Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour An Introduction – J. D. Salinger, 1963 ½★

Losing the Plot

After effortlessly crafting a bestselling book by combining two previously published short stories, J. D. Salinger went back to the well here. This time, the link between the pair is much less apparent, and the result less happy.

Man, do I hate this book. To be more specific, I really hate the second half, “Seymour An Introduction.” It’s a car wreck of an abortive fictional profile that, instead of making the more disciplined first half read better, magnifies the same narcissistic, undisciplined qualities.

John Updike wasn’t kidding when he wrote: “Salinger loves the Glasses more than God loves them.” This is what happens when a previously brilliant writer literally and completely loses the plot.

Beginning in the late 1940s, Salinger’s short fiction began to focus on the offspring of a couple of retired vaudeville performers living in New York City. Geniuses all, the Glass children became national celebrities on a popular radio show before reaching puberty. Their love of learning produced gargantuan intellects but also unsettled mindsets, most visibly in the case of the most gifted Glass, Seymour.

Seymour and his sister Boo Boo center two of Salinger’s Nine Stories, “A Perfect Day For Bananafish” and “Down At The Dinghy.” Their brother Walt is remembered at length in another tale from that collection, “Uncle Wiggly In Connecticut.” All are terrific stories, as is “Franny,” a slightly longer piece about the youngest Glass sibling and an emotional breakdown she suffers in college. You do care about them.

Author J. D. Salinger shares a few moments with his dog, Benny. A Boston Bull terrier once owned by a Glass brother is fondly remembered in "Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenter," in one of many idle moments.
Image from https://katu.com/news/entertainment/unlikely-salinger-detective-spent-decade-on-trail-11-19-2015

“Franny” was initially published by itself in The New Yorker, then republished in 1961 with “Zooey,” a novella which extends the “Franny” narrative into the next day. Two years later came this second pairing of previously printed Glass tales.

“Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters” and “Seymour An Introduction” are built around the same theme, the sublimity of Seymour Glass and his self-imposed absence from the world. Otherwise the two novellas couldn’t be more different.

“Raise High” first appeared in 1955, later the same year as “Franny.” In it, we meet Buddy Glass, the next-oldest Glass sibling after Seymour. Buddy is on leave from the Army in 1942 to attend Seymour’s wedding. Only there is no Seymour, just a lot of befuddled and put-out relatives and friends of the bride. As the lone representative on the groom’s side, Buddy is rather isolated, as he explains in his first-person narration.

Buddy recalls his impressions of the situation and the people he meets:

“You’d better not say you’re a friend of the groom,” the Matron of Honor interrupted me, from the back of the car. “I’d like to get my hands on him for about two minutes. Just two minutes, that’s all.”

The November 19, 1955 issue of The New Yorker was the first time "Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters" saw print. The title comes from a line by the ancient Greek poet Sappho, quoted in the story by Boo Boo Glass, Seymour's oldest sister.
Image from https://archives.newyorker.com/newyorker/1955-11-19/flipbook/050

Over the course of the story, Buddy’s identity is eventually revealed, making him a target for the Matron of Honor’s endless tantrum. While a thoroughly awful person, the type that would be called a “Karen” a few decades later, she strikes a chord with Buddy. “I often feel a rather excessive pull toward people who don’t overapologize,” he says.

Not much else happens over the course of “Raise High.” Seymour never appears directly; his absence gets explained later in a diary entry Buddy finds as the result of feeling too much “the joy of responsibility” about the nuptials. After a few drinks, Buddy tells off the Matron and finds himself alone in the apartment he and Buddy formerly shared, contemplating the wonder of Seymour and God, in that order.

There is an unsettling undertone in “Raise High” that cuts against the largely whimsical material. The members of the bride’s family, not just the Matron, seem an unfriendly lot, subtly suggesting a danger to sensitive Seymour down the road. Buddy is recalling this moment from a much later point in his life when the emotional resonances of his brother’s memory have deeper weight. While praising Seymour’s brilliance, Buddy seems simultaneously defensive:

I said that not one God-damn person, of all the patronizing, fourth-rate critics and column writers, had ever seen him for what he really was. A poet, for God’s sake. And I mean a poet.

A parade blocks traffic for a critical interval during "Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters." It may also set an exact date for when the story takes place: June 13, 1942. On this date, a special parade, "New York At War," was held to rally the city. Otherwise, it's hard to see how a hub of wartime activity would host a parade at all.
Photo by Andreas Feininger from https://www.artsy.net/artwork/andreas-feininger-model-of-plane-on-float-in-new-york-at-war-parade-new-york-city

Admiration for Seymour is another point of commonality between “Raise High” and “Seymour An Introduction.” But in “Seymour” there is no narrative. Originally published in The New Yorker in 1959, “Seymour” is a random series of anecdotes and impressions about Seymour related over the course of a few days. Again our narrator, Buddy tells us he wants to write something different this time.

But on this occasion I’m anything but a short-story writer where my brother is concerned. What I am, I think, is a thesaurus of undetached prefatory remarks about him.

Sometimes Buddy writes about Seymour in “Seymour,” sometimes about other things. Buddy has a lot to talk about.

We learn he is a part-time instructor at a woman’s college. Well-versed in many languages, he teaches Eastern philosophy and religion, though he is down on how much that is now in vogue among American students. He inveighs about “the peerage of tin ears” in academia unable to appreciate his brother’s poetry, and about critics in general who have been analyzing his short stories. (Apparently Buddy has produced a few of them we may be familiar with, as they align with Salinger’s output.)

In "Seymour An Introduction," Buddy relates Seymour's aptitude, or lack thereof, in most outdoor sports as a boy, including tennis and stoopball. At one point, Seymour tells his brother the secret of playing marbles is not to aim.
Image from https://olliconnects.org/boyhood/

Mostly Buddy just natters on in his apartment about how frustrated he is with writing, how everything he tells us about Seymour is a lie, about the clothes his brother wore (badly) and how he played as a boy.

We get glimpses of Seymour scouring a filled ashtray for signs of divinity, encouraging a brother to give away a cherished bicycle, and bestowing affection on a dowdy librarian he loves to visit:

His distributor wasn’t standard, even in the family. He could look grave, not to say funereal, when candles on small children’s birthday cakes were being blown out. On the other hand, he could look positively delighted when one of the kids showed him where he or she had scraped a shoulder swimming under the float.

We are told a lot about Seymour’s poetry, and how it would place him among the dozen or so greatest poets in human history if only his work could be published. Alas, Buddy tells us in a footnote he has been legally barred from doing this. All we get is a crumb of verse Seymour wrote as a boy: “John Keats/John Keats/John/Please put your scarf on.”

The June 6, 1959 issue of The New Yorker included "Seymour An Introduction," the penultimate Salinger story published in that magazine. The next (and last) time a Salinger story appeared, it would take up nearly the entire issue.
Image from https://www.abebooks.com/magazines-periodicals/New-Yorker-June-1959-First-publication/31318664079/bd

The preciousness of Buddy’s memories of Seymour ultimately becomes a weight extending across the entirety of the book. Salinger isn’t writing fiction. He is basking in the glory of his fictional family, going on about how much they love the world while all the time pushing how we don’t deserve them. After not very long, it becomes stifling and twee.

Salinger retreated from publishing fiction of any kind after one more effort, “Hapworth 16 1924,” a novella-length letter from seven-year-old Seymour at summer camp in which he lectures his family about art and God at great length. It has never appeared in print since it was printed in The New Yorker in 1965. Salinger died in 2010.

Salinger has many fans who rate the Glass stories highly. For me, they are a case of diminishing returns. Neither “Raise High” nor “Seymour” are as bad as “Hapworth 16 1924,” but “Seymour” is close, and neither merits the frustration of reading it. One senses Salinger metaphorically taking his ball home with him, removing himself from a world which somehow disappointed him. Knowing what he was capable of, it makes this already unhappy read that much sadder.