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.