Word: seymour
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RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM, CARPENTERS, AND SEYMOUR, AN INTRODUCTION (248 pp.)-J. D. Sallnqer-Little, Brown...
...another against the bourgeois family, Salinger's quiet ones are in revolt against nothing but the "phoniness'" in human life itself, she points out. In fact, the family has become an enclave of private and very special spiritual excellence -specifically the nonphony Glass family, of which Seymour the elder, who has undergone martyrdom-by-suicide. was guru. Rejecting its patents of superiority, Miss McCarthy sees the Glass family as "a terrifying narcissus pool." And it is on the troubling question of Seymour's suicide that she sternly calls to order the little acrobats in Seymour...
Fake or not, it is easy to understand why so many of the young have been led to play Follow My Leader with Seymour. In the Salinger world, most things which trouble those in the process of growing up have been magically abolished (Salinger is said to complain that his true audience is too small to reach his books on the shelves). The Glass children have no need to do anything better than mother or father; they just are superior. Father Les ("Less") is a midget personage when compared with any of his offspring. Mother Bessie is a slightly comic...
Holiness by Ritual. Children have naturally bad taste, and of course the Glass kids can pick their own clothes; their terrible clothes become holy by wear. Children love ritual; under Seymour's hypnotic influence, every bit of business in the Glass family has become ritual. Other people's rituals are odious; thus Seymour rejects a nonsectarian wedding ceremony in favor of elopement. It is the universal cry of childhood: "No! Play it my way," and it is Salinger's law for his children, even the grown-up ones...
...Seymour E. Harris '20, Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Political Economy, disagreed. He termed the proposals "necessary and beneficial--the best that could be hoped for in the given situation...