On Seymour Glass

[tarigwaemir]

Blair Hall Apts., on the Feast of Ste. Agnes

Back at home. Will be returning to campus on Thursday.

sub_divided posted up some interesting lists on reading_mix, and one of the books, or rather group of books, listed is J.D. Salinger's short stories and novellas about the Glass family. Coincidentally, I picked up my copy of Raise High the Roof Beeam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (bound into one volume) this afternoon after a harrowing bus ride home. (Harrowing because the person sitting next to me had long legs which kept jutting into my seat space, leaving me to plaster myself against the window because I am neurotic aboout my personal space in the company of strangers.)

The two novellas in question are written from the perspective of Buddy (the second-eldest in the family) about his older brother Seymour. (The Glass family stories all trace back to Seymour in the end.) The major realization after reading them this time around: on a fundamental and unquestioned level, I've always believed that one ought to aspire to be Seymour Glass. So what am I (are we) to make of his suicide? This question did not bother me so much before, on previous readings, but it bothers me now.

Some quotes from Seymour's diary in Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters:

I met Muriel at the Biltmore at seven. Two drinks, two drugstore tuna-fish sandwiches, then a movie she wanted to see, something with Greer Garson in it. I looked at her several times in the dark when Greer Garson's son's plane was missing in action. Her mouth was open. Absorbed, worried. The identification with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer tragedy complete. I felt awe and happiness. How I love and need her undiscriminating heart.

Zooey was in dreamy top form. The announcer had them off on the subect of housing developments, and the little Burke girl said she hated houses that all look alike--meaning a long row of identical 'development' houses. Zooey said they were very 'nice.' He said it would be very nice to come home and be in the wrong house. To eat dinner with the wrong people by mistake, sleep in the wrong bed by mistake, and kiss everybody goodbye in the morning thinking they were your own family. He said he even wished everybody in the world looked exactly alike. He said you'd keep thinking everybody you met was your wife or your mother or father, and people would always be throwing their arms around each other wherever they went, and it would look 'very nice.'

The familiarity between Muriel and her mother struck me as being so beautiful when we were all sitting in the living room. They know each other's weaknesses, especially conversational weaknesses, and pick at them with their eyes. Mrs. Fedder's eyes watch over Muriel's conversational taste in 'literature,' and Muriel's eyes watch over her mother's tendency to be windy, verbose. When they argue, there can be no danger of a permanent rift, because they're Mother and Daughter. A terrible and beautiful phenomenon to watch.

My one terrible consolation is that my beloved has an undying, basically undeviating love for the institution of marriage itself. She has a primal urge to play house permanently. Her marital goals are so absurd and touching. She wants to get a very dark sun tan and go up to the desk clerk in some very posh hotel and ask if her Husband has picked up the mail yet. She wants to shop for curtains. She wants to shop for maternity clothes. She wants to get out of her mother's house, whether she knows it or not, and despite her attachment to her. She wants children--good-looking children, with her features, not mine. I have a feeling, too, that she wants her own Christmas-tree ornaments to unbox annually, not her mother's.

A very funny letter came from Buddy today, written just after he came off K.P. I think of him as I write about Muriel. He would despise her for her marriage motives as I've put them down here. But are they despicable? In a way, they must be, and yet they seem to be so human-size and beautiful that I can't think of them even now as I write this without feeling deeply moved.

A person deprived, for life, of any understanding or taste for the main current of poetry that flows through things, all things. She might as well be dead, and yet she goes on living, stopping off at delicatessens, seeing her analyst, consuming a novel every night, putting on her girdle, plotting for Muriel's health and prosperity. I love her. I find her unimaginably brave.

I'll champion indiscrimination till doomsday, on the ground that it leads to health and a kind of very real, enviable happiness. Followed purely, it's the way of the Tao, and undoubtedly the highest way. But for a discriminating man to achieve this, it would mean that he would have to dispossess himself of poetry, go beyond poetry. That is, he couldn't possibly learn or drive himself to like bad poetry in the abstract, let alone equate it with good poetry. He would have to drop poetry altogether.

Well.

Nietzsche speaks scornfully of this love of human weakness: the slave revolt in morality, simply another expression of the will to power. So many of the writers we read in the intellectual history course I took this past semester criticized harshly the dictum "love thy neighbor"...It's so easy for intellectuals to take pride in their strength. No wonder they were so disappointed when their genealogies and archaeologies and criticism only continued to uncover human limitations, our essential slavery to contingency.

But you know, the most beautiful part about love is when you can see a person clearly and yet love them even more.

The only question is, why the suicide? Did Seymour love too much? Did it make him more vulnerable to his own aloneness, smallness, separateness? Or did he not love enough? Is it something that you can only ask of a god?

I suppose I should go read "A Song for Bananafish" again.

Yours &c.

Comments

[ldmoonflower.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Last time I tried to analyze that, it was for my June project, and it went badly. Maybe I'll revisit it when we're both home, and we can talk about it.