Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction

2016

For a long time, I have been sitting in the armchair thinking about this sentence, which means that I will read this work every year more and more.

“In fact, the most essential thing I want to say is the following: since the young husband has left the stage forever, I cannot find another one in his place, to whom I can trust in the choice of a horse.”

***************************************

2015

I love “sticking my nose” into the works of the Glass family. As real existing people whom I know, but I still want to learn more about them. And how I love their letters and diaries. I don't remember such an obsession with another author. In fact, about two years ago, something similar happened to me again - with an author named... J. D. Salinger.

For “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” my rating is somewhere around 10 out of 5 stars (it increases every time; I want to learn this work by heart). But the white page is enough.

With “Seymour: An Introduction” the situation is the same - higher and higher (or deeper and deeper?). Before, the heart of the work for me was in the following few sentences, but this time I copied half of the book.

“... now I remember our sister Boo Boo. Seymour was crazy about her. Which doesn't say who knows what, because he was crazy about everyone in the family and most people outside of it.”

“I'm afraid, he said, that I've never come down from the magic carousel of Joe Jackson.”

“Can't you measure yourself just a little less?”

“... that I followed my own, completely natural path to extreme idiocy.”

“And hurry up, Polly.”

Until next time, dear family! :)

(For the umpteenth time, I am comparing the translations of Todor Vulchev and Svetlana Komogorova (of “Seymour”) - in my opinion, the second is definitely superior).

116th book of 2021.

The artist for this review is American painter Colin Campbell Cooper (1856-1937).

2nd reading.

Salinger's fictional Glass family holds a special place in my heart. They seem to reside in another lifetime for me, perhaps in a previous long-lasting relationship, or during my university days. Strangely, they are also entwined with Cornwall. In my early twenties, I became a big Salinger fan and devoured all 4 of his novels, wondering why he hadn't written more.

Penguin recommends a certain reading order for his books, but I didn't follow or know about it. Instead, I long set my own order for considering his corpus and recommending it.

Penguin and I both think this should be the final Salinger novel in the run of 4 (ignoring that one of them is a short story collection, not a novel).

Like much of the Glass family stuff, this is narrated by Buddy Glass, who is quite transparently Salinger's alter-ego.

And before we consider The Catcher in the Rye as being apart from the other three books about the Glass family, Buddy Glass gives us a hint in Seymour: An Introduction.

So, The Catcher in the Rye is also in the Glass' universe, a novel 'written' by Buddy Glass.

After reading The Catcher in the Rye, travellers should pass by Franny and Zooey to meet the youngest of the large Glass family.

Then onto Nine Stories/For Esmé—With Love and Squalor where we meet several more Glass family members here and there but above all read the short story "A Good Day for Bananafish" in which we see Seymour Glass (the eldest child) killing himself after much allusion to the event in other Salinger books.

This then puts the reader at the feet of Salinger's rather strangely titled 1955 book, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; Seymour: An Introduction.

The book is comprised of two separate novellas, at a push.

The first is the superior one by quite a long shot. I originally gave this 5-stars but have since dropped a star on account of the second story, "Seymour: An Introduction".

The former story I remember almost as clear as I read it yesterday and enjoyed it just as much, reading it in a single sitting one night before going to sleep.

Buddy takes us to 1942 for the story as he goes to his older brother's wedding.

Despite this, Seymour does not feature once, physically, in the story. Instead, Buddy is late to the wedding and ends up in a taxi afterwards with a number of strangers where he finds out what happened at the wedding.

One woman in the taxi is not a fan of Seymour.

Salinger's forte has always been characters and everyone on the page of this strange, funny, sad story glows.

The highlight is the touching explosion that comes from Buddy's mouth when he finally defends his brother from the women in the taxi, gossiping about stories they've heard about him.

However, "Seymour: An Introduction" does not glow.

Buddy's tone has lost some of the light humour of the former story and instead becomes imposing, neurotic whilst continuing to try and be funny. He addresses the reader frequently.

The story is more of an internal monologue of Buddy's as he tries to come to terms with Seymour's suicide.

Elements are moving as you'd expect but Salinger really damages the piece with the strange tone Buddy has, the boring interludes talking to the reader and frankly avoiding talking about Seymour.

Lots of people don't like it and say it's self-indulgent and awful; I wouldn't go that far but I think it's one of the weaker things he put to page.

Perhaps the most realised line of the story and the one that identifies itself is '[Seymour was] the one person who was always much, much too large to fit on ordinary typewriter paper—any typewriter paper of mine, anyway.'

In the end, the story is about failing to write about someone beloved who has died, and in writing a story about failing to write about such a subject, Salinger has partially failed in doing so.

Somehow its failing makes for a good ending to the Glass family, as if it says something about losing Seymour, which is at the heart of all of it, in a way; or else it makes a good ending as it makes us want to read them all again.

Without realising I started this novel on the exact same date and finished it on the exact same date as I did 3 years prior.

My fascination with Salinger is such that I can consider a story like “Raise High the Roof Beam” which is just an amusing anecdote with nothing particularly outstanding, and yet it has been a reading well worth it. And what could be said about the Glass brothers? Terribly endearing, always making me long to be one of them. Reading them infects me with their very particular and sarcastic wisdom and creativity although I am quite the opposite.

“Before we meet those others, I tell you in private, old friend (and from very close), please, accept this modest bouquet of early blooming parentheses: (((()))).”

It is a pity that we will not know more about the figure of Seymour although we will always have the way his brothers remember him: as someone romantic and brilliant, yet always tormented. In “Seymour: An Introduction” (which is more of a semi-diary or exercise of consciousness in the voice of Buddy Glass, who certainly rambles a bit and makes it at times, let's admit it, a little, but only a little irritating reading), we get to know a little more about him through one of the best descriptions of brotherly love that I have read:

“Is it so terrible that sometimes we seem like the same person? The membrane between us is so thin… Is it so important that we take into account what belongs to each one? That time, two summers ago, when I was there for so long, I discovered that you, Z. and I have been brothers in at least four incarnations, perhaps more. Isn't there a beauty in that? For us, isn't it true that each of our personalities begins precisely at the moment when we recognize our so close relationships and accept that the mutual borrowing of jokes, talents, follies is inevitable?”

Seymour's letter to Buddy about his writings almost makes me cry:

“For your own good, don't make me feel proud of you. I think that's exactly what I'm trying to say. If you never again kept me awake out of pride… Give me a story that makes me vigilantly irrational. Keep me awake until five only because all your stars have appeared and for no other reason. Forgive the underlining, but it's the first thing I've said about your stories that makes me nod my head up and down. Please, don't let me say anything more. I believe tonight that everything you tell a writer after asking him to let his stars appear are only literary advice.”

I never tire of saying it, Salinger's work (no matter if it comes to be pedantic (and has infected me with the use of parentheses) and ambitious) is all a feeling, one that I will always be delighted to experience. “Now go to bed. Quickly. Quickly and slowly.”

A Book of Two Stories: One Very Classic Salinger and One Very Not

Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters is a short story by JD Salinger, written in his very classic style. It features alliteration, a unique vibe, a lush backstory, abundant dialogue, and the use of enclosed spaces. The story centers on The Glass Family. During World War II, Buddy, at the behest of his sister Boo Boo, attends his brother Seymour’s wedding. However, there’s a catch - Seymour is a no-show at his own wedding! As the guests depart, Buddy gets into a nearly full cab. Since the other wedding guests don’t recognize him, they start badmouthing Seymour.

Throughout Salinger’s published works on The Glass Family, there is constant mention of “It’s a Wise Child”, a radio program that catapulted all of The Glass Children into fame. In many ways, The Glass Children are treated like zoo creatures, with the masses convinced they “know” them just by catching glimpses. This raises the question of whether this is autobiographical for Salinger, with the masses testing his wits while he just wants to be a poet.

The other story, Seymour: An Introduction, has an ironic title as it is more like Seymour’s eulogy or ending. This story isn’t typical of Salinger. It is told in a stream of consciousness style with long, obnoxious paragraphs and lacks the beautiful dialogue that is quintessential Salinger. It was Salinger’s last sanctioned published work and is essentially a send-off letter, explaining his writing philosophy. He also nods to his great influences like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Henry David Thoreau.

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Buddy Glass, the second of the siblings in that prodigious family which Salinger wrote about in several of his works without ever creating the great American novel they could have starred in, is the narrator of these two stories. He is the alter ego of the author, the one who, as suggested in the second of the tales included here, wrote something like “The Catcher in the Rye” in which an adolescent painfully experiences the premature death of a brother. Here too, there is a brother at the center of both stories, alive and about to get married in the first story and dead by suicide a few years after marriage in the second (and of whose death he also wrote in one of the wonderful nine stories titled “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”).

In both stories, Seymour, as the brother is called, is absent: at his wedding because he doesn't show up, much to the annoyance of the bride's family and friends, and for obvious reasons in the second. In both, he is considered by Buddy as the great genius of a family that is characterized by the singularity of all its members, not only because of his work as a poet but also because of his own life, his quality as a human being, and his very Zen spirituality.

\n   “… he could probably admit that there has rarely been a moment when he hasn't written about him, and if under threat of death he had to sit down tomorrow to write a story about a dinosaur, there is no doubt in his mind that, without meaning to, he would give the great beast one or two characteristics that would remind him of Seymour…”\n

The first story is very brisk, with funny dialogues in which Buddy has to listen, without revealing his relationship, to the insults that are hurled at his brother inside a crowded car during a sweltering festive morning. We will learn the reason for the groom's absence in the pages of the diary that his brother finds in the apartment they share and that, incidentally, gives us an idea of his complicated personality, qualifying the idea that Buddy and his talkative car companions had previously transmitted to us about him.

The second story is very different. Buddy, who is selecting poems by his brother for publication, makes a chaotic portrait of him in the manner of a kind Thomas Bernhard, obsessed and in love with his character. Seymour, like Salinger's most famous protagonist, Holden Caulfield, is a misfit who cannot stand conventions, hypocrisies, the agreements that have to be reached for a coexistence that ends up being depressing because it is false. A paradoxical being who seems unable to deal with happiness, who as a child knocked down a girl for the simple reason that seeing her seemed极其 beautiful to him, or who thought he was a kind of reverse paranoid, “I suspect that people are conspiring to make me happy.”

\n   “Seymour once said that everything we do in life is to go from one piece of Holy Land to another.”\n

Both stories are moving.

For a long time, this little book has been sitting on my bookshelf. I bought it due to an enthusiastic review by a noble and out of curiosity aroused by the title. Only when I decided to read it and flipped through the first few pages did I understand the meaning of the title. There are two stories, one titled "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" and the other is "Seymour. An Introduction". I also discovered the origin of the title of the first story, which consists of the verses of an ode by Sappho that goes like this: "Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. The bridegroom, like Ares, approaches, the tallest among all men." I understood this by reading what Boo Boo Glass had written with soap on the bathroom mirror in Seymour's brother's house.

That being said, here is my opinion on the two stories.

After reading the first one, I "fell in love" with Seymour Glass. It was love at first sight, and considering that there is no trace of him in the story itself. In fact, the story revolves around the disappearance of Seymour, who left his bride waiting for him at the altar! Despite Seymour Glass's absence, the eldest of the seven siblings in the family, he conquered me. I would go crazy for someone like him! I fell in love with him by reading some pages of his diary with his brother Buddy. From it, a person of extraordinary sensitivity emerges, so much so that he is almost physically marked by innocence, simple in his needs and approach to the world, but with a rich and profound simplicity. These last words written by him in the diary struck me: "Oh my God, if my personality can be clinically defined, then I'm a kind of reverse paranoid. I suspect that everyone is plotting to make me happy."

How it is possible to make a reader fall in love with a character who is not in the story, which revolves entirely around his absence, only Salinger knows. He has written a story that, in my opinion, is of extremely rare intensity and beauty, close to perfection (perfection for me is achieved with another story, which is not present here but is in a different collection, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish").

The second story seems to be written by another person in the sense that it has a completely different style, a less linear writing, more complex, verbose, with a long and articulated sentence structure, an expression of a certain literary virtuosity dear to postmoderns, and with a particularity that I have found in some other books that I don't like much, the narrator directly addressing the reader with a kind of wink, which in this case turned out to be less annoying than in others. Apart from the writing, the theme is common to the other story: the absence of Seymour. While one would have expected the writer to give us explanations about the character Seymour that would enable us to understand why he behaved as we read in the previous story, instead, none of that. This time, Salinger makes Bobby Glass speak. Amid digressions that are sometimes difficult to understand, with literary and religious implications, he speaks in a fragmented but splendid way about his brother Seymour, about his physical and moral characteristics: Seymour the universal poet, the unconscious saint, the enlightened sage; Seymour who was everything to his brothers and sisters, but no story, not even by his brother, the person who lived in closest contact with him, will be able to exhaustively speak of his multifaceted and complex personality, no story except the one in which Seymour is the absent protagonist.

Papá me critica mi "libro amigo". Ese cuaderno que yo llamo mi "biografía" y que no es otra cosa que la libreta donde voy acumulando las citas de los libros que he leído y que me han dicho algo.

En el caso de estas dos novellas, no hay nada que sobresalga. Esto puede significar una de dos cosas para mí. O el texto es tan soberbio que nada está por encima de lo demás, o simplemente no le entendí una chingada.

Hay, sin embargo, esos flashazos de extrema genialidad. Esos recordatorios que te hacen comprender que estás frente al autor del Catcher in the Rye y el cuento del pez banana y a Esme, con amor y sordidez. Como cuando escribe: "Las palmas eran anchas, el músculo entre el pulgar y el índice inesperadamente desarrollado, 'fuerte' (las comillas son innecesarias, cálmate, por el amor de Dios)".

Esa cita que hago, así, a ojo de buen cubero, puede ser el punto de partida, el génesis, de más de un autor posterior a Salinger. Más de uno nace de ahí, de esas líneas, aunque jamás las hayan leído.

Obra por debajo de Holden, pero, debajo, exactamente en el escalón anterior, lo que es decir un chingo, debajo con "medio pie" ya cerca de él. Y, lo que es más importante, un par de novellas al lado de los nueve cuentos.

La familia Glass, así, entrevista en parpadeos, diseminada en la obra de Salinger, se nos figura una familia, cualquier familia, nuestra familia. De la que creemos saber mucho, todo, pero de la que apenas entendemos una nada.

Una nada.

Me gusta Salinger, me gusta su estilo y sus temas. Y disfruto mucho que no me hace sentir estúpido al leerlo. Es inteligente, y me hace creer con él que yo también lo soy.

¿Cómo es una familia de genios? Como cualquier otra, como la tuya, como la mía.

Before Seymour almost indirectly entered the story, I was bored and even thought in my mind that I would give him a break.

Nothing special happened and all the characters were of the kind that were annoying and unlikable, and we had seen much better of them in other voices.

But after Seymour's arrival... Seymour's character was exactly the opposite of what I had imagined. He was not a person who could be simply said to be special. Seymour was an ordinary person who saw the things that everyone sees with different eyes. And his view was so beautiful that it amazed the reader.

I give four stars to Seymour and his strange view. And BoBo was also good. I didn't like the rest of the characters.

The technique of writing with soap on the mirror was also an interesting thing. Maybe I will try it.