Hapworth 16, 1924 by J.D. Salinger.
Title: Hapworth 16, 1924.
Author: J.D. Salinger.
Genre: Fiction, literature, family saga, epistolary fiction, letter.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1965.
Summary: The story is presented in the form of a letter from camp written by a 7-year-old Seymour Glass. In the course of requesting a veritable library of reading matter from home, Seymour predicts his brother's success as a writer, as well as his own death, and condemns the ironic "twist" endings in the stories of Anatole France, twist endings being an early Salinger device.
My rating: 8/10.
My review:
♥ The majority of young campers here, you will be glad to know, could not possibly be nicer or more heartrending from day to day, particularly when they are not thriving with suspicious bliss in cliques that insure popularity or dubious prestige. Few boys, thank God with a bursting heart, that we have run into here are not the very salt of the earth when you can exchange a little conversation with them away from their damn intimates. Unfortunately, here as elsewhere on this touching planet, imitation is the watchword and prestige the highest ambition. It is not my business to worry about the general situation, but I am hardly made of steel. Few of these magnificent, healthy, sometimes remarkably handsome boys will mature. The majority, I give you my heartbreaking opinion, will merely senesce.
♥ While I intend, to be sure, to work on this sensual problem without ceasing, it would be quite a little wind-fall if you, dear Les, as my dear father and hearty friend, would be a complete, shameless, open book with regard to your own pressing sensuality when you were our ages. I have had the opportunity of reading one or two books dealing with sensuality, but they are either inflaming or inhumanly written, yielding little fruit for thought. I am not asking to know what sensual acts you performed when you were our ages; I am asking something worse; I am asking to know what imaginary sensual acts gave lively, unmentionable entertainment to your mind. Without the mind, sensuality quite has no organs to call her own!
♥ She so easily has no human idea of the terrible need for ordinary kissing in this wide, ungenerous world!
♥ Close on the heels of kindness, originality is one of the most thrilling things in the world, also the most rare!
♥ I am not constructed for continued absences; I have never claimed to be constructed for them.
♥ My God, he is a maddening man; if he does not move one to wrath, he moves one to hysterical laughter, an equal waste of time.
♥ It is my absolute opinion that the only poem of personal, haunting interest to me that I have written so far this summer is one I have not written at all.
♥ When the light mentioned above is insuperably strong, I go to sleep in absolute assurance that we, your son Buddy and I, are every bit as decent, foolish, and human as every single boy or counsellor in this camp, quite tenderly and humorously equipped with the same likable, popular, heartbreaking blindnesses. My God, think of the opportunities and thrusts that lie ahead when one knows without a shred of doubt how commonplace and normal one is at heart! With just a little steadfast devotion to uncommon beauty and passing rectitudes of the heart, combined with our dead certainty that we are as normal and human as anybody else, and knowing it is not just a question of sticking out our tongues, like other boys, during the first, beautiful snowfall of the year, who can prevent us from doing a little good in this appearance? Who, indeed, I say, provided we draw on all our resources and move as silently as possible.
♥ Postponed pain is among the most abominable kind to experience.
♥ The most beautiful thing in the world, in a fairly large family going out to a party or even a casual restaurant, is the easy going, impatient positions of all the bodies in the living room while everybody is waiting for some slowpoke to get ready!
♥ If one has no magnificent teacher, one is obliged to install one in one’s mind; it is a perilous thing to do if you were born cravenhearted, as I was.
♥ For the dubious satisfaction of calling anything in this beautiful, maddening world an unassailable, respectable fact, we are quite firmly obliged, like good-humored prisoners, to fall back on the flimsy information offered in excellent faith by our eyes, hands, ears, and simple, heartrending brains. Do you call that a superb criterion? I do not! It is very touching, without a shadow of a doubt, but it is far, far from superb. It is utter, blind reliance on heartrending, personal agencies.
♥ My God, human beings are brave creatures! Every last, touching coward on the face of the earth is unspeakably brave! Imagine accepting all these flimsy, personal agencies at charming, face value!
♥ Also, my dear, darling, unforgettable Miss Beatrice Glass, please work harder on your manners and etiquette in private as well as in public. I am far less concerned about how you behave in public than how you behave when you are absolutely alone in a solitary room; when you accidentally look deep into a lonely mirror, let a girl with stunning tact, as well as flashing, black eyes, reflect!
♥ While the consequences are often quite hellish, I am absolutely and perhaps permanently against ignoring books recommended from the heart by very nice people and strangers; it is too risky and inhuman; also the consequences are often painful in a fairly charming way.
♥ Some pleasant, rainy day, when you have the stomach for it, examine the bowels of any effective revolution since history began; deep in the heart of every outstanding reformer, if you do not find personal envy, jealousy, hunger for personal aristocracy, in a new, clever disguise, running a very close race with desire for more food and less poverty, I will gladly answer to God for this entire, cynical attitude. Unfortunately, I see no immediate solution to the situation.
♥ It means that every man, woman, and child over the age, let us say, of twenty-one or thirty, at the very outside, should never do anything extremely important or crucial in their life without first consulting a list of persons in the world, living or dead, whom he loves. Remember, I implore you, that he has no right whatever to include on this list anybody he merely admires quite to distraction! If the person or the person’s contributions have not roused his love and unexplainable happiness or eternal warmth, that person must be ruthlessly severed from the list!
♥ I am an emotional youth, frankly mortal, with innumerable experiences under my belt of mortal favoritism; I cannot stand the sight of it; let God favor us all with charming, personal commands or none of us! If you have the stomach to read this letter, dear God, be assured that I am meaning what I say! Do not sprinkle any dubious sugar on my destiny! Do not favor me with charming, personal commands and magnificent short cuts! Do not ask me to join any elite organization of mortals that is not open to all and sundry! Recall quite fervently that I have felt equipped to love Your astonishing, noble Son, Jesus Christ, on the acceptable basis that you did not play favorites with Him or give Him carte blanche throughout his appearance! Give me one, single inkling that You gave Him carte blanche and I will regretfully wipe His name from the slim list of those human beings I respect without countless reservations, despite His many and diverse miracles, which were perhaps necessary in the general circumstance but remain a dubious feature, in my forward opinion…
♥ God bless ladies with costly, tasteful clothes and touching, dirty fingernails that champion gifted, foreign poets and decorate the library in beautiful, melancholy fashion! My God, this universe is nothing to snicker at!