By Stuart Mitchner
I grew up eating breakfast and lunch in the same room as a large three-part folding screen decorated from top to bottom with New Yorker covers. It was the only piece of furniture my parents owned that had no discernible purpose other than to be its own odd, cheery, colorful self. My medievalist father, who was accustomed to working with illuminated manuscripts, had meticulously assembled and arranged it, making sure everything was precisely aligned. The covers on the screen dated back to William Steig’s four-panel, cartoon-style, kids-and-fireworks cover from July 6, 1940. Years later when I was a sales clerk at the Eighth Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village, it was a pleasure to say “hi” to the man himself, a chunky, friendly, grown-up version of one of his own cartoon kids.
On my desk at the moment is a copy of the New Yorker featuring Steig’s drawing of a man and woman kissing in a dream of spring, a pug-faced angel hovering overhead. Between that and the “Things Go Better With Coke” ad on the back is J.D. Salinger’s last piece of published work, “Hapworth 16, 1924,” which runs nearly the length of the issue and is the subject of a column of mine from 20 years ago, give or take a summer (“J.D. Salinger’s Letter From Camp Returned to Sender,” Sept. 13, 2006). Four years later, January 27, 2010, Salinger died, leaving 45 years of work to be, or not to be, published.
Reading “Hapworth”
First, it’s not really a story, not even a novella, but a 20,000 word wonder, a literary tour de force in the guise of a letter. It’s also a stunning, over-the-top act of the imagination that is like nothing else Salinger has ever written, and yet in the way it brazenly and joyfully creates its own language and its own voice, it’s closer than any of the other Glass family pieces to what he accomplished in The Catcher in the Rye. Until that point, we haven’t really heard Seymour Glass’s unfiltered voice except through the medium of his younger brothers, Buddy and Zooey (unless you count the dialogue spoken by the primal, provisional incarnation of 31-year-old Seymour in the 1948 story, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”). As the author has made clear, Buddy, in fact, is Salinger, so in that sense, you could say it’s the work of a 40-something Buddy Salinger disguised as a 7-year-old Seymour writing an unbelievably long letter home from a summer camp called Hapworth and run by the “maddening” Mr. Happy and the “adorable, sensual” Mrs. Happy.
Given the risks and challenges implicit in so daring and unique a display of virtuoso prose, it’s no surprise that the few printed responses I’ve seen have been peevish and humorless, ill-natured, and obstinately at odds with the piece’s spirit and range. Flipping through pages 32 to 113, I see passage after passage that could be mined for samples of irrepressible prose, a delirious, high-kicking chorus line of frenzied adjectival and adverbial excess that jumps off the page at you. If you prefer literature to behave itself and remain docile and minimalist, then you will most likely scorn these teachings from a little boy who has been struck by metaphysical lightning and who will grow up, go off to war, get married, and end by shooting himself after an encounter with the 7-year-old Sybil in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” The contrast between the flat account of Seymour’s suicide and Buddy’s reference to it in his introduction to Seymour’s letter (“died, committed suicide, opted to discontinue living”) suggests that Salinger may have had only a vague notion in 1948 that a whole life’s work could be written around that sudden blunt shocker of an ending (“…he took out an Ortgies calibre 7.65 automatic. He released the magazine, looked at it, then reinserted it. He cocked the piece, … aimed the pistol, and fired a bullet through his right temple”).
The “Party Scene”
The most “heartrending” passage in Seymour’s letter for those of us who have been waiting in vain for further installments in the Glass saga is the one in which the far-seeing kid-genius gives us a brief glimpse of the work-in-progress his grown-up younger brother (now “a mature, swarthy author”) is engaged in as Seymour peers 40 years into the future over the shoulder of Buddy/Salinger, who is writing “a party scene” we may never get to read thanks to Salinger’s decision in 1997 not to publish “Hapworth” or anything else written between June 1965 and January 2010.
An “Implausible” Reading List
Among the issues cited by “Hapworth’s” detractors is the “implausibility” of the reading list Seymour sends to his parents Les and Bessie to pass on to the neighborhood librarian Miss Overman. For a start, you have to wonder how any reasonably intelligent reader could question the plausibility of so exultantly implausible a work. You might as well make the same complaint about Peter Pan or The Wizard of Oz. Could any 7-year-old in the universe, even Seymour Glass, have written so lengthy and stylistically extravagant and giddily learned and allusive a letter home from camp? Is it plausible that such a letter would also include a summer reading list from a 7-year-old ranging from Montaigne to Tolstoy to “that incomparable, decadent genius” Marcel Proust, “in entirety”?
A Whirling and Spinning Sample
At one point, Seymour asks his ex-vaudeville-performer parents to “please send me any thoughtful books on human whirling or spinning. You will recall, quite with my undying, humorous sympathy, that at least three of your children, in sheer independence of each other, and utterly untaught, have picked up the delicate custom of spinning the body around with alarming speed, after which regrettably ostentatious experience the person who does the whirling can often, though not always, by any means, arrive at a decision or an impressive answer to a problem, usually quite small. The practice, to be sure, has been invaluable to me on more than one trivial occasion in the library, provided one can find a place unseen by the naked eye. To date, of course, I have discovered a few people spread widely throughout the world who have used this practice with success, even the touching Shakers, to a small extent. Also, there is an impressive rumor that St. Francis of Assisi, a marvellous person, once asked a fellow monk to do a little spinning when they were on an important crossroad with hesitation which direction to take…. While I am very shortly going to give up the practice for the rest of my life, leaving more responsibility on another portion of my mind, the fact quite remains that copious information on the subject will be very welcome, as the other children may, for personal reasons, prefer to continue the practice well into maturity, though I doubt it.”
“Goings On About Town”
There’s enough room left in the June 19, 1965 issue for a sample of the pageant of art and life in The City That Never Sleeps, where Mose Allison and Sonny Rollins are playing at the Vanguard, Charlie Mingus at the Village Gate, Dizzy Gillespie at the Metropole; where two plays produced by Mike Nichols (Luv and The Odd Couple) are at the Booth and the Plymouth, Zero Mostel is all over the stage at the Imperial in Fiddler on the Roof, and Barbra Streisand is Fanny Brice reincarnate in Funny Girl at the Winter Garden.
To be sure, the “Hapworth” issue also contains a vast quantity of, appropriately inappropiate ads and cartoons —eau de cologne, Scotch, Scandinavia, and South Africa; VW station wagons, American Express, gin and vodka; the Homestead in Hot Springs, the Mayaguez Hilton; an Allied Chemical ad that quotes Emerson; a Woody Allen album; a picture gallery of dogs selling a voyage on the French Line; an invitation to “Shebaland” by Ethiopian Airlines; “Moments with Shakespeare Cigars”; and a poem by James Dickey that refers to “children enchanted” on the same page wherein Salinger’s child mystic Seymour Glass promises not to “harp on the subject of karma.”