J.D. Salinger, fashion victim

National Review, April 7, 1997 by James Gardner

J. D. Salinger remains for the time being in Purgatory. This most famous of living American authors, who has dwelt in eremitical obscurity and cantankerous silence for the past thirty years, is dead to the literary world, at least, and has not yet been reborn. He is, not exactly dated, but intensely different from what our culture has become since he was last heard from. At the same time, those few decades have been too brief a span to integrate him into the living past, as it has happened with Fitzgerald and Dreiser.

Salinger's reputation has recently become an issue once again with his startling decision to bring out in book form his last published novella, "Hapworth 16, 1924," which appeared in The New Yorker in 1965. Michiko Kakutani's article about it, which was the lead story on the New York Times arts page of February 20, appeared long before the book's publication and attests to the seriousness with which this unlikely development is being viewed in literary circles. The very circumstances in which Salinger has agreed to publish at all bespeak a secretiveness verging on misanthropy. He has bestowed the honor on an entirely obscure company, Orchises Press in Alexandria, Virginia.

In this novella Salinger reintroduces us to the illustrious, eccentric, and Angst-ridden Glass family, with its ex-vaudevillian parents and seven children, once famous as radio whiz kids. The family's first appearance was in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," from 1949, which described the suicide of Seymour, the oldest and most gifted of these gifted youngsters. The present narrative, written at the very end of Salinger's brief career, gives us a glimpse of Seymour as a seven-year-old in summer camp. This chronological regression, however, is only one of the eccentricities of this novella.

Its form is that of the standard letter a child writes to his parents from summer camp, with news of Seymour's outings, gossip about counselors, and requests for things from home. His brother Buddy, who is younger by two years and was with him at that camp, purports to have just received the letter, 41 years after it was written, in a package from their parents. In fact it becomes quite clear that the narrative -- saturated with the erudite and world-weary tones of a disappointed middle-aged man -- was written by Buddy himself. In this respect it is a perverse continuation of "Seymour: An Introduction," another of Buddy's first-person narratives about his brother, from six years earlier.

In the very first sentence we are stunned by the affected, almost Jamesian diction in which the supposedly seven-year-old Seymour declares: "I will write for both [my brother and me], I believe, as Buddy is engaged elsewhere for an indefinite period of time." He goes on to refer to Buddy as "a wonderful, resourceful, entertaining chap for five years of age." This is how he addresses his parents: "Bess! Les! God, Almighty, how I miss you on this pleasant, idle morning." There is a general snideness to these meandering meditations on everything from Proust and architecture to Buddhism, forestry, and the fairer sex. Miss Kakutani expresses surprise that Buddy should "want to distort his brother's memory, tear down the myth of the saintly Seymour he has so carefully constructed in the past." But in fact the surly, sarcastic child in this story, even if written by Buddy, is father to the neurotic and abusive adult who hurls unprovoked invective at a woman in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," and who is recorded, in "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters," as having disfigured a young girl's face by hurling a stone at her.

The artistic problems with "Hapworth 16, 1924," are of another kind. In all its myriad asides and precocious meditations on sexuality and literature, it stands to an average child's letter from camp in much the same way that Mozart's variations on the theme of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" stand to the original jingle. In this regard as well it is the logical successor to "Seymour: An Introduction," in which Salinger had already rejected the straightforward narrative style of his earlier works in favor of something much jauntier and closer to the nouveau roman that was coming into style in the early Sixties. Experimentalism in fiction seemed much more interesting then than it does today, and the structure of the present work is so arbitrary and repetitive, while the tone is so uniform, that nowhere can one find in it the crisp narrative integrity that characterized the earlier Glass stories.

But its datedness goes beyond mere questions of formalism. Why is it that this work, as well as the other Glass stories, could not be written in the same way today? What separates its world from the world we now inhabit? One factor is the implicit but palpable Jewishness of these stories, notwithstanding that the characters, unlike the author, are supposed to be only half Jewish. Manifest in almost every paragraph is the cerebral ambitiousness that characterized the Jewish intellectual who loomed so large in our cultural landscape a generation ago, not to mention the effects of the spectacular ascent of the Jews, during the postwar period, into the middle and upper middle classes of American society. These same issues occupied the fiction of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth. But with the completion of this process of assimilation, sometime in the early Seventies, its very relevance to narrative fiction diminished considerably.