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

  I can’t get this new one off my mind. I don’t know what to say about it. I know what the dangers of getting into sentimentality must have been. You got through it fine. Maybe too fine. I wonder if I don’t wish you’d slipped up a little. Can I write a little story for you? Once there was a great music critic, a distinguished authority on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. His little daughter went to P.S. 9, where she was in the Glee Club, and this great music-lover was very annoyed when she came home one day with another child to practice singing a medley of songs by Irving Berlin and Harold Arlen and Jerome Kern and people like that. Why shouldn’t the children sing little simple Schubert Lieder instead of that “trash?” So he went to the principal of the school and made a big stink about it. The principal was much impressed by such a distinguished person’s arguments, and he agreed to turn the Music Appreciation Teacher, a very old lady, over his knee. The great music-lover left his office in very good spirits. On the way home, he thought over the brilliant arguments he had advanced in the principal’s office and his elation grew and grew. His chest expanded. His step quickened. He began to whistle a little tune. The tune: “K-K-K-Katy.”

  THE MEMO now. As presented with pride and resignation. Pride because—Well, I’ll pass that. Resignation because some of my faculty comrades may be listening—veteran interoffice cutups, all—and I have a notion that this particular enclosure is sooner or later bound to be entitled “A Nineteen-Year-Old Prescription for Writers and Brothers and Hepatitis Convalescents Who Have Lost Their Way and Can’t Go On.” (Ah, well. It takes a cutup to know one. Besides, I feel that my loins are oddly girded for this occasion.)

  I think, first, that this was the lengthiest critical comment I ever had from Seymour about any Literary Effort of mine—and, for that matter, probably the longest non-oral communiqué I ever got from him during his life. (We very rarely wrote personal letters to each other, even during the war.) It was written in pencil, on several sheets of notepaper that our mother had relieved the Bismarck Hotel, in Chicago, of, some years earlier. He was responding to what was surely the most ambitious bloc of writing I had done up to that time. The year was 1940, and we were both still living in our parents’ rather thickly populated apartment in the East Seventies. I was twenty-one, as unattached as, shall I say, only a young, unpublished, green-complexioned writer can be. Seymour himself was twenty-three and had just begun his fifth year of teaching English at a university in New York. Herewith, then, in full. (I can foresee a few embarrassments for the discriminating reader, but the Worst, I think, will be over with the salutation. I figure that if the salutation doesn’t embarrass me particularly, I don’t see why it should embarrass any other living soul.)

  DEAR OLD TYGER THAT SLEEPS:

  I wonder if there are many readers who have ever turned the pages of a manuscript while the author snores in the same room. I wanted to see this one for myself. Your voice was almost too much this time. I think your prose is getting to be all the theater your characters can withstand. I have so much I want to tell you, and nowhere to begin.

  This afternoon I wrote what I thought was a whole letter to the head of the English Department, of all people, that sounded quite a lot like you. It gave me such pleasure I thought I ought to tell you. It was a beautiful letter. It felt like the Saturday afternoon last spring when I went to Die Zauberflöte with Carl and Amy and that very strange girl they brought for me and I wore your green intoxicator. I didn’t tell you I wore it. [He was referring here to one of four expensive neckties I’d bought the season before. I’d forbidden all my brothers—but especially Seymour, who had easiest access to them—to go anywhere near the drawer I kept them in. I stored them, only partly as a gag, in cellophane.] I felt no guilt when I wore it, only a mortal fear that you’d suddenly walk on the stage and see me sitting there in the dark with your tie on. The letter was a little bit different. It occurred to me that if things were switched around and you were writing a letter that sounded like me, you’d be bothered. I was mostly able to put it out of my mind. One of the few things left in the world, aside from the world itself, that sadden me every day is an awareness that you get upset if Boo Boo or Walt tells you you’re saying something that sounds like me. You sort of take it as an accusation of piracy, a little slam at your individuality. Is it so bad that we sometimes sound like each other? The membrane is so thin between us. Is it so important for us to keep in mind which is whose? That time, two summers ago when I was out so long, I was able to trace that you and Z. and I have been brothers for no fewer than four incarnations, maybe more. Is there no beauty in that? For us, doesn’t each of our individualities begin right at the point where we own up to our extremely close connections and accept the inevitability of borrowing one another’s jokes, talents, idiocies? You notice I don’t include neckties. I think Buddy’s neckties are Buddy’s neckties, but they are a pleasure to borrow without permission.

  It must be terrible for you to think I have neckties and things on my mind besides your story. I don’t. I’m just looking everywhere for my thoughts. I thought this trivia might help me to collect myself. It’s daylight out, and I’ve been sitting here since you went to bed. What bliss it is to be your first reader. It would be straight bliss if I didn’t think you valued my opinion more than your own. It really doesn’t seem right to me that you should rely so heavily on my opinion of your stories. That is, you. You can argue me down another time, but I’m convinced I’ve done something very wrong that this situation should be. I’m not exactly wallowing in guilt at the moment, but guilt is guilt. It doesn’t go away. It can’t be nullified. It can’t even be fully understood, I’m certain—its roots run too deep into private and long-standing karma. About the only thing that saves my neck when I get to feeling this way is that guilt is an imperfect form of knowledge. Just because it isn’t perfect doesn’t mean that it can’t be used. The hard thing to do is to put it to practical use before it gets around to paralyzing you. So I’m going to write down what I think about this story as fast as I can. If I hurry, I have a powerful feeling my guilt will serve the best and truest purposes here. I do think that. I think if I rush with this, I may be able to tell you what I’ve probably wanted to tell you for years.

  You must know yourself that this story is full of big jumps. Leaps. When you first went to bed, I thought for a while that I ought to wake up everybody in the house and throw a party for our marvellous jumping brother. What am I, that I didn’t wake everybody up? I wish I knew. A worrier, at the very least. I worry about big jumps that I can measure off with my eyes. I think I dream of your daring to jump right out of my sight. Excuse this. I’m writing very fast now. I think this new story is the one you’ve been waiting for. And me, too, in a way. You know it’s mostly pride that’s keeping me up. I think that’s my main worry. For your own sake, don’t make me proud of you. I think that’s exactly what I’m trying to say. If only you’d never keep me up again out of pride. Give me a story that just makes me unreasonably vigilant. Keep me up till five only because all your stars are out, and for no other reason. Excuse the underlining, but that’s the first thing I’ve ever said about one of your stories that makes my head go up and down. Please don’t let me say anything else. I think tonight that anything you say to a writer after you beg him to let his stars come out is just literary advice. I’m positive tonight that all “good” literary advice is just Louis Bouilhet and Max Du Camp wishing Madame Bovary on Flaubert. All right, so between the two of them, with their exquisite taste, they got him to write a masterpiece. They killed his chances of ever writing his heart out. He died like a celebrity, which was the one thing he wasn’t. His letters are unbearable to read. They’re so much better than they should be. They read waste, waste, waste. They break my heart. I dread saying anything to you tonight, dear old Buddy, except the trite. Please follow your heart, win or lose. You got so mad at me when we were registering. [The week before, he and I and several million other young Americans went over to the nearest public school and r
egistered for the draft. I caught him smiling at something I had written on my registration blank. He declined, all the way home, to tell me what struck him so funny. As anyone in my family could verify, he could be an inflexible decliner when the occasion looked auspicious to him.] Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It’s never been anything but your religion. Never. I’m a little over-excited now. Since it is your religion, do you know what you will be asked when you die? But let me tell you first what you won’t be asked. You won’t be asked if you were working on a wonderful moving piece of writing when you died. You won’t be asked if it was long or short, sad or funny, published or unpublished. You won’t be asked if you were in good or bad form while you were working on it. You won’t even be asked if it was the one piece of writing you would have been working on if you had known your time would be up when it was finished—I think only poor Sören K. will get asked that. I’m so sure you’ll get asked only two questions. Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? If only you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions. If only you’d remember before ever you sit down to write that you’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won’t even underline that. It’s too important to be underlined. Oh, dare to do it, Buddy! Trust your heart. You’re a deserving craftsman. It would never betray you. Good night. I’m feeling very much overexcited now, and a little dramatic, but I think I’d give almost anything on earth to see you writing a something, an anything, a story, a poem, a tree, that was really and truly after your own heart. The Bank Dick is at the Thalia. Let’s take the whole bunch tomorrow night. Love, S.

  This is Buddy Glass back on the page. (Buddy Glass, of course is only my pen name. My real name is Major George Fielding Anti-Climax.) I’m feeling over-excited and a little dramatic myself, and my every heated impulse at this second is to make literally starry promises to the reader for our rendezvous tomorrow night. But if I’m smart, I think, I’ll just brush my tooth and run along to bed. If my brother’s long Memo was rather taxing to read, it was positively exhausting, I can’t forbear to add, to type out for my friends. At this moment, I’m wearing that handsome firmament he offered me as a hurry-up-and-get-well-from-your-hepatitis-and-faintheartedness present down around my knees.

  Will it be too rash of me, though, to tell the reader what I intend to do, beginning tomorrow night? For ten years and more, I’ve dreamed of having the question “What did your brother Look Like?” put to me by someone with no special preference for brief, crisp answers to very direct questions. In short, the piece of writing in this world, “the something, the anything,” that my recommended organ of authority tells me I’d most enjoy curling up with is a full physical description of Seymour written by somebody who isn’t in an all-fired hurry to get him off his chest—in a properly shameless word, myself.

  HIS HAIR jumping in the barbershop. This is Tomorrow Night, and I’m sitting here, it goes without saying, in my tuxedo. His hair jumping in the barbershop. Jesus God, is that my opening line? Is this room going to fill up, slowly, slowly, with corn muffins and apple pie? It may. I don’t want to believe it, but it may. If I push for Selectiveness with a description, I’ll quit cold again before I start. I can’t sort out, can’t clerk with this man. I can hope that some things will be bound to get done here with passing sensibility, but let me not screen every damned sentence, for once in my life, or I’m through again. His jumping hair in the barbershop is absolutely the first pressing thing that comes to mind. We went for haircuts usually every second broadcast day, or once every two weeks, right after school was out. The barbershop was at 108th and Broadway, nested verdantly (stop that, now) between a Chinese restaurant and a kosher delicatessen. If we’d forgotten to eat lunch, or, more likely, lost it somewhere, we sometimes bought about fifteen cents’ worth of sliced salami and a couple of new dill pickles, and ate them in our chairs, at least till the hair started to fall. Mario and Victor were the barbers. Probably passed on, these many years, of an overdose of garlic, the way all New York barbers eventually go. (All right, cut that out. Just manage to nip that stuff in the bud, please.) Our chairs were adjoining, and when Mario had finished with me and was ready to take off and shake out that cloth throw-over, I never, never failed to have more of Seymour’s hair on me than my own. Few things in my life, before or since, have riled me more. Only once did I put in a complaint about it, and that was a colossal mistake. I said something, in a distinctively ratty tone of voice, about his “damn hair” always jumping all over me. The instant I said it I was sorry, but it was out. He didn’t say anything, but he immediately started to worry about it. It grew worse as we walked home, crossing streets in silence; he was obviously trying to divine a way of forbidding his hair to jump on his brother in the barbershop. The homestretch on 110th, the long block from Broadway to our building, on the corner of Riverside, was the worst. No one in the family could worry his or her way down that block the way Seymour could if he had Decent Material.

  Which is enough for one night. I’m exhausted.

  Just this one other thing. What is it I want (italics all mine) from a physical description of him? More, what do I want it to do? I want it to get to the magazine, yes; I want to publish it. But that isn’t it—I always want to publish. It has more to do with the way I want to submit it to the magazine. In fact, it has everything to do with that. I think I know. I know very well I know. I want it to get down there without my using either stamps or a Manila envelope. If it’s a true description, I should be able to just give it train fare, and maybe pack a sandwich for it and a little something hot in a thermos, and that’s all. The other passengers in the car must move slightly away from it, as though it were a trifle high. Oh, marvellous thought! Let him come out of this a trifle high. But what kind of high? High, I think, like someone you love coming up on the porch, grinning, grinning, after three hard sets of tennis, victorious tennis, to ask you if you saw that last shot he made. Yes. Oui.

  •

  Another night. This is to be read, remember. Tell the reader where you are. Be friendly—you never know. But of course. I’m in the conservatory, I’ve just rung for the port, and it will be brought in at any moment by the old family retainer, an exceptionally intelligent, fat, sleek mouse, who eats everything in the house except examination papers.

  I’m going back to S.’s hair, since it’s already on the page. Till it started coming out, at about nineteen, in handfuls, he had very wiry hair. The word is almost kinky, but not quite; I think I’d feel determined to use it if it had been. It was most exceedingly pullable-looking hair, and pulled it surely got; the babies in the family always automatically reached for it, even before the nose, which, God wot, was also Outstanding. But one thing at a time. A very hairy man, youth, adolescent. The other kids in the family, not exclusively but especially the boys, the many pre-puberty boys we always seemed to have around the house, used to be fascinated by his wrists and hands. My brother Walt, at about eleven, had a routine of looking at Seymour’s wrists and inviting him to take off his sweater. “Take off your sweater, hey, Seymour. Go ahead, hey. It’s warm in here.” S. would beam back at him, shine back at him. He loved that kind of horseplay from any of the kids. I did, too, but only off and on. He did invariably. He thrived, too, waxed strong, on all tactless or under-considered remarks directed at him by family minors. In 1959, in fact, when on occasion I hear rather nettling news of the doings of my youngest brother and sister, I think on the quantities of joy they brought S. I remember Franny, at about four, sitting on his lap, facing him,
and saying, with immense admiration, “Seymour, your teeth are so nice and yellow!” He literally staggered over to me to ask if I’d heard what she said.

  One remark in this paragraph stops me cold. Why did I like horseplay from the kids only off and on? Undoubtedly because it sometimes had a fair amount of malice in it when it was directed at me. Not that I most probably didn’t have it coming to me. What, I wonder, does the reader know of large families? More important, how much can he stand hearing on the subject, from me? I must say at least this much: If you’re an older brother in a large family (particularly where, as with Seymour and Franny, there’s an age difference of roughly eighteen years), and you either cast yourself or just not very advertently become cast in the role of local tutor or mentor, it’s almost impossible not to turn into a monitor, too. But even monitors come in individual shapes, sizes, and colors. For example, when Seymour told one of the twins or Zooey or Franny, or even Mme. Boo Boo (who was only two years younger than myself, and often entirely the Lady), to take off his or her rubbers on coming into the apartment, each and all of them knew he mostly meant that the floor would get tracked up if they didn’t and that Bessie would have to get out the mop. When I told them to take off their rubbers, they knew I mostly meant that people who didn’t were slobs. It was bound to make no small difference in the way they kidded or ragged us separately. A confession, I groan to overhear, that can’t avoid sounding suspiciously Honest and Ingratiating. What can I do about it? Am I to hold up the whole works every time an Honest John tone comes into my voice? Can’t I count on the reader’s knowing that I wouldn’t play myself down—in this instance, stress my poor leadership qualities—if I didn’t feel certain that I was much more than lukewarmly tolerated in that house? Would it help to tell you my age again? I’m a gray-haired, flaccid-bottomed forty as I write this, with a fair-sized pot and some commensurately fair-sized chances, I hope, of not throwing my silver pusher on the floor because I’m not going to make the basketball squad this year or because my salute isn’t snappy enough to send me to Officer Candidate School. Besides, a confessional passage has probably never been written that didn’t stink a little bit of the writer’s pride in having given up his pride. The thing to listen for, every time, with a public confessor, is what he’s not confessing to. At a certain period of his life (usually, grievous to say, a successful period), a man may suddenly feel it Within His Power to confess that he cheated on his final exams at college, he may even choose to reveal that between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-four he was sexually impotent, but these gallant confessions in themselves are no guarantee that we’ll find out whether he once got piqued at his pet hamster and stepped on its head. I’m sorry to go on about this, but it seems to me I have a legitimate worry here. I’m writing about the only person I’ve ever known whom, on my own terms, I considered really large, and the only person of any considerable dimensions I’ve ever known who never gave me a moment’s suspicion that he kept, on the sly, a whole closetful of naughty, tiresome little vanities. I find it dreadful—in fact, sinister—even to have to wonder whether I may not occasionally be nosing him out in popularity on the page. You’ll pardon me, maybe, for saying so, but not all readers are skilled readers. (When Seymour was twenty-one, a nearly full professor of English, and had already been teaching for two years, I asked him what, if anything, got him down about teaching. He said he didn’t think that anything about it got him exactly down, but there was one thing, he thought, that frightened him: reading the pencilled notations in the margins of books in the college library.) I’ll finish this. Not all readers, I repeat, are skilled readers, and I’m told—critics tell us everything, and the worst first—that I have many surface charms as a writer. I wholeheartedly fear that there is a type of reader who may find it somewhat winning of me to have lived to be forty; i.e. unlike Another Person on the page, not to have been “selfish” enough to commit suicide and leave my Whole Loving Family high and dry. (I said I’d finish this, but I’m not going to make it after all. Not because I’m not a proper iron man but because to finish it right I’d have to touch on—my God, touch on—the details of his suicide, and I don’t expect to be ready to do that, at the rate I’m going, for several more years.)