Term Paper

Each spring the trees remember they once had leaves.
Honey locust leaf bud, my backyard.

Most people know two things about J.D. Salinger. One is that he wrote The Catcher in the Rye. The other is that, not long after he became famous as a writer, he retreated to a small town in New Hampshire, where he died in 2010, and never published another word.  

What most people don't know is that, just after going into self-imposed exile, Salinger published his last short story, "HAPWORTH 16, 1924" in the June 19, 1965 issue of The New Yorker.

The story is a letter home from summer camp, written by seven-year-old Seymour Glass. 

The letter recounts details of the behaviour of Seymour's cabin-mates (including his five-year-old brother, Buddy), and explains how Seymour was (slightly) injured during an excursion. The injury put him in bed for a day so he had time to write. The last third of the letter is a list of books Seymour would like to have sent to him so he has something to read for the rest of the summer.

Readers of that issue of The New Yorker did not like the story. They accused Salinger of no longer caring for his audience. They complained he had disappeared into his own fictional world, and his characters were speaking only to his other characters. 

Glossing over the details of how I came to read "HAPWORTH 16, 1924", I offer the following. It's not exactly an appreciation of the story, but I feel it deserves better treatment than it's gotten so far.

Seymour Glass was a central character in the world Salinger built in his fiction. Readers met him first in the short story "A Perfect Day for Banana Fish" where, in the last sentence, at the age of 31, he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

After that, Seymour showed up, in memoriam, in the works penned by his brother Buddy Glass, a sort of Salinger alter ego. Seymour was remembered as an infinitely wise, compassionate man who loved his family, and the world, but also suffered from humanity's glib cruelty. 

"HAPWORTH 16, 1924" is a detailed portrait of Salinger's fictional character, written by the fictional character himself. The story is an opportunity for a reader to spend some hours (it's 25,000 words at least) in the company of an unusual mind.

How unusual?

First of all, how many seven-year-olds do you know who can write 25,000 words in a day? Or use words like "reticulate" (rare), "persiflages" (banter), "nemophilious" (fond of forests), or "pauciloquent" (brief in speech)?

In his letter to his mom and dad, Seymour suggests he has lived at least two previous lives (calls them "prior appearances"), and predicts future events including the circumstances of his own death.

Seymour is a little foul-mouthed -- "As you damned well know, we never change much in our hearts" -- and pretty horny for a young kid. He describes, to his parents, his fantasies about seeing a woman who works at the camp "in the raw."

The list of books he requests goes on for pages and includes the complete works of Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Tolstoy, Jane Austin, all the Brontes, John Bunyan, Lao-tse and (to give a verbatim example):

Please send anything on the colourful and greedy Medicis, as well as anything on the touching Transcendentalists, quite in our own back yard. Also send copies, preferably without exhibitionist pencil marks on the page, of both the French edition and Mr. Cotton's translation of Montaigne's essays. 

So the reader doesn't have to swallow all of this unaided, Seymour drops a couple of hints about how he came to be so advanced at such a tender age. One is that he recalls the wisdom acquired in his "prior appearances." The other is that he and his brother Buddy have extraordinary powers to absorb and retain information.

On Tuesday afternoon ... [Buddy] bet Mr. Nelson that he could memorize the book Mr. Nelson chanced to be reading within the space of twenty minutes to half an hour.

Seymour also claimed to know how to cut off the communication between his brain and his injury (the one that put him in bed for a day) so that he felt no pain.  

As stories go, "HAPWORTH 16, 1924", is not much of one. There's no plot. No beginning, no middle, no end.  

What the reader gets, at probably higher than the recommended maximum dose, is all Seymour, in a familiar and intimate voice reserved for those people in his life who know him best, indulge him most and forgive him just about everything. 

So those who complained about the story being self-referential were quite right. This is Glass on Glass action; all the reader can do is come along for the ride. 

The promise of relief in the story is in the brief preamble, written by Buddy Glass, suggesting that another story about "a particular party" is in the offing. That story, along with who knows how many others, has not emerged from the horde of documents hidden away in Salinger's New Hampshire home, and likely won't before 2051, or, possibly, ever. 

"HAPWORTH 16, 1924" was never anthologized. If you want to read it (and I know that all of you now do), you either have to find the June 19, 1965 issue of The New Yorker online or in a library, or you can ask me nicely and I'll send you the PDF files.

*****

Returning to the topic of trees, the City of Toronto dropped one off in front of our condo earlier this week. 

Thanks for reading!

Karen