I wrote this about a year ago. I just reread it, and didn’t think it was poop.

I read Hapworth 16 1924 by JD Salinger. If you subscribe to the New Yorker, you can look at a back issue and read it. I’m sure it’s also available in many places on the internet, but I thought it would be best to avoid all that. 

My introduction to JD Salinger I believe was at the age of 18. It was the Fall of 2002, and I was in my second year of an Associate of Arts degree in Sociology at the “University College” near my parent’s house. I had heard of this one professor, from my mom, who told me that one of her church friends’ son had taken this horrible horrible professor who would say weird things and be very strict and just be generally unpleasant. I further heard about his mystique around campus and decided that I must take at least one class by this person, to perhaps shake up what really was me giving no effort in life, and feeling like I was in high school, except that I wasn’t considered a dork anymore, and girls would sometimes talk to me. 

In the Fall of 2002, he was teaching Short Story and Drama, or something like that. Perfect! I thought. Short. I wasn’t much of a reader at that time, but I liked to think of myself as a reader. I probably put on airs as a reader. Or maybe I didn’t. I remember a girl liked me and I made her take me to Burger King on Whopper Wednesday. I still feel bad about that. Asking the girl to do something she would hopefully think in hindsight is a shitty thing for a guy to do, that is. She thought I was smart. Maybe 1 or 2 percent of the population fell for whatever schtick I was subconsciously doing, and thought I was a genius. Or at least they thought the whole thing was a little cute or something, and decided that I was a person to fall desperately in love with. To this date I have never dated a person who felt like this about my schtick. It always made me nervous. 1 or 2 percent is probably being generous anyways, and most people have no such sickness. 

For this to be about Hapworth 16 1924 I don’t feel this digression and lack of structure are inappropriate, but I could probably use a few more exclamation points. 

In this professor’s class, we first read Heart of Darkness, which is not a short story, nor a play. He was being sly and sneaking things into a first year English Literature course that probably shouldn’t have been there, and as I believe he was the head of the English department, he could do this while howling at the moon (rumors were that he howled at the moon and had pagan sex parties, I couldn’t imagine him having the stamina). I think I got 5 pages into Heart of Darkness before I gave up. At 18 I was all about winging it, taking the easy route and giving a big “fuck you” to real work. I wasn’t really able to wing it, nor were the majority of the class who didn’t finish the book (they probably got further than me), but some of us were still spellbound in hearing the professor talk about the book. 

I remember I was once at a girl’s house whom I liked, maybe around this time, and her family was a learned family. They read literature. I remember being over there once and lamenting having to read the book after Heart of Darkness, Billy Budd, and saying there was no way in hell it could be called a short story. The older sister (whom I was friends with long after I stopped being friends with the girl, but with whom I also had a falling out with) said in a very condescending tone, “it’s a novella J”. 

To which I replied (as I was used to acting a fool), “what’s that a female novel?”

The older sister and mother rolled their eyes and laughed, but I don’t think it was with me. The girl I think is now a veterinarian. She always liked horses. 

!!!

My mid-term paper was about Billy Budd. The book (novella) where apparently Melville didn’t hold back on his full vocabulary. Apparently it was an allegory of the Christ story, and one of the essay questions we could chose to write about was discussing this allegory. I think that seemed simple enough, you just find quotes to say why whoever was Jesus, and whoever was Pilate, and you’re done! 

I got 40% on it, and some comment like “needs work”. At the same time I got a shitty job review at Future Shop, and it was a point where I realized that I couldn’t rely on those dashing smarts I had, and do zero work all the time. Sucked. 

The next book wasn’t Nine Stories by Salinger, but the one after was. I didn’t read the next book either (I think it was assigned before I had realized I wasn’t a genius), but I read all Nine Stories. This was my introduction to Salinger. 

The professor went on in his whimsical yet definitive way about the crossing of legs, yellow being a grown up color and blue being a pure childish color and all this other stuff. When I read the stories, I always just sort of thought the shock ending was kind of neat and would make you smirk. He said when we over the book we were not allowed to run down the hallway shouting we knew what the story was about after reading the last page of a story, freshly having formed that smirk. 

Bananafish was an easy story to like. The guys kills himself at the end! Boom! The guy being Seymour Glass, the character who Salinger became obsessed about, and the person who is writing the long letter in Hapworth 16 1924. Only Hapworth takes place in 1924, and Bananafish takes place in what I am going to say is 1948. Seymour is on his honeymoon or something, and his wife’s mom is showing concern for her wife marrying a weirdo. Then Seymour is on the beach playing with a 4 year old girl or something (the professor told us that any sort of weird sexualization of this would not have happened when it was written, and that was a modern thing), and once she sees a banana fish in the ocean, he goes to his room and blows his brains out. 

(The two dramas we read in the class were Hamlet and a Streetcar Named Desire.)

These days, I mostly think about Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut, or whatever it’s called. I feel I can most related to two women talking on the couch in the afternoon and getting absolutely shitfaced, one in an unhappy marriage, remembering when she was in love with Seymour’s younger brother, but now she’s screaming at her kid drunk that there is no imaginary child, and that they have to sleep in the middle of the bed, then sobbing “I was a good girl once, wasn’t I?” It’s powerful stuff. I feel most adults can sort of relate to that, looking at all the shit shows that they are a part of, and step back when they realize their current frustrations are about something innocent and beautiful. Powerful stuff. It’s a story. 

I’m not sure if Hapworth is powerful stuff, or if it is a story. When I really got into Salinger, when I was 19 or 20, I was all about the concept of “getting it”, and how I “got it”, and others did not “get it”. I’m sure Hapworth is actually a beautiful narrative with a rising action and climax and denouement and all the rest for those who get it. In the 20 pages of so of the later half of the story when Seymour is just listing books he wants to read, I’m sure if you “get it”, each author’s name and the book chosen from each author is just dripping with meaning. 

I didn’t get it though. I, like a review I found of the story after a quick Google search, just picked up on the part where Seymour is embarrassed that he can’t read a Czech author in Czech, and could only in English. 

Hapworth is a letter from Seymour Glass, a character written about in many of Salinger’s stories, as a seven year old boy in a summer camp, to his parents, who are on the road as circus performers or something. I think only we who do not get it are constantly being in disbelief and thinking it unrealistic that any 7 year old could ever write like this. The letter focuses a lot on Seymour’s younger brother Buddy who is 5, and also at camp. Buddy is writing all Salinger’s stories kind of. I think in one it was even hinted that Buddy wrote Catcher in the Rye. 

The review I read that having the story be written by a 7 year old gives Salinger an excuse to write shittily and without structure. The reviewer obviously doesn’t get it. (I don’t mean to be menacing.)

There’s no “do it for the fat lady, the fat lady is Jesus”, like there was at the end of Franny and Zooey, there’s no one dying, no old man in bed getting angry at the man who’s wife he just slept with, there’s no Holden frantically wiping off the word fuck of the walls at a subway station or school or whatever that was. 

So what is there? I don’t know, but my take is below: 

There’s a freak 7 year old and a freak 5 year old. The freak 7 year old says in his letter that they are normal boys, and that his spoken English is very different from his written English. I imagine a 7 year old writing so verbose can only do so through copying styles as opposed to creating one of their own, but maybe I’m bogged down by time. 

By freak I mean they read and retain a lot, and are very interested in both things. They’re too smart for their own good. Well, they’re so smart one kills himself when a little girl says she sees a Bananafish and the other lives in the woods in upstate New York or Maine or somewhere reading 100,000 words a day or something. 

The two little kids are not really relatable. I related to a part where Seymour says “you think I’m good, but I’m not! God strike me down with hailstones!” 

I liked that, the hailstones. 

There’s also a part where he tells his younger sister who is 4 I believe at the time of the letter to work on her manners when she is alone. I also liked that bit. It reminded me of the TV show Poirot where Poirot says to Hastings “one must not let themselves go Hastings”. (I often let myself go.)

As mentioned, I didn’t get the big list of books that Seymour wanted Buddy to read before he starts school or something. I liked the part where he rips into this historian who is an Alexander the Great specialist, and doesn’t seem to realize he owes Alexander the Great his career. I mean, he doesn’t really, if Alex didn’t exist, he would pick someone else. Xerves maybe. 

My only guess, which is a guess that is not very positive on Salinger, is he is doing what I do when I allude to punk rock songs that I like. I am trying to convey a specific feeling that song gives me that cannot be put into words, and that feeling is something that becomes so important to my heart or soul, and I secretly make myself vulnerable by referencing the song or liking the song, to suggest in a way that no one will understand X. But Salinger can’t be saying Flaubert’s name to convey a feeling, as that is silly, and I am silly for doing similar things. 

It’s not a page turner. It was a slog. Which is ironic, because when going off about the books that he wants, Seymour says that one shouldn’t waste their time on books that they just like.

So I don’t get it. I read it because I could, but I don’t get it. I probably won’t really give it another chance either. Maybe if my professor was here to tell me how to get it. Maybe he would say it was poop.