Title: Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
Author: J.D. Salinger
Format: Trade Paper
Publisher: Back Bay Books | Little, Brown and Company
Pub Date: 1963; this edition: 2001
Read: Feb 2011
Purchased: St. Mark’s Bookshop
Why: Salinger Project
Fulfills Challenge? No.
Notes: This is the Salinger book I never actually thought I would read. I think I originally looked at the title, had a moment of what the fuck?, and just kept on going.
Review/Thoughts:
This book is made up of two (rather long) short stories, both narrated by Buddy Glass and concerned with the eldest Glass sibling, Seymour. Both are written after Seymour’s suicide though neither is particularly concerned with his reasons for killing himself.
In “Roof Beam,” Buddy Glass looks back on the day of Seymour’s wedding to Muriel. None of the members of the Glass family are able to attend for a variety of reasons and so Boo Boo (third in the family, elder of the two sisters) writes Buddy and insists he find a way to go because the rest of them can’t. As it turns out, the groom does not show up to the wedding and chaos ensues. At least half of the action takes place in one of the cars heading back to the bride’s apartment — Buddy, the Matron of Honor, her husband, a Mrs Silburn, and the bride’s deaf and mute uncle are all stuck in this car together, and as you can imagine, the Matron of Honor is not at all happy with the groom for jilting the bride. She spends a great deal of the time trash-talking Seymour, spreading ugly rumors. It isn’t until they make a pit-stop at Buddy and Seymour’s apartment that Buddy finally tells her off.
Perhaps most interesting about “Roof Beam” is that Seymour’s presence is felt on almost every page despite his notable absence — an absence that at the time of the wedding is temporary, but which is now permanent. The most we see of Seymour is in the pages of his diary, which Buddy takes a moment to read in the bathroom. This is perhaps the closest we will ever get to Seymour but certainly the closest we get to him in this story, and it still doesn’t seem quite enough. That said, I enjoyed reading the page of his diary best
The title, incidentally, comes from a Sappho poem written in soap on the bathroom mirror (the Glasses often left each other little messages on the medicine cabinet mirror):
Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Like Ares comes the bridegroom, taller far than a tall man. Love, Irving Sappho, formerly under contract to Elysium Studios Ltd. Please be happy happy happy with your beautiful Muriel. This is an order. I outrank everybody on this block.
The message of course is from Boo Boo who had taken up residence in Seymour and Buddy’s apartment. The message made me smile despite knowing what was going to happen later in Seymour’s life
The second, and longer of the two stories, “Seymour: An Introduction” almost seems to be asking the question, what’s in a life? How can one get at the essence of another person? How can a biography really capture a life? The answer seems to be, you can’t. “Seymour: An Introduction” is made up of fragments, memories, snippets of Seymour, as only Buddy can remember it. It also concerns itself with Seymour’s poetry and features a fair number of digressions and asides. Buddy, a writer and narrator, is very much a presence in this story, perhaps even more so than in the first. At one point, after a nine week bout of hepatitis that prevented him from continuing his introduction, Buddy says,
From the manageable giant he had been before I got sick, he had shot up, in nine short weeks, into the most familiar human being of my life, the one person who was always much, much too large to fit on ordinary typewriter paper
He is of course talking about Seymour, and he seems to be suggesting that his intimacy with his subject has made it more, rather than less, difficult to discuss him. But truthfully, what life can truly be captured on the page? I imagine this is the problem facing nearly every competent biographer. There is too much, far to much, to ever put on the page and there is no way of knowing everything. That no reasons or theories are ever offered in the matter of Seymour’s suicide just seems to emphasize this point. From “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” it would seem that the problem is either his wife, the war, or a combination of both. But as you get a bigger picture of Seymour both from his diary in the first story and Buddy’s recollections here, it becomes clearer that Seymour’s suicide is not clear. Suicide is a complicated act, and the refusal to simplify it, even for the sake of a story, is both admirable and frustrating. We are used to books telling us why things happen. From Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot:
Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t.
Neither of these stories is a place where things are explained to you. There are hints and suggestions but more open-endedness than not, which isn’t to say that these fragments of Seymour’s life, these small windows, aren’t interesting in and of themselves. They are and I truly wish there were more of them. But they can’t fully explain a life any more than any series of anecdotes. As Paul Auster wrote in The New York Trilogy, “the essential thing resists telling.” Salinger captures this brilliantly in this work.
Final Verdict: 
