Hapworth 16, 1924

By Anne Chudobiak

I recently found myself in the strange position of having nothing to do. My desk was clear. Everything was in its rightful place. I didn’t have to sift through piles of paper looking for my set of New Yorker DVDs. It was finally time to see what kind of world it was that I’d been born into. I inserted Disc 3 (1974-1983) into my computer.

I had some stipulations, though. No fiction, unless I knew it was going to be good, with the exception even then of Mavis Gallant. I’d overdosed on her on the beach this summer.

The first article I stumbled upon looked interesting. It was about Montreal, a woman remembering. Oh, wait, that had to be Mavis. Of course, it was: a Linnet Muir story. Imagine having such a distinctive voice that it gave you away within the space of a paragraph? No byline necessary, not even some thirty years later.

All the same, I was in no mood. I didn’t read it. Instead, I ejected Disc 3 and went to my bookshelf. I’d been meaning to re-read "A Perfect Day for Bananafish." Every now and then, I have to justify to myself why it was okay for me to name my son after the suicidal Seymour Glass. Do parents of modern-day Juliets do the same? If so, they are welcome to borrow my argument (although they might have to tweak it a little), which is that suicide does not seem to be the defining fact of Seymour’s life. The scene that sticks with us is of him on the beach, kissing little Sybil Carpenter’s feet. This was a man with enormous goodwill, who couldn’t express it in a way that others could understand. Or that’s what I used to think. I mean, why exactly did he have to shoot himself in front of his napping wife?

The truth is that I haven’t read all of the Seymour stories. There is at least one, from 1965, that never made it into book form. It apparently used to be extremely difficult for fans to get their hands on Salinger’s many uncollected works. But not in the age of the Internet. “Young Folks,” “The Heart of a Broken Story,” “This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise”: some brave soul has posted them all online (Salinger is famously savage about privacy and copyright). And the final Seymour story, “Hapworth 16, 1924,” is archived on New Yorker Disc 4 (1965-1973). I printed it out last night, all eighty pages. It’s as complicated as it’s long. I’m slowly making my way though it, trying to determine if the first-person narrator, seven-year-old Seymour Glass, exiled at summer camp, is indeed a good person. I’m still leaning towards yes. To quote him: “As you damned well know, we never change much in our hearts.”