Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

  (How can I record what I’ve just recorded and still be happy? But I am. Unjolly, unmerry, to the marrow, but my afflatus seems to be punctureproof. Recollective of only one other person I’ve known in my life.) You can’t imagine what big, hand-rubbing plans I had for this immediate space. They appear to have been designed, though, to look exquisite on the bottom of my wastebasket. I’d intended right here to relieve those last two midnight paragraphs with a couple of sunshiny witticisms, a matched pair of the sort of thigh-slappers that so often, I imagine, turn my fellow-raconteurs green with envy or nausea. It was my intention, right here, to tell the reader that when, or if, young people should stop by to see me about Seymour’s life or death, a curious personal affliction of my own, alas, would make such an audience utterly unfeasible. I planned to mention—just in passing, because this will be developed at, I hope, interminable length someday—that Seymour and I, as children, together spent close to seven years answering questions on a network-radio quiz program, and that ever since we formally went off the air, I’ve felt pretty much about people who as little as ask me the time of day almost precisely the way Betsey Trotwood felt about donkeys. Next, I intended to divulge that after some twelve years as a college instructor I’m now, in 1959, subject to frequent attacks of what my faculty colleagues have been flattering enough to think of, I believe, as Glass’s disease—in lay language, a pathological spasm of the lumbar and lower ventral regions that causes an off-duty classroom lecturer to double up and hurriedly cross streets or crawl under large pieces of furniture when he sees anyone under forty approaching. Neither of the two sallies will work for me here, though. There’s a certain amount of perverse truth to both, but not nearly enough. For the terrible and undiscountable fact has just reached me, between paragraphs, that I yearn to talk, to be queried, to be interrogated, about this particular dead man. It’s just got through to me, that apart from my many other—and, I hope to God, less ignoble—motives, I’m stuck with the usual survivor’s conceit that he’s the only soul alive who knew the deceased intimately. O let them come—the callow and the enthusiastic, the academic, the curious, the long and the short and the all-knowing! Let them arrive in busloads, let them parachute in, wearing Leicas. The mind swarms with gracious welcoming speeches. One hand already reaches for the box of detergent and the other for the dirty tea service. The bloodshot eye practices clearing. The old red carpet is out.

  A VERY delicate matter now. A trifle coarse, to be sure, but delicate, very delicate.

  Considering that this matter may not come up in any desirable, or massive, detail later on, I think the reader should know right now, and preferably bear in mind to the very end, that all the children in our family were, are, descended from an astonishingly long and motley double-file of professional entertainers. For the most part, genetically speaking, or muttering, we sing, dance, and (can you doubt it?) tell Funny Jokes. But I think it peculiarly important to keep in mind—and so did Seymour, even as a child—that there is also among us a wide miscellany of performing circus people and performing, so to say, circus-fringe people. One of my great-grandfathers (and Seymour’s), for an admittedly juicy example, was a quite famous Polish-Jewish carnival clown named Zozo, who had a penchant—up to the very end, one necessarily gathers—for diving from immense heights into small containers of water. Another of Seymour’s and my great-grandfathers, an Irishman MacMahon (whom my mother, to her everlasting credit, has never been tempted to refer to as a “darlin’ man”), was a self-employed type who used to set out a couple of octaves of empty whiskey bottles in a meadow and then, when a paying crowd had closed in, dance, we’re told, rather musically on the sides of the bottles. (So, surely you’ll take my word, we have, among other things, a few nuts on the family tree.) Our parents themselves, Les and Bessie Glass, had a fairly conventional but (we believe) remarkably good song-and-dance-and-patter act in vaudeville and music halls, reaching perhaps most nearly top billing in Australia (where Seymour and I spent about two years, in total bookings, of our very early childhood) but later, too, achieving much more than just passing notability on the old Pantages and Orpheum circuits, here in America. In the opinion of not a few people, they might have gone on as a vaudeville team for quite a bit longer than they did. Bessie had ideas of her own, though. Not only has she always had something of an aptitude for reading handwriting on walls—two-a-day vaudeville already in 1925 was almost finished, and Bessie had, both as a mother and as a dancer, the very strongest convictions against doing four-a-day shows for the big, new, ever-multiplying movie-cum-vaudeville palaces—but, more important than that, ever since she was a child in Dublin and her twin sister succumbed, backstage, of galloping undernutrition, Security, in any form, has had a fatal attraction for Bessie. At any rate, in the spring of 1925, at the end of a so-so run at the Albee, in Brooklyn, with five children bedded down with German measles in three and a half unstately rooms at the old Hotel Alamac, in Manhattan, and a notion that she was pregnant again (mistaken, it turned out; the babies of the family, Zooey and Franny, were not born till 1930 and 1935, respectively), Bessie suddenly appealed to an honest-to-God “influential” admirer, and my father took a job in what he invariably referred to, for years and years, with no real fear of being contradicted around the house, as the ministrative end of commercial radio, and Gallagher & Glass’s extended tour was officially over. What I’m mainly trying to do here, though, is to find the firmest way of suggesting that this curious footlight-and-three-ring heritage has been an almost ubiquitous and entirely significant reality in the lives of all seven of the children in our family. The two youngest, as I’ve already mentioned, are, in fact, professional actors. But no heavy line can be drawn quite there. The elder of my two sisters, to most outward appearances, is a fully landed suburbanite, mother of three children, co-owner of a two-car, filled garage, but at all supremely joyful moments she will, all but literally, dance for her life; I’ve seen her, to my horror, break into a very passable soft shoe routine (a sort of Ned Wayburn out of Pat and Marion Rooney) with a five-day-old niece of mine in her arms. My late younger brother Walt, who was killed in a postwar accident in Japan (and of whom I plan to say as little as possible in this series of sittings, if I’m to get through them), was a dancer, too, in a perhaps less spontaneous but far more professional sense than my sister Boo Boo. His twin—our brother Waker, our monk, our impounded Carthusian—as a boy, privately canonized W. C. Fields and in that inspired and obstreperous but rather holy man’s image used to practice juggling with cigar boxes, among a great many other things, by the hour, till he became spectacularly proficient at it. (Family rumor has it that he was originally cloistered off—that is relieved of his duties as a secular priest in Astoria—to free him of a persistent temptation to administer the sacramental wafer to his parishioners’ lips by standing back two or three feet and trajecting it in a lovely arc over his left shoulder.) As for myself—I’d prefer to take Seymour last—I’m quite sure it goes without saying that I dance a little bit, too. On request, of course. Apart from that, I might mention that I often feel I’m watched over, if somewhat erratically, by Great-Grandfather Zozo; I feel he mysteriously provides that I don’t trip over my invisible baggy clown-pants when I stroll in the woods or walk into classrooms, and perhaps also sees to it that my putty nose occasionally points east when I sit down at the typewriter.

  Nor, finally, did our Seymour himself live or die a whit less affected by his “background” than any of the rest of us. I’ve already mentioned that although I believe his poems couldn’t be more personal, or reveal him more completely, he goes through every one of them, even when the Muse of Absolute Joy is sitting on his back, without spilling a single really autobiographical bean. The which, I suggest, though possibly not to everyone’s taste, is highly literate vaudeville—a traditional first act, a man balancing words, emotions, a golden cornet on his chin, instead of the usual evening cane, chromium table, and champagne glass filled with water. But I have something far mor
e explicit and leading to tell you than that. I’ve been waiting for it: In Brisbane, in 1922, when Seymour and I were five and three, Les and Bessie played on the same bill for a couple of weeks with Joe Jackson—the redoubtable Joe Jackson of the nickel-plated trick bicycle that shone like something better than platinum to the very last row of the theater. A good many years later, not long after the outbreak of the Second World War, when Seymour and I had just recently moved into a small New York apartment of our own, our father—Les, as he’ll be called hereafter—dropped in on us one evening on his way home from a pinochle game. He quite apparently had held very bad cards all afternoon. He came in, at any rate, rigidly predisposed to keep his overcoat on. He sat. He scowled at the furnishings. He turned my hand over to check for cigarette-tar stains on my fingers, then asked Seymour how many cigarettes he smoked a day. He thought he found a fly in his highball. At length, when the conversation—in my view, at least—was going straight to hell, he got up abruptly and went over to look at a photograph of himself and Bessie that had been newly tacked up on the wall. He glowered at it for a full minute, or more, then turned around, with a brusqueness no one in the family would have found unusual, and asked Seymour if he remembered the time Joe Jackson had given him, Seymour, a ride on the handle bars of his bicycle, all over the stage, around and around. Seymour, sitting in an old corduroy armchair across the room, a cigarette going, wearing a blue shirt, gray slacks, moccasins with the counters broken down, a shaving cut on the side of his face that I could see, replied gravely and at once, and in the special way he always answered questions from Les—as if they were the questions, above all others, he preferred to be asked in this life. He said he wasn’t sure he had ever got off Joe Jackson’s beautiful bicycle. And aside from its enormous sentimental value to my father personally, this answer, in a great many ways, was true, true, true.

  BETWEEN THE last paragraph and this, just over two and a half months have gone by, Elapsed. A little bulletin that I grimace slightly to have to issue, since it reads back to me exactly as though I were about to intimate that I always use a chair when I work, drink upward of thirty cups of black coffee during Composing Hours, and make all my own furniture in my spare time; in short, it has the tone of a man of letters unreluctantly discussing his work habits, his hobbies, and his more printable human frailties with the interviewing officer from the Sunday Book Section. I’m really not up to anything that intime just here. (I’m keeping especially close tabs on myself here, in fact. It seems to me that this composition has never been in more imminent danger than right now of taking on precisely the informality of underwear.) I’ve announced a major delay between paragraphs by way of informing the reader that I’m just freshly risen from nine weeks in bed with acute hepatitis. (You see what I mean about underwear. This last open remark of mine happens to be a straight line, almost intacta, right out of Minsky burlesque. Second Banana: “I’ve been in bed for nine weeks with acute hepatitis.” Top Banana: “Which one, you lucky dog? They’re both cute, those Hepatitis girls.” If this be my promised clean bill of health, let me find a quick way back to the Valley of the Sick.) When I now confide, as I surely must, that I’ve been up and around for nearly a week, with the rose fully restored to check and jowl, will the reader, I wonder, misinterpret my confidence—mainly, I think, in two ways? One, will he think it’s a mild rebuke to him for neglecting to flood my sickroom with camellias? (Everyone will be relieved to know, it’s a safe guess, that I’m running out of Humor by the second.) Two, will he, the reader, choose to think, on the basis of this Sick Report, that my personal happiness—so carefully touted at the very beginning of this composition—perhaps wasn’t happiness at all but just liverishness? This second possibility is of extremely grave concern to me. For certain, I was genuinely happy to be working on this Introduction. In my own supine way, I was miraculously happy all through my hepatitis (and the alliteration alone should have finished me off). And I’m ecstatically happy at this moment, I’m happy to say. Which is not to deny (and I’ve come now, I’m afraid, to the real reason I’ve constructed this showcase for my poor old liver)—which is not to deny, I repeat, that my ailment left me with a single, terrible deficiency. I hate dramatic indentations with all my heart, but I suppose I do need a new paragraph for this matter.

  The first night, just this last week, that I felt quite hale and bullish enough to go back to work on this Introduction, I found that I’d lost not my afflatus but my wherewithal to continue to write about Seymour. He’d grown too much while I was away. It was hardly credible. From the manageable giant he had been before I got sick, he had shot up, in nine short weeks, into the most familiar human being in my life, the one person who was always much, much too large to fit on ordinary typewriter paper—any typewriter paper of mine, anyway. To put it flatly, I panicked, and I panicked for five consecutive nights thereafter. I think, though, that I mustn’t paint this any blacker than I have to. For there happens to be a very stunning silver lining. Let me tell you, without pausing, what I did tonight that makes me feel I’ll be back at work tomorrow night bigger and cockier and more objectionable, possibly, than ever. About two hours ago, I simply read an old personal letter—more accurately, a very lengthy memo—that was left on my breakfast plate one morning in 1940. Under half a grapefruit, to be precise. In just another minute or two, I mean to have the unutterable (“pleasure” isn’t the word I want)—the unutterable Blank of reproducing the long memo here verbatim. (O happy hepatitis! I’ve never known sickness—or sorrow, or disaster, for that matter—not to unfold, eventually, like a flower or a good memo. We’re required only to keep looking. Seymour once said, on the air, when he was eleven, that the thing he loved best in the Bible was the word watch!) Before I get to the main item, though, it behooves me, from head to foot, to attend to a few incidental platters. This chance may never come again.

  It seems a serious oversight, but I don’t think I’ve said that it was my custom, my compulsion, whenever it was practical, and very often when it wasn’t, to try out my new short stories on Seymour. That is, read them aloud to him. Which I did molto agitato, with a clearly indicated required Rest Period for everybody at the finish. This is by way of saying that Seymour always refrained from making any comments after my voice had come to a stop. Instead, he usually looked at the ceiling for five or ten minutes—he invariably stretched out flat on the floor for a Reading—then got up, (sometimes) gently stamped a foot that had gone to sleep, and left the room. Later—usually in a matter of hours, but on one or two occasions days—he would jot down a few notes on a piece of paper or a shirt cardboard and either leave it on my bed or at my place at the dinner table or (very rarely) send it to me through the U.S. Mail. Here are a few of his brief criticisms. (This is a warmup, frankly. I see no point in disclaiming it, though I probably should.)

  Horrible, but right. An honest Medusa’s Head.

  I wish I knew. The woman is fire, but the painter seems haunted by your friend the man who painted Anna Karenina’s portrait in Italy. Which is swell haunting, the best, but you have your own irascible painters.

  I think it should be done over, Buddy. The Doctor is so good, but I think you like him too late. The whole first half, he’s out in the cold, waiting for you to like him, and he’s your main character. You see his nice dialogue with the nurse as a conversion. It should have been a religious story, but it’s puritanical. I feel your censure on all his God-damns. That seems off to me. What is it but a low form of prayer when he or Les or anybody else God-damns everything? I can’t believe God recognizes any form of blasphemy. It’s a prissy word invented by the clergy.

  I’m so sorry about this one. I wasn’t listening right. I’m so sorry. The first sentence threw me way off. “Henshaw woke up that morning with a splitting head.” I count so heavily on you to finish off all the fraudulent Henshaws in fiction. There just are no Henshaws. Will you read it to me again?

  Please make your peace with your wit. It’s not going to go away, Bud
dy. To dump it on your own advice would be as bad and unnatural as dumping your adjectives and adverbs because Prof. B. wants you to. What does he know about it? What do you really know about your own wit?

  I’ve been sitting here tearing up notes to you. I keep starting to say things like “This one is wonderfully constructed,” and “The woman on the back of the truck is very funny,” and “The conversation between the two cops is terrific.” So I’m hedging. I’m not sure why. I started to get a little nervous right after you began to read. It sounded like the beginning of something your arch-enemy Bob B. calls a rattling good story. Don’t you think he would call this a step in the right direction? Doesn’t that worry you? Even what is funny about the woman on the back of the truck doesn’t sound like something you think is funny. It sounds much more like something that you think is universally considered very funny. I feel gypped. Does that make you mad? You can say our relatedness spoils my judgment. It worries me enough. But I’m also just a reader. Are you a writer or just a writer of rattling good stories. I mind getting a rattling good story from you. I want your loot.