Re: and the winner is ...

Dang...an actual, bonafide Salinger post...wow! I can't respond about Alsen's
book, but I can respond about Hapworth -- finally finished reading it. See
below.

Kevin Carter wrote:

> Also, I'm wondering what people thought about Buddy's claim that Seymour
> wrote the "Hapworth" letter. I had always seen this as either Salinger's
> striking back at the critics with his portrayal of an unrealistically
> precocious youth in response to their claims about his work or, simply, a
> portrayal of just how gifted young Seymour was. Perhaps the thought had
> loomed at the back of my mind that Buddy could have drafted the letter, but
> I wasn't prepared to take his claim at face value without additional
> analysis.

Did Alsen suggest that Buddy wrote Seymour's letter and tried to pass it off as
Seymour's? The thought never occurred to me, but the letter is unbelievable
from even a gifted 7 year old. The unbelievability goes far beyond just the
diction of the letter -- Buddy's, what, 5 or 6 in 1924, Boo Boo is probably 3
or 4, and who knows how old Walt and Waker are, but they're very very young (I
think I could have lifted more specific ages from the letter).

The things Seymour says of Buddy and of Boo Boo are just as unbelievable as his
own vocabulary. Seymour goes beyond this -- he predicts his own death at the
age of 30ish, but I don't remember that he knows it was by suicide. He has a
pretty active libido and is aware of adult sexual politics, and forget about
his reading list.

What Seymour really sounds like at age 7 is a young intellectual -- the sort
that recognizes, accurately, his own intelligence and stands besides himself,
impressed, but not one that's recognized his own intelligence long enough to
quit being impressed with it. It's like he has to glance in the mirror every
time he uses his brains -- it's almost like the whole letter is a long,
sideways glance in the mirror. Maybe like someone who just published a
brilliant dissertation and hasn't learned enough to learn how much he still
doesn't know, as opposed to someone working in the same field 20 years and
knows how much bigger it all is than he is.

Now the hyperadvanced intelligence and the prescience is also in Teddy -- who
predicts his own death later during the day that the story takes place. I can
see Alsen drawing parallels between Teddy -- a character that "Buddy," I
suppose, created -- and the Seymour who wrote "Hapworth," then assuming that
Buddy invented them both.

I think it'd be more accurate to say that Buddy was inspired by Seymour to
write Teddy, though (within the context of the Glass saga). I get the feeling
the letter is supposed to be honest dictation by Buddy -- that he got this old
letter from his mother, in his late 50s, in Seymour's 7 year old handwriting
and typed it all out.

The story as part of the Glass family chronicle is pretty useful, but as
fiction it's self indulgent and completely unbelievable. I can see the sense
in following John G's advice (if I remember it right) and reading all the
stories in chronological order (rather than in the order they were published),
but this requires more suspension of disbelief than I'm capable of. The
stories are more interesting to me if I read them as Salinger's constructions
-- seeing how he appended to, revised, and expanded the Glass family stories as
he went on, as he allowed them to say more and different things, perhaps even
considering that some of the stories weren't intended as Glass family material
until after the fact.

Jim

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Received on Sat Mar 15 23:02:56 2003