Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction

This volume collects two interconnected stories, both narrated by Buddy Glass, the second-eldest of seven children in the Glass family of New York City. The Glass children are the offspring of Les and Bessie (Gallagher) Glass, retired vaudeville performers, and all seven appeared at various times under pseudonyms on a nationally broadcast children's radio quiz program called "It's a Wise Child." The stories center on Buddy's eldest brother, Seymour, a brilliant, enigmatic figure whom Buddy regards as a poet and spiritual guide, and who died by suicide in 1948 at the age of thirty-one.

"Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" opens with a prologue set roughly twenty years before the present narration. During a family mumps outbreak, baby Franny, the youngest Glass child, is moved into the bedroom Buddy and Seymour share. When she cries in the night, seventeen-year-old Seymour reads her a Taoist tale about a horse judge named Chiu-fang Kao, who identifies a superlative horse while getting its color and sex completely wrong. The tale's moral is that Kao perceives the spiritual essence of things while ignoring surface details. Buddy reproduces this story as a preface to an account of Seymour's wedding day in 1942, disclosing that since Seymour's death, he has found no one he would trust to "look for horses" in Seymour's place.

In May 1942, the seven Glass children are scattered by the war. Buddy is in a military hospital at Fort Benning, Georgia, with pleurisy when he receives a letter from his sister Boo Boo, the eldest Glass daughter, announcing that Seymour is getting married to a woman named Muriel Fedder. Boo Boo describes the bride as "a zero in my opinion but terrific-looking" (9) and expresses unease about Muriel's mother, who sees a Jungian analyst and wishes Seymour would "relate" to more people. She urges Buddy to attend at all costs.

Buddy secures a three-day pass and takes an overnight train to New York. He reaches the bride's grandmother's brownstone on 63rd Street just before three o'clock and is seated in a stifling, packed room. An hour and twenty minutes pass with no ceremony. At twenty past four, the unmarried bride, head down, flanked by her parents, is escorted out of the building and into a hired car. The groom has not appeared.

Buddy finds himself helping stunned guests into the remaining cars, then jumps into one of the departing vehicles. Its occupants include Helen Silsburn, a fellow guest; the Matron of Honor, an outspoken young woman in pink satin; her husband, a lieutenant; and a tiny elderly man in a top hat who is deaf and mute, later identified as the bride's father's uncle. As the car heads north on Madison Avenue, the Matron of Honor vents her fury. She reveals that Seymour arrived in New York only the night before and kept Muriel talking in a hotel lobby until nearly five in the morning. She reports that Muriel's mother, Mrs. Fedder, whose views are informed by her own psychoanalyst, has declared Seymour a "latent homosexual" and a "schizoid personality."

The Matron of Honor adds that Seymour told Muriel the night before the wedding that he was too happy to get married and asked her to postpone. She also claims Seymour once struck a childhood friend, an actress named Charlotte Mayhew, leaving her needing nine stitches. Buddy's distress becomes visible, and the Matron of Honor identifies him as Seymour's brother. He confirms it.

When a parade halts the car, the group decides to walk. They find the nearby Schrafft's restaurant closed, so Buddy offers his apartment, which Boo Boo has been using while Buddy and Seymour are in the service. Inside, the Matron of Honor continues her attack, echoing Mrs. Fedder's view that Seymour's upbringing as a child radio celebrity left him unfit for normal life. Buddy erupts in defense, declaring that no one has seen Seymour for what he truly is: a poet. He then spots Seymour's canvas bag in the bedroom, with Seymour's diary inside. He takes it to the bathroom, where he finds a message Boo Boo has written in soap on the medicine-cabinet mirror: a quotation from the ancient Greek poet Sappho celebrating the bridegroom, followed by a loving command to Seymour to be happy with Muriel.

The diary entries, written at Fort Monmouth in late 1941 and early 1942, reveal Seymour's deep love for Muriel and his tenderness toward her "undiscriminating heart," his awareness that Mrs. Fedder considers him to have a mental health condition, and his half-promise to see a psychoanalyst. They also reveal his spiritual preoccupations and his conviction that people are "plotting to make me happy." Buddy hides the diary and pours himself a large Scotch, an extraordinary act for a near-nondrinker. Back in the living room, he identifies a photograph on the wall as Charlotte Mayhew, explaining that Seymour threw a stone at her as a child because she looked so beautiful. The Lieutenant observes that Charlotte resembles Muriel.

The Matron of Honor returns from a phone call with decisive news: Seymour was at the Fedders' apartment when the family returned, and Muriel simply packed a bag and eloped with him. The other guests depart. Buddy, now drunk, finds only the old man still there, toasting him jubilantly. He retrieves the diary and reads its final entry, written at a military airfield as Seymour waits to fly to his wedding. Seymour describes feeling as though he is about to be born and reflects on Vedanta teachings about marriage as mutual service. The entry ends: "Someone must sit up with the happy man" (106). Buddy falls asleep. When he wakes, the old man has gone, leaving only an empty glass and a cigar end that Buddy thinks should have been forwarded to Seymour as a wedding gift.

"Seymour: An Introduction," written in 1959, is less a narrative than a sprawling, digressive essay in which Buddy, now forty and teaching at a girls' college near the Canadian border, attempts to describe his dead brother. He announces himself an "ecstatically happy" writer incapable of brevity. He defends the creative artist against psychoanalytic critics, arguing that the true poet is the only real seer on earth, "dazzled to death by his own scruples" (123).

Buddy reveals that he possesses 184 short poems Seymour wrote during his last three years, which he intends to publish. He meditates on the Chinese and Japanese poetry Seymour loved and describes the form Seymour developed: a six-line poem of thirty-four syllables, double the classical haiku's seventeen. He reproduces a long memo Seymour left on Buddy's breakfast plate in 1940, urging Buddy to stop seeking approval and follow his own heart. Seymour tells Buddy that when he dies, he will be asked only: "Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out?" (187).

Buddy then attempts a physical description: Seymour's wiry black hair, long Buddha-like earlobes, large dark eyes, and great drooping nose. He describes Seymour's perpetually ill-fitting clothes and his love of sports and games at which he was either spectacular or atrocious. A pivotal memory surfaces: during a childhood game of curb marbles, ten-year-old Seymour calls to eight-year-old Buddy, "Could you try not aiming so much?" (236). Buddy connects this advice to the spirit of Zen archery, in which the master forbids the student to aim at the target. The piece ends with Buddy preparing for his morning class, declaring there is no place more important than his classroom, and invoking Seymour's teaching that "all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next" (248).