mour. I said they couldn’t see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but he had a very Seymour look on his face, and so I did it. He never did tell me who the Fat Lady was, but I shined my shoes for the Fat Lady every time I ever went on the air again—all the years you and I were on the program together, if you remember. I don’t think I missed more than just a couple of times. This terribly clear, clear picture of the Fat Lady formed in my mind. I had her sitting on this porch all day, swatting flies, with her radio going full-blast from morning till night. I figured the heat was terrible, and she probably had cancer, and—I don’t know. Anyway, it seemed goddam clear why Seymour wanted me to shine my shoes when I went on the air. It made sense.”
Franny was standing. She had taken her hand away from her face to hold the phone with two hands. “He told me, too,” she said into the phone. “He told me to be funny for the Fat Lady, once.” She released one hand from the phone and placed it, very briefly, on the crown of her head, then went back to holding the phone with both hands. “I didn’t ever picture her on a porch, but with very—you know—very thick legs, very veiny. I had her in an awful wicker chair. She had cancer, too, though, and she had the radio going full-blast all day! Mine did, too!”
“Yes. Yes. Yes. All right. Let me tell you something now, buddy. . . . Are you listening?”
Franny, looking extremely tense, nodded.
“I don’t care where an actor acts. It can be in summer stock, it can be over a radio, it can be over television, it can be in a goddam Broadway theatre, complete with the most fashionable, most well-fed, most sunburned-looking audience you can imagine. But I’ll tell you a terrible secret—Are you listening to me? There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. That includes your Professor Tupper, buddy. And all his goddam cousins by the dozens. There isn’t anyone anywhere that isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. Don’t you know that? Don’t you know that goddam secret yet? And don’t you know—listen to me, now—don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is? . . . Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It’s Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.”
For joy, apparently, it was all Franny could do to hold the phone, even with both hands.
For a fullish half minute or so, there were no other words, no further speech. Then: “I can’t talk any more, buddy.” The sound of a phone being replaced in its catch followed.
Franny took in her breath slightly but continued to hold the phone to her ear. A dial tone, of course, followed the formal break in the connection. She appeared to find it extraordinarily beautiful to listen to, rather as if it were the best possible substitute for the primordial silence itself. But she seemed to know, too, when to stop listening to it, as if all of what little or much wisdom there is in the world were suddenly hers. When she had replaced the phone, she seemed to know just what to do next, too. She cleared away the smoking things, then drew back the cotton bedspread from the bed she had been sitting on, took off her slippers, and got into the bed. For some minutes, before she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, she just lay quiet, smiling at the ceiling.
Seymour
An Introduction
The actors by their presence always convince me, to my horror, that most of what I’ve written about them until now is false. It is false because I write about them with steadfast love (even now, while I write it down, this, too, becomes false) but varying ability, and this varying ability does not hit off the real actors loudly and correctly but loses itself dully in this love that will never be satisfied with the ability and therefore thinks it is protecting the actors by preventing this ability from exercising itself.
It is (to describe it figuratively) as if an author were to make a slip of the pen, and as if this clerical error became conscious of being such. Perhaps this was no error but in a far higher sense was an essential part of the whole exposition. It is, then, as if this clerical error were to revolt against the author, out of hatred for him, were to forbid him to correct it, and were to say, “No, I will not be erased, I will stand as a witness against thee, that thou art a very poor writer.”
At times, frankly, I find it pretty slim pickings, but at the age of forty I look on my old fair-weather friend the general reader as my last deeply contemporary confidant, and I was rather strenuously requested, long before I was out of my teens, by at once the most exciting and the least fundamentally bumptious public craftsman I’ve ever personally known, to try to keep a steady and sober regard for the amenities of such a relationship, be it ever so peculiar or terrible; in my case, he saw it coming on from the first. The question is, how can a writer observe the amenities if he has no idea what his general reader is like? The reverse is common enough, most certainly, but just when is the author of a story ever asked what he thinks the reader is like? Very luckily, to push on and make my point here—and I don’t think it’s the kind of point that will survive an interminable buildup—I found out a good many years back practically all I need to know about my general reader; that is to say, you, I’m afraid. You’ll deny it up and down, I fear, but I’m really in no position to take your word for it. You’re a great bird-lover. Much like a man in a short story called “Skule Skerry,” by John Buchan, which Arnold L. Sugarman, Jr., once pressed me to read during a very poorly supervised study-hall period, you’re someone who took up birds in the first place because they fired your imagination; they fascinated you because “they seemed of all created beings the nearest to pure spirit—those little creatures with a normal temperature of 125°.” Probably just like this John Buchan man, you thought many thrilling related thoughts; you reminded yourself, I don’t doubt, that: “The gold crest, with a stomach no bigger than a bean, flies across the North Sea! The curlew sandpiper, which breeds so far north that only about three people have ever seen its nest, goes to Tasmania for its holidays!” It would be too much of a good thing to hope, of course, that my very own general reader should turn out to be one of the three people who have actually seen the curlew sandpiper’s nest, but I feel, at least, that I know him—you—quite well enough to guess what kind of well-meant gesture might be welcomed from me right now. In this entre-nous spirit, then, old confidant, before we join the others, the grounded everywhere, including, I’m sure, the middle-aged hot-rodders who insist on zooming us to the moon, the Dharma Bums, the makers of cigarette filters for thinking men, the Beat and the Sloppy and the Petulant, the chosen cultists, all the lofty experts who know so well what we should or shouldn’t do with our poor little sex organs, all the bearded, proud, unlettered young men and unskilled guitarists and Zen-killers and incorporated aesthetic Teddy boys who look down their thoroughly unenlightened noses at this splendid planet where (please don’t shut me up) Kilroy, Christ, and Shakespeare all stopped—before we join these others, I privately say to you, old friend (unto you, really, I’m afraid), please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: ( ( ( ( ) ) ) ). I suppose, most unflorally, I truly mean them to be taken, first off, as bowlegged—buckle-legged—omens of my state of mind and body at this writing. Professionally speaking, which is the only way I’ve ever really enjoyed speaking up (and, just to ingratiate myself still less, I speak nine languages, incessantly, four of them stone-dead)—professionally speaking, I repeat I’m an ecstatically happy man. I’ve never been before. Oh, once, perhaps, when I was fourteen and wrote a story in which all the characters had Heidelberg dueling scars—the hero, the villain, the heroine, her old nanny, all the horses and dogs. I was reasonably happy then, you might say, but not ecstatically, not like this. To the point: I happen to know, possibly none better, that an ecstatically happy writing person is often a totally draining type to have around. Of course, the poets in this state are by far the most “difficult,” but even the prose writer similarly seized hasn’t any real choice of behavior in decent company; divine or not, a seizure’s a seizure. And while I think an ecstatically happy prose writer can
do many good things on the printed page—the best things, I’m frankly hoping—it’s also true, and infinitely more self-evident, I suspect, that he can’t be moderate or temperate or brief; he loses very nearly all his short paragraphs. He can’t be detached—or only very rarely and suspiciously, on down-waves. In the wake of anything as large and consuming as happiness, he necessarily forfeits the much smaller but, for a writer, always rather exquisite pleasure of appearing on the page serenely sitting on a fence. Worst of all, I think, he’s no longer in a position to look after the reader’s most immediate want; namely, to see the author get the hell on with his story. Hence, in part, that ominous offering of parentheses a few sentences back. I’m aware that a good many perfectly intelligent people can’t stand parenthetical comments while a story’s purportedly being told. (We’re advised of these things by mail—mostly, granted, by thesis preparers with very natural, oaty urges to write us under the table in their off-campus time. But we read, and usually we believe; good, bad, or indifferent, any string of English words holds our attention as if it came from Prospero himself.) I’m here to advise that not only will my asides run rampant from this point on (I’m not sure, in fact, that there won’t be a footnote or two) but I fully intend, from time to time, to jump up personally on the reader’s back when I see something off the beaten plot line that looks exciting or interesting and worth steering toward. Speed, here, God save my American hide, means nothing whatever to me. There are, however, readers who seriously require only the most restrained, most classical, and possibly deftest method of having their attention drawn, and I suggest—as honestly as a writer can suggest this sort of thing—that they leave now, while, I can imagine, the leaving’s good and easy. I’ll probably continue to point out available exits as we move along, but I’m not sure I’ll pretend to put my heart into it again.
I’d like to start out with some rather unstinting words about those two opening quotations. “The actors by their presence . . . ” is from Kafka. The second one—“It is (to describe it figuratively) as if an author were to make a slip of the pen . . .”—is from Kierkegaard (and it’s all I can do to keep from unattractively rubbing my hands together at the thought that this particular Kierkegaard passage may catch a few Existentialists and somewhat overpublished French mandarins with their—well, by some little surprise).2 I don’t really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it’s always nice, I’ll grant you, if he has one. In this case, it seems to me that those two passages, especially in contiguity, are wonderfully representative of the best, in a sense, not only of Kafka and Kierkegaard but of all the four dead men, the four variously notorious Sick Men or underadjusted bachelors (probably only van Gogh, of the four, will be excused from making a guest appearance in these pages), whom I most often run to—occasionally in real distress—when I want any perfectly credible information about modern artistic processes. By and large, I’ve reproduced the two passages to try to suggest very plainly how I think I stand in regard to the overall mass of data I hope to assemble here—a thing that in some quarters, I don’t a bit mind saying, an author can’t be too explicit about, or any too early. In part, though, it would be rewarding for me to think, to dream, that those two short quotations may quite conceivably serve as a sort of spot convenience to the comparatively new breed of literary critics—the many workers (soldiers, I suppose you could say) who put in long hours, often with waning hopes of distinction, in our busy neo-Freudian Arts and Letters clinics. Especially, perhaps, those still very young students and greener clinicians, themselves implicitly bursting with good mental health, themselves (undeniably, I think) free of any inherent morbid attrait to beauty, who one day intend to specialize in aesthetic pathology. (Admittedly, this is a subject I’ve felt flinty about since I was eleven years old and watched the artist and Sick Man I’ve loved most in this world, then still in knee pants, being examined by a reputable group of professional Freudians for six hours and forty-five minutes. In my not altogether reliable opinion, they stopped just short of taking a brain smear from him, and I’ve had an idea for years that only the latish hour—2 a.m.—dissuaded them from doing exactly that. Flinty, then, I do indeed mean to sound here. Churlish, no. I can perceive, though, that it’s a very thin line, or plank, but I’d like to try to walk it for a minute more; ready or not, I’ve waited a good many years to collect these sentiments and get them off.) A great variety of rumors, of course, run high and wide about the extraordinarily, the sensationally creative artist—and I’m alluding exclusively, here, to painters and poets and full Dichter. One of these rumors—and by far, to me, the most exhilarating of the lot—is that he has never, even in the pre-psychoanalytical dark ages, deeply venerated his professional critics, and has, in fact, usually lumped them, in his generally unsound views of society, with the echt publishers and art dealers and the other, perhaps enviably prosperous camp followers of the arts, who, he’s just scarcely said to concede, would prefer different, possibly cleaner work if they could get it. But what, at least in modern times, I think one most recurrently hears about the curiously-productive-though-ailing poet or painter is that he is invariably a kind of super-size but unmistakably “classical” neurotic, an aberrant who only occasionally, and never deeply, wishes to surrender his aberration; or, in English, a Sick Man who not at all seldom, though he’s reported to childishly deny it, gives out terrible cries of pain, as if he would wholeheartedly let go both his art and his soul to experience what passes in other people for wellness, and yet (the rumor continues) when his unsalutary-looking little room is broken into and someone—not infrequently, at that, someone who actually loves him—passionately asks him where the pain is, he either declines or seems unable to discuss it at any constructive clinical length, and in the morning, when even great poets and painters presumably feel a bit more chipper than usual, he looks more perversely determined than ever to see his sickness run its course, as though by the light of another, presumably working day he had remembered that all men, the healthy ones included, eventually die, and usually with a certain amount of bad grace, but that he, lucky man, is at least being done in by the most stimulating companion, disease or no, he has ever known. On the whole, treacherous as it may sound, coming from me, with just such a dead artist in the immediate family as I’ve been alluding to throughout this near-polemic, I don’t see how one can rationally deduce that this last general rumor (and mouthful) isn’t based on a fairish amount of substantial fact. While my distinguished relative lived, I watched him—almost literally, I sometimes think—like a hawk. By every logical definition, he was an unhealthy specimen, he did on his worst nights and late afternoons give out not only cries of pain but cries for help, and when nominal help arrived, he did decline to say in perfectly intelligible language where it hurt. Even so, I do openly cavil with the declared experts in these matters—the scholars, the biographers, and especially the current ruling intellectual aristocracy educated in one or another of the big public psychoanalytical schools—and I cavil with them most acrimoniously over this: they don’t listen properly to cries of pain when they come. They can’t, of course. They’re a peerage of tin ears. With such faulty equipment, with those ears, how can anyone possibly trace the pain, by sound and quality alone, back to its source? With such wretched hearing equipment, the best, I think, that can be detected, and perhaps verified, is a few stray, thin overtones—hardly even counterpoint—coming from a troubled childhood or a disordered libido. But where does by far the bulk, the whole ambulance load, of pain really come from? Where must it come from? Isn’t the true poet or painter a seer? Isn’t he, actually, the only seer we have on earth? Most apparently not the scientist, most emphatically not the psychiatrist. (Surely the one and only great poet the psychoanalysts have had was Freud himself; he had a little ear trouble of his own, no doubt, but who in his right mind could deny that an epic poet was at work?) Forgive me; I’m nearly finished with this. In a seer, what part of the human anatomy would necessarily be required to take the most abuse? The eyes, certainly. Please, dear general reader, as a last indulgence (if you’re still here), re-read those two short passages from Kafka and Kierkegaard I started out with. Isn’t it clear? Don’t those cries come straight from the eyes? However contradictory the coroner’s report—whether he pronounces Consumption or Loneliness or Suicide to be the cause of death—isn’t it plain how the true artist-seer actually dies? I say (and everything that follows in these pages all too possibly stands or falls on my being at least nearly right)—I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience.
My credo is stated. I sit back. I sigh—happily, I’m afraid. I light a Murad, and go on, I hope to God, to other things.
Something, now—and briskly, if I can—about that subtitle, “An Introduction,” up near the top of the marquee. My central character here, at least in those lucid intervals when I can prevail upon myself to sit down and be reasonably quiet, will be my late, eldest brother, Seymour Glass, who (and I think I’d prefer to say this in one obituary-like sentence), in 1948, at the age of thirty-one, while vacationing down in Florida with his wife, committed suicide. He was a great many things to a great many people while he lived, and virtually all things to his brothers and sisters in our somewhat outsized family. Surely he was all real things to us: our blue-striped unicorn, our double-lensed burning glass, our consultant genius, our portable conscience, our supercargo, and our one full poet, and, inevitably, I think, since not only was reticence never his strongest suit but he spent nearly seven years of his childhood as star turn on a children’s coast-to-coast radio quiz program, so there wasn’t much that didn’t eventually get aired, one way or another—ine
vitably, I think, he was also our rather notorious “mystic” and “unbalanced type.” And since I’m obviously going whole hog right here at the outset, I’ll further enunciate—if one can enunciate and shout at the same time—that, with or without a suicide plot in his head, he was the only person I’ve ever habitually consorted with, banged around with, who more frequently than not tallied with the classical conception, as I saw it, of a mukta, a ringding enlightened man, a God-knower. At any rate, his character lends itself to no legitimate sort of narrative compactness that I know of, and I can’t conceive of anyone, least of all myself, trying to write him off in one shot or in one fairly simple series of sittings, whether arranged by the month or the year. I come to the point: My original plans for this general space were to write a short story about Seymour and to call it “SEYMOUR ONE," with the big “ONE” serving as a built-in convenience to me, Buddy Glass, even more than to the reader—a helpful, flashy reminder that other stories (a Seymour Two, Three, and possibly Four) would logically have to follow. Those plans no longer exist. Or, if they do—and I suspect that this is much more likely how things stand—they’ve gone underground, with an understanding, perhaps, that I’ll rap three times when I’m ready. But on this occasion I’m anything but a short-story writer where my brother is concerned. What I am, I think, is a thesaurus of undetached prefatory remarks about him. I believe I essentially remain what I’ve almost always been—a narrator, but one with extremely pressing personal needs. I want to introduce, I want to describe, I want to distribute mementos, amulets, I want to break out my wallet and pass around snapshots, I want to follow my nose. In this mood, I don’t dare go anywhere near the short-story form. It eats up fat little undetached writers like me whole.
But I have many, many unfelicitous-sounding things to tell you. For instance, I’m saying, cataloguing, so much so early about my brother. I feel you must have noticed. You may also have noticed—I know it hasn’t entirely escaped my attention—that everything I’ve so far said about Seymour (and about his blood type in general, as it were) has been graphically panegyric. It gives me pause, all right. Granted that I haven’t come to bury but to exhume and, most likely, to praise, I nonetheless suspect that the honor of cool, dispassionate narrators everywhere is remotely at stake here. Had Seymour no grievous faults, no vices, no meannesses, that can be listed, at least in a hurry? What was he, anyway? A saint?
Thankfully, it isn’t my responsibility to answer that one. (Oh, lucky day!) Let me change the subject and say, without hesitation, he had a Heinzlike variety of personal characteristics that threatened, at different chronological intervals of sensitivity or thin-skinnedness, to drive every minor in the family to the bottle. In the first place, there is very evidently one rather terrible hallmark common to all persons who look for God, and apparently with enormous success, in the queerest imaginable places—e.g. in radio announcers, in newspapers, in taxicabs with crooked meters, literally everywhere. (My brother, for the record, had a distracting habit, most of his adult life, of investigating loaded ashtrays with his index finger, clearing all the cigarette ends to the sides—smiling from ear to ear as he did it—as if he expected to see Christ himself curled up cherubically in the middle, and he never looked disappointed.) The hallmark, then, of the advanced religious, nonsectarian or any other (and I graciously include in the definition of an “advanced religious,” odious though the phrase is, all Christians on the great Vivekananda’s terms; i.e. “See Christ, then you are a Christian; all else is talk”)—the hallmark most commonly identifying this person is that he very frequently behaves like a fool, even an imbecile. It’s a trial to a family that has a real grandee in it if he can’t always be relied on to behave like one. I’m now about to quit cataloguing, but I can’t do so quite at this point without citing what I think was his most trying personal characteristic. It had to do with his speech habits—or, rather, the anomalous range of his speech habits. Vocally, he was either as brief as a gatekeeper at a Trappist monastery—sometimes for days, weeks at a stretch—or he was a non-stop talker. When he was wound up (and, to state the matter exactly, almost everybody was forever winding him up, and then, of course, quickly sitting in close, the better to pick his brains)—when he was wound up, it was nothing for him to talk for hours at a time, occasionally with no redeeming awareness whatever that one or two or ten other people were in the room. He was an inspired non-stop talker, I’m firmly suggesting, but, to put it very mildly, even the most sublimely accomplished non-stop talker can’t consistently please. And I say that, I should add, less from any repellent splendid impulse to play “fair” with my invisible reader than—much worse, I suppose—because I believe that this particular non-stop talker can take almost any amount of knocking. Certainly from me, at any rate. I’m in the unique position of being able to call my brother, straight out, a non-stop talker—which is a pretty vile thing to call somebody, I think—and yet at the same time to sit back, rather, I’m afraid, like a type with both sleeves full of aces, and effortlessly remember a whole legion of mitigating factors (and “mitigating” is hardly the word for it). I can condense them all into one: By the time Seymour was in mid-adolescence—sixteen, seventeen—he not only had learned to control his native vernacular, his many, many less than elite New York speech mannerisms, but had by then already come into his own true, bull’s-eye, poet’s vocabulary. His non-stop talks, his monologues, his near-harangues then came as close to pleasing from start to finish—for a good many of as, anyway—as, say, the bulk of Beethoven’s output after he ceased being encumbered with a sense of hearing, and maybe I’m thinking especially, though it seems a trifle picky, of the B-flat-major and C-sharp-minor quartets. Still, we were a family of seven children, originally. And, as it happened, none of us was in the least tongue-tied. It’s an exceedingly weighty matter when six naturally profuse verbalizers and expounders have an undefeatable champion talker in the house. True, he never sought the title. And he passionately yearned to see one or another of us outpoint or simply outlast him in a conversation or an argument. A small matter which, of course, though he himself never saw it—he had his blank spots, like everybody else—bothered some of us all the more. The fact remains that the title was always his, and though I think he would have given almost anything on earth to retire it—this is the weightiest matter of all, surely, and I’m not going to be able to explore it deeply for another few years—he never did find a completely graceful way of doing it.
At this point, it doesn’t seem to me merely chummy to mention that I’ve written about my brother before. For that matter, with a little good-humored cajoling I might conceivably admit that there’s seldom been a time when I haven’t written about him, and if, presumably at gunpoint, I had to sit down tomorrow and write a story about a dinosaur, I don’t doubt that I’d inadvertently give the big chap one or two small mannerisms reminiscent of Seymour—a singularly endearing way of biting off the top of a hemlock, say, or of wagging his thirty-foot tail. Some people—not close friends—have asked me whether a lot of Seymour didn’t go into the young leading character of the one novel I’ve published. Actually, most of these people haven’t asked me; they’ve told me. To protest this at all, I’ve found, makes me break out in hives, but I will say that no one who knew my brother has asked me or told me anything of the kind—for which I’m grateful, and, in a way, more than a bit impressed, since a good many of my main characters speak Manhattanese fluently and idiomatically, have a rather common flair for rushing in where most damned fools fear to tread, and are, by and large, pursued by an Entity that I’d much prefer to identify, very roughly, as the Old Man of the Mountain. But what I can and should state is that I’ve written and published two short stories that were supposed to be directly about Seymour. The more recent of the two, published in 1955, was a highly inclusive recount of his wedding day in 1942. The details were served up with a fullness possibly just short of presenting the reader with a sherbet mold of each and every wedding guest’s footprint to t
ake home as a souvenir, but Seymour himself—the main course—didn’t actually put in a physical appearance anywhere. On the other hand, in the earlier, much shorter story I did, back in the late forties, he not only appeared in the flesh but walked, talked, went for a dip in the ocean, and fired a bullet through his brain in the last paragraph. However, several members of my immediate, if somewhat far-flung, family, who regularly pick over my published prose for small technical errors, have gently pointed out to me (much too damned gently, since they usually come down on me like grammarians) that the young man, the “Seymour,” who did the walking and talking in that early story, not to mention the shooting, was not Seymour at all but, oddly, someone with a striking resemblance to—alley oop, I’m afraid—myself. Which is true, I think, or true enough to make me feel a craftsman’s ping of reproof. And while there’s no good excuse for that kind of faux pas, I can’t forbear to mention that that particular story was written just a couple of months after Seymour’s death, and not too very long after I myself, like both the “Seymour” in the story and the Seymour in Real Life, had returned from the European Theater of Operations. I was using a very poorly rehabilitated, not to say unbalanced, German typewriter at the time.
Oh, this happiness is strong stuff. It’s marvellously liberating. I’m free, I feel, to tell you exactly what you must be longing to hear now. That is, if, as I know you do, you love best in this world those little beings of pure spirit with a normal temperature of 125°, then it naturally follows that the creature you love next best is the person—the God-lover or God-hater (almost never, apparently, anything in between), the saint or profligate, moralist or complete immoralist—who can write a poem that is a poem. Among human beings, he’s the curlew sandpiper, and I hasten to tell you what little I presume to know about his flights, his heat, his incredible heart.
Since early in 1948, I’ve been sitting—my family thinks literally—on a loose-leaf notebook inhabited by a hundred and eighty-four short poems that my brother wrote during the last three years of his life, both in and out of the Army, but mostly in, well in. I intend very soon now—it’s just a matter of days or weeks, I tell myself—to stand aside from about a hundred and fifty of the poems and let the first willing publisher who owns a pressed morning suit and a fairly clean pair of gray gloves bear them away, right off to his shady presses, where they’ll very likely be constrained in a two-tone dust jacket, complete with a back flap featuring a few curiously damning remarks of endorsement, as solicited and acquired from those “name” poets and writers who have no compunction about commenting in public on their fellow-artists’ works (customarily reserving their more deeply quarter-hearted commendations for their friends, suspected inferiors, foreigners, fly-by-night oddities, and toilers in another field), then on to the Sunday literary sections, where, if there’s room, if the critique of the big, new, definitive biography of Grover Cleveland doesn’t run too long, they’ll be tersely introduced to the poetry-loving public by one of the little band of regulars, moderate-salaried pedants, and income-supplementers who can be trusted to review new books of poetry not necessarily either wisely or passionately but tersely. (I don’t think I’ll strike quite this sour note again. But if I do, I’ll try to be equally transparent about it.) Now, considering that I’ve been sitting on the poems for over ten years, it might be well—refreshingly normal or un-perverse, at least—if I gave what I think are the two main reasons I’ve elected to get up, rise, from them. And I’d prefer to pack both reasons into the same paragraph, duffel bag-style, partly because I’d like them to stick close to each other, partly because I have a perhaps impetuous notion that I won’t be needing them again on the voyage.
First, there is the matter of family pressure. It’s doubtless a very common thing, if not much more common than I’d care to hear about, but I have four living, lettered, rather incontinently articulate younger brothers and sisters, of part Jewish, part-Irish, and conceivably part-Minotaur extraction—two boys, one, Waker, an ex-roving Carthusian monk-reporter, now impounded, and the other, Zooey, a no less vigorously called and chosen nonsectarian actor, aged, respectively, thirty-six and twenty-nine; and two girls, one a budding young actress, Franny, and the other, Boo Boo, a bouncy, solvent Westchester matron, aged, respectively, twenty-five and thirty-eight. Off and on since 1949, from seminary and boarding school, from the obstetrical floor of Woman’s Hospital and the exchange-students’ writing room below the waterline on the Queen Elizabeth, between, as it were, exams and dress rehearsals and matins and two-o’clock feedings, all four of these dignitaries have been laying down, through the mail, a series of unspecified but discernibly black ultimatums of what will happen to me unless I dosomething, soon, about Seymour’s Poems. It should be noted, perhaps immediately, that besides being a writing man, I’m a part-time English Department member at a girls’ college in upper New York, not far from the Canadian border. I live alone (but catless, I’d like everybody to know) in a totally modest, not to say cringing, little house, set deep in the woods and on the more inaccessible side of a mountain. Not counting students, faculty, and middle-aged waitresses, I see very few people during the working week, or year. I belong, in short, to a species of literary shut-in that, I don’t doubt, can be coerced or bullied pretty successfully by mail. Everybody, anyhow, has a saturation point, and I can no longer open my post-office box without excessive trepidation at the prospect of finding, nestled among the farm-equipment circulars and the bank statements, a long, chatty, threatening postcard from one of my brothers or sisters, two of whom, it seems peculiarly worth adding, use ball-point pens. My second main reason for deciding to let go of the poems, get them published, is, in a way, much less emotional, really, than physical. (And it leads, I’m proud as a peacock to say, straight to the swamps of rhetoric.) The effects of radioactive particles on the human body, so topical in 1959, are nothing new to old poetry-lovers. Used with moderation, a first-class verse is an excellent and usually fast-working form of heat therapy. Once, in the Army, when I had what might be termed ambulatory pleurisy for something over three months, my first real relief carne only when I had placed a perfectly innocent-looking Blake lyric in my shirt pocket and worn it like a poultice for a day or so. Extremes, though, are always risky and ordinarily downright baneful, and the dangers of prolonged contact with any poetry that seems to exceed what we most familiarly know of the first-class are formidable. In any case, I’d be relieved to see my brother’s poems moved out of this general small area, at least for a while. I feel mildly but extensively burned. And on what seems to me the soundest basis: During much of his adolescence, and all his adult life, Seymour was drawn, first, to Chinese poetry, and then, as deeply, to Japanese poetry, and to both in ways that he was drawn to no other poetry in the world.3 I have no quick way of knowing, of course, how familiar or unfamiliar my dear, if victimized, general reader is with Chinese or Japanese poetry. Considering, however, that even a short discussion of it may possibly shed a good deal of light on my brother’s nature, I don’t think this is the time for me to go all reticent and forbearing. At their most effective, I believe, Chinese and Japanese classical verses are intelligible utterances that please or enlighten or enlarge the invited eavesdropper to within an inch of his life. They may be, and often are, fine for the ear particularly, but for the most part I’d say that unless a Chinese or Japanese poet’s real forte is knowing a good persimmon or a good crab or a good mosquito bite on a good arm when he sees one, then no matter how long or unusual or fascinating his semantic or intellectual intestines may be, or how beguiling they sound when twanged, no one in the Mysterious East speaks seriously of him as a poet, if at all. My inner, incessant elation, which I think I’ve rightly, if repeatedly, called happiness, is threatening, I’m aware, to turn this whole composition into a fool’s soliloquy. I think, though, that even I haven’t the gall to try to say what makes the Chinese or Japanese poet the marvel and the joy he is. Something, however (wouldn’t you know?), does happen to come to mind. (I don’t imagine it’s precisely the thing I’m looking for, but I can’t simply throw it out.) Once, a terrible number of years ago, when Seymour and I were eight and six, our parents gave a party for nearly sixty people in our three and a half rooms at the old Hotel Alamac, in New York. They were officially retiring from vaudeville, and it was an affecting as well as a celebrative occasion. We two were allowed to get out of bed around eleven or so, and come in and have a look. We had more than a look. By request, and with no objections whatever on our part, we danced, we sang, first singly, then together, as children of our station often do. But mostly we just stayed up and watched. Toward two in the morning, when the leavetakings began, Seymour begged Bessie—our mother—to let him bring the leavers their coats, which were hung, draped, tossed, piled all over the small apartment, even on the foot of our sleeping younger sister’s bed. He and I knew about a dozen of the guests intimately, ten or so more by sight or reputation, and the rest not at all or hardly. We had been in bed, I should add, when everyone arrived. But from watching the guests for some three hours, from grinning at them, from, I think, loving them, Seymour—without asking any questions first—brought very nearly all the guests, one or two at a time, and without any mistakes, their own true coats, and all the men involved their hats. (The women’s hats he had some trouble with.) Now, I don’t necessarily suggest that this kind of feat is typical of the Chinese or Japanese poet, and certainly I don’t mean to imply that it makes him what he is. But I do think, that if a Chinese or Japanese verse composer doesn’t know whose coat is whose, on sight, his poetry stands a remarkably slim chance of ever ripening. And eight, I’d guess, is very nearly the outside age limit for mastering this small feat.
(No, no, I can’t stop now. It seems to me, in my Condition, that I’m no longer merely asserting my brother’s position
as a poet; I feel I’m removing, at least for a minute or two, all the detonators from all the bombs in this bloody world—a very tiny, purely temporary public courtesy, no doubt, but mine own.) It’s generally agreed that Chinese and Japanese poets like simple subjects best, and I’d feel more oafish than usual if I tried to refute that, but “simple” happens to be a word I personally hate like poison, since—where I come from, anyway—it’s customarily applied to the unconscionably brief, the timesaving in general, the trivial, the bald, and the abridged. My personal phobias aside, I don’t really believe there is a word, in any language—thank God—to describe the Chinese or Japanese poet’s choice of material. I wonder who can find a word for this kind of thing: A proud, pompous Cabinet member, walking in his courtyard and reliving a particularly devastating speech he made that morning in the Emperor’s presence, steps, with regret, on a pen-and-ink sketch someone has lost or discarded. (Woe is me, there’s a prose writer in our midst; I have to use italics where the Oriental poet wouldn’t.) The great Issa will joyfully advise us that there’s a fat-faced peony in the garden. (No more, no less. Whether we go to see his fat-faced peony for ourselves is another matter; unlike certain prose writers and Western poetasters, whom I’m in no position to name off, he doesn’t police us.) The very mention of Issa’s name convinces me that the true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it. A fat-faced peony will not show itself to anyone but Issa—not to Buson, not to Shiki, not even to Basho. With certain prosaic modifications, the same rule holds for the proud and pompous Cabinet member. He will not dare to step with divinely human regret on a piece of sketch paper till the great commoner, bastard, and poet Lao Ti-kao has arrived on the scene to watch. The miracle of Chinese and Japanese verse is that one pure poet’s voice is absolutely the same as another’s and at once absolutely distinctive and different. Tang-li divulges, when he is ninety-three and is praised to his face for his wisdom and charity, that his piles are killing him. For another, a last, example, Ko-huang observes, with tears coursing down his face, that his late master had extremely bad table manners. (There is a risk, always, of being a trifle too beastly to the West. A line exists in Kafka’s Diaries—one of many of his, really—that could easily usher in the Chinese New Year: “The young girl who only because she was walking arm in arm with her sweetheart looked quietly around.”) As for my brother Seymour—ah, well, my brother Seymour. For this Semitic-Celtic Oriental I need a spanking-new paragraph.
Unofficially, Seymour wrote and talked Chinese and Japanese poetry all the thirty-one years he stopped with us, but I’d say that he made a formal beginning at composing it one morning when he was eleven, in the first-floor reading room of a public library on upper Broadway, near our house. It was a Saturday, no school, nothing more pressing ahead of us than lunch, and we were having a fine time idly swimming around or treading water between the stacks, occasionally doing a little serious fishing for new authors, when he suddenly signalled to me to come over and see what he had. He’d caught himself a whole mess of translated verses by P’ang, the wonder of the eleventh century. But fishing, as we know, in libraries or anywhere else, is a tricky business, with never a certainty of who’s going to catch whom. (The hazards of fishing in general were themselves a favorite subject of Seymour’s. Our younger brother Walt was a great bent-pin fisherman as a small boy, and for his ninth or tenth birthday he received a poem from Seymour—one of the major delights of his life, I believe—about a little rich boy who catches a lafayette in the Hudson River, experiences a fierce pain in his own lower lip on reeling him in, then dismisses the matter from his mind, only to discover when he is home and the still-alive fish has been given the run of the bathtub that he, the fish, is wearing a blue serge cap with the same school insignia over the peak as the boy’s own; the boy finds his own name-tape sewn inside the tiny wet cap.) Permanently, from that morning on, Seymour was hooked. By the time he was fourteen, one or two of us in the family were fairly regularly going through his jackets and windbreakers for anything good he might have jotted down during a slow gym period or a long wait at the dentist’s. (A day has passed since this last sentence, and in the interim I’ve put through a long-distance call from my Place of Business to my sister Boo Boo, in Tuckahoe, to ask her if there’s any poem from Seymour’s very early boyhood that she’d especially like to go into this account. She said she’d call me back. Her choice turned out to be not nearly so apposite to my present purposes as I’d like, and therefore a trifle irritating, but I think I’ll get over it. The one she picked, I happen to know, was written when the poet was eight: “John Keats / John Keats / John / Please put your scarf on.”) When he was twenty-two, he had one special, not thin, sheaf of poems that looked very, very good to me, and I, who have never written a line longhand in my life without instantly visualizing it in eleven-point type, rather fractiously urged him to submit them for publication somewhere. No, he didn’t think he could do that. Not yet; maybe never. They were too un-Western, too lotusy. He said he felt that they were faintly affronting. He hadn’t quite made up his mind where the affronting came in, but he felt at times that the poems read as though they’d been written by an ingrate, of sorts, someone who was turning his back—in effect, at least—on his own environment and the people in it who were close to him. He said he ate his food out of our big refrigerators, drove our eight-cylinder American cars, unhesitatingly used our medicines when he was sick, and relied on the U.S. Army to protect his parents and sisters from Hitler’s Germany, and nothing, not one single thing in all his poems, reflected these realities. Something was terribly wrong. He said that so often after he’d finished a poem he thought of Miss Overman. It should be said that Miss Overman had been the librarian in the first public-library branch in New York we regularly used when we were children. He said he felt he owed Miss Overman a painstaking, sustained search for a form of poetry that was in accord with his own peculiar standards and yet not wholly incompatible, even at first sight, with Miss Overman’s tastes. When he got through saying that, I pointed out to him calmly, patiently—that is, of course, at the bloody top of my voice—what I thought were Miss Overman’s shortcomings as a judge, or even a reader, of poetry. He then reminded me that on his first day in the public library (alone, aged six) Miss Overman, wanting or not as a judge of poetry, had opened a book to a plate of Leonardo’s catapult and placed it brightly before him, and that it was no joy to him to finish writing a poem and know that Miss Overman would have trouble turning to it with pleasure or involvement, coming, as she probably would come, fresh from her beloved Mr. Browning or her equally dear, and no less explicit, Mr. Wordsworth. The argument—my argument, his discussion—ended there. You can’t argue with someone who believes, or just passionately suspects, that the poet’s function is not to write what he must write but, rather, to write what he would write if his life depended on his taking responsibility for writing what he must in a style designed to shut out as few of his old librarians as humanly possible.
For the faithful, the patient, the hermetically pure, all the important things in this world—not life and death, perhaps, which are merely words, but the important things—work out rather beautifully. Before his finish, Seymour had over three years of what must have been the profoundest satisfaction that a veteran craftsman is permitted to feel. He found for himself a form of versification that was right for him, that met his most long-standing demands of poetry in general, and that, I believe, had she still been alive, Miss Overman herself would very likely have thought striking, perhaps even comely, to look upon, and certainly “involving,” provided she gave her attention to it as unfrugally as she gave it to her old swains, Browning and Wordsworth. What he found for himself, worked out for himself, is very difficult to describe.4 It may help, to start with, to say that Seymour probably loved the classical Japanese three-line, seventeen-syllable haiku as he loved no other form of poetry, and that he himself wrote—bled—haiku (almost always in English, but sometimes, I h
ope I’m duly reluctant to bring in, in Japanese, German, or Italian). 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. And the fact that it isn’t true won’t necessarily stop a pedant, if he feels that the class is properly warmed up and ready. Anyway, while I’m able, I’m going to say this rather slowly and carefully: A late poem of Seymour’s is a six-line verse, of no certain accent but usually more iambic than not, that, partly out of affection for dead Japanese masters and partly from his own natural bent, as a poet, for working inside attractive restricted areas, he has deliberately hold down to thirty-four syllables, or twice the number of the classical haiku. Apart from that, nothing in any of the hundred and eighty-four poems currently under my roof is much like anything except Seymour himself. To say the least, the acoustics, even, are as singular as Seymour. That is, each of the poems is as unsonorous, as quiet, as he believed a poem should be, but there are intermittent short blasts of euphony (for want of a less atrocious word for it), which have the effect on me personally of someone—surely no one completely sober—opening my door, blowing three or four or five unquestionably sweet and expert notes on a cornet into the room, then disappearing. (I’ve never known a poet to give the impression of playing a cornet in the middle of a poem before, let alone playing one beautifully, and I’d just as soon say next to nothing about it. In fact, nothing.) Within this six-line structure and these very odd harmonics, Seymour does with a poem, I think, exactly what he was meant to do with one. By far the majority of the hundred and eighty-four poems are immeasurably not light- but high-hearted, and can be read by anyone, anywhere, even aloud in rather progressive orphanages on stormy nights, but I wouldn’t unreservedly recommend the last thirty or thirty-five poems to any living soul who hasn’t died at least twice in his lifetime, preferably slowly. My own favorites, if I have any, and I most assuredly do, are the two final poems in the collection. I don’t think I’ll be stepping on anybody’s toes if I very simply say what they are about. The next-to-last poem is about a young married woman and mother who is plainly having what it refers to here in my old marriage manual as an extra-marital love affair. Seymour doesn’t describe her, but she comes into the poem just when that cornet of his is doing something extraordinarily effective, and I see her as a terribly pretty girl, moderately intelligent, immoderately unhappy, and not unlikely living a block or two away from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She comes home very late one night from a tryst—in my mind, bleary and lipstick-smeared—to find a balloon on her bedspread. Someone has simply left it there. The poet doesn’t say, but it can’t be anything but a large, inflated toy balloon, probably green, like Central Park in spring. The other poem, the last one in the collection, is about a young suburban widower who sits down on his patch of lawn one night, implicitly in his pajamas and robe, to look at the full moon. A bored white cat, clearly a member of his household and almost surely a former kingpin of his household, comes up to him and rolls over, and he lets her bite his left hand as he looks at the moon. This final poem, in fact, could well be of extra interest to my general reader on two quite special counts. I’d like very much to discuss them.