I’d like to start out with some rather unstinting words about those two opening quotations. “The actors by their presence . . . ” is from Kafka. The second one—“It is (to describe it figuratively) as if an author were to make a slip of the pen . . .”—is from Kierkegaard (and it’s all I can do to keep from unattractively rubbing my hands together at the thought that this particular Kierkegaard passage may catch a few Existentialists and somewhat overpublished French mandarins with their—well, by some little surprise).1 I don’t really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it’s always nice, I’ll grant you, if he has one. In this case, it seems to me that those two passages, especially in contiguity, are wonderfully representative of the best, in a sense, not only of Kafka and Kierkegaard but of all the four dead men, the four variously notorious Sick Men or underadjusted bachelors (probably only van Gogh, of the four, will be excused from making a guest appearance in these pages), whom I most often run to—occasionally in real distress—when I want any perfectly credible information about modern artistic processes. By and large, I’ve reproduced the two passages to try to suggest very plainly how I think I stand in regard to the overall mass of data I hope to assemble here—a thing that in some quarters, I don’t a bit mind saying, an author can’t be too explicit about, or any too early. In part, though, it would be rewarding for me to think, to dream, that those two short quotations may quite conceivably serve as a sort of spot convenience to the comparatively new breed of literary critics—the many workers (soldiers, I suppose you could say) who put in long hours, often with waning hopes of distinction, in our busy neo-Freudian Arts and Letters clinics. Especially, perhaps, those still very young students and greener clinicians, themselves implicitly bursting with good mental health, themselves (undeniably, I think) free of any inherent morbid attrait to beauty, who one day intend to specialize in aesthetic pathology. (Admittedly, this is a subject I’ve felt flinty about since I was eleven years old and watched the artist and Sick Man I’ve loved most in this world, then still in knee pants, being examined by a reputable group of professional Freudians for six hours and forty-five minutes. In my not altogether reliable opinion, they stopped just short of taking a brain smear from him, and I’ve had an idea for years that only the latish hour—2 A.M.—dissuaded them from doing exactly that. Flinty, then, I do indeed mean to sound here. Churlish, no. I can perceive, though, that it’s a very thin line, or plank, but I’d like to try to walk it for a minute more; ready or not, I’ve waited a good many years to collect these sentiments and get them off.) A great variety of rumors, of course, run high and wide about the extraordinarily, the sensationally creative artist—and I’m alluding exclusively, here, to painters and poets and full Dichter. One of these rumors—and by far, to me, the most exhilarating of the lot—is that he has never, even in the pre-psychoanalytical dark ages, deeply venerated his professional critics, and has, in fact, usually lumped them, in his generally unsound views of society, with the echt publishers and art dealers and the other, perhaps enviably prosperous camp followers of the arts, who, he’s just scarcely said to concede, would prefer different, possibly cleaner work if they could get it. But what, at least in modern times, I think one most recurrently hears about the curiously-productive-though-ailing poet or painter is that he is invariably a kind of super-size but unmistakably “classical” neurotic, an aberrant who only occasionally, and never deeply, wishes to surrender his aberration; or, in English, a Sick Man who not at all seldom, though he’s reported to childishly deny it, gives out terrible cries of pain, as if he would wholeheartedly let go both his art and his soul to experience what passes in other people for wellness, and yet (the rumor continues) when his unsalutary-looking little room is broken into and someone—not infrequently, at that, someone who actually loves him—passionately asks him where the pain is, he either declines or seems unable to discuss it at any constructive clinical length, and in the morning, when even great poets and painters presumably feel a bit more chipper than usual, he looks more perversely determined than ever to see his sickness run its course, as though by the light of another, presumably working day he had remembered that all men, the healthy ones included, eventually die, and usually with a certain amount of bad grace, but that he, lucky man, is at least being done in by the most stimulating companion, disease or no, he has ever known. On the whole, treacherous as it may sound, coming from me, with just such a dead artist in the immediate family as I’ve been alluding to throughout this near-polemic, I don’t see how one can rationally deduce that this last general rumor (and mouthful) isn’t based on a fairish amount of substantial fact. While my distinguished relative lived, I watched him—almost literally, I sometimes think—like a hawk. By every logical definition, he was an unhealthy specimen, he did on his worst nights and late afternoons give out not only cries of pain but cries for help, and when nominal help arrived, he did decline to say in perfectly intelligible language where it hurt. Even so, I do openly cavil with the declared experts in these matters—the scholars, the biographers, and especially the current ruling intellectual aristocracy educated in one or another of the big public psychoanalytical schools—and I cavil with them most acrimoniously over this: they don’t listen properly to cries of pain when they come. They can’t, of course. They’re a peerage of tin ears. With such faulty equipment, with those ears, how can anyone possibly trace the pain, by sound and quality alone, back to its source? With such wretched hearing equipment, the best, I think, that can be detected, and perhaps verified, is a few stray, thin overtones—hardly even counterpoint—coming from a troubled childhood or a disordered libido. But where does by far the bulk, the whole ambulance load, of pain really come from? Where must it come from? Isn’t the true poet or painter a seer? Isn’t he, actually, the only seer we have on earth? Most apparently not the scientist, most emphatically not the psychiatrist. (Surely the one and only great poet the psychoanalysts have had was Freud himself; he had a little ear trouble of his own, no doubt, but who in his right mind could deny that an epic poet was at work?) Forgive me; I’m nearly finished with this. In a seer, what part of the human anatomy would necessarily be required to take the most abuse? The eyes, certainly. Please, dear general reader, as a last indulgence (if you’re still here), re-read those two short passages from Kafka and Kierkegaard I started out with. Isn’t it clear? Don’t those cries come straight from the eyes? However contradictory the coroner’s report—whether he pronounces Consumption or Loneliness or Suicide to be the cause of death—isn’t it plain how the true artist-seer actually dies? I say (and everything that follows in these pages all too possibly stands or falls on my being at least nearly right)—I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience.
My credo is stated. I sit back. I sigh—happily, I’m afraid. I light a Murad, and go on, I hope to God, to other things.
SOMETHING, NOW—and briskly, if I can—about that subtitle, “An Introduction,” up near the top of the marquee. My central character here, at least in those lucid intervals when I can prevail upon myself to sit down and be reasonably quiet, will be my late, eldest brother, Seymour Glass, who (and I think I’d prefer to say this in one obituary-like sentence), in 1948, at the age of thirty-one, while vacationing down in Florida with his wife, committed suicide. He was a great many things to a great many people while he lived, and virtually all things to his brothers and sisters in our somewhat outsized family. Surely he was all real things to us: our blue-striped unicorn, our double-lensed burning glass, our consultant genius, our portable conscience, our supercargo, and our one full poet, and, inevitably, I think, since not only was reticence never his strongest suit but he spent nearly seven years of his childhood as star turn on a children’s coast-to-coast radio quiz program, so there wasn’t much that didn’t eventually get aired, one way or another—inev
itably, I think, he was also our rather notorious “mystic” and “unbalanced type.” And since I’m obviously going whole hog right here at the outset, I’ll further enunciate—if one can enunciate and shout at the same time—that, with or without a suicide plot in his head, he was the only person I’ve ever habitually consorted with, banged around with, who more frequently than not tallied with the classical conception, as I saw it, of a mukta, a ringding enlightened man, a God-knower. At any rate, his character lends itself to no legitimate sort of narrative compactness that I know of, and I can’t conceive of anyone, least of all myself, trying to write him off in one shot or in one fairly simple series of sittings, whether arranged by the month or the year. I come to the point: My original plans for this general space were to write a short story about Seymour and to call it “SEYMOUR ONE," with the big “ONE” serving as a built-in convenience to me, Buddy Glass, even more than to the reader—a helpful, flashy reminder that other stories (a Seymour Two, Three, and possibly Four) would logically have to follow. Those plans no longer exist. Or, if they do—and I suspect that this is much more likely how things stand—they’ve gone underground, with an understanding, perhaps, that I’ll rap three times when I’m ready. But on this occasion I’m anything but a short-story writer where my brother is concerned. What I am, I think, is a thesaurus of undetached prefatory remarks about him. I believe I essentially remain what I’ve almost always been—a narrator, but one with extremely pressing personal needs. I want to introduce, I want to describe, I want to distribute mementos, amulets, I want to break out my wallet and pass around snapshots, I want to follow my nose. In this mood, I don’t dare go anywhere near the short-story form. It eats up fat little undetached writers like me whole.
But I have many, many unfelicitous-sounding things to tell you. For instance, I’m saying, cataloguing, so much so early about my brother. I feel you must have noticed. You may also have noticed—I know it hasn’t entirely escaped my attention—that everything I’ve so far said about Seymour (and about his blood type in general, as it were) has been graphically panegyric. It gives me pause, all right. Granted that I haven’t come to bury but to exhume and, most likely, to praise, I nonetheless suspect that the honor of cool, dispassionate narrators everywhere is remotely at stake here. Had Seymour no grievous faults, no vices, no meannesses, that can be listed, at least in a hurry? What was he, anyway? A saint?
Thankfully, it isn’t my responsibility to answer that one. (Oh, lucky day!) Let me change the subject and say, without hesitation, he had a Heinzlike variety of personal characteristics that threatened, at different chronological intervals of sensitivity or thin-skinnedness, to drive every minor in the family to the bottle. In the first place, there is very evidently one rather terrible hallmark common to all persons who look for God, and apparently with enormous success, in the queerest imaginable places—e.g. in radio announcers, in newspapers, in taxicabs with crooked meters, literally everywhere. (My brother, for the record, had a distracting habit, most of his adult life, of investigating loaded ashtrays with his index finger, clearing all the cigarette ends to the sides—smiling from ear to ear as he did it—as if he expected to see Christ himself curled up cherubically in the middle, and he never looked disappointed.) The hallmark, then, of the advanced religious, nonsectarian or any other (and I graciously include in the definition of an “advanced religious,” odious though the phrase is, all Christians on the great Vivekananda’s terms; i.e. “See Christ, then you are a Christian; all else is talk”)—the hallmark most commonly identifying this person is that he very frequently behaves like a fool, even an imbecile. It’s a trial to a family that has a real grandee in it if he can’t always be relied on to behave like one. I’m now about to quit cataloguing, but I can’t do so quite at this point without citing what I think was his most trying personal characteristic. It had to do with his speech habits—or, rather, the anomalous range of his speech habits. Vocally, he was either as brief as a gatekeeper at a Trappist monastery—sometimes for days, weeks at a stretch—or he was a non-stop talker. When he was wound up (and, to state the matter exactly, almost everybody was forever winding him up, and then, of course, quickly sitting in close, the better to pick his brains)—when he was wound up, it was nothing for him to talk for hours at a time, occasionally with no redeeming awareness whatever that one or two or ten other people were in the room. He was an inspired non-stop talker, I’m firmly suggesting, but, to put it very mildly, even the most sublimely accomplished non-stop talker can’t consistently please. And I say that, I should add, less from any repellent splendid impulse to play “fair” with my invisible reader than—much worse, I suppose—because I believe that this particular non-stop talker can take almost any amount of knocking. Certainly from me, at any rate. I’m in the unique position of being able to call my brother, straight out, a non-stop talker—which is a pretty vile thing to call somebody, I think—and yet at the same time to sit back, rather, I’m afraid, like a type with both sleeves full of aces, and effortlessly remember a whole legion of mitigating factors (and “mitigating” is hardly the word for it). I can condense them all into one: By the time Seymour was in mid-adolescence—sixteen, seventeen—he not only had learned to control his native vernacular, his many, many less than elite New York speech mannerisms, but had by then already come into his own true, bull’s-eye, poet’s vocabulary. His non-stop talks, his monologues, his near-harangues then came as close to pleasing from start to finish—for a good many of as, anyway—as, say, the bulk of Beethoven’s output after he ceased being encumbered with a sense of hearing, and maybe I’m thinking especially, though it seems a trifle picky, of the B-flat-major and C-sharp-minor quartets. Still, we were a family of seven children, originally. And, as it happened, none of us was in the least tongue-tied. It’s an exceedingly weighty matter when six naturally profuse verbalizers and expounders have an undefeatable champion talker in the house. True, he never sought the title. And he passionately yearned to see one or another of us outpoint or simply outlast him in a conversation or an argument. A small matter which, of course, though he himself never saw it—he had his blank spots, like everybody else—bothered some of us all the more. The fact remains that the title was always his, and though I think he would have given almost anything on earth to retire it—this is the weightiest matter of all, surely, and I’m not going to be able to explore it deeply for another few years—he never did find a completely graceful way of doing it.
At this point, it doesn’t seem to me merely chummy to mention that I’ve written about my brother before. For that matter, with a little good-humored cajoling I might conceivably admit that there’s seldom been a time when I haven’t written about him, and if, presumably at gunpoint, I had to sit down tomorrow and write a story about a dinosaur, I don’t doubt that I’d inadvertently give the big chap one or two small mannerisms reminiscent of Seymour—a singularly endearing way of biting off the top of a hemlock, say, or of wagging his thirty-foot tail. Some people—not close friends—have asked me whether a lot of Seymour didn’t go into the young leading character of the one novel I’ve published. Actually, most of these people haven’t asked me; they’ve told me. To protest this at all, I’ve found, makes me break out in hives, but I will say that no one who knew my brother has asked me or told me anything of the kind—for which I’m grateful, and, in a way, more than a bit impressed, since a good many of my main characters speak Manhattanese fluently and idiomatically, have a rather common flair for rushing in where most damned fools fear to tread, and are, by and large, pursued by an Entity that I’d much prefer to identify, very roughly, as the Old Man of the Mountain. But what I can and should state is that I’ve written and published two short stories that were supposed to be directly about Seymour. The more recent of the two, published in 1955, was a highly inclusive recount of his wedding day in 1942. The details were served up with a fullness possibly just short of presenting the reader with a sherbet mold of each and every wedding guest’s footprint to ta
ke home as a souvenir, but Seymour himself—the main course—didn’t actually put in a physical appearance anywhere. On the other hand, in the earlier, much shorter story I did, back in the late forties, he not only appeared in the flesh but walked, talked, went for a dip in the ocean, and fired a bullet through his brain in the last paragraph. However, several members of my immediate, if somewhat far-flung, family, who regularly pick over my published prose for small technical errors, have gently pointed out to me (much too damned gently, since they usually come down on me like grammarians) that the young man, the “Seymour,” who did the walking and talking in that early story, not to mention the shooting, was not Seymour at all but, oddly, someone with a striking resemblance to—alley oop, I’m afraid—myself. Which is true, I think, or true enough to make me feel a craftsman’s ping of reproof. And while there’s no good excuse for that kind of faux pas, I can’t forbear to mention that that particular story was written just a couple of months after Seymour’s death, and not too very long after I myself, like both the “Seymour” in the story and the Seymour in Real Life, had returned from the European Theater of Operations. I was using a very poorly rehabilitated, not to say unbalanced, German typewriter at the time.
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction Page 8