Re: Hapworthless

AntiUtopia@aol.com
Tue, 28 Sep 1999 17:23:35 -0400 (EDT) 

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 >>