In conclusion, quite absolutely final, I would greatly appreciate it if you would ask Miss Overman to ask Mrs. Hunter, possibly on the phone if it is convenient, to please track down the January, 1842, issue of Dublin University Magazine, the January, 1866, issue of the Gentleman's Magazine, and the September, 1866, number of the North British Review, as all these unrecent magazines contain articles about a very dear friend of mine, purely by correspondence, in my last appearance, quite frankly, Sir William Rowan Hamilton! I am very seldom able to do this, which is quite a blessing in disguise, but I can still see his friendly, lonely, sociable face before me, at wide intervals! Do not however, mention any of these personal connections to Miss Overman, I beg you! Her set of automatic revulsions on this subject is perfectly normal; she is invariably taken aback with alarm and disappointment on the rare occurrences when I am damn foolish and thoughtless enough to introduce the unpopular subject of appearances. There is also another reason for not going into dubious details with her, as follows: It is, unfortunately, a subject that makes quite a rotten subject for casual, social conversation. Although Miss Overman does not generally use us, your son Buddy and myself, as dubious subjects of conversation to entertain her friends or associates, being an honorable lady and wont to consider other people's feelings and dubious positions, she is utterly incapable of withholding peculiar or slightly novel information from Mr. Fraser or any other well-dressed, cultured gentleman with distinguished, white hair, being inclined to fall slightly in love with them if they are kind and attentive to her or use conversational persiflage with her, with or without sincerity. This is quite a gentle, humorous fault, to be sure, but it would be very expensive to indulge too freely. Please just ask her to phone Mrs. Hunter and see if the magazines in question can be tracked down without great inconvenience, mentioning no reasons, perhaps requesting in the same breath, quite casually, that she, Miss Overman, pass on to us any delightful light reading that she has enjoyed lately. This stinks to high heaven for rank duplicity, but her taste in light reading is also often delightful, so I regretfully recommend the ruse. I trust your discretion in this and all affairs completely, needless to say, Bessie sweetheart. Also we would appreciate it if you would casually slip Mr.

and Mrs. Moon Mullins, and perhaps a few copies of Variety into a convenient envelope when you are done with them. Jesus, what a millstone, bore, and general nuisance I am becoming to your lives! No day passes that I am not mindful of my rotten, demanding traits of character. Also, quite by the way, I think I should warn Miss Overman that Mr. Fraser may well be vexed and quite floored at the number of books requested, though he himself failed to mention the maximum number he would be willing to send us while we were away. Please ask Miss Overman to impress upon him that we are both reading with increased, incredible rapidity every day of our lives and return any very valuable books in a trice, where speed of return is essential and we can get stamps. Difficulties, I am afraid, will be myriad. He, Mr. Fraser, is really a very generous, kind man, with an astonishingly high tolerance for my rotten traits, but there is also a small catch in his generosity, as he likes to see the grateful recipients' faces in person when he does them a favor of this magnitude. This is entirely human and cannot be expected or uselessly desired to disappear from the earth overnight, but please keep the warning under your belts anyway. In my private, humorous opinion, we will be very damn lucky if Mr. Fraser sends as much as two or three books on the entire list! Oh, my God, there is a maddening, comical thought!

Guess who entered the bungalow with a broad smile on his face! Your son Buddy! Also known as W. G. Glass, the superb author! What an inexpugnable lad he is! He has obviously had a productive day's work! I wish to God you were here, quite in the flesh, to see his stunning, appealing, slightly tanned face; in more ways than one, dear Bessie and Les, you are paying a very exorbitant price for our frivolous summer's enjoyments and recreations. Au revoir! Buddy joins me in every sincere wish for your continued health and happy existence in our prolonged absence. We remain, Your loving sons and brothers, Seymour and W. G.

Glass; united forever by spirit and blood and uncharted depths and chambers of the heart.

In my haste to bring this letter to a swift termination, as well as my joy to see your astounding son pop into the bungalow, following an absence of seven and one half hours, I am in danger of overlooking a small cluster of final requests, quite slight, let us hope. As already mentioned, the chances are blackly excellent that Mr. Fraser will fall into a pit of dejection upon receiving a list of books, utterly to his sociable, spontaneous offer to me; however, I may be doing him quite a grave injustice with this thought; in the hopeful event that I am, which I sadly doubt, please ask Miss Overman to remind him that this will be absolutely our last fling for 6 long months at the very least!

With summer's glorious end, we will be devoting the remainder of this memorable year to dictionary consultation entirely; we will avoid even poetry during the crucial period in the offing; this freely means that Mr. Fraser will not have the experience, more trouble than rewarding, of seeing our young, exasperating faces in any public library in Gotham for the entire, comfortable period of six, full months! Who will not be quite relieved to hear this, with the heartening exception of perhaps no one! Quite in connection with the 6 months just mentioned, I am freely asking you, as our beloved parents and brothers and sister, to issue a few, crisp, earnest prayers in our behalf. I am personally very hopeful that great layers of unnatural, affected, stilted fustian and rotten, disagreeable words will drop off my young body like flies during the crucial period to come! It is worth every effort, my future sentence construction quite hanging in the balance!

Please do not get annoyed with me, Bessie, however, here is my absolutely last word on the subject of retirement from the stage at an uncommonly early age. I quite beg you again not to do anything out of season. At least wait, quite patiently, till October and then keep your eyes very peeled for retirement opportunities; October could be very clean sailing! Also, lest I forget, Buddy requests that you be sure to send him some of those very big tablets, quite without lines, for his haunting stories. Absolutely do not send him the kind with lines, such as I am using up for this day of pleasant communication, as he despises them. Also, though I have not dared to discuss the matter with him in a frank matter, I think he would enjoy it very much if you sent him middle bunny, having lost big bunny when the porter on the train made the bed in the morning; please, however, do not refer to this matter in your future correspondence, merely placing middle bunny silently in a convenient package, perhaps an empty shoe box or container, and dispatching it in the mail. I know I can leave this or any other matter quite to your discretion, Bessie; my God, you are as admirable as you are lovable! As well as not sending him any more tablets with lines for his stories, also absolutely do not send him any tablets with very flimsy paper, such as onion skin, as he merely drops this kind in the garbage can for general disposal outside the bungalow. This is wasteful, to be sure, but I would appreciate it if you did not ask me to step in a delicate matter of this kind. I am hesitant to say that certain kinds of waste do not offend me; indeed, certain kinds of waste tend to thrill me to the marrow. Also worth keeping in mind, it is this chap's leonine devotion to his literary implements, I give you my word of honor, that he will eventually cause of his utter release, with honor and happiness, from this enchanting vale of tears, laughter, redeeming human love, affection, and courtesy.

With 50,000 additional kisses from the two looming pests of Bungalow 7 who love you, Most cordially, S. G.

Appendix.

The Return of JD Salinger (Latter changed by them to: "Salinger Sneaks Back").

INTRO The legendary and enigmatic J.D. Salinger, author of the cult Catcher in the Rye is publishing a book after 34 years. An Indian caught the low-key event on the Internet broke the news.

"Some comment in advance, as plain and bare as I can make it: My name, first, is Buddy Glass, and for a great many years of my life--very possibly all forty-six--I have felt myself installed, elaborately wired, and occasionally, plugged in, for the purpose of shedding some light on the short, reticulate life and times of my late, eldest brother, Seymour Glass, who died, committed suicide, opted to discontinue living, back in 1948, when he was thirty-one."

Thus begins Hapworth 16, 1924, Jerome David Salinger's last published story that appeared in The New Yorker on 19 June, 1965, and which is about to become the mysterious and reclusive author's first book in 34 years.

On October 18, 1996, while idly browsing through amazon.com, an on-line bookstore on the Internet, the following words suddenly flashed before my eyes: Hapworth 16, 1924, by J. D. Salinger, Hardcover, Price information not available. Published by Orchises Press. Publication date: January 1997.

ISBN: 0914061658. My first reaction was--to put it mildly--disbelief. This surely was just a prank?

I had of course read the story, and the other 21 "uncollected" stories (see box "The Hermit In His Cave"), like any serious Salinger fan, but the fact that it had been 31 years since he had originally published it (Ah, the 'Aha!' feeling once again as I type this: after all, Seymour was 31 years old when he offed himself! This would give you an idea about the adaptationist theories doing the rounds, thanks to Salinger's silence, I, uh, indulging in Seymour-speech, "regret with my entire body to say"), and suddenly one fine day, actually night, to see it listed, oh-so-innocuously somewhere unexpected, with no fanfare, no media blitz, quite took "my personal breath away!" to quote the precocious seven-year old Seymour in Hapworth again.

The folks at Bananafish had to be told. Bananafish is a mailing list on the Net where I regularly hang about along with Salingerians from all over the planet. The initial responses were: "OH...MY...GOD!!!" "Is this book authorized? I can't believe that JDS would publish this story." "Could the whole thing be an elaborate hoax?" Wondered Will Hochman, who teaches Salinger at a US university: "My guess is that JDS...wouldn't put Hapworth 16, l924 in a book--has anyone contacted the alleged publisher?" On October 22, Stephen Foskett, the Bananafish administrator, reported: "The Library of Congress catalogue now lists Hapworth 16, 1994 as being published in 1997.

I've ordered MY copy!" The news was more or less confirmed.

By November 5, Chris Kubica had called Roger Lathbury of Orchises Press: "He confirmed that it'd be published in Jan 1997, that it'd be $15.99 plus shipping when ordered from him (seems a bit steep for a 50-page story, eh?).

However, when queried about the 'how did you get permission to do this'

jazz, he said his lips were sealed. He was nice enough, but quiet. Now I have to ask myself, am I enough of a fan to dish out $16 for a mediocre story (see box "Hapworth 16, 1997") I've already read. 'Prolly."

Obviously, JDS had chosen Orchises Press because of its very obscurity. It has till now been publishing reprints of Tolstoy and Auden, along with much original poetry; most sales are through mail order.

Then, as we learned later, the November 15 issue of something called The Washington Business Journal, carried an item on Hapworth. No one noticed.

Except for, apparently, Washington Post reporter David Streitfield, who broke the story in the mass media on January 12. It was instantly picked up on both sides of the Atlantic, some papers according it front page status.

According to Streitfield's January 17 report, "(Lathbury) had wanted to keep it as secret as possible for as long as possible. His plans were somewhat foiled when a Salinger fan saw a listing for the forthcoming book in the online bookstore amazon.com. This fellow told his sister, Karen Lundegaard, a reporter at the Washington Business Journal, who wrote about it."

The western press has still not established who approached whom. There are to be--but naturally--no review copies ("They'll buy it--or better yet, not review it," Lathbury told Streitfield), no promotion (Lathbury, sounding uncannily like JDS: "My philosophy is that books are pushed at people for wrong reasons. There's a marketing mentality that has little to do with the literary experience. While I want people to know Hapworth is available, I don't want to force it on anyone."), no disclosure of print run or advance orders received ("This is a book meant for readers, not for collectors. Part of the reason for not revealing a press run is to discourage investing. I want people to read the story."). Indeed, rumour has it Salinger insisted his name should appear vertically, to diminish its impact.

So what is certain? amazon.com had listed January as the scheduled date, but it now seems to be March. As for me, I'll believe it only when--more correctly, if--it happens. After all, JDS has changed his mind about publishers a number of times, starting with Catcher. In any case, one can always persuade the nearest American Centre to get a copy of the relevant New Yorker and read the story. But the real issue is something else. In Hapworth, Buddy Glass, Salinger's "alter-ego and collaborator", appears in first person briefly to introduce, and to "type up" Seymour's 20,000-word-or-so long epistle, "an exact copy...word for word, comma for comma." It would be interesting to see if Salinger, circa 1997, has, as he put it once, been "fussing with it ('Polishing' is another dandy word that comes to mind)."

"Good night. I'm feeling very much overexcited now and a little dramatic, but I think I'd give almost anything on earth to see you writing a something, an anything, a story, a poem, a tree, that was really and truly after your own heart...Love,S." - Seymour, age 23, letter to Buddy, quoted in Seymour An Introduction, the last book JDS published.

Sundeep Dougal professes to run a Delhi-based ad (hoc) agency called Holden Caulfield.

BOXES.

HAPWORTH 16, 1997.

Even in 1965, Hapworth 16, 1924 was a long time coming because Salinger had not published anything "new" since Seymour, An Introduction in 1959. At the time, it left most of the fans disappointed, a feeling shared by the general Salinger fan even today. The story, except for a brief introduction from Buddy Glass, is a letter from Seymour, then aged seven, addressed to his parents, Les and Bessie, and to Boo Boo, Walter and Waker. Buddy is with Seymour--and Zooey and Franny are not yet born.

The most common complaint against Hapworth has been that it should have been at most half its published length, ending at the point where Seymour finds another pad of paper and takes off again in what has been called "a pompous display of erudition". The Los Angeles Times commented in 1988 that it "was widely regarded as narcissistic, prolix and ultimately obscure in its intent". Almost all the "serious" crtics--Warren French, John Updike et al, have been dismissive and derisive of Hapworth, and Alsen Eberhard, (Salinger's Glass Stories As A Composite Novel, which also, incidentally, contains the fullest account anywhere of Salinger's interest in, and use of, Advaita Vedanta) is perhaps the only one of note who's tried to establish that it is better than generally supposed.

In In Search of J.D. Salinger, Ian Hamilton wrote that the story is "a weird, exasperating tour de force...'Take it or leave it' is Salinger's unmistakable retort to any grumbles from the non-amateurs among his audience and he seems fairly certain (indeed makes certain) that most of them will leave it...The Glass family has, in this last story, become both Salinger's subject and his readership, his creatures and his companions." But, calling it "the Dead Sea Scrolls of the Salinger cult," critic Ron Rosenbaum felt that "somewhere buried in it might be the key to Salinger's mysterious silence ever since." Could Salinger's decision to reprint the story be proof of that?

THE HERMIT IN HIS CAVE.

Stories abound by the dozens about how zealously Salinger guards his privacy. From the time that he had his photograph removed from the cover of Catcher in the Rye, to the furor over being "tricked" by the Claremont Daily Eagle, in November, 1953: Salinger gave an interview for the school page of the daily, which, however, front-paged the interview. Not only did JDS go off the press but also the high school kids he had befriended to shut himself inside his house Life had described as "totally hidden behind a solid, impenetrable, man-tall, woven wood fence".

And then there is what Time called the "coy fraudulence" of the "throwaway self-interview" published only on the first edition jacket-flap of Franny & Zooey, which ends with "My wife has asked me to add, however, in a single explosion of candour, that I live in Westport with my dog." This had led Time to thunder: "The dark facts are that he has not lived in Westport or had a dog for years." Time was right on the Westport part but Salinger must have been amused when weeks later Life carried a photograph of, what it claimed was the Salinger family dog. So here's a man who, as JDS' absolutely unauthorised biographer Ian Hamilton sums up, left "America's two wealthiest and most resouceful newsmagazines unable to agree on the matter of whether or not he owned a dog."

The most celebrated case of course is Hamilton's attempted book, J.D.

Salinger: A Writing Life, that could not be published after Salinger took him to court. Hamilton is perhaps the only man to have pierced Salinger's veil of secrecy to any sizeable extent and his later book In Search of J.D.

Salinger offers a fascinating glimpse of the enigma that is Salinger, despite heavy excisions. Hamilton may have lost the case for quoting from the author's personal letters and "uncollected stories"--which appeared in various magazines, but which JDS refused to be ever reprinted--but ironically it brought Salinger more in the public eye than he probably would have been had the book been allowed to be published. For he did have to depose, which marked Salinger's first public appearance in over 30 years.

The irony is that the personal letters Hamilton had quoted from had to be copyrighted individually and duplicates of them may now be consulted at the copyright office in Washington DC for a small fee. Not only that, in the publicity given to the case by the media, the original letters were freely quoted from, far more freely, it appears, than Hamilton himself had ever intended.

The rapid spread of the Internet has only added to Salinger's perceived need for legal activism. Perhaps his fans have never had it so good, for technology makes it possible to exchange even book-length material with ease. Till as recently as 1996, almost half of the 22 uncollected stories were put up by an enthusiast on his web page for anyone to download, till Salinger's lawyers moved in. In the early '70s, an unauthorised paperbound Complete Uncollected Short Stories of J.D. Salinger appeared in two volumes.

Salinger got it suppressed.

One of JDS' latest assaults has been on the Holden server on the Web, where visitors were randomly rewarded with one of 169 quotes from Catcher. Site developer Luke Seemann was promptly warned by Salinger's agents that the site was a copyright violation. Seemann resisted: while reprinting 169 quotes from one book would obviously violate copyright, if each visitor only saw one, wouldn't that fall in the realm of "fair use"?

But Seemann ultimately decided not to fight this battle, and killed the site. "No matter who won a legal battle, J.D. Salinger would lose," he wrote to Tribe magazine. "He would become the hermit who came out of his cave to sue the pants off a poor, defenseless college kid. I didn't want that. His was an effort to protect his obscurity; mine was merely a gesture toward someone who changed my life."

Source: The Australian, Wed 29 January, 1997, page 11.

__________.

Recluse Salinger hangs up on the phoniness

SIAN POWELL on the difference between cult status and celebrity

JD. SALINGER'S first book in 34 years will be published soon and, unusually in the world of modern literature, it will emerge into a fanfare vacuum. No attempts will be made to market it, no review copies will be sent to critics and as for author interviews, just forget it. The 78-year-old recluse of New Hampshire has such an entrenched disgust for the postwar American world of materialism and phoniness that it's a wonder a publishing deal was even contemplated.

Holden Caulfield was the first of Salinger's alter-egos to rail against phoniness, but his beloved Glass family kept it up through various short stories, his book Franny and Zooey, and his last work, Raise High the Hoof Beam Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.

In each book, his evident dislike of modern American superficiality increases and in the later works it is counter-pointed by weighty, even preachy, discussions of religion, particularly Eastern religion. Writers who lean toward Zen, haiku and

the Upanishads rarely have much time for the glassy chatter of literary launches. They have even less time for earnest journalists who want to dissect former marriages, nose into past failings and interview the dog.

In Salinger's short story about Seymour Glass's suicide, titled A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Seymour's wife waits for a trunk call. "She used the time, though," Salinger wrote. "She read an article in a women's pocket size magazine, called 'Sex is Fun-or Hell'. She washed her comb and brush.

She took the spot out of the skirt of her beige suit. She moved the button on her Saks blouse. She tweezed out two freshly surfaced hairs in her mole.

When the operator finally rang her room, she was sitting on the window seat and had almost finished putting lacquer on the nails of her left hand."

At first glance there may not be much of a link between mole-hair tweezing and Salinger's almost pathological dislike of publicity. But Seymour's wife is irredeemably a phoney and a time-waster and Salinger, it seems, thinks the modern focus on the author rather than his writing is equally phoney.

And he simply won't cater to it. He won't have an author photo on his book jackets. He won't have an author introduction unless he can write it. And he most certainly won't talk to anyone about his life or literary influences.

The dedication of Raise High the Hoof Beam Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction is illuminating. "If there is an amateur reader still left in the world," he wrote, "-or anybody who just reads and runs-I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children."

Perversely, Salinger's untouchability has guaranteed the publicity for this latest offering. Hapworth 16, 1924 is not a new piece of writing.