Name: Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour
ISBN: 9780316766944

J. D. Salinger

An Introduction

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour

avoided writing about this for an entire half year bc glass family stories have a bizarre way of materializing a gun from between the pages jjba-style! incidentally relevant to my close and personal friend seymour glass tho so maybe it’s like a salinger king in yellow kind of curse ehe

my first encounters in childhood with the glass family were through 

so it’s always felt like i met the seymour-shaped void left after he 

-ed far far before i fully ever knew who seymour glass could have been. which. love. but when a character is treated simultaneously as person, myth, and wound, they are often created to remain, and be engaged with, as exactly that. seymour in my mind is the dead wife in an oscar bait film if the dead wife was the eldest sibling and literally everybody else’s explanation for why they are the way they are, so sure ofc every other glass child exists partly in orbit around seymour’s aftermath, by design, by necessity. maybe even there’s no story without the end of seymour’s and everyone else’s attempt to tell it in completion.

 tends to be discussed primarily as a standalone veteran story. and. okay. obviously, war matters there. i don’t particularly care for prioritizing that, but yes, okay, obviously, military trauma matters there. yet seymour feels larger and stranger than a diagnosis or a social category of postwar disillusionment when what destroys him doesn’t feel reducible to a single cause so much as it is an almost pathological overconsciousness about existence itself. he experiences humanity like someone standing just one quantum second too far outside of it, and i think 

made him way more hold-able for me precisely bc it felt like a joint attempt between him, buddy, 

the reader to traverse that second and experience for once what it’s like to see him as a creature made of marrow and bone. before this, seymour read very nearly like pure symbol: this impossible gifted child, the enlightened brother, the mysterious shadowed family saint who walked into the sea and never returned. even in 

there was a monk-like quality to his morbid peace, his resignation. he’s made the choice; he was almost martyrly in his certainty in what he’s about to do. but in these two novellas, you start seeing how hard he had been trying to be ordinary and how excruciatingly self-aware he was about failing at it, and it’s at once disorienting and ridiculously gutting. 

so true, king. the whole phone call diary entry reveals this terrible recursive quality to seymour’s sadness: he is conscious not only of his inability to comfortably inhabit human life, but of the effect that this inability has on the people trying to love him. he keeps trying to bridge the gap, but every attempt becomes evidence of the gap itself, and just digs his hole further and further into how muriel’s family and friends see him. he cannot stop analyzing his own humanity long enough to simply participate in it, and if that’s not #real. he feels so horribly relatable to me despite every instinct in me wanting to resist that identification bc seymour’s tragedy is not that he lacks humanity but that he approaches it through rationale, vigilance, interpretation. he is constantly trying to understand how to be a person correctly, lovingly, harmlessly. but a “real” human being, as seymour himself seems painfully aware, and i’ve heard so much over the years, would not be trying in this way at all. they would simply exist. 

meanwhile, all his siblings are left trying to preserve evidence that he did exist naturally once, or at least that loving him naturally was something quantifiable. buddy writes about seymour with this frantic overarticulation that feels inseparable from grief, until every description threatens to become hagiography but only succeeds at being an early version of his retrospective apology from 

. booboo feels, on the other hand, like she remembers not seymour the genius or seymour the mystic, but seymour the older brother trying very hard to be gentle, and for whom she wants the simplest, most mundane, and therefore most impossible happiness. it makes me want to pull all my hair out!! the glass family is full of brilliant people, but seymour is maybe the only one who seems actively terrified by the distance between perception and living. everybody else intellectualizes bc they cannot help it; the source of the grief has come and gone, two brothers dead and nothing but childhood precociousness translating into adult not-enough-ness to catch them. seymour, though, intellectualizes bc he is in the before, where he just seems convinced that if he stops trying to consciously construct a tolerable mode of being, something catastrophic will happen. and eventually it does. and that’s where the rest of the stories sit. in the aftermath of the catastrophic thing. no wonder seymour is more symbol than brother, most times. 

devastating as this was, it’s also somehow the funniest buddy has ever been, so i admit my guard was down by the latter half of 

 mostly bc the beginning scenes were pandemonium. at one point, when asked if he knows seymour, buddy panics and answers “we were boys together.” he squints “neutrally,” dodges questions in the most roundabout way imaginable, develops an imagined kinship with the one person in the car who doesn’t speak (also #real), then gets back in with these strangers he can’t stand bc "i was twenty-three, newly drafted, newly advised in the efficacy of keeping close to the herd—and, above all, i felt lonely.” he’s a mess! yet as the story goes on and we learn about why seymour had called off his wedding, buddy’s humour, looking back at this from the future, also begins to feel at times inseparable from the helplessness of 

 has this incredible rhythm where buddy’s narration always feels like it’s about to spiral into complete overexplained existential anguish, only to be interrupted by him being socially impossible in some specific way—so when the narrative does finally slow down during the bathroom break scene, it’s as if closing that door also shuts out the rest of the apartment, the world, the rest of the narratives everyone is trying to tell about seymour, even the heat of this summer memory and all the summers that have followed since despite being privy to something that had since left you defenceless against loss. 

it was hard not to feel for how vulnerable buddy comes across here compared to 

. there, buddy still had a degree of narrative authority; even when he was self-conscious, overapologetic to zooey, aware of the depth (and justification) of zooey’s bitter anger, buddy felt controlled, curated, capable of shaping the emotional architecture of the story through sheer intelligence and narration. here, he felt far more exposed. lonelier. almost frightened by his own memories. there are moments in 

 where he sounded less like a narrator than somebody trying desperately to keep composure in public while realizing every thought he has still routes back to seymour somehow. it’s no surprise he’s holed himself up by 

is by far the weaker of the two novellas, so this duo still falls short of 

perfection, but both stories, exhaustingly full of wit combined, gives this awful sense that buddy has spent years trying to write seymour into a shape survivable enough for both himself and everybody else. not necessarily understandable, bc it gets hard to figure out which seymour among all the siblings’ stories is the closest to 

seymour, and if understanding counts as knowing when both are damning in different ways, but at least inhabitable. narratable. something that can remain inside language without dissolving it. buddy keeps circling him through anecdote and humour and obsessive qualification, trying to preserve not just seymour himself but the feeling of having once lived beside somebody so emotionally overexposed to the world that ordinary life became unbearable to sustain. yet seymour exceeds every framework available to his siblings, buddy above all: brother, genius, depressive, saint, fraud, casualty, eccentric, mentor. none of them hold for very long. and if that isn’t buddy in a nutshell; a writer trapped in the limitlessness of language, paradoxical as that is.

these stories always linger so dreadfully for me, god. for all the mythology around seymour, what survives most vividly is not transcendence thereof but the vulnerability that myth-making did not ultimately supersede. not wisdom but exhaustion. not enlightenment but the desperate, visibly failing effort to remain reachable by other people. ahhhhhhhhh look at all the lonely people pum pum pum pum pum pum pum pum (◞‸◟,)

avoided writing about this for an entire half year bc glass family stories have a bizarre way of materializing a gun from between the pages jjba-style! incidentally relevant to my close and personal friend seymour glass tho so maybe it’s like a salinger king in yellow kind of curse ehe

my first encounters in childhood with the glass family were through for esmé (thanks lemony snicket) + franny and zooey, so it’s always felt like i met the seymour-shaped void left after he bananafish-ed far far before i fully ever knew who seymour glass could have been. which. love. but when a character is treated simultaneously as person, myth, and wound, they are often created to remain, and be engaged with, as exactly that. seymour in my mind is the dead wife in an oscar bait film if the dead wife was the eldest sibling and literally everybody else’s explanation for why they are the way they are, so sure ofc every other glass child exists partly in orbit around seymour’s aftermath, by design, by necessity. maybe even there’s no story without the end of seymour’s and everyone else’s attempt to tell it in completion.

it never helped seymour’s case that a perfect day for bananafish tends to be discussed primarily as a standalone veteran story. and. okay. obviously, war matters there. i don’t particularly care for prioritizing that, but yes, okay, obviously, military trauma matters there. yet seymour feels larger and stranger than a diagnosis or a social category of postwar disillusionment when what destroys him doesn’t feel reducible to a single cause so much as it is an almost pathological overconsciousness about existence itself. he experiences humanity like someone standing just one quantum second too far outside of it, and i think raise high and seymour: an introduction made him way more hold-able for me precisely bc it felt like a joint attempt between him, buddy, and the reader to traverse that second and experience for once what it’s like to see him as a creature made of marrow and bone. before this, seymour read very nearly like pure symbol: this impossible gifted child, the enlightened brother, the mysterious shadowed family saint who walked into the sea and never returned. even in bananafish, there was a monk-like quality to his morbid peace, his resignation. he’s made the choice; he was almost martyrly in his certainty in what he’s about to do. but in these two novellas, you start seeing how hard he had been trying to be ordinary and how excruciatingly self-aware he was about failing at it, and it’s at once disorienting and ridiculously gutting. 

She looked over at me when the children in the picture brought in the kitten to show to their mother. M. loved the kitten and wanted me to love it. Even in the dark, I could sense that she felt the usual estrangement from me when I don’t automatically love what she loves. Later, when we were having a drink at the station, she asked me if I didn’t think that kitten was ‘rather nice.’ She doesn't use the word ‘cute’ any more. When did I ever frighten her out of her normal vocabulary? Bore that I am, I mentioned R. H. Blyth’s definition of sentimentality: that we are being sentimental when we give to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it. I said (sententiously?) that God undoubtedly loves kittens, but not, in all probability, with Technicolor bootees on their paws. He leaves that creative touch to script writers. M. thought this over, seemed to agree with me, but the ‘knowledge’ wasn’t too very welcome. She sat stirring her drink and feeling unclose to me. She worries over the way her love for me comes and goes, appears and disappears. She doubts its reality simply because it isn’t as steadily pleasurable as a kitten. God knows it is sad. The human voice conspires to desecrate everything on earth…

so true, king. the whole phone call diary entry reveals this terrible recursive quality to seymour’s sadness: he is conscious not only of his inability to comfortably inhabit human life, but of the effect that this inability has on the people trying to love him. he keeps trying to bridge the gap, but every attempt becomes evidence of the gap itself, and just digs his hole further and further into how muriel’s family and friends see him. he cannot stop analyzing his own humanity long enough to simply participate in it, and if that’s not #real. he feels so horribly relatable to me despite every instinct in me wanting to resist that identification bc seymour’s tragedy is not that he lacks humanity but that he approaches it through rationale, vigilance, interpretation. he is constantly trying to understand how to be a person correctly, lovingly, harmlessly. but a “real” human being, as seymour himself seems painfully aware, and i’ve heard so much over the years, would not be trying in this way at all. they would simply exist. 

meanwhile, all his siblings are left trying to preserve evidence that he did exist naturally once, or at least that loving him naturally was something quantifiable. buddy writes about seymour with this frantic overarticulation that feels inseparable from grief, until every description threatens to become hagiography but only succeeds at being an early version of his retrospective apology from zooey. booboo feels, on the other hand, like she remembers not seymour the genius or seymour the mystic, but seymour the older brother trying very hard to be gentle, and for whom she wants the simplest, most mundane, and therefore most impossible happiness. it makes me want to pull all my hair out!! the glass family is full of brilliant people, but seymour is maybe the only one who seems actively terrified by the distance between perception and living. everybody else intellectualizes bc they cannot help it; the source of the grief has come and gone, two brothers dead and nothing but childhood precociousness translating into adult not-enough-ness to catch them. seymour, though, intellectualizes bc he is in the before, where he just seems convinced that if he stops trying to consciously construct a tolerable mode of being, something catastrophic will happen. and eventually it does. and that’s where the rest of the stories sit. in the aftermath of the catastrophic thing. no wonder seymour is more symbol than brother, most times. 

devastating as this was, it’s also somehow the funniest buddy has ever been, so i admit my guard was down by the latter half of raise high mostly bc the beginning scenes were pandemonium. at one point, when asked if he knows seymour, buddy panics and answers “we were boys together.” he squints “neutrally,” dodges questions in the most roundabout way imaginable, develops an imagined kinship with the one person in the car who doesn’t speak (also #real), then gets back in with these strangers he can’t stand bc "i was twenty-three, newly drafted, newly advised in the efficacy of keeping close to the herd—and, above all, i felt lonely.” he’s a mess! yet as the story goes on and we learn about why seymour had called off his wedding, buddy’s humour, looking back at this from the future, also begins to feel at times inseparable from the helplessness of just being that someone looking back. raise high has this incredible rhythm where buddy’s narration always feels like it’s about to spiral into complete overexplained existential anguish, only to be interrupted by him being socially impossible in some specific way—so when the narrative does finally slow down during the bathroom break scene, it’s as if closing that door also shuts out the rest of the apartment, the world, the rest of the narratives everyone is trying to tell about seymour, even the heat of this summer memory and all the summers that have followed since despite being privy to something that had since left you defenceless against loss. 

it was hard not to feel for how vulnerable buddy comes across here compared to zooey. there, buddy still had a degree of narrative authority; even when he was self-conscious, overapologetic to zooey, aware of the depth (and justification) of zooey’s bitter anger, buddy felt controlled, curated, capable of shaping the emotional architecture of the story through sheer intelligence and narration. here, he felt far more exposed. lonelier. almost frightened by his own memories. there are moments in raise high where he sounded less like a narrator than somebody trying desperately to keep composure in public while realizing every thought he has still routes back to seymour somehow. it’s no surprise he’s holed himself up by franny and zooey. 

seymour: an introduction is by far the weaker of the two novellas, so this duo still falls short of franny and zooey perfection, but both stories, exhaustingly full of wit combined, gives this awful sense that buddy has spent years trying to write seymour into a shape survivable enough for both himself and everybody else. not necessarily understandable, bc it gets hard to figure out which seymour among all the siblings’ stories is the closest to bananafish seymour, and if understanding counts as knowing when both are damning in different ways, but at least inhabitable. narratable. something that can remain inside language without dissolving it. buddy keeps circling him through anecdote and humour and obsessive qualification, trying to preserve not just seymour himself but the feeling of having once lived beside somebody so emotionally overexposed to the world that ordinary life became unbearable to sustain. yet seymour exceeds every framework available to his siblings, buddy above all: brother, genius, depressive, saint, fraud, casualty, eccentric, mentor. none of them hold for very long. and if that isn’t buddy in a nutshell; a writer trapped in the limitlessness of language, paradoxical as that is.

these stories always linger so dreadfully for me, god. for all the mythology around seymour, what survives most vividly is not transcendence thereof but the vulnerability that myth-making did not ultimately supersede. not wisdom but exhaustion. not enlightenment but the desperate, visibly failing effort to remain reachable by other people. ahhhhhhhhh look at all the lonely people pum pum pum pum pum pum pum pum (◞‸◟,)

“were most of your stars out?” is the most devastatingly hopeful line to read and i probably shouldn’t be entering the new year with All These Feelings but. in true mcr fashion i really am not afraid to keep on living and i want to strangle salinger for gifting me this. for gifting the world this in all its convolution. if seymour is a poet, if seymour is poetry, i suppose we are all buddy glass. we are all the dear old tyger who sleeps. see this is a(n attempt) recount of seymour and yet buddy is the one rendered human here, in his assigned imposter syndrome, in the way he says to ira “it’s getting dark anyway” as seymour approaches with “how can it be luck if i aim?”. seymour. dear brother. north star. i can go on now.

☀️

Holy ground this holy ground that; you’re telling me Seymour doesn’t dress well???????

Clay Carey

Reading "Seymour: An Introduction"  admittedly feels like work, but " Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" is a brilliantly architected and beautifully constructed short story. I love the intro dedication* (it feels very personal, especially during the several intentional dialogues Buddy Glass initiates with the reader in "Seymour"), and it was a large factor in helping me stay the course through to the (ultimately satisfying) end of "Seymour." 

Although I still don't see what all the fuss is about with The Catcher in the Rye (what a phoney that Caulfield guy is, eh?), I still adore the rest of the Salinger oevre and look forward to the set of posthumous works his surviving family will be publishing in the coming decade. 

*DEDICATION: "If there is an amateur reader still left in the world—or anybody who just reads and runs—I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children." - J. D. Salinger, dedication from  “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" and "Seymour: An Introduction"

Ashlyn

Reading "Seymour: An Introduction"  admittedly feels like work, but " Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" is a brilliantly architected and beautifully constructed short story. I love the intro dedication* (it feels very personal, especially during the several intentional dialogues Buddy Glass initiates with the reader in "Seymour"), and it was a large factor in helping me stay the course through to the (ultimately satisfying) end of "Seymour." 

Although I still don't see what all the fuss is about with The Catcher in the Rye (what a phoney that Caulfield guy is, eh?), I still adore the rest of the Salinger oevre and look forward to the set of posthumous works his surviving family will be publishing in the coming decade. 

*DEDICATION: "If there is an amateur reader still left in the world—or anybody who just reads and runs—I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children." - J. D. Salinger, dedication from  “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" and "Seymour: An Introduction"

First part went off easily, it was intriguing as the plot was becoming more clear, the change of form in the second part was more challenging to keep binge reading it, but personally I needed time to adapt to it. Second part after awhile became very heart warming picture of true brother love, which was so beautifully written, that it often made tear up.

Kasia Chodzinska

First published in the New Yorker in the 1950s, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction are two novellas narrated by Buddy Glass, a character often said to be a portrait of Salinger himself. In the first, Buddy has taken leave from the army during World War II to attend the wedding of the eldest Glass brother, Seymour, and an atmosphere of portentous suspense sets the scene for the tragedy that will follow. In the second, Buddy reminisces about Seymour and the novella unfolds into a deep and far-reaching exploration of a complex and sad character which displays all the tenderness and subtlety which distinguish the best of Salinger's writing.

And Seymour - an Introduction

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters

noodle

the second story was such a struggle for me to finish that it broke my two weeks reading binge lol

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour

Silvia Morgantini

Salinger is the only writer who has ever made me want to read poems written by a non-existent character.
Also, the way Buddy writes about his older brother Seymour? True love.

Donald

I did not like 'Cather in the Rye' at all when I read it in high school, but this book is incredible, especially 'Seymour: An Introduction'.

Reading this, I finally understand the cult of the now deceased Salinger. What a thorough intelligence and distinctive literary style! I had not read a book by him in years, and yet I recognized his voice immediately.

Perhaps I will go back a reread 'Catcher'.

Do výšok zdvíhajte krov, tesári a Seymour

Akože, ono by to aj bolo šarmantné, ale nikdy, nikdy, NIKDY nepochopím, prečo to dal niekto v roku 2001 prekladať Kotovi (a to nie je skratka od vulgarizmu, aj keď by mohla byť). Najväčšie perly v histórii anglicko-slovenského prekladu posielam do správy na vyžiadanie...*smútoček*

Christina Hufford

Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters is probably my favorite of all I've read of Salinger's so far. It's unfortunate though that it's paired with Seymour, which may be my least favorite of his work that I've read. Truthfully, though, I havent even finished reading Seymour: An Introduction, but I just can't slog through it any longer. So, while Seymour I might not recommend, Raise High... was absolutely delightful to read, and that I recommend highly.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour An Introduction

Reviews

Highlights