Personal response to J.D. Salinger's "Seymour: an Introduction"

The second half of the Salinger book I just finished is called “Seymour: an Introduction.” I am hesitant to write a response to this story for a couple of reasons. The first is that I do not think “Seymour” is as good as “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” which I wrote about last time. The second is that this is my second time reading it, and I have been quite slack and disorderly in my reading habits over the last few weeks. Having just completed ten successive months of graduate studies with a heavy reading load that is well documented, I have taken a few weeks to recharge the batteries, re-watch “The Wire,” and enjoy a bit of “light” reading in the form of the Dune series by Frank Herbert. So I read “Seymour” in fits and starts, over the course of a couple of weeks, although the story is only about 100 pages long and could easily be read in one sitting. The first time I read this story I actually preferred it to “Carpenters,” but I also had a few misconceptions about it, that I will try to clear up now.

“Seymour” is a fictional biography about Seymour Glass, whose wedding was almost depicted in the previous story in this book. Once again the narrator is Buddy Glass, but this is an older Buddy who has become a successful story writer and English teacher. Seymour, it turns out, has committed suicide, not long after the events of the last story. Much of what I noticed about “Carpenters” is explicitly mentioned here: namely, we find out that Seymour was literally a poet, meaning that he was a Writer of Poems, which Buddy owns but has never published. The comparison between Buddy the narrator and Seymour the poet is discussed at length. Buddy even warns us of becoming attached to him when the real subject is Seymour and he continually demeans himself, by describing how old and flaccid he has become, when, I suppose, the memory of Seymour (who I remind you, we have not met except in flashbacks) remains vital despite his having committed suicide. But Buddy is so interesting, not to mention believable as a middle-aged writer who still feels overwhelmed by the world and underwhelmed by his own success that I couldn’t help, on my first reading, but think that there must be some biographical artifacts about Salinger hidden within Buddy Glass. But despite several Google searches, I couldn’t find any information to indicate that the Glass family is anything but completely made up. I would hazard to say that Buddy is less of a fictional doppelganger to Salinger than, say, Kilgore Trout is to Kurt Vonnegut.

As a narrator, Buddy is self-conscious and apologetic: he says, “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.” I mention in closing that if anyone doesn’t like this story it could be because they find it boring. After all, it is not a story per se, but a kind of fictional memoir. Salinger was criticized near the end of his writing career for becoming too close to the Glass family—that he cared more about them than the reader did, and that stories like “Seymour” and Franny and Zooey suffer for it. I am not sure that I agree. I think this book is well worth reading, but you want to get through “Seymour” a bit quicker than I did this time. As is typical with Salinger, there are turns of phrase that will make you gasp at their beauty and gritty realism, and two characters well worth becoming interested in: Seymour, the late poet and savant and, more importantly, the underrated Buddy, who lived his fictional life in the rain shadow of a giant.

Response to Hemingway's "The Garden of Eden"

May 3, 2011

I have had a chance to read a couple of wonderful modern American novels these past few weeks: DeLillo’s Underworld, and Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden. The latter is a posthumous publication but I believe it is generally considered to be pretty good work and worthy of scholarship. The editors apparently just took the unfinished manuscript and cut it off at a place they thought would make a good ending. This was the correct thing to do of course, and it leaves us with a delightful feeling of unfinishedness that suits the ambiguous nature of the novel.

The story involves a love-triangle and gender reversal, but the best part is the way Hemingway intermixes the main character David’s story writing into the course of the narrative. David on his honeymoon in Europe writes about David as a boy tracking an elephant in Africa with his father. This brings us to the title and, I think, the main idea of the novel. The Garden of Eden is nature in an innocent and uncorrupted form, which can only be corrupted. In the love triangle, David often calls his new wife Catherine “Devil,” and her desire to change her appearance (she is constantly dying her hair so that it is paler and tanning her skin to be as dark as possible) parallels the corruption of nature that occurs in Genesis when Adam and Eve feel ashamed and decide to put on their clothes. In the Africa story, a young David loses his innocence early and brutally when he must watch his father’s drunkenness and his cruelty against an elephant that would have ruled the jungle if humans did not have guns.

This novel features some staggering sentences that, because of the usual flatness and vagueness of his prose, pop out like dynamite on the page. David says, as he pours himself a drink (of course), “I do love her and you make a note of it, whiskey, and you witness it for me, Perrier old boy old Perrier, I have been faithful to you, Perrier, in my fucking fashion.”  Or the loving advice from his father that David remembers: “Never bet on anything that can talk, your father said and you said, Except yourself. And he said, Not me, Davey, but pile it on yourself sometime you iron-hearted little bastard.”

David’s surname is Bourne, and this is very much a story about birth and re-birth.  David, like many of us is raised to believe in some sort of perfection, some magic and perfect place, some Eden. He does not find it in Africa as a boy or in his marriage as a man. The optimistic ending seems to tell us that he might yet find it in his writing, but that is far from reassuring, especially because his best writing is about the most traumatic events of his life—where his innocence in childhood is drowned in so much elephant blood and overshadowed by the economics of the ivory trade. Still, this is a happy ending for Hemingway—far less cynical than anything else I have read from him. This is quite a novel and if you are interested in Hemingway at all I recommend it. 

Response to Salinger's "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters"

I am often amazed by poets: those people who seem to understand the delicate magic of everyday life, and who delve deeply into the mystery with only words as their instruments of discovery. I am not a poet. I have known this intrinsically ever since I first started to write poetry. Poets do not necessarily write, of course; they just seem to connect to the world in a way that calls your own connection to it into question. In my early years of discovery in literature, I was drawn to a couple of characters who are poets: Hamlet, of course, and Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. These characters say what I feel. You get the sense that, although of course it isn’t true, Shakespeare and Salinger could pull their ideas out of a vacuum. This brings me to the story I want to discuss, in what will be a two-part ‘blog entry on J.D. Salinger’s novel Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction. These are essentially two novellas about one person, or rather one poet, Seymour Glass, who does not appear in either story. They are related stories, but I will discuss them individually, and I start with “Raise High the Roof Beam.”

The plot of the story is simple—almost nonexistent: Buddy Glass is the only member of Salinger’s recurring Glass family who is able to attend his brother Seymour’s wedding, because in 1942, World War II has indisposed many Americans. So Buddy attends the wedding alone and finds himself in an awkward spot when it appears that even the bridegroom, his brother Seymour, has decided not to attend. After the bride flees the house of the wedding for her apartment, Buddy finds himself in a chauffeured car with several of the bride’s baffled guests, melting hot in the middle of the summer, stopped in gridlock in New York City on account of a parade. Eventually the group makes its way to Buddy’s apartment to drink Tom Collinses.

In other words, the plot isn’t important. What is important is the way Buddy interacts with these people, some of whom are hostile, some sympathetic, and one exuberantly joyful. There is poetic mastery in the way the maid of honor flicks her cigarette “in lieu of better stage direction,” to make a violent gesture, and in the way Buddy describes the mutual and inexplicable bond that develops between himself and the bride’s father’s uncle, a deaf mute who is inhumanly small, despite his immaculate top hat. An irony lies waiting in the background of this text: in the Glass family, Seymour, the eldest son, is thought to be the poet, the gifted one, and all the other children live in his shadow (this is apparent in both this book and in Franny and Zooey). But Seymour is always conspicuous in his absence. He is like a shadow in this story: we see his bag left behind in the apartment, and we read his diary entries, but he does not physically appear in the text. The irony is that Buddy is the poet with whom we interact. His observations are keen and witty, and as off-the-cuff as Holden Caulfield’s, but far less cynical. Buddy, who narrates the story in the first person, is the person we want to know more about, but he is caught in a loop of having to explain his elusive older brother.

I would like to take a moment to importune you, whoever reads this public document of mine now, or years after my death, to take a few hours and read this 92 page novella. It has affected me on first and second reading. It is inspirational in its poetic nature. While you are at it, you might as well read all of Salinger’s four published works. You will not regret it. 

A sad and lonesome day

Sometimes I look back and count up the things I've achieved in a day and the sum seems greater than the whole. Here's what I did today. Please bear in mind I slept in and had a hangover.

1. Wrote a poem that I quite like
2. Played baseball with friends and hit an out-of-the-park homerun.
3. Consolidated new living arrangement and met my landlord-to-be
4. Took a nap
5. Did some research and wrote about a page of the essay I'm working on.

Somehow I still feel guilty for wanting to drink beer and play video games after midnight. Ah, life. Here is the poem. Out of everything I did today, this is likely the only thing I will remember:

***

I could look at you all day

from every angle

and never want to leave.

There is a depth to your countenance

I still can’t pull myself out of.

There are only a few of you,

rare bird,

and you only stay a season:

happily fluttering

on a strong perch to hold.

It makes me so, so

sad to see you sing.


***

Personal response to Hardy's "A Pair of Blue Eyes"

For anyone who has followed the last few entries in this ‘blog, you may have noticed me gradually discovering that Victorian fiction isn’t all bad. I noticed that in books like Wuthering Heights, gothic romance can actually be fairly gripping, even if there are too many commas. I noticed that even a long novel like Great Expectations can be pithy and unsentimental. I didn’t like Jekyll and Hyde, but at least it was short. Then along came Hardy and A Pair of Blue Eyes, which lived up exactly to all of my preconceived ideas of what a shitty novel from that time period could be. In fact, if I had never read any of these books, and you asked me to write a parody of a Victorian novel, I would probably write something like A Pair of Blue Eyes. Where to start? The language: sentimental, flowery, verbose, descriptive, and so, so weak. At this point I can work around the odd passive sentence in the name of the style of the day, but Hardy takes loquaciousness to new heights.

You may recall my main problem with Jekyll and Hyde was that there can be no suspense when the audience knows the outcome before they open the book—and therefore my objection was that the action of the narrative was insufficient to bear a retelling. There is a similar cultural gap at work in Hardy’s novel for a modern reader: the scandals that unfold all have to do with engagements and social propriety and have no bearing on even the strictest relationships of our century. I won’t bore anyone by condensing the story, but it has to do with an engagement broken off for reasons of social station, a secret yet aborted elopement, and a love triangle that ensues. It’s just that there is nothing to sink your teeth into. How exciting is a stolen kiss on the cheek, really? I know that they wouldn’t be having sex, nor could Hardy portray it if they did, but all of the romantic interludes and “lovemaking” scenes in the story are painstakingly dull because nothing happens, and the scandal is really just a kind of misunderstanding—sort of. It’s not a comedy of errors; it’s a drama of indecisiveness. It’s about a stupid young girl who falls in love with every man that takes her for a walk. It’s also about two men, of whom I can’t decide which is duller. There is no Heathcliff here, just an architect and an art critic.

Of course there is a bright side to this literary adventure: I have been assigned this book for my essay topic and there are actually some great things to write about from a formal perspective. The narrator, for example, is very interesting. He is constantly moralizing and passing judgment. He tends to have incredible insight into the ways of men and women—especially women, and hence I plan to call my essay “What women want: dating tips from Thomas Hardy.” Here’s an example: “A young girl who is scarcely ill at all can hardly help becoming so when regarded as such by all eyes turning upon her at the table in obedience to some remark.” Really, narrator! Is that so? Tell us more: “When women are secret they are secret indeed; and more often than not they only begin to be secret with the advent of a second lover.”

I refuse to believe that this could be read seriously even in the nineteenth century. I mean, the narrator seems so sure that these blatant generalizations are correct, and he keeps them coming throughout the book. This omniscient third-person narrator speaks his mind so often that he becomes like another character in the book—although he is not literally a character. There is a very slight chance that these statements are ironic, which means that Hardy believes none of it, which also means he is actually a genius. I doubt it, but I have my back against the wall, and that may just be my only reasonable position. So I will go a write and try to be generous, because my current professor does not appreciate my cynicism. Next up, the book with the most boring title of all time: George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. Wish me luck.

Response to Ford Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier"

For some reason The Good Soldier hooked me before I had even cracked the book. First, at Russell Books I got to climb the ladder in order to get it down from the topmost shelf, and I found a really good, used copy with nice, big, attractive print and a foreword. I noticed right away that at 278 pages, it is the perfect length for a novel. That is a bonus. Also, my edition has a quote from Graham Greene on the cover, calling The Good Soldier “[o]ne of the fifteen or twenty greatest novels produced in English in our century.” I have recently delved into Greene’s oeuvre and I think of him as a “novelist’s novelist”—that is to say that he is a master storyteller and a formal genius. So if he likes The Good Soldier, it must be good, right? Also, Ford Madox Ford is just a wonderful name for an author (I know it’s not his real name). So the stars were aligned for me and this book, and I was glad to see it on the reading list.

One of the most striking things, and one of my favourite things about the book, is the narrator, John Dowell, and the way he structures the story self-consciously, as if he is sitting “at one side of the fireplace of a country cottage” for a couple of weeks, telling the story as it falls out. This allows the narrative to build in a multi-faceted way and to gain in intensity as we find out more and more about this, the “saddest story”. Another quality of this style of storytelling is that the narrator forgets details, leaves things out by accident and returns to them later, gets sidetracked, and omits things about which he’d rather not speak. He is the epitome of the unreliable narrator, it seems to me. I love this aspect of Modernism, and I completely understand the impulse to distance narrative from the unnaturalness of Naturalism, and the reliability of an omniscient narrator. The 20^th Century was a century of uncertainty, of expansion, colonialism, and of global conflict. To pretend to be sure about anything would seem arrogant, especially as the characters are dashing away from country to country, continent to continent, and as people fall in love with people to whom they are not married, and conduct affairs under the very noses of their spouses and friends. Our poor, misled Dowell seems hopelessly unequal to the task of sorting out what happens, and part of the joy of The Good Soldier is sorting out the bits that he seems to resist admitting to himself and to us. Notably, he refuses to show us that he is at all emotionally distressed, and the story reads not as catharsis, but as a sort of parsing. It makes me feel sorry for Dowell.

If this story were truly a slipshod narrative, or a series of fireside fables, as Dowell believes it to be, and for which he continuously apologizes, then the reader would likely lose interest. However, I for one was gripped by the narrative to the degree that I read most of the second half of the novel in a single sitting. When I step back from the narrative and concentrate on Ford the author, I notice brilliance in storytelling that I do not come across every day. Ford seems to know exactly how much to give the reader and when. I wonder (and this can be argued both ways) whether Dowell himself is capable of constructing such a complex and engaging narrative. If the answer is yes, then he is a supremely manipulative narrator; if no, then the novel presents a logical problem about where the implied author ends and the narrator begins.  I return here to Graham Greene—the novelist’s novelist—and his admiration of Ford. I think both authors are not only great storytellers but great writers. I feel as a reader that I am in good hands: that the story will go on, and no matter how sad, nonsensical or disjointed, the journey through the novel will be the ultimate reward. 

Response to R.L Stevenson's "Jekyll and Hyde"

I thought R.L. Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde would unquestionably be my favorite book in the Victorian novel class I’m taking. I mean, it’s a monster story set in Victorian London; it should have adventure, intrigue, murder, a race against time and maybe a love interest. It should be great, but it isn’t, really. After having read three out of the five novels assigned for the class, I would so far call it my least favorite. Despite the fact that it’s short and has to do with strange and supernatural events, there is just no suspense to the story because anyone reading it in this era is all-too familiar with what’s going on. So there’s no tension as we get to the big reveal, and it seems anticlimactic. Jekyll and Hyde are the same person, in case you were wondering. That being said, I could probably enjoy the story more if it weren’t written in that flowery, overly complicated style that I despise so much. Here’s an example: “And indeed the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public.” Yawn. I used to think all Victorians wrote like this, but it turns out that plenty of them understood that plain speech does a lot more to engage your audience (see the Dickens quotation in my last post on Great Expectations). This kind of language seems to be designed to impress people with powdered faces and bouffant wigs—it is the same aesthetic in my mind.

There’s really not much else to say. There isn’t much of a story here other than the origin and death of Jekyll and Hyde, which we all know about already. And no one figures out the mystery; it’s left to Jekyll’s last written confession to sort out all the details for Utterson (who is basically a flat narrator/main character) and for the reader. Hyde’s big crime—a murder of a magistrate or something—is not too exciting; it’s told by a bystander who sees it from a distance. There was one funny moment that sadly had nothing to do with the text itself, but with the editor, who seemed determined to make sure we didn’t misread the old-fashioned words and accidentally conclude that Jekyll and Hyde are gay. The words “gaiety,” “faggot” and “comely” all have footnotes with definitions. How on earth did the meaning of the word “faggot” get changed from bundle of sticks to . . . oh, I get it. So anyways, I would say if you want to read some old gothic monster story, you might as well give this one a miss and read Dracula or Frankenstein instead. Of course, as it weighs in at a comfortable 72 pages, you can read it and decide for yourself without too much inconvenience.