THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 9, 1997 TAG: 9702060737
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY BERNICE GROHSKOPF
LENGTH: 55 lines
J.D. Salinger's Hapworth 16, 1924, is a letter written by Seymour Glass to his family, from Camp Hapworth, Maine. He is 7, and his brother Buddy, 5. To introduce the letter, Buddy, age 46 - the same age as Salinger when he wrote the story, and then went into seclusion - explains that he feels obligated to shed light on the life ``of my late, eldest brother, Seymour Glass, who died, committed suicide . . . in 1948, when he was 31.''
While Holden Caufield's teen-age observations on the superficiality of adult society in Catcher in the Rye do not endow Holden with more wisdom than is believable in an adolescent, the young Seymour does not fare as well. He far exceeds his years, writing, for example, to his vaudeville-touring parents that ``my loss of you is very acute today, hardly bearable in the last analysis.'' And asking his father, ``what imaginary sensual acts gave lively unmentionable entertainment to your mind'' when he was his age?
Confined to bed because of a leg injury, Seymour lists in his 25,000-word letter the books he would like to have sent: conversational Italian; all of Tolstoy, Proust, Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray; the Holy Bible; Don Quixote; Porter Smith's Chinese Materia Medica; translations of Montaigne's essays; books on God and religion, on the Transcendentalists, on the structure of the human heart, and on the formation of callus. A veritable Great Books list from the adult Salinger.
The boy also writes home about ``karmic responsibility'' and ``the Byzantine influence on the Troubadours.'' And confesses that he mistrusts Guy de Mauppassant and ``any other monumental author who thrives, day in, day out, on lowly irony.''
Through the precocious Seymour, Salinger reveals his own self-effacement, compounded by arrogance. His ``letter'' - datelined ``Camp Simon Hapworth/Hapworth, Maine/Hapworth 16, 1924, or quite in the lap of the Gods!'' - is itself lowly irony.
The title suggests ``Stalag 17,'' the 1950s drama about inmates in a World War II German prison camp. Is Salinger comparing life in a German POW camp to (his own) childhood? Who knows? All publisher Roger Lathbury has said is that the story is true: ``The main character is right.''
Hapworth may be judged, as was Catcher, as too long, and even more monotonous. Salinger fans who buy this ``new'' book may well conclude that 7-year-old Seymour is a self-conscious windbag. MEMO: EDITOR'S NOTE
Reclusive writer J.D. Salinger made news last month when it was
announced that Orchises Press, a tiny Virginia publishing house, would
be re-issuing his long short-story, Hapworth 16, 1924. Published first
in The New Yorker on June 19, 1965, Hapworth was Salinger's last
creative work.
Mum's the word on the book's exact release date, but Orchises
publisher Roger Lathbury, an English professor at George Mason
University in Alexandria, is taking orders, at (703) 683-1243.