It's a longish short story-in the form of a letter from the seven-year old Seymour Glass to his family-that was first published in The New Yorker in 1965. It's a fair bet there would be a lot less interest in this slightly shop-worn piece if Salinger had allowed more of his writing to be published (it is rumoured he is sitting on at least two full-length books), or if he had ever spoken publicly about his work and his ideas.

As it is, Salinger's fame rests largely on The Catcher in The Rye and 13 short stories. Other short stories are only available in ancient back issues of American magazines -Salinger has refused just about every offer to anthologize them. Reports on the man himself are rare. He cuts dead friends who talk to reporters. Articles on Salinger make much of glimpses of him striding toward his Jeep. They include lyrical descriptions of the shape and style of his letterbox and they are generally padded with "no comment" quotes from his acquaintances.

In his unauthorized biography, In Search of J. D. Salinger, Ian Hamilton tried to fill in some of the details of the man's early life-quoting from letters Salinger had written to friends and editors-but Salinger sued and the American courts eventually forced Hamilton to cut all the quotations from Salinger's letters, and most of the paraphrases that came too close to the original wording.

It is probably just as well. Salinger's enormous popularity-particularly with the young - is because his wise and uncompromising voice comes through so clearly in his stories. It is a voice with a sense of humour, but it is one that has no patience with vanity or pretentiousness or shallow thinking. Hamilton hints that Salinger's early letters reveal a tendency towards all these. Most Salinger devotees would prefer not to know; they'd prefer, with great affection, to read and run.

Sian Powell is a staff writer with The Australian.

New York Times Article.....

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February 20, 1997

>From J.D. Salinger, a New Dash of Mystery

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

So, at long last, we have news that the famously reclusive J.D. Salinger is bringing out another book, not a new story, but one called "Hapworth 16, 1924," which appeared in The New Yorker in the 1960s.

Read in retrospect, that story continues -- perhaps even completes -- the saga of the Glass family, that band of precocious, high-strung whiz kids who have captivated Salinger fans for four decades. It also stands as a logical, if disappointing, culmination of Salinger's published work to date.

Why wait three decades to bring out this story in book form? And why choose the obscure Orchises Press in Alexandria, Va., to publish it? One can only speculate: that the author wanted to remind his readers of his existence, that he wanted to achieve a kind of closure by putting his last published story between book covers, that he wanted readers to reappraise the Glass family (and by extension his body of work) through a story that, within the Glass canon, is nothing less than revisionistic.

As with most things connected with Salinger, an air of mystery hovers about the publication of "Hapworth." His agent has not returned phone calls, and even bookstores say they do not know exactly when they will have copies of the book for sale -- this month, perhaps, or March or April. In the meantime, the story can be found in the June 19, 1965, issue of The New Yorker -- in the library stacks or on microfilm.

The New Yorker story, a novella really, takes the form of a nearly interminable letter ostensibly written from summer camp by the 7-year-old Seymour Glass. It is unlikely to be of any interest to anyone who has not closely followed the emotional peregrinations of the Glass family over the years, and for ardent Glass-ites, it is likely to prove a disillusioning, if perversely fascinating, experience. an experience that will forever change their perception of Seymour and his siblings.

Like Holden Caulfield, the Glass children are both avatars of adolescent angst and emblems of Salinger's own alienated stance toward the world.

Bright, gregarious and entertaining (their parents are retired vaudevillians), the Glasses embody all the magic of their creator's early stories; they appeal to the reader to identify with their sensitivity, their braininess, their impatience with phonies, hypocrites and bores.

The Glasses' emotional translucence, their febrile charm, their spiritual yearning and nausea -- all delivered in the wonderfully idiomatic voice of cosmopolitan New Yorkese -- initially made them a glamorous mirror of our own youthful confusions.

Yet there is a darker side to their estrangement as well: a tendency to condescend to the vulgar masses, a familial self-involvement that borders on the incestuous and an inability to relate to other people that, in Seymour's case at least, will have tragic consequences indeed.

Seymour, of course, was the oldest of the Glass children, who in the 1948 short story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" (collected in "Nine Stories") put a gun to his head and blew his brains out. In that story, Seymour appeared to be a sweet if somewhat disturbed young man, ill equipped to deal with the banal, grown-up world represented by his frivolous wife.

In subsequent stories, we learned, largely through the reminiscences of his brother Buddy -- the family historian and Salinger's alter ego, who actually purports to have written "Bananafish" and "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" (1955) -- that Seymour was regarded as the family saint and resident mystic.

In "Seymour: An Introduction" (1959), Buddy described his brother as "our blue-striped unicorn, our double-lensed burning glass, our consultant genius, or portable conscience, our supercargo and our one full poet."

Seymour was the one who inculcated the younger Glasses in Eastern mysticism and Western philosophy and preached a Zen-like doctrine of acceptance.

Seymour was the one who said that "all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next." Seymour was supposed to be the one who saw more.

It is something of a shock, then, to meet the Seymour presented in "Hapworth": an obnoxious child given to angry outbursts. "No single day passes," this Seymour writes, "that I do not listen to the heartless indifferences and stupidities passing from the counselors' lips without secretly wishing I could improve matters quite substantially by bashing a few culprits over the head with an excellent shovel or stout club!"

This Seymour confesses to lustful feelings about the camp matron ("I have looked forward with mounting pleasure to the possibility, all too slight for words, of her opening the door, quite unwittingly, in the raw"), condescends to his parents ("Jesus, you are a talented, cute, magnificent couple!") and boasts of his own talent ("the distinguished Edgar Semple having told Fraser that I have the makings of a splendid American poet, which is quite true in the last analysis").

For a child, Seymour makes requests for reading material that verge on the preposterous: among many other books, he asks for "the complete works again of Count Leo Tolstoy" and "any unbigoted or bigoted books on God or merely religion, as written by persons whose last names begin with any letter after H; to stay on the safe side, please include H itself, though I think I have mostly exhausted it."

Though Seymour and his siblings have always been renowned for their precocity, this hardly sounds like a 7-year-old, no matter how brilliant or advanced. After all, Buddy told us in an earlier story that when Seymour was 8, he was writing poems like this: "John Keats/John Keats/John/Please put your scarf on."

Indeed, there are plenty of suggestions that Buddy -- who introduces the Hapworth letter, saying he's typed "an exact copy" of Seymour's words -- is actually the letter's author, distorting Seymour in much the same way that he once said he distorted Seymour in "Bananafish," impersonating a brother through an act of ventriloquism as Zooey did in the 1957 story "Zooey."

It is never explained, for instance, why Seymour, once described as "the least prolific letter writer in the family," has penned such a ludicrously long epistle.

Equally unexplained are the bizarre hints in the letter that Seymour can foretell the future, that he has predicted, at such a young age, his own untimely death and Buddy's dazzling future as a writer.

Why would Buddy Glass want to distort his brother's memory, tear down the myth of the saintly Seymour he has so carefully constructed in the past? No doubt one possible motive lies in the Glass siblings' resentment of Seymour's mentorship and sanctimonious love of perfection and their bitterness over his suicide, which left the "Whole Loving Family high and dry."

Buddy, especially, has always had a deeply ambivalent relationship with his older brother, his professed love and adoration belying, in "Seymour: An Introduction" at least, envy, pique and simple weariness with being haunted by a ghost.

In the end, of course, Buddy is a fictional narrator, a mouthpiece for his creator, and so the larger question becomes, what light does "Hapworth" shed on Salinger's conception of the Glasses and the evolution of his art?

The first thing the reader notices, in looking back on the Glass stories, is that the tales have grown increasingly elliptical over the years, tidily crafted works like "Bananafish" and "Franny" giving way to the increasingly verbose "Zooey" and the shapeless, mock stream of consciousness employed in "Seymour" and "Hapworth."

The second thing one notices is that the stories have also grown increasingly self-conscious and self-reflexive, much the way many of Philip Roth's later fictions have. This solipsism, in turn, makes the reader increasingly aware of the solipsism of the Glass family itself, underscoring the rarefied, self-enclosed air of all the stories they inhabit.

"Seymour," which teasingly conflates Buddy's and Salinger's identities, is filled with little gibes against critics with tin ears, defensive remarks about being a literary entertainer with "surface charms," and even allusions to rumors about being a recluse.

"Hapworth" can similarly be read as a response of sorts to Salinger's critics, who in the years before its New Yorker publication took his Glass stories to task for being too cute, too self-involved, too smug.

With "Hapworth," Salinger seems to be giving critics a send-up of what he contends they want.

Accused of writing only youthful characters, he has given us a 7-year-old narrator who talks like a peevish old man. Accused of never addressing the question of sexual love, he has given us a young boy who speaks like a lewd adult. Accused of loving his characters too much, he has given us a hero who's deeply distasteful.

And accused of being too superficially charming, he has given us a nearly impenetrable narrative, filled with digressions, narcissistic asides and ridiculous shaggy-dog circumlocutions.

In doing so, however, Salinger has not only ratified his critics'

accusations of solipsism, but also fulfilled his own fear that one day he might "disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and mannerisms."

This falling off in his work, perhaps, is a palpable consequence of Salinger's own Glass-like withdrawal from the public world: withdrawal feeding self-absorption and self-absorption feeding tetchy disdain.

The infinitely engaging author of "The Catcher in the Rye" (1951), the writer who captured the hearts of several generations with his sympathetic understanding, his ear for vernacular speech, his pitch-perfect knowledge of adolescence and, yes, his charm, has produced, with "Hapworth," a sour, implausible and, sad to say, completely charmless story.