Re: Hapworthless

Thor Cameron (my_colours@hotmail.com)
Mon, 04 Oct 1999 14:57:29 -0700 (PDT) 

Here, here, Jim, well put.  Let's also not forget that there seems to lie 
some confusion between Holiness and elocution.  Not Esme, nor ANY other 
children in Salinger's work speak with an absurdly Oscar-Wildean vocabulary. 
  One need not use a thesaurus to make an eloquent point.
Thor



>I think a little bit of a sense or proportion would be in order here.  A
>teenager writing Hapworth I could buy.  Maybe even a 13 year old.  A very
>intelligent -- in other words, pushing 180 IQ teenager.  Let's not digress
>about the how meaningless IQ scores are, either.
>
>But a seven year old?  No way.  That's the difference between Esme and
>Seymour.  I can see Seymour in Hapworth as part of a progression in 
>Salinger,
>but I would tend to label it in more negative terms.
>
>So my empathy is more with the people asking..."How could Salinger write
>this?"  Teddy is the closest Salinger ever came to creating a character 
>whose
>abilities exceeded belief, but he connected us back to reality by making 
>him
>so much a progeny he's under psychiactric observation and study....
>
>
>Jim
>
>In a message dated 9/28/99 9:20:11 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
>verona_beach@hotpop.com writes:
>
><< Are *you* kidding? Salinger has always been, to paraphrase his own 
>words, a
>  purveyor of the hopelessly flamboyant, a digressor of the highest order, 
>a
>  waffler, a sayer-of-ten-words-when-two-would-have-done, an indulger of
>  indulgences, a man almost pathologically unable to pour prodigious fluid
>  into the unfamiliar vessels of traditional structure. Could Hapworth be
>  anything else than the product of the mind that produced S:AI and Raise
>  High the Roof Beams? In a word, no. As for the Childe Seymoure, he's just
>  another step in Salinger's deification of the child, from cute little
>  soothsayer (Mattie) to bringer of simple truth (Phoebe) to annoyingly
>  prescient seer (Teddy) to, well, Christ Incarnate. Hapworth simply 
>couldn't
>  have come from anyone else's pen.
>
>  I was mulling over the case of the child in JDS's writings the other day
>  after having re-read `For Esme'. It occured to me that it's so strange - 
>in
>  a lot of ways Esme is portrayed similar to Seymour in Hapworth 16 - she
>  tries to use big words and sound grown up, she is guilelessly
>  self-reflective and unsentimental - in short, a typical graduate of
>  Salinger's Kindergarten of Precocious Kids. Why then, do things come out 
>of
>  her mouth so endearingly and from Seymour's so obnoxiously? Why do we
>  reject Seymour's adult voice and embrace Esme's? Why on the whole is
>  Seymour's character - be it adult or child - one that so seldom evokes
>  affection in the way Esme's does, or Phoebe Caulfield's? I feel that if 
>we
>  had felt a greater affection for Seymour, Hapworth may have been a 
>greater
>  success.
>
>  Gotta go now, 2 appointments and a rail strike to contend with, aaaargh!
>
>  Camille >>

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