As suits most poetry, and emphatically befits any poetry with a marked Chinese or Japanese “influence,” Seymour’s verses are all as bare as possible, and invariably ungarnished. However, on a weekend visit up here, some six months ago, my younger sister, Franny, while accidentally rifling my desk drawers, came across this widower poem I’ve just finished (criminally) plotting out; it had been detached from the main body of the collection for retyping. For reasons not strictly pertinent at the moment, she had never seen the poem before, and so, naturally, she read it on the spot. Later, in talking to me about the poem, she said she wondered why Seymour had said it was the left hand the young widower let the white cat bite. That bothered her. She said it sounded more like me than like Seymour, that “left” business. Apart, of course, from the slanderous reflection on my ever-increasing professional passion for detail, I think she meant that the adjective struck her as obtrusive, overexplicit, unpoetic. I argued her down, and I’m prepared, frankly, to argue you down, too, if necessary. I’m certain in my own mind that Seymour thought it vital to suggest that it was the left, the second-best, hand the young widower let the white cat press her needle-sharp teeth into, thereby leaving the right hand free for breast- or forehead-smiting—an analysis that may seem to many readers very, very tiresome indeed. And may be so. But I know how my brother felt about human hands. Besides, there is another, exceedingly considerable aspect of the matter. It may seem a little tasteless to go into it at any length—rather like insisting on reading the entire script of “Abie’s Irish Rose” to a perfect stranger over the phone—but Seymour was a half Jew, and while I can’t speak up with the great Kafka’s absolute authority on this theme, it’s my very sober guess, at forty, that any thinking man with a muchness of Semitic blood in his veins either lives or has lived on oddly intimate, almost mutually knowledgeable terms with his hands, and though he may go along for years and years figuratively or literally keeping them in his pockets (not always, I’m afraid, altogether unlike two pushy old friends or relatives he’d prefer not to bring to the party), he will, I think, use them, break them out very readily, in a crisis, often do something drastic with them in a crisis, such as mentioning, unpoetically, in the middle of a poem that it was the left hand the cat bit—and poetry, surely, is a crisis, perhaps the only actionable one we can call our own. (I apologize for that verbiage. Unfortunately, there’s probably more.) My second reason for thinking that the particular poem may be of extra—and, I hope, real—interest to my general reader is the queer personal force that has gone into it. I’ve never seen anything quite like it in print, and, I might injudiciously mention, from early childhood till I was well past thirty I seldom read fewer than two hundred thousand words a day, and often closer to four. At forty, admittedly, I rarely feel even peckish, and when I’m not required to inspect English compositions belonging either to young ladies or to myself, I customarily read very little except harsh postcards from relatives, seed catalogues, bird-watchers’ bulletins (of one sort or another), and poignant Get-Well-Soon notes from old readers of mine who have somewhere picked up the bogus information that I spend six months of the year in a Buddhist monastery and the other six in a mental institution. The pride of a nonreader, however, I’m well aware—or, for that matter, the pride of a markedly curtailed consumer of books—is even more offensive than the pride of certain voluminous readers, and so I’ve tried (I think I mean this seriously) to keep up a few of my oldest literary conceits. One of the grossest of these is that I can usually tell whether a poet or prose writer is drawing from first-, second-, or tenth-hand experience or is foisting off on us what he’d like to think is pure invention. Yet when I first read that young-widower-and-white-cat verse, back in 1948—or, rather, sat listening to it—I found it very hard to believe that Seymour hadn’t buried at least one wife that nobody in our family knew about. He hadn’t, of course. Not (and first blushes here, if any, will be the reader’s, not mine)—not in this incarnation, at any rate. Nor, to my quite extensive and somewhat serpentine knowledge of the man, had he any intimate acquaintance with young widowers. For a final and entirely ill-advised comment on the matter, he himself was about as far from being a widower as a young American male can be. And while it’s possible that, at odd moments, tormenting or exhilarating, every married man—Seymour, just conceivably, though almost entirely for the sake of argument, not excluded—reflects on how life would be with the little woman out of the picture (the implication here being that a first-class poet might work up a fine elegy from that sort of woolgathering), the possibility seems to me mere grist to psychologists’ mills, and certainly much beside my point. My point being—and I’ll try, against the usual odds, not to labor it—that the more personal Seymour’s poems appear to be, or are, the less revealing the content is of any known details of his actual daily life in this Western world. My brother Waker, in fact, contends (and let us hope that his abbot never gets wind of it) that Seymour, in many of his most effective poems, seems to be drawing on the ups and downs of former, singularly memorable existences in exurban Benares, feudal Japan, and metropolitan Atlantis. I pause, of course, to give the reader a chance to throw up his hands, or, more likely, to wash them of the whole lot of us. Just the same, I imagine all the living children in our family would rather volubly agree with Waker about that, though one or two, perhaps, with slight reservations. For instance, on the afternoon of his suicide Seymour wrote a straight, classical style haiku on the desk blotter in his hotel room. I don’t much like my literal translation of it—he wrote it in Japanese—but in it he briefly tells of a little girl on an airplane who has a doll in the seat with her and turns its head around to look at the poet. A week or so before the poem was actually written, Seymour had actually been a passenger on a commercial airplane, and my sister Boo Boo has somewhat treacherously suggested that there may have been a little girl with a doll aboard his plane. I myself doubt it. Not necessarily flatly, but I doubt it. And if such was the case—which I don’t believe for a minute—I’d make a bet the child never thought to draw her friend’s attention to Seymour.
Do I go on about my brother’s poetry too much? Am I being garrulous? Yes. Yes. I go on about my brother’s poetry too much. I’m being garrulous. And I care. But my reasons against leaving off multiply like rabbits as I go along. Furthermore, though I am, as I’ve already conspicuously posted, a happy writer, I’ll take my oath I’m not now and never have been a merry one; I’ve mercifully been allowed the usual professional quota of unmerry thoughts. For example, it hasn’t just this moment struck me that once I get around to recounting what I know of Seymour himself, I can’t expect to leave myself either the space or the required pulse rate or, in a broad but true sense, the inclination to mention his poetry again. At this very instant, alarmingly, while I clutch my own wrist and lecture myself on garrulousness, I may be losing the chance of a lifetime—my last chance, I think, really—to make one final, hoarse, objectionable, sweeping public pronouncement on my brother’s rank as an American poet. I mustn’t let it slip. Here it is: When I look back, listen back, over the half-dozen or slightly more original poets we’ve had in America, as well as the numerous talented eccentric poets and—in modern times, especially—the many gifted style deviates, I feel something close to a conviction that we have had only three or four very nearly nonexpendable poets, and I think Seymour will eventually stand with those few. Not overnight, verständlich—zut, what would you? It’s my guess, my perhaps flagrantly over-considered guess, that the first few waves of reviewers will obliquely condemn his verses by calling them Interesting or Very Interesting, with a tacit or just plain badly articulated declaration, still more damning, that they are rather small, sub-acoustical things that have failed to arrive on the contemporary Western scene with their own built-in transatlantic podium, complete with lectern, drinking glass, and pitcher of iced sea water. Yet a real artist, I’ve noticed, will survive anything. (Even praise, I happily suspect.) And I’m reminded, too, that once, when we we
re boys, Seymour waked me from a sound sleep, much excited, yellow pajamas flashing in the dark. He had what my brother Walt used to call his Eureka Look, and he wanted to tell me that he thought he finally knew why Christ said to call no man Fool. (It was a problem that had been baffling him all week, because it sounded to him like a piece of advice, I believe, more typical of Emily Post than of someone busily about his Father’s Business.) Christ had said it, Seymour thought I’d want to know, because there are no fools. Dopes, yes—fools, no. It seemed to him well worth waking me up for, but if I admit that it was (and I do, without reservations), I’ll have to concede that if you give even poetry critics enough time, they’ll prove themselves unfoolish. To be truthful, it’s a thought that comes hard to me, and I’m grateful to be able to push on to something else. I’ve reached, at long last, the real head of this compulsive and, I’m afraid, occasionally somewhat pustulous disquisition on my brother’s poetry. I’ve seen it coming from the very beginning. I would to God the reader had something terrible to tell me first. (Oh, you out there—with your enviable golden silence.)
I have a recurrent, and, in 1959, almost chronic, premonition that when Seymour’s poems have been widely and rather officially acknowledged as First Class (stacked up in college bookstores, assigned in Contemporary Poetry courses), matriculating young men and women will strike out, in singlets and twosomes, notebooks at the ready, for my somewhat creaking front door. (It’s regrettable that this matter has to come up at all, but it’s surely too late to pretend to an ingenuousness, to say nothing of grace, I don’t have, and I must reveal that my reputedly heart-shaped prose has knighted me one of the best-loved sciolists in print since Ferris L. Monahan, and a good many young English Department people already know where I live, hole up; I have their tire tracks in my rose beds to prove it.) By and large, I’d say without a shred of hesitation, there are three kinds of students who have both the desire and the temerity to look as squarely as possible into any sort of literary horse’s mouth. The first kind is the young man or woman who loves and respects to distraction any fairly responsible sort of literature and who, if he or she can’t see Shelley plain, will make do with seeking out manufacturers of inferior but estimable products. I know these boys and girls well, or think I do. They’re naïve, they’re alive, they’re enthusiastic, they’re usually less than right, and they’re the hope always, I think, of blasé or vested-interested literary society the world over. (By some good fortune I can’t believe I’ve deserved, I’ve had one of these ebullient, cocksure, irritating, instructive, often charming girls or boys in every second or third class I’ve taught in the past twelve years.) The second kind of young person who actually rings doorbells in the pursuit of literary data suffers, somewhat proudly, from a case of academicitis, contracted from any one of half a dozen Modern English professors or graduate instructors to whom he’s been exposed since his freshman year. Not seldom, if he himself is already teaching or is about to start teaching, the disease is so far along that one doubts whether it could be arrested, even if someone were fully equipped to try. Only last year, for example, a young man stopped by to see me about a piece I’d written, several years back, that had a good deal to do with Sherwood Anderson. He came at a time when I was cutting part of my winter’s supply of firewood with a gasoline-operated chain saw—an instrument that after eight years of repeated use I’m still terrified of. It was the height of the spring thaw, a beautiful sunny day, and I was feeling, frankly, just a trifle Thoreauish (a real treat for me, because after thirteen years of country living I’m still a man who gauges bucolic distances by New York City blocks). In short, it looked like a promising, if literary, afternoon, and I recall that I had high hopes of getting the young man, à la Tom Sawyer and his bucket of whitewash, to have a go at my chain saw. He appeared healthy, not to say strapping. His deceiving looks, however, very nearly cost me my left foot, for between spurts and buzzes of my saw, just as I finished delivering a short and to me rather enjoyable eulogy on Sherwood Anderson’s gentle and effective style, the young man asked me—after a thoughtful, a cruelly promising pause—if I thought there was an endemic American Zeitgeist. (Poor young man. Even if he takes exceptionally good care of himself, he can’t at the outside have more than fifty years of successful campus activity ahead of him.) The third kind of person who will be a fairly constant visitor around here, I believe, once Seymour’s poems have been quite thoroughly unpacked and tagged, requires a paragraph to himself or herself.
It would be absurd to say that most young people’s attraction to poetry is far exceeded by their attraction to those few or many details of a poet’s life that may be defined here, loosely, operationally, as lurid. It’s the sort of absurd notion, though, that I wouldn’t mind taking out for a good academic run someday. I surely think, at any rate, that if I were to ask the sixty odd girls (or, that is, the sixty-odd girls) in my two Writing for Publication courses—most of them seniors, all of them English majors—to quote a line, any line from “Ozymandias,” or even just to tell me roughly what the poem is about, it is doubtful whether ten of them could do either, but I’d bet my unrisen tulips that some fifty of them could tell me that Shelley was all for free love, and had one wife who wrote “Frankenstein” and another who drowned herself.5 I’m neither shocked nor outraged at the idea, please mind. I don’t think I’m even complaining. For if nobody’s a fool, then neither am I, and I’m entitled to a non-fool’s Sunday awareness that, whoever we are, no matter how like a blast furnace the heat from the candles on our latest birthday cake, and however presumably lofty the intellectual, moral, and spiritual heights we’ve all reached, our gusto for the lurid or the partly lurid (which, of course, includes both low and superior gossip) is probably the last of our fleshy appetites to be sated or effectively curbed. (But, my God, why do I rant on? Why am I not going straight to the poet for an illustration? One of Seymour’s hundred and eighty-four poems—a shocker on the first impact only; on the second, as heartening a paean to the living as I’ve read—is about a distinguished old ascetic on his deathbed, surrounded by chanting priests and disciples, who lies straining to hear what the washerwoman in the courtyard is saying about his neighbor’s laundry. The old gentleman, Seymour makes it clear, is faintly wishing the priests would keep their voices down a bit.) I can see, though, that I’m having a little of the usual trouble entailed in trying to make a very convenient generalization stay still and docile long enough to support a wild specific premise. I don’t relish being sensible about it, but I suppose I must. It seems to me indisputably true that a good many people, the wide world over, of varying ages, cultures, natural endowments, respond with a special impetus, a zing, even, in some cases, to artists and poets who as well as having a reputation for producing great or fine art have something garishly Wrong with them as persons: a spectacular flaw in character or citizenship, a construably romantic affliction or addiction—extreme self-centredness, marital infidelity, stone-deafness, stone-blindness, a terrible thirst, a mortally bad cough, a soft spot for prostitutes, a partiality for grand-scale adultery or incest, a certified or uncertified weakness for opium or sodomy, and so on, God have mercy on the lonely bastards. If suicide isn’t at the top of the list of compelling infirmities for creative men, the suicide poet or artist, one can’t help noticing, has always been given a very considerable amount of avid attention, not seldom on sentimental grounds almost exclusively, as if he were (to put it much more horribly than I really want to) the floppy-eared runt of the litter. It’s a thought, anyway, finally said, that I’ve lost sleep over many times, and possibly will again.
(How can I record what I’ve just recorded and still be happy? But I am. Unjolly, unmerry, to the marrow, but my afflatus seems to be punctureproof. Recollective of only one other person I’ve known in my life.) You can’t imagine what big, hand-rubbing plans I had for this immediate space. They appear to have been designed, though, to look exquisite on the bottom of my wastebasket. I’d intended right here to relieve thos
e last two midnight paragraphs with a couple of sunshiny witticisms, a matched pair of the sort of thigh-slappers that so often, I imagine, turn my fellow-raconteurs green with envy or nausea. It was my intention, right here, to tell the reader that when, or if, young people should stop by to see me about Seymour’s life or death, a curious personal affliction of my own, alas, would make such an audience utterly unfeasible. I planned to mention—just in passing, because this will be developed at, I hope, interminable length someday—that Seymour and I, as children, together spent close to seven years answering questions on a network-radio quiz program, and that ever since we formally went off the air, I’ve felt pretty much about people who as little as ask me the time of day almost precisely the way Betsey Trotwood felt about donkeys. Next, I intended to divulge that after some twelve years as a college instructor I’m now, in 1959, subject to frequent attacks of what my faculty colleagues have been flattering enough to think of, I believe, as Glass’s disease—in lay language, a pathological spasm of the lumbar and lower ventral regions that causes an off-duty classroom lecturer to double up and hurriedly cross streets or crawl under large pieces of furniture when he sees anyone under forty approaching. Neither of the two sallies will work for me here, though. There’s a certain amount of perverse truth to both, but not nearly enough. For the terrible and undiscountable fact has just reached me, between paragraphs, that I yearn to talk, to be queried, to be interrogated, about this particular dead man. It’s just got through to me, that apart from my many other—and, I hope to God, less ignoble—motives, I’m stuck with the usual survivor’s conceit that he’s the only soul alive who knew the deceased intimately. O let them come—the callow and the enthusiastic, the academic, the curious, the long and the short and the all-knowing! Let them arrive in busloads, let them parachute in, wearing Leicas. The mind swarms with gracious welcoming speeches. One hand already reaches for the box of detergent and the other for the dirty tea service. The bloodshot eye practices clearing. The old red carpet is out.
A very delicate matter now. A trifle coarse, to be sure, but delicate, very delicate.
Considering that this matter may not come up in any desirable, or massive, detail later on, I think the reader should know right now, and preferably bear in mind to the very end, that all the children in our family were, are, descended from an astonishingly long and motley double-file of professional entertainers. For the most part, genetically speaking, or muttering, we sing, dance, and (can you doubt it?) tell Funny Jokes. But I think it peculiarly important to keep in mind—and so did Seymour, even as a child—that there is also among us a wide miscellany of performing circus people and performing, so to say, circus-fringe people. One of my great-grandfathers (and Seymour’s), for an admittedly juicy example, was a quite famous Polish-Jewish carnival clown named Zozo, who had a penchant—up to the very end, one necessarily gathers—for diving from immense heights into small containers of water. Another of Seymour’s and my great-grandfathers, an Irishman MacMahon (whom my mother, to her everlasting credit, has never been tempted to refer to as a “darlin’ man”), was a self-employed type who used to set out a couple of octaves of empty whiskey bottles in a meadow and then, when a paying crowd had closed in, dance, we’re told, rather musically on the sides of the bottles. (So, surely you’ll take my word, we have, among other things, a few nuts on the family tree.) Our parents themselves, Les and Bessie Glass, had a fairly conventional but (we believe) remarkably good song-and-dance-and-patter act in vaudeville and music halls, reaching perhaps most nearly top billing in Australia (where Seymour and I spent about two years, in total bookings, of our very early childhood) but later, too, achieving much more than just passing notability on the old Pantages and Orpheum circuits, here in America. In the opinion of not a few people, they might have gone on as a vaudeville team for quite a bit longer than they did. Bessie had ideas of her own, though. Not only has she always had something of an aptitude for reading handwriting on walls—two-a-day vaudeville already in 1925 was almost finished, and Bessie had, both as a mother and as a dancer, the very strongest convictions against doing four-a-day shows for the big, new, ever-multiplying movie-cum-vaudeville palaces—but, more important than that, ever since she was a child in Dublin and her twin sister succumbed, backstage, of galloping undernutrition, Security, in any form, has had a fatal attraction for Bessie. At any rate, in the spring of 1925, at the end of a so-so run at the Albee, in Brooklyn, with five children bedded down with German measles in three and a half unstately rooms at the old Hotel Alamac, in Manhattan, and a notion that she was pregnant again (mistaken, it turned out; the babies of the family, Zooey and Franny, were not born till 1930 and 1935, respectively), Bessie suddenly appealed to an honest-to-God “influential” admirer, and my father took a job in what he invariably referred to, for years and years, with no real fear of being contradicted around the house, as the ministrative end of commercial radio, and Gallagher & Glass’s extended tour was officially over. What I’m mainly trying to do here, though, is to find the firmest way of suggesting that this curious footlight-and-three-ring heritage has been an almost ubiquitous and entirely significant reality in the lives of all seven of the children in our family. The two youngest, as I’ve already mentioned, are, in fact, professional actors. But no heavy line can be drawn quite there. The elder of my two sisters, to most outward appearances, is a fully landed suburbanite, mother of three children, co-owner of a two-car, filled garage, but at all supremely joyful moments she will, all but literally, dance for her life; I’ve seen her, to my horror, break into a very passable soft shoe routine (a sort of Ned Wayburn out of Pat and Marion Rooney) with a five-day-old niece of mine in her arms. My late younger brother Walt, who was killed in a postwar accident in Japan (and of whom I plan to say as little as possible in this series of sittings, if I’m to get through them), was a dancer, too, in a perhaps less spontaneous but far more professional sense than my sister Boo Boo. His twin—our brother Waker, our monk, our impounded Carthusian—as a boy, privately canonized W. C. Fields and in that inspired and obstreperous but rather holy man’s image used to practice juggling with cigar boxes, among a great many other things, by the hour, till he became spectacularly proficient at it. (Family rumor has it that he was originally cloistered off—that is relieved of his duties as a secular priest in Astoria—to free him of a persistent temptation to administer the sacramental wafer to his parishioners’ lips by standing back two or three feet and trajecting it in a lovely arc over his left shoulder.) As for myself—I’d prefer to take Seymour last—I’m quite sure it goes without saying that I dance a little bit, too. On request, of course. Apart from that, I might mention that I often feel I’m watched over, if somewhat erratically, by Great-Grandfather Zozo; I feel he mysteriously provides that I don’t trip over my invisible baggy clown-pants when I stroll in the woods or walk into classrooms, and perhaps also sees to it that my putty nose occasionally points east when I sit down at the typewriter.
Nor, finally, did our Seymour himself live or die a whit less affected by his “background” than any of the rest of us. I’ve already mentioned that although I believe his poems couldn’t be more personal, or reveal him more completely, he goes through every one of them, even when the Muse of Absolute Joy is sitting on his back, without spilling a single really autobiographical bean. The which, I suggest, though possibly not to everyone’s taste, is highly literate vaudeville—a traditional first act, a man balancing words, emotions, a golden cornet on his chin, instead of the usual evening cane, chromium table, and champagne glass filled with water. But I have something far more explicit and leading to tell you than that. I’ve been waiting for it: In Brisbane, in 1922, when Seymour and I were five and three, Les and Bessie played on the same bill for a couple of weeks with Joe Jackson—the redoubtable Joe Jackson of the nickel-plated trick bicycle that shone like something better than platinum to the very last row of the theater. A good many years later, not long after the outbreak of the Second World War, when Seymour and I had just recently moved into a small New York apartment of our own, our father—Les, as he’ll be called hereafter—dropped in on us one evening on his way home from a pinochle game. He quite apparently had held very bad cards all afternoon. He came in, at any rate, rigidly predisposed to keep his overcoat on. He sat. He scowled at the furnishings. He turned my hand over to check for cigarette-tar stains on my fingers, then asked Seymour how many cigarettes he smoked a day. He thought he found a fly in his highball. At length, when the conversation—in my view, at least—was going straight to hell, he got up abruptly and went over to look at a photograph of himself and Bessie that had been newly tacked up on the wall. He glowered at it for a full minute, or more, then turned around, with a brusqueness no one in the family would have found unusual, and asked Seymour if he remembered the time Joe Jackson had given him, Seymour, a ride on the handle bars of his bicycle, all over the stage, around and around. Seymour, sitting in an old corduroy armchair across the room, a cigarette going, wearing a blue shirt, gray slacks, moccasins with the counters broken down, a shaving cut on the side of his face that I could see, replied gravely and at once, and in the special way he always answered questions from Les—as if they were the questions, above all others, he preferred to be asked in this life. He said he wasn’t sure he had ever got off Joe Jackson’s beautiful bicycle. And aside from its enormous sentimental value to my father personally, this answer, in a great many ways, was true, true, true.
Between the last paragraph and this, just over two and a half months have gone by, Elapsed. A little bulletin that I grimace slightly to have to issue, since it reads back to me exactly as though I were about to intimate that I always use a chair when I work, drink upward of thirty cups of black coffee during Composing Hours, and make all my own furniture in my spare time; in short, it has the tone of a man of letters unreluctantly discussing his work habits, his hobbies, and his more printable human frailties with the interviewing officer from the Sunday Book Section. I’m really not up to
anything that intime just here. (I’m keeping especially close tabs on myself here, in fact. It seems to me that this composition has never been in more imminent danger than right now of taking on precisely the informality of underwear.) I’ve announced a major delay between paragraphs by way of informing the reader that I’m just freshly risen from nine weeks in bed with acute hepatitis. (You see what I mean about underwear. This last open remark of mine happens to be a straight line, almost intacta, right out of Minsky burlesque. Second Banana: “I’ve been in bed for nine weeks with acute hepatitis.” Top Banana: “Which one, you lucky dog? They’re both cute, those Hepatitis girls.” If this be my promised clean bill of health, let me find a quick way back to the Valley of the Sick.) When I now confide, as I surely must, that I’ve been up and around for nearly a week, with the rose fully restored to check and jowl, will the reader, I wonder, misinterpret my confidence—mainly, I think, in two ways? One, will he think it’s a mild rebuke to him for neglecting to flood my sickroom with camellias? (Everyone will be relieved to know, it’s a safe guess, that I’m running out of Humor by the second.) Two, will he, the reader, choose to think, on the basis of this Sick Report, that my personal happiness—so carefully touted at the very beginning of this composition—perhaps wasn’t happiness at all but just liverishness? This second possibility is of extremely grave concern to me. For certain, I was genuinely happy to be working on this Introduction. In my own supine way, I was miraculously happy all through my hepatitis (and the alliteration alone should have finished me off). And I’m ecstatically happy at this moment, I’m happy to say. Which is not to deny (and I’ve come now, I’m afraid, to the real reason I’ve constructed this showcase for my poor old liver)—which is not to deny, I repeat, that my ailment left me with a single, terrible deficiency. I hate dramatic indentations with all my heart, but I suppose I do need a new paragraph for this matter.
The first night, just this last week, that I felt quite hale and bullish enough to go back to work on this Introduction, I found that I’d lost not my afflatus but my wherewithal to continue to write about Seymour. He’d grown too much while I was away. It was hardly credible. From the manageable giant he had been before I got sick, he had shot up, in nine short weeks, into the most familiar human being in my life, the one person who was always much, much too large to fit on ordinary typewriter paper—any typewriter paper of mine, anyway. To put it flatly, I panicked, and I panicked for five consecutive nights thereafter. I think, though, that I mustn’t paint this any blacker than I have to. For there happens to be a very stunning silver lining. Let me tell you, without pausing, what I did tonight that makes me feel I’ll be back at work tomorrow night bigger and cockier and more objectionable, possibly, than ever. About two hours ago, I simply read an old personal letter—more accurately, a very lengthy memo—that was left on my breakfast plate one morning in 1940. Under half a grapefruit, to be precise. In just another minute or two, I mean to have the unutterable (“pleasure” isn’t the word I want)—the unutterable Blank of reproducing the long memo here verbatim. (O happy hepatitis! I’ve never known sickness—or sorrow, or disaster, for that matter—not to unfold, eventually, like a flower or a good memo. We’re required only to keep looking. Seymour once said, on the air, when he was eleven, that the thing he loved best in the Bible was the word watch!) Before I get to the main item, though, it behooves me, from head to foot, to attend to a few incidental platters. This chance may never come again.
It seems a serious oversight, but I don’t think I’ve said that it was my custom, my compulsion, whenever it was practical, and very often when it wasn’t, to try out my new short stories on Seymour. That is, read them aloud to him. Which I did molto agitato, with a clearly indicated required Rest Period for everybody at the finish. This is by way of saying that Seymour always refrained from making any comments after my voice had come to a stop. Instead, he usually looked at the ceiling for five or ten minutes—he invariably stretched out flat on the floor for a Reading—then got up, (sometimes) gently stamped a foot that had gone to sleep, and left the room. Later—usually in a matter of hours, but on one or two occasions days—he would jot down a few notes on a piece of paper or a shirt cardboard and either leave it on my bed or at my place at the dinner table or (very rarely) send it to me through the U.S. Mail. Here are a few of his brief criticisms. (This is a warmup, frankly. I see no point in disclaiming it, though I probably should.)
Horrible, but right. An honest Medusa’s Head.
I wish I knew. The woman is fire, but the painter seems haunted by your friend the man who painted Anna Karenina’s portrait in Italy. Which is swell haunting, the best, but you have your own irascible painters.
I think it should be done over, Buddy. The Doctor is so good, but I think you like him too late. The whole first half, he’s out in the cold, waiting for you to like him, and he’s your main character. You see his nice dialogue with the nurse as a conversion. It should have been a religious story, but it’s puritanical. I feel your censure on all his God-damns. That seems off to me. What is it but a low form of prayer when he or Les or anybody else God-damns everything? I can’t believe God recognizes any form of blasphemy. It’s a prissy word invented by the clergy.
I’m so sorry about this one. I wasn’t listening right. I’m so sorry. The first sentence threw me way off. “Henshaw woke up that morning with a splitting head.” I count so heavily on you to finish off all the fraudulent Henshaws in fiction. There just are no Henshaws. Will you read it to me again?
Please make your peace with your wit. It’s not going to go away, Buddy. To dump it on your own advice would be as bad and unnatural as dumping your adjectives and adverbs because Prof. B. wants you to. What does he know about it? What do you really know about your own wit?
I’ve been sitting here tearing up notes to you. I keep starting to say things like “This one is wonderfully constructed,” and “The woman on the back of the truck is very funny,” and “The conversation between the two cops is terrific.” So I’m hedging. I’m not sure why. I started to get a little nervous right after you began to read. It sounded like the beginning of something your arch-enemy Bob B. calls a rattling good story. Don’t you think he would call this a step in the right direction? Doesn’t that worry you? Even what is funny about the woman on the back of the truck doesn’t sound like something you think is funny. It sounds much more like something that you think is universally considered very funny. I feel gypped. Does that make you mad? You can say our relatedness spoils my judgment. It worries me enough. But I’m also just a reader. Are you a writer or just a writer of rattling good stories. I mind getting a rattling good story from you. I want your loot.
I can’t get this new one off my mind. I don’t know what to say about it. I know what the dangers of getting into sentimentality must have been. You got through it fine. Maybe too fine. I wonder if I don’t wish you’d slipped up a little. Can I write a little story for you? Once there was a great music critic, a distinguished authority on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. His little daughter went to P.S. 9, where she was in the Glee Club, and this great music-lover was very annoyed when she came home one day with another child to practice singing a medley of songs by Irving Berlin and Harold Arlen and Jerome Kern and people like that. Why shouldn’t the children sing little simple Schubert Lieder instead of that “trash?” So he went to the principal of the school and made a big stink about it. The principal was much impressed by such a distinguished person’s arguments, and he agreed to turn the Music Appreciation Teacher, a very old lady, over his knee. The great music-lover left his office in very good spirits. On the way home, he thought over the brilliant arguments he had advanced in the principal’s office and his elation grew and grew. His chest expanded. His step quickened. He began to whistle a little tune. The tune: “K-K-K-Katy.”
The memo now. As presented with pride and resignation. Pride because—Well, I’ll pass that. Resignation because some of my faculty comrades may be listening—veteran interoffice cutups, all—and I have a notion that this particular enclosure is sooner or later bound to be entitled “A Nineteen-Year-Old Prescription for Writers and Brothers and Hepatitis Convalescents Who Have Lost Their Way and Can’t Go On.” (Ah, well. It takes a cutup to know one. Besides, I feel that my loins are oddly girded for this occasion.)
I think, first, that this was the lengthiest critical comment I ever had from Seymour about any Literary Effort of mine—and, for that matter, probably the longest non-oral communiqué I ever got from him during his life. (We very rarely wrote personal letters to each other, even during the war.) It was written in pencil, on several sheets of notepaper that our mother had relieved the Bismarck Hotel, in Chicago, of, some years earlier. He was responding to what was surely the most ambitious bloc of writing I had done up to that time. The year was 1940, and we were both still living in our parents’ rather thickly populated apartment in the East Seventies. I was twenty-one, as unattached as, shall I say, only a young, unpublished, green-complexioned writer can be. Seymour himself was twenty-three and had just begun his fifth year of teaching English at a university in New York. Herewith, then, in full. (I can foresee a few embarrassments for the discriminating reader, but the Worst, I think, will be over with the salutation. I figure that if the salutation doesn’t embarrass me particularly, I don’t see why it should embarrass any other living soul.)
Dear old Tyger that Sleeps:
I wonder if there are many readers who have ever turned the pages of a manuscript while the author snores in the same room. I wanted to see this one for myself. Your voice was almost too much this time. I think your prose is getting to be all the theater your characters can withstand. I have so much I want to tell you, and nowhere to begin.
This afternoon I wrote what I thought was a whole letter to the head of the English Department, of all people, that sounded quite a lot like you. It gave me such pleasure I thought I ought to tell you. It was a beautiful letter. It felt like the Saturday afternoon last spring when I went to Die Zauberflöte with Carl and Amy and that very strange girl they brought for me and I wore your green intoxicator. I didn’t tell you I wore it. [He was referring here to one of four expensive neckties I’d bought the season before. I’d forbidden all my brothers—but especially Seymour, who had easiest access to them—to go anywhere near the drawer I kept them in. I stored them, only partly as a gag, in cellophane.] I felt no guilt when I wore it, only a mortal fear that you’d suddenly walk on the stage and see me sitting there in the dark with your tie on. The letter was a little bit different. It occurred to me that if things were switched around and you were writing a letter that sounded like me, you’d be bothered. I was mostly able to put it out of my mind. One of the few things left in the world, aside from the world itself, that sadden me every day is an awareness that you get upset if Boo Boo or Walt tells you you’re saying something that sounds like me. You sort of take it as an accusation of piracy, a little slam at your individuality. Is it so bad that we sometimes sound like each other? The membrane is so thin between us. Is it so important for us to keep in mind which is whose? That time, two summers ago when I was out so long, I was able to trace that you and Z. and I have been brothers for no fewer than four incarnations, maybe more. Is there no beauty in that? For us, doesn’t each of our individualities begin right at the point where we own up to our extremely close connections and accept the inevitability of borrowing one another’s jokes, talents, idiocies? You notice I don’t include neckties. I think Buddy’s neckties are Buddy’s neckties, but they are a pleasure to borrow without permission.
It must be terrible for you to think I have neckties and things on my mind besides your story. I don’t. I’m just looking everywhere for my thoughts. I thought this trivia might help me to collect myself. It’s daylight out, and I’ve been sitting here since you went to bed. What bliss it is to be your first reader. It would be straight bliss if I didn’t think you valued my opinion more than your own. It really doesn’t seem right to me that you should rely so heavily on my opinion of your stories. That is, you. You can argue me down another time, but I’m convinced I’ve done something very wrong that this situation should be. I’m not exactly wallowing in guilt at the moment, but guilt is guilt. It doesn’t go away. It can’t be nullified. It can’t even be fully understood, I’m certain—its roots run too deep into private and long-standing karma. About the only thing that saves my neck when I get to feeling this way is that guilt is an imperfect form of knowledge. Just because it isn’t perfect doesn’t mean that it can’t be used. The hard thing to do is to put it to practical use before it gets around to paralyzing you. So I’m going to write down what I think about this story as fast as I can. If I hurry, I have a powerful feeling my guilt will serve the best and truest purposes here. I do think that. I think if I rush with this, I may be able to tell you what I’ve probably wanted to tell you for years.
You must know yourself that this story is full of big jumps. Leaps. When you first went to bed, I thought for a while that I ought to wake up everybody in the house and throw a party for our marvellous jumping brother. What am I, that I didn’t wake everybody up? I wish I knew. A worrier, at the very least. I worry about big jumps that I can measure off with my eyes. I think I dream of your daring to jump right out of my sight. Excuse this. I’m writing very fast now. I think this new story is the one you’ve been waiting for. And me, too, in a way. You know it’s mostly pride that’s keeping me up. I think that’s my main worry. For your own sake, don’t make me proud of you. I think that’s exactly what I’m trying to say. If only you’d never keep me up again out of pride. Give me a story that just makes me unreasonably vigilant. Keep me up till five only because all your stars are out, and for no other reason. Excuse the underlining, but that’s the first thing I’ve ever said about one of your stories that makes my head go up and down. Please don’t let me say anything else. I think tonight that anything you say to a writer after you beg him to let his stars come out is just literary advice. I’m positive tonight that all “good” literary advice is just Louis Bouilhet and Max Du Camp wishing Madame Bovary on Flaubert. All right, so between the two of them, with their exquisite taste, they got him to write a masterpiece. They killed his chances of ever writing his heart out. He died like a celebrity, which was the one thing he wasn’t. His letters are unbearable to read. They’re so much better than they should be. They read waste, waste, waste. They break my heart. I dread saying anything to you tonight, dear old Buddy, except the trite. Please follow your heart, win or lose. You got so mad at me when we were registering. [The week before, he and I and several million other young Americans went over to the nearest public school and registered for the draft. I caught him smiling at something I had written on my registration blank. He declined, all the way home, to tell me what struck him so funny. As anyone in my family could verify, he could be an inflexible decliner when the occasion looked auspicious to him.] Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It’s never been anything but your religion. Never. I’m a little over-excited now. Since it is your religion, do you know what you will be asked when you die? But let me tell you first what you won’t be asked. You won’t be asked if you were working on a wonderful moving piece of writing when you died. You won’t be asked if it was long or short, sad or funny, published or unpublished. You won’t be asked if you were in good or bad form while you were working on it. You won’t even be asked if it was the one piece of writing you would have been working on if you had known your time would be up when it was finished—I think only poor Sören K. will get asked that. I’m so sure you’ll get asked only two questions. Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? If only
you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions. If only you’d remember before ever you sit down to write that you’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won’t even underline that. It’s too important to be underlined. Oh, dare to do it, Buddy! Trust your heart. You’re a deserving craftsman. It would never betray you. Good night. I’m feeling very much overexcited now, and a little dramatic, but I think I’d give almost anything on earth to see you writing a something, an anything, a story, a poem, a tree, that was really and truly after your own heart. The Bank Dick is at the Thalia. Let’s take the whole bunch tomorrow night. Love, S.
This is Buddy Glass back on the page. (Buddy Glass, of course is only my pen name. My real name is Major George Fielding Anti-Climax.) I’m feeling over-excited and a little dramatic myself, and my every heated impulse at this second is to make literally starry promises to the reader for our rendezvous tomorrow night. But if I’m smart, I think, I’ll just brush my tooth and run along to bed. If my brother’s long Memo was rather taxing to read, it was positively exhausting, I can’t forbear to add, to type out for my friends. At this moment, I’m wearing that handsome firmament he offered me as a hurry-up-and-get-well-from-your-hepatitis-and-faintheartedness present down around my knees.