The Glass House Gang

RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM, CARPENTERS, AND SEYMOUR, AN INTRODUCTION (248 pp.)--J. D. Sallnqer--Little, Brown ($4).

As Buddy Glass, the compulsively garrulous chronicler of the Glass family might admit, it is very, very, very true that a large segment of the U.S. young is hung on old Buddy and his six weird brothers and sisters.

The publishers confidently believe that another wave of what has been called the Salinger generation will be a solid market for the last two Glass stories in hardcover at $4, both having appeared in The New Yorker, in 1955 and 1959 respectively. Outside the campus, there are signs that crabbed age is becoming short-tempered about the cutups in the Salinger kindergarten. London's New Statesman has muttered about "Zenny & Phooey." and Critic Mary McCarthy has brought her severe forensic intelligence to bear on Salinger and files a contemptuous brief which indicts him for attempting to feed the young the poisoned pap of a false religiosity.

Revolt Against What? Unlike the generation of the '20s and '30s, both of which were in revolt in one form or 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's moral gymnasium. "Did Seymour commit suicide because he had married a phony?" she asks. "Or because he had been lying, his author had been lying, and it was all terrible, and he was a fake?''

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 sergeant major to her own young, all of whom have spiritual commissions. In the magic Glass family, the kids, like the stars of a radio quiz show, have taken over even as breadwinners.

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.

In Salinger's hands, it is a magical world. But increasingly, the grown reader is beginning to wonder whether the sphinxlike Seymour had a secret worth sharing. And if so, when Salinger is going to reveal it.

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