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.
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