Salinger's Letter From Camp Returned to Sender

JD Salinger

J.D. Salinger's Letter 

From Camp Returned to Sender

by Stuart Mitchner

Ten years ago the news was broken by a reporter for the Washington Business Journal: a new book by J.D. Salinger was scheduled for publication. It was even listed on Amazon for $15.95. Because the author of The Catcher in the Rye had been submerged in the silence of his self-imposed exile for 34 years, the promised spring 1997 appearance of Hapworth 16, 1924 was a literary event of some magnitude. Except that it never happened. Check online and you'll find that the same book was supposedly on its way into the world again in 2002. Even now a site called FetchBook lists it for January 2009, but don't hold your breath.

The subject of this review, then, is the tenth anniversary of the announcement of something that never happened, a great big What Might Have Been.

Why all the fuss, anyway? Strictly speaking, the work in question isn't new; it already saw the light in the June 19, 1965 issue of The New Yorker. The most remarkable thing about the news in 1996 was that the publication had the defiantly unforthcoming author's blessing, in contrast to several pirated editions of his unpublished stories that he'd managed to more or less successfully suppress. For readers who, like me, consider J.D. Salinger's history of the Glass family a book or books worth waiting three or four or more decades for, this was a hopeful sign, like an out-of-town preview on the way to the ultimate Broadway opening of the masterpiece his readers have been hoping for all these years. By choosing Orchises Press, a small publisher in Virginia rather than a big trade house, he seemed to be hoping to make a quiet, dignified, tentative return to a world he'd abandoned. Maybe he fondly hoped that the little book would be passed from hand to hand like some underground document destined to fly beneath the radar of Big Business Publishing and its juggernaut of corporate money machines and cutthroat or clueless reviewers. The eventual response to Hapworth would help him gauge whether or not he would still be able to continue cultivating his work-in-progress "with all its faculties intact" after exposing a portion of it to the book world's slings and arrows, insults and inanities

Shortly before the scheduled publication of what would have been the third installment in book form of the Glass series (after Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction), a highly-placed reviewer pounced on Salinger and his about-to-be-delivered work with an attack so biased and vicious that it apparently convinced him that his worst fears were about to be realized. Soon after the attack, Orchises Press announced that publication of Hapworth 16, 1924 had been suspended indefinitely.

A Wonder

I've read and reread this story over the years and read it again just this week. First, it's not really a story, nor even a novella, but a 20,000 word wonder, a literary tour de force in the guise of a letter; it's also a stunning, over-the-top act of imagination that is like nothing else Salinger has ever written, and yet in the way it brazenly and joyfully creates its own language and its own voice, it's closer than any of the other Glass pieces to what he accomplished in The Catcher in the Rye. Until now we haven't really heard Seymour Glass's unfiltered voice except through the medium of his younger brothers Buddy and Zooey (unless you count the dialogue spoken by the primal, provisional incarnation of 31-year-old Seymour in the 1948 story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish"). As the author has made clear, Buddy, in fact, is Salinger, so in that sense, you could say it's the work of a 40-something Buddy Salinger disguised as a 7-year-old Seymour writing an unbelievably long letter home from a summer camp called Hapworth and run by the "maddening" Mr. Happy and the adorable, sensual Mrs. Happy.

Given the risks and challenges implicit in so daring and unique a display of virtuoso prose, it should probably be no surprise that the few printed responses to it I've seen, including especially the one from the "highly-placed" reviewer, have been peevish and humorless, ill-natured, and obstinately at odds with the spirit and range of this remarkable accomplishment. It tempts a person to resort to young Seymour's voice. "My God, I quite ask you what are you looking at or looking for in this quite juicy, touching piece of work? Something damnably sound, maddeningly straight and heartrendingly narrow?"

I've been scanning the environment of Hapworth in my copy of the magazine, with its touching, heartrending, appropriately inappropiate ads and cartoons — eau de cologne, Scotch, Scandinavia and South Africa, VW station wagons, American Express, gin and vodka, the Homestead in Hot Springs, the Mayaguez Hilton, an Allied Chemical ad that quotes Emerson, a Woody Allen album, a picture gallery of dogs selling a voyage on the French Line, an invitation to "Shebaland" by Ethiopian Airlines, "Moments with Shakespeare Cigars," MGs and yachts, ads that promise "Flights of Fancy" and "Fables for the Very Rich," a Charles Addams cartoon, and a poem by James Dickey that refers to "children enchanted" on the same page wherein the child mystic promises not to "harp on the subject of karma." Flipping through pages 32 to 113, I see passage after passage of delirious, irrepressible adjectival and adverbial excess. The language jumps off the page at you. If you prefer literature to behave itself and remain docile and minimalist, then you will most likely scorn these teachings from a little boy who has been struck by metaphysical lightning and who will grow up, go off to war, get married, and end by shooting himself after an encounter with the six or seven-year-old Sybil in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish." The contrast between the story's flat account of Seymour's suicide and Buddy's reference to it in his introduction to Seymour's letter ("died, committed suicide, opted to discontinue living") suggests that Salinger may have had only a vague notion in 1948 that a whole life's work could be written around that sudden blunt shocker of an ending.

The most "heartrending" passage in Seymour's letter for those of us who have been waiting for further installments is the one in which the far-seeing kid-genius seer gives us a brief glimpse of the work-in-progress his grown-up younger brother (now "a mature, swarthy author") is engaged in as Seymour peers 40 years into the future over the shoulder of Buddy/Salinger, who is writing "a party scene" we may never get to read thanks to what happened to Hapworth ten years ago.

The Unkindest Cut

The abovementioned "highly placed" individual who apparently singlehandedly thwarted J.D. Salinger's return to the world was (and still is) arguably the most powerful book reviewer in the country, the New York Times' Michiko Kakutani. After digging up a copy of the June 19, 1965 New Yorker, she presumably read (or, more likely, skimmed) the story, and then wrote a piece for the Times on February 20, 1997 ("From Salinger, a New Dash of Mystery") in which she performed a psychoanalytic post-mortem on the author and his fictional family. The Glasses, she wrote, have "a familial self-involvement that borders on the incestuous and an inability to relate to other people," not to mention "a tendency to condescend to the vulgar masses." The warmed-over psychobabble continued with remarks about the family's "solipsism," which she then explained was a result of Salinger's "own failure to deal with the real world." As for the work itself, she disposed of it as "a sour, implausible, and, sad to say, completely charmless story."

"Sad to say!" Like everything else in that sentence, the phrase rings false. The misreading is so extreme it would be an insult to Ms. Kakutani's intelligence to assume that she could have actually read the piece and still have so completely missed the point, not to mention the spirit and the language. It's interesting that Salinger's withdrawal from the world seems to bring out the worst in people, as it did, for example, with his sulky, wannabe biographer, Ian Hamilton. It certainly seems to have brought out the worst in Ms. Kakutani, whose mission was to bestow a full measure of her all-powerful contempt on both the Glass series and Salinger's exile by trashing the latest installment, which she describes as "a nearly interminable letter ostensibly written from summer camp by the 7-year-old Seymour Glass." The point she carefully misrepresents the facts to make is that the letter reduces Seymour, "the family saint and resident mystic," to, among other things, a "peevish old man" and "a young boy who speaks like a lewd adult;" she also finds him "deeply distasteful": "an obnoxious child given to angry outbursts," who has "lustful feelings about the camp matron" and "condescends" to his parents. Quoted out of context, the evidence she gives of these "angry outbursts" neglects to include the fact that he admitted as much as part of an effort to correct his family's too rosy view of him ("You think I am a kind fellow at heart, is that not so?"). As Salinger makes clear, Seymour's violent thoughts are aroused not by malice or envy but by the "heartless indifferences and stupidities passing from the counselors' lips." For Seymour, whose heart is all over the place, "heartlessness" is the sin that moves him to admit wishing he could "bash a few culprits over the head with an excellent shovel or club." The fact that Ms. Kakutani actually includes the reference to "heartless indifferences" in the quote she's using to show us the "obnoxious child" in action suggests how out of sympathy she is with a work wholly driven by a sometimes funny, often charming, and generally wildly indiscriminate compassion for humanity. Anyone who reads Hapworth will soon discover that this self-confessedly long-winded kid's two favorite adjectives are "heart-rending" and "touching." His excessiveness is an excess of spirit. If anything, the reviewer herself has behaved like one of those heartless camp counselors, and if you doubt that "stupidites" pass from her lips, ask yourself how any reasonably intelligent reader could question the plausibility of so exultantly implausible a work? You might as well make the same complaint about Peter Pan or The Wizard of Oz. Could any seven-year-old in the universe, even Seymour Glass, have written so lengthy and stylistically extravagant and giddily learned and allusive a letter home from camp? Is it plausible that such a letter would also include a summer reading list from a 7-year-old ranging from Montaigne to Tolstoy to "that incomparable, decadent genius" Marcel Proust, "in entirety"? Add to that, young Seymour's request for the neighborhood librarian to please track down the January 1842 issue of Dublin University magazine containing articles by Sir William Rowan Hamilton whom he knew in his last incarnation, and you gotta admit, yep, that's pretty darn implausible, no doubt about it!

As for Seymour's "lustful feelings about the camp matron," the best Ms. Kakutani can do is to quote him admitting he imagines how nice it would be see her "in the raw." Just as she did with the "obnoxious" kid's "angry outbursts," the reviewer omits the context and the motive for Seymour's admission, which once again was to give his parents a clearer insight into their child; or, as he puts it, "if perfect frankness is to pass between parent and child as freely by mail as in loving person, which is the relationship I have striven for during my entire life with increasing slight success, then I must admit, in all joviality, to moments when this cute, ravishing girl, Mrs. Happy, unwittingly rouses all my unlimited sensuality. Considering my absurd age, the situation has its humorous side, to be sure."

Does this sound like the "peevish old man" Ms. Kakutani describes writing the letter, or like the "young boy who speaks like a lewd adult"?

Of course to see how egregiously the dean of book reviewers has violated the truth of Hapworth 16, 1924, you would have to read the work yourself. If you wonder why Salinger has a jaundiced view of the book world, consider this: a year after writing the piece in question, and quite possibly on the strength of it, Michiko Kakutani was given a Pulitizer Prize "for her fearless and authoritative judgments."

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