Re: Hapworth

Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Thu, 20 May 1999 22:58:25 +1000 

Jake McHenry wrote:
> I tend to hear that alot in certain circles and waht strikes me most
about
> Seymour's seven year old vocabulary is quite the opposite. What I hear is
> him trying to sound overly literate as opposed to actually being overly
> literate. He uses the same "big" words over and over and will go out of
his
> way to use them in context. This, to me, is not him being truly
> grandiloquent in the common sense of the word. What I think is happening
is
> that he is being wordy the way that we all are when we discover a new
word
> or two. Hell, I use the word noisome and grandiloquent and other words
that
> may make me sound like a smart-ass to some. 

Another good point. I for one found Seymour's endearingly skew-whiff
Adultese kind of engaging, although I could see how it could become
annoying. This is because I knew exactly his trap, it's the same trap I
fell into in my formative writing years: big word=good writing. I think
just about every writer goes through this; luckily I more or less got it
out of my system early. Though in the few remaining dot-matrix transcripts
of my first novel there still exists that howler of a phrase:

`The room was overflowing with pulchitrude'

I would do Seymour proud (: Though I don't discount the efforts of twelve
year old me; in a lot of ways that little precocious so-and-so achieved a
lot more than I am now.

Seymour's parlance does however tap at what I see as a fundamental
conundrum in Salinger's work. One of the main portents of Buddhism is: no
reliance on words. Some of Salinger's early works were fragile and
beautiful in their very sparseness - `Franny' for example is a story I
often cite as not having a single word out of place. However, we could all
agree that Salinger has gotten more and more loquacious as time had gone on
- which would violate that fundamental precept and, I think, rob his work
of a lot of that zen-like simplicity - or at least replace it with a
totally different mode of expression. `Catcher' for example is every bit as
long winded and digressional as `Hapworth 16' - but you never feel that
anything is expressed in too many or too few words.

The obvious conclusion to me, and the one that everything we know about
Salinger would seem to support is in fact that he is not the Zen master we
have all heard about. In fact in the 1974 interview (facts? I'm not 100%
sure on this) he describes himself as a `failed Buddhist'. Instead, writing
*is* Salinger's religion. Seymour is the central figure of that religion.
And Salinger's exile is nothing different from the medieval monks who spent
their lives transcribing the Bible.

Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
@ THE ARTS HOLE http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442
@ THE INVERTED FOREST http://www.angelfire.com/pa/invertedforest