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

  I’ll tell you one thing, though, before I go to bed, that seems to me vastly pertinent. And I’d be grateful if everybody tried his hardest not to consider this a categorical afterthought. I can give you, that is, one perfectly explorable reason that makes my being forty at this writing a monstrous advantage-disadvantage. Seymour was dead at thirty-one. Even to bring him up to that exceedingly unhoary age will take me many, many months, as I’m geared, and probably years. For the present, you’ll see him almost exclusively as a child and young boy (never, I hope to God, as a nipper). While I’m with him in the business on the page, I’ll be a child and young boy, too. But always I’ll be aware, and so, I believe, will the reader, if rather less partisanly, that a somewhat paunchy and very nearly middle-aged man is running this show. In my view, this thought is no more melancholy than most of the facts of life and death, but no less, either. You’ve only my word for it so far, but I must tell you that I know as well as I know anything that if our positions were switched around and Seymour were in my seat, he would be so affected—so stricken, in fact—by his gross seniority as narrator and official shot-caller that he’d abandon this project. I’ll say no more about it, of course, but I’m glad it came up. It’s the truth. Please don’t simply see it; feel it.

  I’m not going to bed after all. Somebody around here hath murdered sleep. Good for him.

  Shrill, unpleasant voice (not of any of my readers): You said you were going to tell us what your brother Looked Like. We don’t want all this goddamn analysis and gluey stuff.

  But I do. I want every bit of this gluey stuff. I could use a little less analysis, no doubt, but I want every bit of the gluey stuff. If I have a prayer of staying straight with this, it’s the gluey stuff that’ll do it.

  I think I can describe his face, form, manner—the works—at almost any time of his life (barring the overseas years) and get a good likeness. No euphemisms, please. A perfect image. (When and where, if I go on with this, will I have to tell the reader what sort of memories, powers of recall, some of us in the family have? Seymour, Zooey, myself. I can’t put it off indefinitely, but how ugly will it look in print?) It would help enormously if some kind soul were to send me a telegram stating precisely which Seymour he’d prefer me to describe. If I’m called upon merely to describe Seymour, any Seymour, I get a vivid-type picture, all right, but in it he appears before me simultaneously at the ages of, approximately, eight, eighteen, and twenty-eight, with a full head of hair and getting very bald, wearing a summer camper’s red-striped shorts and wearing a creased suntan shirt with buck-sergeant stripes, sitting in padmasana and sitting in the balcony at the R.K.O. 86th Street. I feel the threat of presenting just that kind of picture, and I don’t like it. For one thing, I think it would worry Seymour. It’s rough when one’s Subject is also one’s cher maître. It wouldn’t worry him a very great deal, I think, if after due consultation with my instincts I elected to use some sort of literary Cubism to present his face. For that matter, it wouldn’t worry him at all if I wrote the rest of this exclusively in lower-case letters—if my instincts advised it. I wouldn’t mind some form of Cubism here, but every last one of my instincts tells me to put up a good, lower-middle-class fight against it. I’d like to sleep on it, anyway. Good night. Good night, Mrs. Calabash. Good night, Bloody Description.

  •

  Since I’m having a little trouble speaking for myself, I decided this morning, in class (rather staring the while, I’m afraid, at Miss Valdemar’s incredibly snug pedal pushers), that the really courteous thing to do would be to let one of my parents have the first word here, and where better to start than with the Primeval Mother? The risks involved, though, are overwhelming. If sentiment doesn’t ultimately make fibbers of some people, their natural abominable memories almost certainly will. With Bessie, for instance, one of the main things about Seymour was his tallness. In her mind she sees him as an uncommonly rangy, Texan type, forever ducking his head as he came into rooms. The fact is, he was five ten and a half—a short tall man by modern, multiple-vitamin standards. Which was fine with him. He had no love whatever for height. I wondered for a while, when the twins went over six feet, whether he was going to send them condolence cards. I think if he were alive today he’d be all smiles that Zooey, being an actor, grew up small. He, S., was a very firm believer in low centers of gravity for real actors.

  That bit about “all smiles” was a mistake. I can’t get him to stop smiling now. I’d be very happy if some other earnest-type writer sat in for me here. One of my first vows when I took up this profession was to put the damper on my characters’ Smiling or Grinning on the printed page. Jacqueline grinned. Big, lazy Bruce Browning smiled wryly. A boyish smile lit up Captain Mittagessen’s craggy features. Yet it presses in on me like hell here. To get the worst over with first: I think he had a very, very good smile, for somebody whose teeth were somewhere between so-so and bad. What seems not a whit onerous to write about is the mechanics of it. His smile often went backward or forward when all the other facial traffic in the room was either not moving at all or moving in the opposite direction. His distributor wasn’t standard, even in the family. He could look grave, not to say funereal, when candles on small children’s birthday cakes were being blown out. On the other hand, he could look positively delighted when one of the kids showed him where he or she had scraped a shoulder swimming under the float. Technically, I think, he had no social smile whatever, and yet it seems true (maybe just a trifle extravagant) to say that nothing essentially right was ever missing in his face. His scraped-shoulder smile, for example, was often maddening, if it was your shoulder that had got scraped, but it also distracted where distraction counted. His gravity at birthday parties, surprise parties, didn’t wet-blanket them—or almost never, any more than, say, his grinniness as a guest at First Communions or Bar Mizvahs. And I don’t think this is just the prejudiced brother talking. People who didn’t know him at all, or knew him only slightly, or just as a Child Radio Celebrity, active or retired, were sometimes disconcerted by a particular expression—or a lack of one—on his face, but merely for a moment, I think. And often in such cases the victims felt something pleasantly close to curiosity—never, that I can remember, any real personal resentment or ruffling of the feathers. For one reason—the least complex, surely—his every expression was ingenuous. When he was to manhood grown (and this is, I suppose, the prejudiced brother speaking), I think he had about the last absolutely unguarded adult face in the Greater New York Area. The only times I can remember anything disingenuous, artful, going on in his face were when he was intentionally amusing some blood relative around the apartment. Even this, though, wasn’t a daily occurrence. On the whole, I’d say, he partook of Humor with a temperateness denied to anyone else in our household. Which, rather emphatically, is not to imply that humor wasn’t a staple of his diet, too, but it is to say that he generally got, or took for himself, the smallest piece. The Standing Family Joke almost invariably fell to him, if our father wasn’t around at the moment, and he usually put it away with good grace. For a neat enough example, I think, of what I mean, when I read my new short stories aloud to him it was his unwavering custom, once in every story, to interrupt me in the middle of a line of dialogue to ask me if I knew that I had a Good Ear for the Rhythms and Cadences of Colloquial Speech. It was his pleasure to look very sapient as he put that one to me.

  What I get next is Ears. In fact, I get a whole little movie of them—a streaky one-reeler of my sister Boo Boo, at about eleven, leaving the dinner table on a riotous impulse and lunging back into the room a minute later to try out a pair of rings, detached from a loose-leaf notebook, on Seymour’s ears. She was very pleased with the result, and Seymour kept them on all evening. Not improbably till they drew blood. But they weren’t for him. He hadn’t, I’m afraid, the ears of a buccaneer but the ears of an old cabalist or an old Buddha. Extremely long, fleshy lobes. I remember Father Waker, passing through here a few years ago in a hot black
suit, asking me, while I was doing the Times crossword, if I thought S.’s ears had been Tang dynasty. Myself, I’d put it earlier than that.

  I’m going to bed. Perhaps a nightcap, first, in the Library, with Colonel Anstruther, then bed. Why does this exhaust me so? The hands are sweating, the bowels churning. The Integrated Man is simply not at home.

  Except for the eyes, and maybe (I say maybe) the nose, I’m tempted to pass up the rest of his face, and the hell with Comprehensiveness. I couldn’t bear to be accused of leaving nothing to the reader’s imagination.

  •

  In one or two conveniently describable ways, his eyes were similar to mine, to Les’s, and to Boo Boo’s, in that (a) the eyes of this bunch could all be rather bashfully described as extra-dark oxtail in color, or Plaintive Jewish Brown, and (b) we all ran to half circles, and, in a couple of cases, outright bags. There, though, all intra-familial comparison stops dead. It seems a little ungallant to the ladies of the ensemble, but my vote for the two “best” pairs of eyes in the family would go to Seymour and Zooey. And yet each of those pairs was so utterly different from the other, and color only the least of it. A few years ago, I published an exceptionally Haunting, Memorable, unpleasantly controversial, and thoroughly unsuccessful short story about a “gifted” little boy aboard a transatlantic liner, and somewhere in it there was a detailed description of the boy’s eyes. By a happy stroke of coincidence, I happen to have a copy of that very story on my person at this moment, tastefully pinned to the lapel of my bathrobe. I quote: “His eyes, which were pale brown in color and not at all large, were slightly crossed—the left eye more than the right. They were not crossed enough to be disfiguring, or even to be necessarily noticeable at first glance. They were crossed just enough to be mentioned, and only in context with the fact that one might have thought long and seriously before wishing them straighter, or deeper, or browner, or wider set.” (Perhaps we’d better pause a second to catch our breath.) The fact is (truly, no Ho Ho intended), those were not Seymour’s eyes at all. His eyes were dark, very large, quite adequately spaced, and, if anything, exceedingly uncrossed. Yet at least two members of my family knew and remarked that I was trying to get at his eyes with that description, and even felt that I hadn’t brought it off too badly, in a peculiar way. In reality, there was something like a here-again, gone-again, super-gossamer cast over his eyes—except that it wasn’t a cast at all, and that was where I ran into trouble. Another, equally fun-loving writer—Schopenhauer—tries, somewhere in his hilarious work, to describe a similar pair of eyes, and makes, I’m delighted to say, an entirely comparable hash of it.

  All right. The Nose. I tell myself this’ll only hurt a minute.

  If, any time between 1919 and 1948, you came into a crowded room where Seymour and I were present, there would possibly be only one way, but it would be foolproof, of knowing that he and I were brothers. That would be by the noses and chins. The chins, of course, I can breezily dismiss in a minute by saying we almost didn’t have any. Noses, however, we emphatically had, and they were close to being identical: two great, fleshy, drooping, trompe-like affairs that were different from every other nose in the family except, all too vividly, that of dear old Great Grandfather Zozo, whose own nose, ballooning out from an early daguerreotype, used to alarm me considerably as a small boy. (Come to think of it, Seymour, who never made, shall I say, anatomical jokes, once rather surprised me by wondering whether our noses—his, mine, Great-Grandfather Zozo’s—posed the same bedtime dilemma that certain beards do, meaning did we sleep with them outside or inside the covers.) There’s a risk, though, of sounding too airy about this. I’d like to make it very clear—offensively so, if need be—that they were definitely not romantic Cyrano protuberances. (Which is a dangerous subject on all counts, I think, in this brave new psychoanalytical world, where almost everybody as a matter of course knows which came first, Cyrano’s nose or his wisecracks, and where there’s a widespread, international clinical hush for all the big-nosed chaps who are undeniably tongue-tied.) I think the only difference worth mentioning in the general breadth, length, and contours of our two noses was that there was a very notable bend, I’m obliged to say, to the right, an extra lopsidedness, at the bridge of Seymour’s nose. Seymour always suspected that it made my nose patrician by comparison. The “bend” was acquired when someone in the family was rather dreamily making practice swings with a baseball bat in the hall of our old apartment on Riverside Drive. His nose was never set after the mishap.

  Hurrah. The nose is over. I’m going to bed.

  •

  I don’t dare look back yet over what I’ve written so far; the old occupational fear of turning into a used Royal typewriter ribbon at the stroke of midnight is very strong tonight. I have a good idea, though, that I haven’t been presenting a living portrait of the Sheik of Arabee. Which is, I pray, fair and correct. At the same time, no one must be led to infer, through my dammed incompetence and heat, that S. was, in the usual, tiresome terminology, an Attractively Ugly Man. (It’s a very suspect tag in any event, most commonly used by certain womenfolk, real or imaginary, to justify their perhaps too singular attraction to spectacularly sweet-wailing demons or, somewhat less categorically, badly brought-up swans.) Even if I have to hammer at it—and I already have, I’m aware—I must make it plain that we were, if to slightly different degrees, two obtrusively “homely” children. My God, were we homely. And though I think I may say that our looks “improved considerably” with age and as our faces “filled out,” I must assert and reassert that as boys, youths, adolescents, we undoubtedly gave a great many genuinely thoughtful people a distinct pang at first sight. I’m speaking here, of course, of adults, not other children. Most young children don’t pang very readily—not that way, anyhow. On the other hand, neither are most young children notably large-hearted. Often, at children’s parties, someone’s rather showily broad-minded mother would suggest a game of Spin the Bottle or Post Office, and I can freely attest that throughout childhood the two eldest Glass boys were veteran recipients of bag after bag of unmailed letters (illogically but satisfactorily put, I think), unless, of course, the Postman was a little girl called Charlotte the Harlot, who was a trifle mad anyway. Did this bother us? Did it cause pain? Think carefully, now, writer. My very slow, very considered answer: Almost never. In my own case, for three reasons that I can easily think of. First, except for one or two shaky intervals, I believed straight through my childhood—thanks largely to Seymour’s insistence, but by no means entirely—that I was an egregiously charming, able fellow, and it was at once a marked and a curiously unimportant reflection on anyone’s taste if he thought otherwise. Second (if you can stand this one, and I don’t see how you can), I had a rosy, full conviction before I was five that I was going to be a superlative writer when I grew up. And, third, with very few deviations, and none whatever within the heart, I was always secretly pleased and proud to bear any physical resemblance to Seymour. With Seymour himself, the case, as usual, was different. He cared alternately much and not at all about his funny-lookingness. When he cared much, he cared for the sake of other people, and I find myself thinking especially, at this moment, of our sister Boo Boo. Seymour was wild about her. Which isn’t saying a great deal, since he was wild about everybody in the family and most people outside it. But, like all young girls I’ve ever known, Boo Boo went through a stage—admirably short, in her case, I must say—when she “died” at least twice daily of the gaffes, the faux pas, of adults in general. At the height of this period, a favorite history teacher who came into class after lunch with a dot of charlotte russe on her cheek was quite sufficient cause for Boo Boo to wither and die at her desk. Quite frequently, however, she came home dead from somewhat less trivial causes, and these were the times that bothered and worried Seymour. He worried rather particularly, for her sake, about adults who came over to us (him and me) at parties or such to tell us how handsome we were looking tonight. If not that precisely, t
hat sort of thing happened not seldom, and Boo Boo always seemed to be within earshot when it did, positively waiting to die.