Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: an Introduction

This book, a pair of novella-length pieces (the fictitousness of which are just as dubious as their genre) by J.D. Salinger, is, though I am not in the habit of naming favourites, probably close to one of my preferred books of all time. This was the fifth time I've read it. In tribute to Salinger's dedication of the book to [any] "amateur reader still left in the world - or anybody who just reads and runs", and the general soul of the book itself, this post shall be especially lengthy, incoherent, verbose, and almost certainly more meaningful to me than you. How did I come across this book? Well, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a half-intelligent middle-class white male westerner post-1960 will, in the height of his teenage years, read The Catcher in the Rye, and I was no different. Needless to say, it filled me with depressive angst, yet I found Holden Caulfield so compelling a voice that I promptly sought out and read every other book that J.D. Salinger ever wrote (there were only three others, so this only took about a fortnight), and I found that these other books were, though in a similar vein, much more positive, life-affirming, generally excellent. This one most of all.

   Both are written in the voice of Buddy Glass, a quasi-fictional man whose outlooks and present circumstances bear marked similarities to the life of the actual author while he was writing (pronounced resemblances include a deep fascination with oriental philosophy and poetry, a world-weary hunger for sincerity and innocence and a despair in other people's failing to feed that need, and the author's/narrator's living as a recluse in the New York woods), though with familial and background details embellished somewhat so as to provide sufficient texture to write extensively of oneself without betraying many real facts thereof. This background includes the large erratic colourful Glass family, central among which (in these pieces of writing at least) is Buddy's elder brother Seymour, a character whom I am about as much in love with as it is possible for a heterosexual male to be enamoured with a fictional man. Though we do not actually physically meet Seymour in these works, through Buddy we are shown his spirit, we are pulled by the crook of the neck into the intimate incommunicable aspects of their brotherhood and told to drink in every speck of what the words can tell us and still know that those words can never tell us enough. The Glass family may be fictional but these are two of the most arrestingly honest pieces of writing you will ever read; and despite their apparent disparity in topic, style and measure, they complement each other perfectly if you lean into the heart of Buddy's memories of Seymour, as that is what they are both chiefly about. More specifically though? I suppose you deserve rough outlines, given that this blog is about the books I've read and not the non-existent poetic brothers I wish I knew.

   Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters is a novella-length anecdote about Seymour's 1942 wedding to a woman called Muriel Fedder. It being the war and most of Buddy's family being inordinately scattered across various American entertainment-industry professions, he is told by his sister that he must attend, as he is the only immediate Glass relative available to do so. He does so, still hindered by the pleurisy that has left him on medical leave from the Army, reaches New York and sits through a service only to be caught up in the mass irritated confusion of a crowd of well-dressed strangers when it is realised that Seymour has bailed. Buddy and a small motley entourage (including the matron of honour and her husband, an obscure aunt named Helen Silsburn, and a short deaf-mute man in a top-hat who in his indefatigable silly sparkle is one of the story's highlights) are held up in a wedding car by a parade, and he suggests his nearby apartment as a rest-stop. Though mild resentment turns his way upon their learning his blood-relation to Muriel's scarpered almost-spouse, they comply. After reaching the apartment, Buddy finds himself further pressed into defending Seymour's character, and slips away to avoid awkward questions by offering to make drinks, necking accidentally-too-much scotch himself before he does so, and then chancing upon Seymour's diary. Fearing one of the spurned bride's friends finding it, he takes it into the bathroom and reads several of his enigmatic brother's recent entries (these are also a highlight - Seymour's voice is similar to Buddy's in tone but so much wiser, full of good sadness and jilted purity), before, really quite drunk, he finally remembers to make and serve drinks to his guests. The matron of honour has managed to phone ahead to the main party, and discovered that Seymour showed up secretly after all and has eloped with a surprised Muriel. Buddy, past all caring, sees them out and falls inebriatedly asleep on the sofa.

   Seymour: an Introduction is of similar length, but what kind of piece of writing it actually is I find hard to explain. Sort of potted character description (by Buddy of Seymour) though with extreme reluctance; sort of elucidation on what it means to be creative or wise or good; sort of discourse on the connections forged by interpersonal relationships and written words, the value and yet the insufficiency of reading or writing or being or knowing; sort of compilation of anecdotes from the Glass family's unusual past; sort of extended complaint about being an honest writer with a properly attuned aesthetic sense in a culture where literature is increasingly becoming overwhelmed by the simple, the easy, the cheap, the fake; sort of autobiographical truth-mingled-with-untruth (Buddy refers to other stories by J.D. Salinger that "he" has written); sort of sad and sort of joyous; both mournful and delightful in reminiscence and completely committed to lacking full clarity. It weaves and bobs and floats its linguistic form in a way that is conversational, frank, unpretentious; incredibly easy to read and in a way quite unlike anything else by anyone else. It is probably one of the best pieces of writing I know; it is, even on fifth reading, one of the only ones that can so fully flood my mind that no semi-conscious distraction can possibly meander its way into the foreground of my concentration, heart clenched all the while.

   Together these two short diamonds of the English word blur the lines between fact and fiction, between written and spoken, between personhood and characterhood, between memory and story, between anecdote and essay, in ways that would be extraordinarily complex to describe were I a literature student. Fortunately I am not one; the work is thrown lovingly into the arms of those who will take truths and enjoy goodnesses (be they in books or persons) as they come, and from this book I well-received much just so. It is not written to blur lines, that's just a happy fact of what happens when one writes as honestly as Salinger does.

   I will stop myself here. The virtues of this book far surpass what I could encompass in a blog post, much as those of Seymour are untrapped yet glorified by Buddy's efforts. Let me not begin to exorcise angels.
   I love this book immensely, almost too much even to recommend anyone else read it, as the fear that you won't be struck similarly weighs too heavily upon me - but if you do happen to encounter this book, treat it well. Think while you read, not intellectually but interpersonally, this is not a test, it is an introduction. Don't be clever, be friendly - and if that's an attitude you find it hard to muster as a reader, leave this book well alone, as you don't deserve it.

Gilead

This book, a masterful novel by Marilynne Robinson, was recommended to me a couple of years ago by one of the internet's greatest humans in a short video discussing his favourite books. The title lodged itself in my head, and though I never sought it out to buy it, I nipped into a charity shop the day after I finished exams last week, and Ze Frank's approval ghosted me as I browsed the bookshelf so I ended up acquiring it. It's truly an astoundingly beautiful work of fiction, one of those ones which I'd like to reread in a single sitting someday - partly to revisit characters who I have come to know better than many real people, but also just to take it in more fully.

   The novel takes the form of an extended series of notes, written in 1956 by John Ames, an elderly pastor, to his seven-year-old son, whom he wants to leave with a breadth and depth of fatherly wisdom after his impending departure. Everything is perfectly written; as if by John Ames himself, possibly the most real fictional person I've ever known, such is the consistency of voice and character laid out in his pages. The notes range from theological insights, meditations on meanings and truths, anecdotal observations of the son himself and others; Ames's old friend Boughton and his family, Ames's late first wife and child and his unexpected new marriage to a godly younger woman, Ames's father and grandfather who had been pastors there before him and his atheist brother Edward whose influence, quirks and deeds resound throughout, Boughton's son Jack to whom Ames is a second father, and most pervasively the dry tiny Iowa town of Gilead itself. John Ames's relationship with Jack Boughton is the most conflicted stream of development in the book, and through rememberings and newly recorded events we are given moving glimpses into the similarly real life of the narrator's "son".* It is an enormously gripping book, despite the protagonist being very much a good, peaceful man, and not much happening in the present of his writing. However, John Ames's discourses of varying length are unceasingly strewn with nuggets of wisdom, bound by a constancy of faith in truth and goodness, often probing and questioning and hoping and regretting but always from the clear eloquent view of an old man whose entire life is, and always has been, in Gilead, and in God. It leaves you with an astounding awareness of the beauty of grace and forgiveness, and how these are fundamental moral components of any human's life if they are to have peace and similarly any relationship if it is to be good.

   I cannot fully give the impression of his voice, or his life, which together in being so real as fiction comprise the novel. It reminds me of another book I read last year which was similar in depth and tone, but this is far more uplifting, less linear, more meaningful and encouraging, more full of love and humanity and rightness. It's actually kind of made me worried as it's the first fiction I've read in 2015 and it's highly improbable that anything else will match up now. Anyway, whoever you are, read it; keep your heart open and as you meet Jack Boughton, several generations of townsfolk in Gilead, an attic full of unread sermons, and the eye-leakingly personal John Ames himself; you will be engrossed by this novel and it will sadden and gladden you to finish.

* Apparently, this relationship between Jack Boughton and John Ames is explored from the other's perspective in another of Marilynne Robinson's novels, which since having found this out I intend to acquire and read posthaste.

Surprised by Joy

This book, the autobiographical coming-of-spiritual-age story of that darling of 20th century Christianity, Clive Staples Lewis, is so deeply thought-provoking and insightful and wise that I actually have very little to say about it. I acquired it second-hand almost immediately after a stunned encounter with the fact that he was an atheist for much of his life. Surely, I thought, any mind as piercing as his sojourning from godlessness to joy in Christ would be worth reading. It was.

   What can I say? C.S. Lewis has a unique ability to describe combinations of feeling, thought, circumstance and motive to penetrate with alarming clarity the truth of what is going on in a person or an idea - and he is well able to apply this skill to the evolution of his own mindset. His overall journey can broadly be described as tasting "joy" early in life and commencing searches in art, philosophy, science and history to find clues as to where it might come from and how he might reliably attain its source (SPOILER ALERT: God). He explores how his conception of a worldview grows and changes, based on aesthetic taste, satisfactory narratives, his character's reaction to places in which he finds himself and people who challenge him, and (though these are surprisingly not as central as I expected) intellectual truths to which he assented.

   Exploratory reading of a huge assortment of books (especially myth and legend, the grandeur of which grounded his inkling of a more meaningful universal story than atheism provides) and formal education (from the violent aristocracies of Wyvern boarding school to the relentless logic of a tutor referred to as "the Knock") are the two main currents of growth and development in his coming-to-faith. A host of other places and people and circumstances are significant in the tale too, but I would rather not list them nor summarise them. From World War One to an aging father to frequent lengthy trips to and from Northern Ireland to tutoring at Oxford; Lewis's life, even the abridged aspects presented in this book, are far too wondrously individualistically interesting to do justice* even in his own words, let alone mine, which here are far fewer, less well-chosen, and read by almost nobody.

   It's very easy reading, which is just as well, because I was breezing through it during the days surrounding my last exam (I am, as of Thursday, free, thank goodness, at least until tomorrow when lectures start again, but hurrah nonetheless). It's insightful and challenging and I would recommend anyone read it; christians will find it an excellent source of pearls regarding wisdom, truth and goodness and one's acquisition of those things in coming to know God; non-christians will be entertained by his lucid cheery writing style and perhaps provoked to reflection by some of the ideas Lewis encounters in books or observes floating about his own worldview.

* Biographies always irk me slightly in that regard. They have value in that aspects of a life can be accentuated to shed light on a particular purpose or meaning, but the sheer inadequacy of reducing something as marvellous as human experience to words on pages is such that most endeavours to do so come across as superficial and sad. Autobiographies are slightly better, as at least it's the mind describing its own history. Truly though, if you want to make a point about something extrinsic, write non-fiction, and if you want to expose something of the untellable beauty of humankind, figure out fiction or poetry that manages. Sometimes I don't mind though, as with this book. The arc is so well-articulated and the points made so important and embedded in the biographical details themselves, that this is the first proper "autobiography" I've been able to engage with happily.**

** Except the political diaries of Chris Mullin and Tony Benn, but those are more of a direct continuous insight into the working life of leftist politicians, which is cool. Come to think of it, a huge amount of fiction I love is semi-autobiographical, and many essays, journalism pieces, and memoirs that I've enjoyed definitely are, not to mention well-worded anecdotes, or even much of the Bible... there appear to be blurred lines here. I'll have a think and come up with a better definition of what kind of biographical works I dislike next time I read one.