The Books: “Seymour An Introduction” (J.D. Salinger)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf:

Seymour: An Introduction, by J.D. Salinger

How on earth should I describe this novella? First of all, I should say that it is in the tradition of Ulysses and Proust and all of those giant modernist writers mainly interested in upending the personal sensoral experiences of moment-to-moment living … that’s what’s going on in Seymour, although it’s not so much sensoral – as intellectual. It’s an excavation of memory. The narrator, Buddy Glass, is determined to put Seymour, his brother, on paper – but he finds it more challenging than he realized, and eventually has to just stop writing. It’s devastating. You want to shout at him to keep going, but nope. Buddy Glass is done. Whatever or whoever Seymour was – it remains between the lines. And isn’t that true of people we love? You can try to describe them – what they looked like, for example … or, more accurately, you can describe what they did, their actions, their behavior. That gets closer to someone’s essence. The books they read, their climactic moments in life … But still: you can’t capture someone. And Buddy Glass wants to capture Seymour – his brother who committed suicide – he wants to somehow capture him in words. Words are inadequate to the job. And that is shattering to a writer. You hear stories about writers who finally have to put down their pens forever, because their whole raison d’etre, their only skill really – has proven to be not up to the job. What, if not words?

The book is called Seymour An Introduction. There is no more. It is an introduction to nothing. And so we are left bereft, along with the Glass family … unable to understand, unable to see enough between the lines to maybe understand WHY … WHY did this beautiful beloved original soul kill himself? Why? What was it that Seymour “saw” that was so unbearable that he decided to check out?

It’s an extraordinary piece of writing. It is the meaning of stream-of-conscious writing. And as the story goes on, the parentheticals become longer and longer and longer. You get lost in them. Buddy Glass cannot state anything unequivocally. Writing becomes a noose, strangling expression. How much of this was Salinger? I have no idea. But to read a writer, over the course of one story, become unable to write anymore is just shattering. I only read Seymour An Introduction once – in one sitting- I remember where I was when I read it, and I remember the tears streaming down my face. It’s amazing.

In a comment to my Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters post, I said:

I may be foolish ( wouldn’t be the first time) but I still hold out hope as long as Salinger is alive that Seymour will come back. I believe that there is a manuscript somewhere – I mean, Seymour: An Introduction … an introduction!! He had more to say – he did – but to watch him in that story kind of spiral out of control (in the best way) and to be unable to keep going … it’s almost like his own parentheticals became ropes that bound and gagged him … Everything he writes has to be qualified with a parenthetical – until finally language itself loses its meaning. I found it so so hard and moving to read. It’s one of the most human pieces of literature I have ever read. Now I am probably confusing Buddy Glass with JD Salinger – and perhaps they are NOT one and the same … but I felt Salinger the writer in Seymour: An Introduction finally, after 60 pages, just throw up his hands and say, “You know what? No. Screw this. I’m not writing anymore.”

But wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were more? If there exists a manuscript in that house of his that someday will come to light? I do like to imagine that.

Seymour An Introduction is one of the most immediate pieces of literature I have ever read. The writer struggling with writing as he writes. Navel-gazing? Sure. I don’t happen to have a problem with that (of course not – look at my blog) … and it is also a piece of art that is also about the artistic process. Buddy Glass (JD Salinger) is doing battle through the prose. Not just with the memory of his brother, but with how to write about it. He wrestles with words. He gets angry. Frustrated. It’s hard to take. It reminds me a bit of John Cassavetes’ film Opening Night (my favorite of all of his films). It’s about actors putting on a play. It’s a movie about how hard it is to act, sometimes … and the movie looks at it in an unblinking way. It’s the kind of thing that is the thing itself at the same time it is about that thing itself (like that great quote from Sam Beckett about Finnegans Wake: “You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself.”)

Here’s an excerpt from Seymour An Introduction:

EXCERPT FROM Seymour: An Introduction, by J.D. Salinger

I have a recurrent, and, in 1959, almost chronic, premonition that when Seymour’s poems have been widely and rather officially acknowledged as First Class (stacked up in college bookstores, assigned in Contemporary Poetry courses), matriculating young men and women will strike out, in singlets and twosomes, notebooks at the ready, for my somewhat creaking front door. (It’s regrettable that this matter has to come up at all, but it’s surely too late to pretend to an ingenuousness, to say nothing of a grace, I don’t have, and I must reveal that my reputedly heartshaped prose has knighted me one of the best-loved sciolists in print since Ferris L. Monahan, and a good many young English Department people already know where I live, hole up; I have their tire tracks in my rose beds to prove it.) By and large, I’d say without a shred of hesitation, there are three kinds of students who have both the desire and the temerity to look as squarely as possible into any sort of literary horse’s mouth. The first kind is the young man or woman who loves and respects to distraction any fairly responsible sort of literature and who, if he or she can’t see Shelley plain, will make do with seeking out manufacturers of inferior but estimable products. I know these boys and girls well, or think I do. They’re naive, they’re alive, they’re enthusiastic, they’re usually less than right, and they’re the hope always, I think, of blase or vested-interested literary society the world over. (By some good fortune I can’t believe I’ve deserved, I’ve had one of these ebullient, cocksure, irritating, instructive, often charming girls or boys in every second or third class I’ve taught in the past twelve years.) The second kind of young person who actually rings doorbells in the pursuit of literary data suffers, somewhat proudly, from a case of academicitis, contracted from any one of half a dozen Modern English professors or graduate instructors to whom he’s been exposed since his freshman year. Not seldom, if he himself is already teaching or is about to start teaching, the disease is so far along that one doubts whether it could be arrested, even if someone were fully equipped to try. Only last year, for example, a young man stopped by to see me about a piece I’d written, several years back, that had a good deal to do with Sherwood Anderson. He came at a time when I was cutting part of my winter’s supply of firewood with a gasoline-operated chain saw – an instrument that after eight years of repeated use I’m still terrified of. It was the height of the spring thaw, a beautiful sunny day, and I was feeling, frankly, just a trifle Thoreauish (a real treat for me, because after thirteen years of country living I’m still a man who gauges bucolic distances by New York City blocks). In short, it looked like a promising, if literary, afternoon, and I recall that I had high hopes of getting the young man, a la Tom Sawyer and his bucket of whitewash, to have a go at my chain saw. He appeared healthy, not to say strapping. His deceiving looks, however, very nearly cost me my left foot, for between spurts and buzzes of my saw, just as I finished delivering a short and to me rather enjoyable eulogy on Sherwood Anderson’s gentle and effective style, the young man asked me – after a thoughtful, a cruelly promising pause – if I thought there was an endemic American Zeitgeist. (Poor young man. Even if he takes exceptionally good care of himself, he can’t at the outside have more than fifty years of successful campus activity ahead of him.) The third kind of person who will be a fairly constant visitor around here, I believe, once Seymour’s poems have been quite thoroughly unpacked and tagged, requires a paragraph to himself or herself.

It would be absurd to say that most young people’s attraction to poetry is far exceeded by their attraction to those few or many details of a poet’s life that may be defined here, loosely, operationally, as lurid. It’s the sort of absurd notion, though, that I wouldn’t mind taking out for a good academic run someday. I surely think, at any rate, that if I were to ask the sixty odd girls (or, that is, the sixty-odd girls) in my two Writing for Publication courses – most of them seniors, all of them English majors – to quote a line, any line from “Ozymandias,” or even just to tell me roughly what the poem is about, it is doubtful whether ten of them could do either, but I’d bet my unrisen tulips that some fifty of them could tell me that Shelley was all for free love, and had one wife who wrote “Frankenstein” and another who drowned herself.* I’m neither shocked nor outraged at the idea, please mind. I don’t think I’m even complaining. For if nobody’s a fool, then neither am I, and I’m entitled to a non-fool’s Sunday awareness that, whoever we are, no matter how like a blast furnace the heat from the candles on our latest birthday cake, and however presumably lofty the intellectual, moral, and spiritual heights we’ve all reached, our gusto for the lurid or partly lurid (which, of course, includes both low and superior gossip) is probably the last of our fleshy appetites to be sated or effectively curbed. (But, my God, why do I rant on? Why am I not going straight to the poet for an illustration? One of Seymour’s hundred and eighty-four poems – a shocker on the first impact only; on the second, as heartening a paean to the living as I’ve read – is about a distinguished old ascetic on his deathbed, surrounded by chanting priests and disciples, who lies straining to hear what the washerwoman in the courtyard is saying about his neighbor’s laundry. The old gentleman, Seymour makes it clear, is faintly wishing the priests would keep their voices down a bit.) I can see, though, that I’m having a little of the usual trouble entailed in trying to make a very convenient generalization stay still and docile long enough to support a wild specific premise. I don’t relish being sensible about it, but I suppose I must. It seems to me indisputably true that a good many people, the wide world over, of varying ages, cultures, natural endowments, respond with a special impetus, a zing, even, in some cases, to artists and poets who as well as having a reputation for producing great or fine art have something garishly Wrong with them as persons: a spectacular flaw in character or citizenship, a construably romantic affliction or addiction – extreme self-centeredness, marital infidelity, stone-deafness, stone-blindness, a terrible thirst, a mortally bad cough, a soft spot for prostitutes, a partiality for grand-scale adultery or incest, a certified or uncertified weakness for opium or sodomy, and so on, God have mercy on the lonely bastards. If suicide isn’t at the top of the list of compelling infirmities for creative men, the suicide poet or artist, one can’t help noticing, has always been given a very considerable amount of avid attention, not seldom on sentimental grounds almost exclusively, as if he were (to put it much more horribly than I really want to) the floppy-eared runt of the litter. It’s a thought, anyway, finally said, that I’ve lost sleep over many times, and possibly will again.

(How can I record what I’ve just recorded and still be happy? But I am. Unjolly, unmerry, to the marrow, but my afflatus seems to be punctureproof. Recollective of only one other person I’ve known in my life.)

*Just for the sake of making a point I could be embarrassing my students unnecessarily here. Schoolteachers have done it before. Or maybe I’ve just picked out the wrong poem. If it’s true, as I’ve wickedly posed, that “Ozymandias” has left my students vividly unimpressed, perhaps a good deal of the blame for this can be laid to “Ozymandias” itself. Perhaps Mad Shelley wasn’t quite mad enough. Assuredly, in any case, his madness wasn’t a madness of the heart. My girls undoubtedly know that Robert Burns drank and romped to excess, and are probably delighted about it, but I’m also equally sure they also know all about the magnificent mouse his plow turned up. (Is it just possible, I wonder, that those “two vast and trunkless legs of stone” standing in the desert are Percy’s own? Is it conceivable that his life is outliving much of his best poetry? And if so, is it because – Well, I’ll desist. But young poets beware. If you want us to remember your best poems at least as fondly as we do your Racy, Colorful Lives, it might be as well to give us one good field mouse, flushed by the heart, in every stanza.)