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

by J. D. Salinger

  As suits most poetry, and emphatically befits any poetry with a marked Chinese or Japanese “influence,” Seymour’s verses are all as bare as possible, and invariably ungarnished. However, on a weekend visit up here, some six months ago, my younger sister, Franny, while accidentally rifling my desk drawers, came across this widower poem I’ve just finished (criminally) plotting out; it had been detached from the main body of the collection for retyping. For reasons not strictly pertinent at the moment, she had never seen the poem before, and so, naturally, she read it on the spot. Later, in talking to me about the poem, she said she wondered why Seymour had said it was the left hand the young widower let the white cat bite. That bothered her. She said it sounded more like me than like Seymour, that “left” business. Apart, of course, from the slanderous reflection on my ever-increasing professional passion for detail, I think she meant that the adjective struck her as obtrusive, overexplicit, unpoetic. I argued her down, and I’m prepared, frankly, to argue you down, too, if necessary. I’m certain in my own mind that Seymour thought it vital to suggest that it was the left, the second-best, hand the young widower let the white cat press her needle-sharp teeth into, thereby leaving the right hand free for breast- or forehead-smiting—an analysis that may seem to many readers very, very tiresome indeed. And may be so. But I know how my brother felt about human hands. Besides, there is another, exceedingly considerable aspect of the matter. It may seem a little tasteless to go into it at any length—rather like insisting on reading the entire script of “Abie’s Irish Rose” to a perfect stranger over the phone—but Seymour was a half Jew, and while I can’t speak up with the great Kafka’s absolute authority on this theme, it’s my very sober guess, at forty, that any thinking man with a muchness of Semitic blood in his veins either lives or has lived on oddly intimate, almost mutually knowledgeable terms with his hands, and though he may go along for years and years figuratively or literally keeping them in his pockets (not always, I’m afraid, altogether unlike two pushy old friends or relatives he’d prefer not to bring to the party), he will, I think, use them, break them out very readily, in a crisis, often do something drastic with them in a crisis, such as mentioning, unpoetically, in the middle of a poem that it was the left hand the cat bit—and poetry, surely, is a crisis, perhaps the only actionable one we can call our own. (I apologize for that verbiage. Unfortunately, there’s probably more.) My second reason for thinking that the particular poem may be of extra—and, I hope, real—interest to my general reader is the queer personal force that has gone into it. I’ve never seen anything quite like it in print, and, I might injudiciously mention, from early childhood till I was well past thirty I seldom read fewer than two hundred thousand words a day, and often closer to four. At forty, admittedly, I rarely feel even peckish, and when I’m not required to inspect English compositions belonging either to young ladies or to myself, I customarily read very little except harsh postcards from relatives, seed catalogues, bird-watchers’ bulletins (of one sort or another), and poignant Get-Well-Soon notes from old readers of mine who have somewhere picked up the bogus information that I spend six months of the year in a Buddhist monastery and the other six in a mental institution. The pride of a nonreader, however, I’m well aware—or, for that matter, the pride of a markedly curtailed consumer of books—is even more offensive than the pride of certain voluminous readers, and so I’ve tried (I think I mean this seriously) to keep up a few of my oldest literary conceits. One of the grossest of these is that I can usually tell whether a poet or prose writer is drawing from first-, second-, or tenth-hand experience or is foisting off on us what he’d like to think is pure invention. Yet when I first read that young-widower-and-white-cat verse, back in 1948—or, rather, sat listening to it—I found it very hard to believe that Seymour hadn’t buried at least one wife that nobody in our family knew about. He hadn’t, of course. Not (and first blushes here, if any, will be the reader’s, not mine)—not in this incarnation, at any rate. Nor, to my quite extensive and somewhat serpentine knowledge of the man, had he any intimate acquaintance with young widowers. For a final and entirely ill-advised comment on the matter, he himself was about as far from being a widower as a young American male can be. And while it’s possible that, at odd moments, tormenting or exhilarating, every married man—Seymour, just conceivably, though almost entirely for the sake of argument, not excluded—reflects on how life would be with the little woman out of the picture (the implication here being that a first-class poet might work up a fine elegy from that sort of woolgathering), the possibility seems to me mere grist to psychologists’ mills, and certainly much beside my point. My point being—and I’ll try, against the usual odds, not to labor it—that the more personal Seymour’s poems appear to be, or are, the less revealing the content is of any known details of his actual daily life in this Western world. My brother Waker, in fact, contends (and let us hope that his abbot never gets wind of it) that Seymour, in many of his most effective poems, seems to be drawing on the ups and downs of former, singularly memorable existences in exurban Benares, feudal Japan, and metropolitan Atlantis. I pause, of course, to give the reader a chance to throw up his hands, or, more likely, to wash them of the whole lot of us. Just the same, I imagine all the living children in our family would rather volubly agree with Waker about that, though one or two, perhaps, with slight reservations. For instance, on the afternoon of his suicide Seymour wrote a straight, classical style haiku on the desk blotter in his hotel room. I don’t much like my literal translation of it—he wrote it in Japanese—but in it he briefly tells of a little girl on an airplane who has a doll in the seat with her and turns its head around to look at the poet. A week or so before the poem was actually written, Seymour had actually been a passenger on a commercial airplane, and my sister Boo Boo has somewhat treacherously suggested that there may have been a little girl with a doll aboard his plane. I myself doubt it. Not necessarily flatly, but I doubt it. And if such was the case—which I don’t believe for a minute—I’d make a bet the child never thought to draw her friend’s attention to Seymour.

  Do I go on about my brother’s poetry too much? Am I being garrulous? Yes. Yes. I go on about my brother’s poetry too much. I’m being garrulous. And I care. But my reasons against leaving off multiply like rabbits as I go along. Furthermore, though I am, as I’ve already conspicuously posted, a happy writer, I’ll take my oath I’m not now and never have been a merry one; I’ve mercifully been allowed the usual professional quota of unmerry thoughts. For example, it hasn’t just this moment struck me that once I get around to recounting what I know of Seymour himself, I can’t expect to leave myself either the space or the required pulse rate or, in a broad but true sense, the inclination to mention his poetry again. At this very instant, alarmingly, while I clutch my own wrist and lecture myself on garrulousness, I may be losing the chance of a lifetime—my last chance, I think, really—to make one final, hoarse, objectionable, sweeping public pronouncement on my brother’s rank as an American poet. I mustn’t let it slip. Here it is: When I look back, listen back, over the half-dozen or slightly more original poets we’ve had in America, as well as the numerous talented eccentric poets and—in modern times, especially—the many gifted style deviates, I feel something close to a conviction that we have had only three or four very nearly nonexpendable poets, and I think Seymour will eventually stand with those few. Not overnight, verständlich—zut, what would you? It’s my guess, my perhaps flagrantly over-considered guess, that the first few waves of reviewers will obliquely condemn his verses by calling them Interesting or Very Interesting, with a tacit or just plain badly articulated declaration, still more damning, that they are rather small, sub-acoustical things that have failed to arrive on the contemporary Western scene with their own built-in transatlantic podium, complete with lectern, drinking glass, and pitcher of iced sea water. Yet a real artist, I’ve noticed, will survive anything. (Even praise, I happily suspect.) And I’m reminded, too, that once, when we we
re boys, Seymour waked me from a sound sleep, much excited, yellow pajamas flashing in the dark. He had what my brother Walt used to call his Eureka Look, and he wanted to tell me that he thought he finally knew why Christ said to call no man Fool. (It was a problem that had been baffling him all week, because it sounded to him like a piece of advice, I believe, more typical of Emily Post than of someone busily about his Father’s Business.) Christ had said it, Seymour thought I’d want to know, because there are no fools. Dopes, yes—fools, no. It seemed to him well worth waking me up for, but if I admit that it was (and I do, without reservations), I’ll have to concede that if you give even poetry critics enough time, they’ll prove themselves unfoolish. To be truthful, it’s a thought that comes hard to me, and I’m grateful to be able to push on to something else. I’ve reached, at long last, the real head of this compulsive and, I’m afraid, occasionally somewhat pustulous disquisition on my brother’s poetry. I’ve seen it coming from the very beginning. I would to God the reader had something terrible to tell me first. (Oh, you out there—with your enviable golden silence.)

  I have a recurrent, and, in 1959, almost chronic, premonition that when Seymour’s poems have been widely and rather officially acknowledged as First Class (stacked up in college bookstores, assigned in Contemporary Poetry courses), matriculating young men and women will strike out, in singlets and twosomes, notebooks at the ready, for my somewhat creaking front door. (It’s regrettable that this matter has to come up at all, but it’s surely too late to pretend to an ingenuousness, to say nothing of grace, I don’t have, and I must reveal that my reputedly heart-shaped prose has knighted me one of the best-loved sciolists in print since Ferris L. Monahan, and a good many young English Department people already know where I live, hole up; I have their tire tracks in my rose beds to prove it.) By and large, I’d say without a shred of hesitation, there are three kinds of students who have both the desire and the temerity to look as squarely as possible into any sort of literary horse’s mouth. The first kind is the young man or woman who loves and respects to distraction any fairly responsible sort of literature and who, if he or she can’t see Shelley plain, will make do with seeking out manufacturers of inferior but estimable products. I know these boys and girls well, or think I do. They’re naïve, they’re alive, they’re enthusiastic, they’re usually less than right, and they’re the hope always, I think, of blasé or vested-interested literary society the world over. (By some good fortune I can’t believe I’ve deserved, I’ve had one of these ebullient, cocksure, irritating, instructive, often charming girls or boys in every second or third class I’ve taught in the past twelve years.) The second kind of young person who actually rings doorbells in the pursuit of literary data suffers, somewhat proudly, from a case of academicitis, contracted from any one of half a dozen Modern English professors or graduate instructors to whom he’s been exposed since his freshman year. Not seldom, if he himself is already teaching or is about to start teaching, the disease is so far along that one doubts whether it could be arrested, even if someone were fully equipped to try. Only last year, for example, a young man stopped by to see me about a piece I’d written, several years back, that had a good deal to do with Sherwood Anderson. He came at a time when I was cutting part of my winter’s supply of firewood with a gasoline-operated chain saw—an instrument that after eight years of repeated use I’m still terrified of. It was the height of the spring thaw, a beautiful sunny day, and I was feeling, frankly, just a trifle Thoreauish (a real treat for me, because after thirteen years of country living I’m still a man who gauges bucolic distances by New York City blocks). In short, it looked like a promising, if literary, afternoon, and I recall that I had high hopes of getting the young man, à la Tom Sawyer and his bucket of whitewash, to have a go at my chain saw. He appeared healthy, not to say strapping. His deceiving looks, however, very nearly cost me my left foot, for between spurts and buzzes of my saw, just as I finished delivering a short and to me rather enjoyable eulogy on Sherwood Anderson’s gentle and effective style, the young man asked me—after a thoughtful, a cruelly promising pause—if I thought there was an endemic American Zeitgeist. (Poor young man. Even if he takes exceptionally good care of himself, he can’t at the outside have more than fifty years of successful campus activity ahead of him.) The third kind of person who will be a fairly constant visitor around here, I believe, once Seymour’s poems have been quite thoroughly unpacked and tagged, requires a paragraph to himself or herself.

  It would be absurd to say that most young people’s attraction to poetry is far exceeded by their attraction to those few or many details of a poet’s life that may be defined here, loosely, operationally, as lurid. It’s the sort of absurd notion, though, that I wouldn’t mind taking out for a good academic run someday. I surely think, at any rate, that if I were to ask the sixty odd girls (or, that is, the sixty-odd girls) in my two Writing for Publication courses—most of them seniors, all of them English majors—to quote a line, any line from “Ozymandias,” or even just to tell me roughly what the poem is about, it is doubtful whether ten of them could do either, but I’d bet my unrisen tulips that some fifty of them could tell me that Shelley was all for free love, and had one wife who wrote “Frankenstein” and another who drowned herself.4 I’m neither shocked nor outraged at the idea, please mind. I don’t think I’m even complaining. For if nobody’s a fool, then neither am I, and I’m entitled to a non-fool’s Sunday awareness that, whoever we are, no matter how like a blast furnace the heat from the candles on our latest birthday cake, and however presumably lofty the intellectual, moral, and spiritual heights we’ve all reached, our gusto for the lurid or the partly lurid (which, of course, includes both low and superior gossip) is probably the last of our fleshy appetites to be sated or effectively curbed. (But, my God, why do I rant on? Why am I not going straight to the poet for an illustration? One of Seymour’s hundred and eighty-four poems—a shocker on the first impact only; on the second, as heartening a paean to the living as I’ve read—is about a distinguished old ascetic on his deathbed, surrounded by chanting priests and disciples, who lies straining to hear what the washerwoman in the courtyard is saying about his neighbor’s laundry. The old gentleman, Seymour makes it clear, is faintly wishing the priests would keep their voices down a bit.) I can see, though, that I’m having a little of the usual trouble entailed in trying to make a very convenient generalization stay still and docile long enough to support a wild specific premise. I don’t relish being sensible about it, but I suppose I must. It seems to me indisputably true that a good many people, the wide world over, of varying ages, cultures, natural endowments, respond with a special impetus, a zing, even, in some cases, to artists and poets who as well as having a reputation for producing great or fine art have something garishly Wrong with them as persons: a spectacular flaw in character or citizenship, a construably romantic affliction or addiction—extreme self-centredness, marital infidelity, stone-deafness, stone-blindness, a terrible thirst, a mortally bad cough, a soft spot for prostitutes, a partiality for grand-scale adultery or incest, a certified or uncertified weakness for opium or sodomy, and so on, God have mercy on the lonely bastards. If suicide isn’t at the top of the list of compelling infirmities for creative men, the suicide poet or artist, one can’t help noticing, has always been given a very considerable amount of avid attention, not seldom on sentimental grounds almost exclusively, as if he were (to put it much more horribly than I really want to) the floppy-eared runt of the litter. It’s a thought, anyway, finally said, that I’ve lost sleep over many times, and possibly will again.