Searching For Salinger

The story behind "Hapworth 16, 1924" is better known than the story itself, its place in the annals of modern literary debacles secure alongside Ford Motor's paying Carole Matthews to have her heroines drive their cars and Franzen v. Winfrey. First appearing in the June 19, 1965 issue of The New Yorker, J.D. Salinger's last installment in the Glass family saga (though chronologically its first) was, at nearly 25,000 words, the longest work of fiction the 30-year-old magazine had theretofore published. Though its profusion seemed a claim of its worth, it was greeted mostly with embarrassed silence.

As Janet Malcolm noted in her 2001 reappraisal of Salinger's oeuvre for the New York Review of Books, the 81-page letter from 17-year-old summer camper Seymour Glass to his parents and three younger siblings "was greeted with unhappy, and even embarrassed silence?confirm[ing] the growing critical consensus that Salinger was going to hell in a handbasket." It was even excluded from 1974's two-volume bootleg edition of Salinger's uncollected stories, leaving fanatics and the merely curious alike with little recourse save spending upward of $400 on an original copy of the increasingly scarce New Yorker issue or tracking it down on microfilm.

That looked to change in January 1997, when the tiny, Alexandria, Virginia?based Orchises Press announced, with Salinger's consent, it would publish "Hapworth" in novella form. New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani rushed to deride it as a "sour, implausible and sad to say, completely charmless story." A series of apparently unrelated, yet unexplained delays pushed back the release until Amazon finally pulled the title from their website in 2002 and the project was apparently scrapped.

Now, thanks to the September arrival of The Complete New Yorker, an eight?DVD-ROM archive containing half a million pages from 4,109 issues, the book on "Hapworth" is again open.

One of the first things I did upon moving to New York in May of 2001, right after securing an $850 bedroom in the Great Jones loft of a fiftysomething Sufi divorcee who, despite her master's in painting from Ohio State, worked at home as an astrologer, was pay a visit to the Humanities and Social Sciences Library. While a few hours respite from the incessant meowing of my landlady's Persian was incentive enough, my goal was to unearth a copy of "Hapworth." I'd come to New York to get my MFA, but it was Salinger's work that had, along with the usual heartbreak and an inability to hit right-handed pitching, inspired me to take up writing-particularly the passage in Seymour: An Introduction about being a reader first and foremost. Salinger had introduced me to a New York less superficial than Fitzgerald's and more humane than Selby Jr.'s-and therefore, I would quickly learn, more fantastical on both accounts.

Spending an afternoon wandering the dusky, marble-floored corridors of that hallowed, Beaux Arts branch seemed a wholly-albeit hardly Holdenesque-New York adventure.

Clearly, I wasn't the first person to have had this idea. The microfilm was so badly warped that I needed a librarian's help affixing it to the spindle. The scratches were so severe I had to reverse the printer setting to white on black. Even then the trademark Irvin font was barely decipherable.

The musty smell of moldering negatives was overwhelmed by a pungent waft of decay, abetted rather than abated by cold cream and liniment and dollar-store perfume. With the exception of a couple of high-school kids frantically researching eleventh-hour term papers, the vast first floor was full of senior citizens. I've always been horrified by the elderly en masse, who invariably call to mind the assisted-living center in Stow, Ohio, where I spent every Sunday between the ages of eight and 13 visiting my bedridden, palsy-stricken grandmother, unbeknownst to her, wracked as she was by Alzheimer's. This time, I found the sight strangely comforting. To think that, were I to remain in New York, in 60-odd years I might be doing the same thing I was at present. Granted, most of them were merely tracing genealogies.

Yet, examining The New Yorker's advertisements for Woody Allen's recent comedy album, "delectable prime roast beef" for $3.95 at the Park Sheraton's once-haute Mermaid Room and a fragrance aptly named "Summer Camp" sold exclusively at pre-Cusack Serendipity 3 (an ad long purported by Salinger cultists to be a postmodern gag) I felt employed in a similarly anthropological undertaking. Three hours, $12 in dimes and a half-dozen paper jams later, my expedition was complete.

I read "Hapworth" slowly over the next few weeks, four or five pages at a time. This was partly due to the strain on my eyes of the blurry white-on-black text, but mainly because I suspected it would be the last thing I'd ever read by Salinger for the very first time. I found the story both funnier and darker than anything preceding it. I'd never laughed out loud reading Salinger. Gasped with awe, certainly, but never laughed out loud. At moments such as this, though, I couldn't help losing my shit: "Miss Culgery cleaned the wound and bandaged me. She is a young girl and registered nurse, age unknown to me, far from gorgeous or lovely, but with a trim, superb body, which most of the counselors and one or two of the seniors are trying very hard to make physical love to before they have to go back to college."

Seymour's breezy asides regarding past "appearances" and his ability to "glimpse" the future felt just as comical-the first few asides at least. As the mentions became more numerous, however, I grew increasingly disturbed. I thought of the heated, late-night arguments Bessie and Les must've had, upon receipt of the letter, as to the degree of their eldest son's sanity and whether or not to institutionalize him.

It's a testament to the quality of the writing that one pays more attention to the characters than to the craft. The paragraphs are Jamesian in both their length and reliance on the relative clause, but like all classic epistolary fiction, the digressions are intentional, an attempt to parrot the capricious, constitutionally scattershot nature of letter writing. In a world where correspondence is dominated by email and text messaging, emoticons and acronyms, it's no wonder most critics deem Seymour's detours and deviations long-winded.

After receiving the Complete New Yorker for my birthday and recently rereading the story, I'm inclined to agree with those critics. Once again, I read four or five pages at a time-not from any sort of relish, but because that was all I could stand. Rather than sympathy or pity, all I felt toward Seymour was the annoyance and rage often conjured by the phenomenon of precocious child narrators: Yann Martel's Pi Patel, Mark Haddon's Christopher Boone and, most recently and irritatingly, Jonathan Safran Foer's Oskar Schell.

Perhaps my taste has refined in the intervening years. More likely, it has regressed. Whichever the case, much of my aversion no doubt stems from having read "Hapworth" on the computer. My photocopy had been too thick to staple, and it had been a wonderful feeling adding another finished page to the mounting, facedown pile. Moving the scrollbar, on the other hand, gave me no such satisfaction.

Taking up most of page 35 of the "Hapworth" issue is a cartoon by Donald Reilly. A middle-aged couple stands at the threshold of an alley lit up with restaurant and bar signs. The caption reads, "Oh, oh! It's been discovered." Part of the reason I loved "Hapworth" so much-maybe the only reason-was the thrill of partaking in something unique, that few people had ever experienced-rarer still in this era of chain bookstores, internet auctions and Google Print.

Now if I can just beat David Remnick to Hemingway's suitcase.