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

by J. D. Salinger

  Perhaps I feel less concerned than I ought to feel about the possibility of going overboard on this subject of his face, his physical face. I’ll concede, readily, a certain absence of total perfection in my methods. Perhaps I’m overdoing this whole description. For one thing, I see that I’ve discussed almost every feature of his face and haven’t so much as touched on the life of it yet. That thought in itself—I hadn’t expected it—is a staggering depressant. Yet even while I feel it, even while I go under with it, a certain conviction that I’ve had from the beginning remains intact—snug and dry. “Conviction” isn’t the right word at all. It’s more like a prize for the best glutton for punishment, a certificate of endurance. I feel I have a knowledge, a kind of editorial insight gained from all my failures over the past eleven years to describe him on paper, and this knowledge tells me he cannot be got at with understatement. The contrary, in fact. I’ve written and histrionically burned at least a dozen stories or sketches about him since 1948—some of them, and I says it what shouldn’t, pretty snappy and readable. But they were not Seymour. Construct an understatement for Seymour and it turns, it matures, into a lie. An artistic lie, maybe, and sometimes, even, a delicious lie, but a lie.

  I feel I should stay up for another hour or so. Turnkey! See that this man doesn’t go to bed.

  There was such a lot that wasn’t gargoyle in the least. His hands, for instance, were very fine. I hesitate to say beautiful, because I don’t want to run into the thoroughly damnable expression “beautiful hands.” The palms were broad, the muscle between thumb and index finger unexpectedly developed looking, “strong” (the quotes are unnecessary—for God’s sake, relax), and yet the fingers were longer and thinner than Bessie’s, even; the middle fingers looked like something you would measure with a tailor’s tape.

  I’m thinking about this last paragraph. That is, about the amount of personal admiration that has gone into it. To what extent, I wonder, may one be allowed to admire one’s brother’s hands without raising a few modern eyebrows? In my youth, Father William, my heterosexuality (discounting a few, shall I say, not always quite voluntary slow periods) was often rather common gossip in some of my old Study Groups. Yet I now find myself recalling, perhaps just a wee bit too vividly, that Sofya Tolstoy, in one of her, I don’t doubt, well-provoked marital piques, accused the father of her thirteen children, the elderly man who continued to inconvenience her every night of her married life, of homosexual leanings. I think, on the whole, Sofya Tolstoy was a remarkably unbrilliant woman—and my atoms, moreover, are arranged to make me constitutionally inclined to believe that where there’s smoke there’s usually strawberry Jello, seldom fire—but I do very emphatically believe there is an enormous amount of the androgynous in any all-or-nothing prose writer, or even a would-be one. I think that if he titters at male writers who wear invisible skirts he does so at his eternal peril. I’ll say no more on the subject. This is precisely the sort of confidence that can be easily and juicily Abused. It’s a wonder we’re not worse cowards in print than we already are.

  Seymour’s speaking voice, his incredible voice box, I can’t discuss right here. I haven’t room to back up properly first. I’ll just say, for the moment, in my own unattractive Mystery Voice, that his speaking voice was the best wholly imperfect musical instrument I’ve ever listened to by the hour. I repeat, though, I’d like to postpone going ahead with a full description of it.

  His skin was dark, or at least on the very far, safe side of sallow, and it was extraordinarily clear. He went all through adolescence without a pimple, and this both puzzled and irritated me greatly, since he ate just about the same amount of pushcart fare—or what our mother called Unsanitary Food Made by Dirty Men That Never Even Wash Their Hands—that I did, drank at least as much bottled soda as I drank, and surely washed no more often than I did. If anything, he washed a lot less than I did. He was so busy seeing to it that the rest of the bunch—particularly the twins—bathed regularly that he often missed his own turn. Which snaps me, not very conveniently, right back to the subject of barbershops. As we were on our way to get haircuts one afternoon, he stopped dead short in the middle of Amsterdam Avenue and asked me, very soberly, with cars and trucks clipping past us from both directions, if I’d mind very much getting a haircut without him. I pulled him over to the curb (I’d like to have a nickel for every curb I pulled him over to, man and boy) and said I certainly would mind. He had a notion his neck wasn’t clean. He was planning to spare Victor, the barber, the offense of looking at his dirty neck. It was dirty, properly speaking. This was neither the first nor the last time that he inserted a finger in the back of his shirt collar and asked me to take a look. Usually that area was as well policed as it ought to have been, but when it wasn’t, it definitely wasn’t.

  I really must go to bed now. The Dean of Women—a very sweet person—is coming at the crack of dawn to vacuum.

  •

  The terrible subject of clothes should get in here somewhere. What a marvellous convenience it would be if writers could let themselves describe their characters’ clothes, article by article, crease by crease. What stops us? In part, the tendency to give the reader, whom we’ve never met, either the short end or the benefit of the doubt—the short end when we don’t credit him with knowing as much about men and mores as we do, the benefit when we prefer not to believe that he has the same kind of petty, sophisticated data at his fingertips that we have. For example, when I’m at my foot doctor’s and I run across a photograph in Peekaboo magazine of a certain kind of up-and-coming American public personality—a movie star, a politician, a newly appointed college president—and the man is shown at home with a beagle at his feet, a Picasso on the wall, and himself wearing a Norfolk jacket, I’ll usually be very nice to the dog and civil enough to the Picasso, but I can be intolerable when it comes to drawing conclusions about Norfolk jackets on American public figures. If, that is, I’m not taken with the particular personage in the first place, the jacket will cinch it. I’ll assume from it that his horizons are widening just too goddam fast to suit me.

  Let’s go. As older boys, both S. and I were terrible dressers, each in his own way. It’s a little odd (not really very) that we were such awful dressers, because as small boys we were quite satisfactorily and unremarkably turned out, I think. In the early part of our career as hired radio performers, Bessie used to take us down to De Pinna’s, on Fifth Avenue, for our clothes. How she discovered that sedate and worthy establishment in the first place is almost anybody’s guess. My brother Walt, who was a very elegant young man while he lived, used to feel that Bessie had simply gone up and asked a policeman. A not unreasonable conjecture, since our Bessie, when we were children, habitually took her knottiest problems to the nearest thing we had in New York to a Druidic oracle—the Irish traffic cop. In a way, I can suppose the reputed luck of the Irish did have something to do with Bessie’s discovery of De Pinna’s. But surely not everything, by a long shot. For instance (this is extraneous, but nice), my mother has never in any known latitude of the expression been a book-reader. Yet I’ve seen her go into one of the gaudy book palaces on Fifth Avenue to buy one of my nephews a birthday present and come out, emerge, with the Kay Nielsen-illustrated edition of “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” and if you knew her, you’d be certain that she’d been Ladylike but aloof to cruising helpful salesmen. But let’s go back to the way we looked as Youths. We started to buy our own clothes, independent of Bessie and of each other, when we were in our earliest teens. Being the older, Seymour was the first to branch out, as it were, but I made up for lost time when my chance came. I remember dropping Fifth Avenue like a cold potato when I had just turned fourteen, and making straight for Broadway—specifically, to a shop in the Fifties where the sales force, I thought, were more than faintly hostile but at least knew a born snappy dresser when they saw one coming. In the last year S. and I were on the air together—1933—I showed up every broadcast night wearing a pale-gray
double-breasted suit with heavily wadded shoulders, a midnight-blue shirt with a Hollywood “roll” collar, and the cleaner of two identical crocus-yellow cotton neckties I kept for formal occasions in general. I’ve never felt as good in anything since, frankly. (I don’t suppose a writing man ever really gets rid of his old crocus-yellow neckties. Sooner or later, I think, they show up in his prose, and there isn’t a hell of a lot he can do about it.) Seymour, on the other hand, picked out marvellously orderly clothes for himself. The main hitch there was that nothing he bought—suits, overcoats particularly—ever fitted him properly. He must have bolted, possibly half dressed, and certainly unchalked, whenever anyone from the alteration department approached him. His jackets all hiked either up or down on him. His sleeves usually either extended to the middle joints of his thumbs or stopped at the wrist-bones. The seats of his trousers were always close to the worst. They were sometimes rather awe-inspiring, as if a 36-Regular behind had been dropped like a pea in a basket into a 42-Long pair of trousers. But there are other and more formidable aspects to be considered here. Once an article of clothing was actually on his body, he lost all earthly consciousness of it—barring, perhaps, a certain vague technical awareness that he was no longer stark naked. And this wasn’t simply a sign of an instinctive, or even a well-educated, antipathy to being what was known in our circles as a Good Dresser. I did go along with him once or twice when he was Buying, and I think, looking back, that he bought his clothes with a mild but, to me, gratifying degree of pride—like a young brahmacharya, or Hindu-religious novice, picking out his first loincloth. Oh, it was a very odd business. Something always went wrong, too, with Seymour’s clothes at the exact instant he was actually putting them on. He could stand for a good, normal three or four minutes in front of an open closet door surveying his side of our necktie rack, but you knew (if you were damned fool enough to sit around watching him) that once he’d actually made his selection the tie was doomed. Either its knot-to-be was fated to balk at fitting snugly into the V of his shirt collar—it most often came to rest about a quarter of an inch short of the throat button—or if the potential knot was to be slid safely into its proper place, then a little band of foulard was definitely fated to stick out from under the collar fold at the back of his neck, looking rather like a tourist’s binoculars strap. But I’d prefer to leave this large and difficult subject. His clothes, in short, often wore the whole family to something akin to despair. I’ve given only a very passing description, really. The thing came in any number of variations. I might just add, and then drop it quickly, that it can be a deeply disturbing experience to be standing, say, beside one of the potted palms at the Biltmore, at cocktail rush hour, on a summer day, and have your liege lord come bounding up the public stairs obviously pleased as punch to see you but not entirely battened down, fastened.

  I’d love to pursue this stairs-bounding business for a minute—that is, pursue it blind, without giving a great damn where it lands me. He bounded up all flights of stairs. He rushed them. I rarely saw him take a flight of stairs any other way. Which delivers me up—penitently, I’m going to assume—to the subject of vim, vigor, and vitality. I can’t imagine anyone, these days (I can’t easily imagine anyone these days)—with the possible exception of unusually insecure longshoremen, a few retired general officers of the Army and Navy, and a great many small boys who worry about the size of their biceps—taking much stock in the old popular aspersions of Unrobustness laid to poets. Nonetheless, I’m prepared to suggest (particularly since so many military and outdoorsy thoroughgoing he-men number me among their favorite yarn spinners) that a very considerable amount of sheer physical stamina, and not merely nervous energy or a cast-iron ego, is required to get through the final draft of a first-class poem. Only too often, sadly, a good poet turns into a damned poor keeper of his body, but I believe he is usually issued a highly serviceable one to start out with. My brother was the most nearly tireless person I’ve known. (I’m suddenly time-conscious. It’s not yet midnight, and I’m playing with the idea of sliding to the floor and writing this from a supine position.) It’s just struck me that I never saw Seymour yawn. He must have, of course, but I never saw him. Surely not for any reasons of etiquette, either; yawns weren’t fastidiously suppressed at home. I yawned regularly, I know—and I got more sleep than he did. Emphatically, though, we were both short sleepers, even as small boys. During, especially, our middle years on radio—the years, that is, when we each carried at least three library cards around with us in our hip pockets, like manhandled old passports—there were very few nights, school nights, when our bedroom lights went out before two or three in the morning, except during the crucial little post-Taps interval when First Sergeant Bessie was making her general rounds. When Seymour was hot on something, investigating something, he could and frequently did, from the age of about twelve, go two and three nights in a row without going to bed at all, and without distinctly looking or sounding the worse for it. Much loss of sleep apparently affected just his circulation; his hands and feet got cold. Along about the third wakeful night in a row, he’d look up at least once from whatever he was doing and ask me if I felt a terrible draft. (No one in our family, not even Seymour, felt drafts. Only terrible drafts.) Or he’d get up from the chair or the floor—wherever he was reading or writing or contemplating—and check to see if someone had left the bathroom window open. Besides me, Bessie was the only one in the apartment who could tell when Seymour was ignoring sleep. She judged by how many pairs of socks he was wearing. In the years after he’d graduated from knickers to long trousers, Bessie was forever lifting up the cuffs of his trousers to see if he was wearing two pairs of draftproof socks.

  I’m my own Sandman tonight. Good night! Good night, all you infuriatingly uncommunicative people!

  •

  Many, many men my age and in my income bracket who write about their dead brothers in enchanting semi-diary form never even bother to give us dates or tell us where they are. No sense of collaboration. I’ve vowed not to let that happen to me. This is Thursday, and I’m back in my horrible chair.

  It’s a quarter to one in the morning, and I’ve been sitting here since ten, trying, while the physical Seymour is on the page, to find a way to introduce him as Athlete and Gamesman without excessively irritating anybody who hates sports and games. I’m dismayed and disgusted, really, to find I can’t get into it unless I start with an apology. For one reason, I happen to belong to an English Department of which at least two members are well on their way to becoming established repertory modern poets and a third member is a literature critic of enormous chic here on the academic Eastern Seaboard, a rather towering figure among Melville specialists. All three of these men (they have great soft spots for me, too, as you might imagine) make what I tend to regard as a somewhat too public rush at the height of the professional-baseball season for a television set and a bottle of cold beer. Unfortunately, this small, ivy-covered stone is a little less devastating for the circumstance that I throw it from a solid-glass house. I’ve been a baseball fan myself all my life, and I don’t doubt that there’s an area inside my skull that must look like a bird-cage bottom of old shredded Sports Sections. In fact (and I consider this the last word in intimate writer-reader relations), probably one of the reasons I stayed on the air for well over six consecutive years as a child was that I could tell the Folks in Radioland what the Waner boys had been up to all week or, still more impressive, how many times Cobb had stolen third in 1921, when I was two. Am I still a trifle touchy about it? Have I still not made my peace with the afternoons of youth when I fled Reality, via the Third Avenue “L,” to get to my little womb off third base at the Polo Grounds? I can’t believe it. Maybe it’s partly because I’m forty and I think it’s high time all the elderly boy writers were asked to move along from the ballparks and the bull rings. No. I know—my God, I know—why I’m so hesitant to present the Aesthete as Athlete. I haven’t thought of this in years and years, but this is
the answer: There used to be an exceptionally intelligent and likeable boy on the radio with S. and me—one Curtis Caulfield, who was eventually killed during one of the landings in the Pacific. He trotted off with Seymour and me to Central park one afternoon, where I discovered he threw a ball as if he had two left hands—like most girls, in short—and I can still see the look on Seymour’s face at the sound of my critical horse-laugh, stallion-laugh. (How can I explain away this deep-type analysis? Have I gone over to the Other Side? Should I hang out my shingle?)