors' lips without
secretly wishing I could improve matters quite substantially by bashing a few
culprits over the head with an excellent shovel or stout club!"
This Seymour confesses to lustful feelings about the camp matron ("I have
looked forward with mounting pleasure to the possibility, all too slight for
words, of her opening the door, quite unwittingly, in the raw"), condescends
to his parents ("Jesus, you are a talented, cute, magnificent couple!") and
boasts of his own talent ("the distinguished Edgar Semple having told Fraser
that I have the makings of a splendid American poet, which is quite true in
the last analysis").
For a child, Seymour makes requests for reading material that verge on the
preposterous: among many other books, he asks for "the complete works again
of Count Leo Tolstoy" and "any unbigoted or bigoted books on God or merely
religion, as written by persons whose last names begin with any letter after
H; to stay on the safe side, please include H itself, though I think I have
mostly exhausted it."
Though Seymour and his siblings have always been renowned for their
precocity, this hardly sounds like a 7-year-old, no matter how brilliant or
advanced. After all, Buddy told us in an earlier story that when Seymour was
8, he was writing poems like this: "John Keats/John Keats/John/Please put
your scarf on."
Indeed, there are plenty of suggestions that Buddy -- who introduces the
Hapworth letter, saying he's typed "an exact copy" of Seymour's words -- is
actually the letter's author, distorting Seymour in much the same way that he
once said he distorted Seymour in "Bananafish," impersonating a brother
through an act of ventriloquism as Zooey did in the 1957 story "Zooey."
It is never explained, for instance, why Seymour, once described as "the
least prolific letter writer in the family," has penned such a ludicrously
long epistle.
Equally unexplained are the bizarre hints in the letter that Seymour can
foretell the future, that he has predicted, at such a young age, his own
untimely death and Buddy's dazzling future as a writer.
Why would Buddy Glass want to distort his brother's memory, tear down the
myth of the saintly Seymour he has so carefully constructed in the past? No
doubt one possible motive lies in the Glass siblings' resentment of Seymour's
mentorship and sanctimonious love of perfection and their bitterness over his
suicide, which left the "Whole Loving Family high and dry."
Buddy, especially, has always had a deeply ambivalent relationship with his
older brother, his professed love and adoration belying, in "Seymour: An
Introduction" at least, envy, pique and simple weariness with being haunted
by a ghost.
In the end, of course, Buddy is a fictional narrator, a mouthpiece for his
creator, and so the larger question becomes, what light does "Hapworth" shed
on Salinger's conception of the Glasses and the evolution of his art?
The first thing the reader notices, in looking back on the Glass stories,
is that the tales have grown increasingly elliptical over the years, tidily
crafted works like "Bananafish" and "Franny" giving way to the increasingly
verbose "Zooey" and the shapeless, mock stream of consciousness employed in
"Seymour" and "Hapworth."
The second thing one notices is that the stories have also grown
increasingly self-conscious and self-reflexive, much the way many of Philip
Roth's later fictions have. This solipsism, in turn, makes the reader
increasingly aware of the solipsism of the Glass family itself, underscoring
the rarefied, self-enclosed air of all the stories they inhabit.
"Seymour," which teasingly conflates Buddy's and Salinger's identities, is
filled with little gibes against critics with tin ears, defensive remarks
about being a literary entertainer with "surface charms," and even allusions
to rumors about being a recluse.
"Hapworth" can similarly be read as a response of sorts to Salinger's
critics, who in the years before its New Yorker publication took his Glass
stories to task for being too cute, too self-involved, too smug.
With "Hapworth," Salinger seems to be giving critics a send-up of what he
contends they want.
Accused of writing only youthful characters, he has given us a 7-year-old
narrator who talks like a peevish old man. Accused of never addressing the
question of sexual love, he has given us a young boy who speaks like a lewd
adult. Accused of loving his characters too much, he has given us a hero
who's deeply distasteful.
And accused of being too superficially charming, he has given us a nearly
impenetrable narrative, filled with digressions, narcissistic asides and
ridiculous shaggy-dog circumlocutions.
In doing so, however, Salinger has not only ratified his critics'
accusations of solipsism, but also fulfilled his own fear that one day he
might "disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and mannerisms."
This falling off in his work, perhaps, is a palpable consequence of
Salinger's own Glass-like withdrawal from the public world: withdrawal
feeding self-absorption and self-absorption feeding tetchy disdain.
The infinitely engaging author of "The Catcher in the Rye" (1951), the
writer who captured the hearts of several generations with his sympathetic
understanding, his ear for vernacular speech, his pitch-perfect knowledge of
adolescence and, yes, his charm, has produced, with "Hapworth," a sour,
implausible and, sad to say, completely charmless story.
Other Places of Interest on the Web <A HREF="http://members.aol.com/jdslette
rs/index.html">The Official Letters to J.D. Salinger Home Page
Former Site of the Holden Server
<a href="http://www.stardot.com/~lukeseem/holden/">http://www.stardot.com/~luk
eseem/holden/</A>
A List of Salinger Books on
<A HREF="http://slf.gweep.net/~sfoskett/jds/stories/books.html#hapworth">http:
//slf.gweep.net/~sfoskett/jds/stories/books.html#hapworth</A>
Bananafish Home ,an Unofficial J.D. Salinger Home Page
Copyright 1997 The New York Times
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