BOOK REVIEW: RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM, CARPENTERS

For millions of devoted readers, J.D. Salinger remains synonymous with The Catcher in the Rye. The author and his New Yorker stories -- most notably "Raise the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour, an Introduction" -- are apt to appear as mere extensions of the modern iconoclassic. Biographers have contested the view that Salinger "is one with his alter-ego, Holden Caulfield". Their efforts may, over time, prove successful in dispelling the author's Holdenesque mystique. Similarly, a close read of Raise High and Seymour may distinguish it, to some degree, from Catcher in the Rye.

Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour, An Introduction compiles two related stories which were originally published in The New Yorker. "Carpenters", the first and probably most appealing installment, is reminiscent of Catcher, in terms of setting and narrative voice.

Salinger has distinguished himself as a perennial New York writer. As the Big Apple set the stage for Holden's odyssey, it is central to this tale of wedding day blues. The protagonist, Buddy Glass, has arrived in town to attend the nuptials of his older brother Seymour. Buddy explains that he was previously stationed "in the post hospital at Fort Benning." The year is 1942 and he has contracted pleurisy, "a keepsake of thirteen weeks' infantry basic training." Like Holden, he has landed in New York just as his story is taking off. The city is Buddy's hometown, as it is Holden's. It functions, moreover, as a seed of discontent in both stories. In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden speaks of how 'it just kills him' to be back in New York.

The forties' slang, coupled with the standard notion of the verb "kill," evoke the dual effects of harm and pleasure. While the return to New York brings pain to both Holden and Buddy, the city remains a source of pleasure and humor as well.

Like Holden, Buddy is a wise-ass with soul. With plaintive humor, he surveys the scene at the bride's house, after the groom has elected not to show.

At twenty minutes past four - or, to put it another, blunter way, an hour and twenty minutes past what seemed to be all reasonable hope - the unmarried bride...was helped out of the building...It was an excessively graphic moment - a tabloid moment - and, as tabloid moments go, it had its full complement of eyewitnesses, for the wedding guests (myself among them) had already begun to pour out of the building, however decorously, in alert, not to say goggle- eyed, droves. Buddy accuses the blazing weather of adding a "lenitive aspect to the spectacle." The June sun, he maintains, "was so hot and so glaring, of such multi-flashbulb-like mediacy, that the image of the bride...tended to blur where blurring mattered most."

Salinger employs the New York steam heat, as a metaphorical oppressor, later in the story. Buddy finds himself stifling in a cab with the bride's friends and family. Their remarks about Seymour are caustic and heated. The Matron of Honor -- "a hefty, outspoken girl of about twenty-four or -five" -- accuses Seymour of being "a latent homosexual and a schizoid personality." Her words inflame Buddy, principally on account of their derogatory nature. Buddy idolizes Seymour, as becomes evident in the second story. Like Holden, however, he is also revolted by the affectations of Seymour's attackers. All have been "thoroughly psychoanalyzed" and, hence, consider themselves qualified to expound on his "condition." In reference to Seymour's years on the It's a Wise Child radio show, the Matron of Honor responds as follows: "I mean you lead an absolutely freakish life when you're a kid, so naturally you never learn to grow up. You never learn to relate to normal people or anything...ask any psychiatrist." This pretension is underscored by superficiality, on the part of the bride's aunt. She has a face "glued together with pancake make-up" and a "tinkling laugh that is, of course, death to the sensitive anecdotist." Unlike the Matron of Honor, she is impressed with the Glass family's show-biz connections. Her pre-occupation with celebrities -- as Holden would say, "all that Hollywood crap" -- is the mark of her general phoniness.

While Holden Caulfield inhabits a world of phoniness and pretension, he is not corrupted. He suffers, but the ingenuousness of his youth remains intact. (Catcher fans will remember this point is made crystal- clear during his encounter with the prostitute.) Buddy in the second story, however, is no longer young. In "Seymour, an Introduction", he relates that he is currently forty years old. Salinger's literary manner, by this time, is every way more affected than in Catcher in the Rye.

...It could be said, and most likely will be, that a late-period poem of Seymour's looks substantially like an English translation of a sort of double haiku, if such a thing existed, and I don't think I'd quibble over that, but I tend to sicken at the strong probability that some tired but indefatigably waggish English Department member in 1970 - not impossibly myself, God help me - will get off a good one about a poem of Seymour's being to the haiku what a double Martini is to the usual Martini.

This degree of pretension would doubtlessly annoy the hell outta Holden, as well as the reader who champions him. No one could accuse Salinger of "selling out" in an effort to solicit a wider audience. It is questionable, however, whether his artistic vision is worth preserving, this time around. Even Buddy seems irked by his contrived prose. Much of Seymour consists of passages that could be interpreted as self- indictments. It seems that Buddy exploits his faults -- his pretension, for example -- in order to depict the converse attributes of his brother Seymour. The latter's simplicity and poetic nature -- mirrored in the haiku, his preferred form of expression -- emerge as the focal points of this perplexing ode. It is perplexing and unsettling for the reason that Seymour never comes across as an appealing character. Although he is characterized, by Buddy, as being "practically a saint," there is something cold and abstract about Seymour which overshadows his whole Introduction.

Perhaps, as suggested by the Matron of Honor, it is impossible to sympathize with a man who'd leave "a poor kid sobbing her eyes out." Seymour's explanation, that he was "much too happy" to be married, does show an appreciation for honesty and truth. However, it is not a satisfying response. It is quite disturbing, moreover, that such an individual could, in this way, be likened to the charismatic Holden. Seymour, then, brings a ready and unpleasant sense of distinction to Raise High.