Text as a Salinger Go-between in Hapworth 16, 1924 by will Hochman ...cont Readers need to experience Salinger’s troubled sense of spiritual seeking blossoming as “The Way of the Pilgrim” becomes Seymour’s Christly fat lady in “Franny” and “Zooey.” From Seymour’s first appearance and suicide in a 1948 issue of The New Yorker in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” to his seven-year-old “letter voice” in Hapworth 16, 1924, Salinger’s characterization of Seymour makes readers yearn to understand the character’s God-seeking, his love, his family, his suicide, and his poetry. Although it’s doubtful there’s a direct correlation between Salinger and Seymour, understanding Salinger’s withdrawal from public life may indeed come from reading Hapworth as the story of Seymour first realizing his need to withdraw from society into his family, art and religious seeking. Hapworth explains some of the origins of the conflicts Seymour and his siblings experience in previous “Glass” stories. After Catcher was published in 1951 and Nine Stories in 1953, Salinger wrote exclusively about his Glass family in “Franny,” “Zooey,” “Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters,” “Seymour—An Introduction” and “Hapworth 16, 1924.” The first four of these stories were published in The New Yorker from 1955 to 1959 and then collected in Franny and Zooey in 1961 and in Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour An Introduction in 1963. If a character is introduced at his point of death and remembered at younger ages in successive stories, it makes rough, reverse chronological “sense” then to publish another book about the Glass siblings from Seymour’s youngest age yet. The story may be long and fuzzy to some readers, but it can also act as a lens, sharpening its own focus as readers move in the letter/story from Seymour’s camp life at Hapworth, to family advice, to Seymour’s list of requested library books. The story illustrates the time in Seymour’s life when he first realizes his need to withdraw from the society of campers into his family, his God-seeking, and into his words.... Hochman's complete essay can be found in our Spring '98 Issue. Forward -- Previous -- Contents