J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [204]
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“Hapworth 16, 1924” was published in The New Yorker on June 19, 1965. Professionally, it was a disaster. Not only did the novella require its readers to be familiar with Seymour’s and Buddy’s characters from previous stories, but it also demanded that they love them as much as Salinger did. Even then, readers were punished for their sentiments with an eighty-one-page letter that was at once pretentious, unbelievable, and taxing. Seymour himself admits to this opinion. “I am freely saddling you,” he recognizes, “one and all, parent and child, with a very long, boring letter, quite filled to the brim with my stilted flow of words and thoughts.” The line’s location midway through the piece was unfortunate. It held the greatest truth of the novella and clearly belonged at the beginning. Of the thousands of readers who bought The New Yorker that June, each anticipating a fresh work from a master author, few would make it to the story’s final line. By the time Seymour’s embarrassed confession appeared in the text, most readers had already closed the magazine.
Salinger was spared the critics’ scorn. The story was met instead by bewildered silence. It was ignored, which may actually have bothered him far more than if it had been reviled. Time magazine did run a disapproving review on June 25, but it was a mere single paragraph dismissively tucked away in the “People” section. Some critics were reluctant to throw stones at a famous author who had always defied their opinions. Still others felt satisfied to let “Hapworth” speak for itself, considering the story the most articulate proof that Salinger had indeed lost his way as a writer. By ignoring the story’s release, they were dismissing the author himself. In “Justice to J. D. Salinger,” in The New York Review of Books, Janet Malcolm wrote that “Hapworth” “seemed to confirm the growing critical consensus that Salinger was ‘going to hell in a hand basket.’ ”13 It is also possible that many critics, like many readers, were simply defeated by the text and unable to review a piece that they were incapable of reading to completion. In a strange way, the critical silence over “Hapworth 16, 1924” was an appropriate precursor of what followed next: the silence of the author himself.
Questions regarding “Hapworth” have plagued Salinger fans ever since. Did he intentionally write the story as his final publication? Why is “Hapworth” so unreadable? The story fostered a suspicion that, after alienating professional readers with “Seymour—an Introduction,” Salinger attempted to release himself from the affections of average readers by feeding them a work that was completely indigestible.
“Hapworth” contains several passages that have been interpreted as gentle farewells from the author. The first is Seymour’s advice to his mother to keep herself open for retirement opportunities. Less noticeable are two passages that show a creative delicacy rare for this story. In one, Seymour writes of a vision he has into the future. He describes seeing his brother Buddy in 1965. The description paints a precise portrait of J. D. Salinger, who, like Buddy, is older in Seymour’s vision, his hair graying and his hands thickly veined. He is seated at his typewriter in his writing studio, complete with bookshelves and skylight. And he is happy. “It is all his youthful dreams realized to the full!” Seymour proclaims. “I would far from object if that were practically