One Fell Soup

by Roy Blount

  What of Napoleon Bonaparte? The former French Emperor, reached in Elba, said he was working with aides on his forthcoming memoirs, stretching his 24-inch-inseam legs with daily strolls on the beach, and puttering around the governor’s mansion. “Mais maintenant, il fata courir,” he concluded. “Il faut ‘cultiver mon jardin.’”

  Listen, this “people” stuff is not the bargain it seems. It’s fast folks, makes its way into the bloodstream like bacon substitute. But—we are not obliged to nibble away submissively on processed “people.” We can take a hand.

  Pick somebody—anybody: Carmen Basilio … Saint Crispin … Leon Trotsky. Think about him. “Oh, yeah, Trotsky—better-natured kind of guy, wasn’t he, than Stalin? Communist, though. Hit with an ice axe in Mexico … but how’d anybody look innocent carrying around an ice axe, down there, oh well what the hell, etc., etc.” And on to the next “person,” be it Elihu Root … Colley Cibber … Imre Nagy … Ned Buntline … Herod … Julia Ward Howe … Gorboduc … or August Gneisenau.

  But wait a minute. Would you have hit Leon?

  If so, with what?

  We headline our columns “Notes on People,” or “Newsmakers,” or “Names … Faces,” but are these in fact the lowest common denominator? Are they even units? In the process of some random paragraph’s filtration through your household perhaps you have caught a glint of this microbiological hypothesis: that all of us, even Henry L. Stimson, have been host organisms for that master race by which we are, so to speak, peopled—those wee, ineffably knowing, intimate, unconfrontable intracellular bodies that live our inner lives, even carry our genes, the Mitochondria.

  Are the Mitochondria just laughing up our sleeves? They must have hummed to themselves while those scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory bred a person-plant: cancer cells from a Baltimore woman fused with cells of hybrid tobacco. And what has she/it developed? No doubt foliage, ratiocination, limited enthusiasm for the Orioles, and a hacking cough. But the Mitochondria don’t care: to them it’s just a kicky new split-level home.

  The reunion after sixty years of Dr. Sigmund Freud with his school soccer team was a hit with all concerned except Freud himself and goaltender Sandor Ferenczi, whom Freud steadfastly maintained he didn’t remember, even after Ferenczi did a certain droll thing with his ears and fingers that had made him highly popular in school, then donned an old team jersey and produced a ball that he kicked toward the father of psychoanalysis.

  Freud ignored the kick, and seemed to be incensed by the thing with the ears and fingers. Ferenczi said he found the Freudian lapse “interesting.”

  Atatürk … Dana X. Bible … O. E. Rolvaag … Sacagawea.

  His “Principle of Uncertainty” he called it, in no uncertain terms. It is impossible to determine exactly and simultaneously both the position and the momentum of any body, stated Werner Karl Heisenberg, thereby weakening the law of cause and effect.

  “What makes you so hot? What makes you so sure?” exclaimed a policeman in the audience. In the ensuing confusion a series of shots was heard which struck the rostrum.

  But Heisenberg was gone.

  Vasco da Gama … Vaughn Monroe… Huey, … Dewey, and Louie.

  It’s a brand-new White House pet for Amy Carter: a baby chimera swapped to her by an unnamed classmate. The President’s daughter would not reveal to reporters either the quid pro quo or the chimera’s name, or whether it liked peanuts or understood the role of the press.

  Diderot … Capucine.

  I slim. I put on weight. My belt also shrinks and stretches. Ajax. Alaric. (I sometimes feel that someone on the copy-desk made up Al Kaline and Dr. Armand Hammer out of whole cloth, just to see if I was paying attention.) Bhutto. Qaddafi. I am paying attention. To what is there. To what is not there. To the people who move their lips concerning me, in such a manner that I can’t quite make out the words or the tone. To the media. Which engross us in taglanguage, which take us for granted, which never remember our name.

  Eugène Delacroix.

  SYNTAX’S TACK

  SYNTAX RETURNS HOME AFTER DISAPPEARANCE

  Michael P. Syntax, 62, Maple Heights advertising executive who disappeared May 24, is back home. He returned Sunday, according to his wife, Doxie, who said he has resumed working.

  Syntax was not available for comment. But in a prepared statement he said he did not recall how he “strayed to the Veterans Hospital in Houston, Tex.”

  He said that no political threats were involved in his disappearance. He had attended a political meeting the night he disappeared. He is a Democratic precinct committeeman.

  Mrs. Syntax told The Plain Dealer she did not want to say anything more about the incident because she is still “too upset.” She said her husband’s spirits were good.

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer,

  June 13, 1971

  Syntax is back,

  And Doxies got him.

  Size would know

  If it were not him.

  Loose, he strayed,

  Unlike he useta, ‘n’

  In a while

  Popped up in Houston.

  Spirits good,

  He lay with vets,

  Ruling out

  Political threats.

  Did he tire

  Of constant tense

  Agreement? Take

  His leave of sense?

  “The answer needn’t

  Be rabbinic.

  Simple error,”

  Says the cynic:

  “He preferred

  [I don’t agree]

  Sin tactics to

  Doxology.”

  I say, he left

  Ohio bound to

  Make some point

  He will come round to.

  He may have been

  To Maine, or Mars.

  Give him time.

  Syntax will parse.

  THE NEW WRITING AIDS

  THERE MAY STILL BE those who think it is just: look into your heart, study the markets, pull on your moleskin trousers and write.

  Wrong. We who do write know better. Some mornings it may be more than you can do to plug your typewriter in. As a word person, you are not electronically minded. You tend to get the prongs wrong. And with your special sensitivity, you may regard the word plugging with a deep ambivalence. You are drawn into this work by a love affair with the English language, or perhaps with an editor somewhere. You resist the connotation of “plugging away.”

  But just as there are marital aids, which need not foreclose romance, so too are there aids to writing.

  For the writer who balks at plugging: turn on every morning with the new solid-state power-pack Afflatus Apparatus, $64.95 retail. With a slight pressure of either foot, this elegantly engineered Penn Inc. product can be nudged smoothly along the oiled cambered grooves of its felt-backed burnished blue-steel housing to lock securely into any office or residential socket. Not only is your keyboard now thrumming, but as contact is made, lagniappe: a subtle electrical charge enters your body through the specially conductive accessory sock ($4.95, fits all sizes 10–13). Gets those mot juices flowing.

  “Facing that blank sheet of paper” is an agony all of us know. Available from O’Fiction House are Pic’n-Scribe preworded sheets, $49.50 the ream. Just start crossing out the words you don’t want and pretty soon you’ve built up enough momentum to shift bing bing without skipping a beat to freshly guilt-free virgin recycled bond. Specify if special Gothic, Newsweekly or Critical sheet is desired.

  Are you a writer who hears in the hum of your fluorescent desk lamp a mocking, antihumanistic tone? You sit there trying to summon up something and what you hear, the still small voice, is nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng? Check out Tu-ne-on, which modulates your light’s sound into whatever pitch and tempo suits your rhythms best. It’s $19.95 at Better Noise.

  But sometimes gear is not enough. You need a service. Has it been four and a half years since you promised delivery “early next week” of “the first big chunk” o
f that novel of Liberal Republicanism which was even then overdue by twenty-six months? And are you still struggling with that big opening scene, in which Whisenant receives the troubling phone calls on both extensions from Evans and Novak at once?

  That big opening scene, versions of which you have worked out not-quite-convincingly from seven different points of view, including those of Whisenant himself, Evans, Novak, Evans and Novak, a fly on the wall, the omniscient narrator, the omniscient narrator’s doctor-friend and a shamus hired by Senator Jesse Helms, Jr.

  That big opening scene, several key pages of which slithered down into the dark recesses behind your long-unfinished basement game room’s paneling when you were changing a fuse while distractedly holding those pages in your fuse-turning hand (as several members of the family loudly demanded to know whether they were ever going to be able to play in the game room, and the dog stood behind you making a nagging catarrhal sound), in March 1975? And you don’t want to pull the paneling down, it’s the only part of the game room that’s finished? And the publisher’s legal firm is on the phone?

  Enter Inter Inc. (motto: We’re Inter Everything). “Mr. Beddoes [should your name be Beddoes] is unable to be reached,” says your Inter rep into the phone. “In fact, he is … gone. Done in by valueless goons while averting their interference with an elderly nurse. Gone, but remembered fondly. Many a one—many a man, woman and corporation at every level of society—now regrets plaguing Mr. Beddoes with subliterary concerns while he … was … among us.”

  That buys you some time. But say that you also badly need at this point a new advance of funds from the same publisher. And when you phone to urge your literary agent to negotiate this advance, the switchboard operator answers, and says that your agent’s secretary is in a meeting. And when you phone again, a recording device answers, and says that the switchboard operator is unable to be reached.

  Enter Inter Inc. (motto: New Modes of Middle) again. Your rep proceeds physically—dressed as a fireman—to your agent’s offices, confronts your agent’s switchboard operator face to face, gives his ax a brandish and exclaims, “The building is fully involved!”

  Then, as the operator flees, your rep dons the discarded headset and performs whatever plugging is required (you needn’t know the details), then changes to plaster-dusted workman’s garb, walks physically up to your agent’s secretary, revs his pneumatic drill meaningfully and exclaims, “Today’s the day it comes down!”

  Then, as the secretary flees, your rep sits down at the abandoned desk, buzzes your agent on the intercom, disguises his voice skillfully and says: “Ready on your call to Mr. Beddoes.” (Should your name still be Beddoes.)

  What is the cost to you? Inter Inc. bills on a basis of coming into your, home and looking around among your possessions and taking whatever seems right. (Motto: What We Do Is Between Us.)

  But—while Inter Inc. is working for you, what are you doing?

  Writing? No? Perhaps, then, you share with many writers another problem: no one, at home or office, is willing to believe that you are just about to start working. Or that you have to start working, right now. “Just help me repot this sweet William, and then write,” you will hear. Or, “Come on, let’s stop by Production for Gibbie’s going-away pouring. You’ll be back at your typewriter before dawn.” Or, “Why can’t you put my B.J. and the Bear Go to Namibia Action-Rama Kit together for me this very minute?”

  Yet no one doubts that an athlete or a bus driver is just about to do some work. “Well, here I am in War Memorial Coliseum where at 8:05 my mates and I are slated to lock horns with the streaking SuperSonics,” observes the former. “Well, I have to go drive the Number 8 Cromie Heights–117th Street–McArdle Avenue bus now,” notes the latter. And off they go to it, no questions asked. Why? Because they have put on their uniforms.

  Now: a uniform for writers. Not quite a bushjacket, not quite a smock, the rumpled-deerskin top allows plenty of play yet ample surface tension. Ingeniously engineered bias-cut pockets hold pens, notes, snacks, reference materials, ampules of whiskey and your smoking preference—and for that loosely regimental, staunchly unregimented look, a hint of piping down the vents subdued. Don’t forget the hat: a modified slouch, perma-stained, with just the suggestion of cavalry braid. The pants? Comfort and a hint of nostalgia as well: Victor Charlie pajama. By Mr. Ernest for Leon of Russia, about $250.

  Unless you would rather repot the sweet william. Because of the way your prose doesn’t move. You want it to come at the reader bim bim, bimbimbim, bim like some mythic animal. You don’t want it to be like

  I am rigging up a paragraph here. Wait … let me work my way back, around, here to the point, wait a minute wait a minute if I can just get this … one more second—to the point that

  I am rigging up a paragraph again.

  No, you want that first paragraph suddenly to be there. And then as the reader murmurs “What th’ … ?” you tug its thread and it all unravels and ravels again, and all unravels and ravels agai, nan dal lunravel sand ravel saga, inanda llunrav …

  What has gone wrong here?

  You forgot, or were unaware, that ravel and unravel mean the same thing.

  For God’s sake. Get yourself a little three-dollar dictionary.

  Are you sure you write?

  TOTAL NUDES AND BUBBLING BABIES

  THOSE PEOPLE WHO SHOOK their heads at the news that there were “topless” dancers in California, who shook them even harder at the news that there were “bottomless” dancers in California, and who keep wondering “What will they think of next?” will be interested to learn that a nitery on the Sunset Strip now has its outside covered with this summing-up of the girls inside: ONE NUDE, THE REST TOTALLY NAKED!

  It heartens a writer to see that it is language—energetically if loosely applied—to which we turn for a sense of revelation when we run out of actual veils to strip away. After “One Nude, the Rest Totally Naked” there is always “One Totally Naked, the Rest Buck Nekkid and Barefooted,” and so on.

  Another Language matter has enlivened my stay here. I have just been reading a magazine called Story of Life, whose cover story, “The Art of Walking,” tacks on the following claims:

  “In two-footed walking, a limb is off the ground longer than on it.”

  “Medical statistics record a case of someone with 12 toes on each foot.”

  I am willing to accept the second claim, though I wish there were a picture backing it up.

  But I don’t know what to make of the first claim. To begin with, I don’t know what to make of the phrase two-footed walking. Is there, in Portugal or Tunisia or among the Horse-guards, one-footed or three-footed walking? Maybe by two-footed is meant “real, unadulterated” walking—as in “pure, unadulterated smut.” If I ever have to promote a walking show, I will bill it as “One Walking, the Rest Two-Foot Striding.”

  Furthermore, I don’t think that feet in any number are limbs. A limb is an arm or a leg. And I don’t think it is noteworthy that either an arm or a leg is mostly off the ground during walking. If it isn’t, the walker is so drunk or in such a hurry as to be more nearly tumbling.

  Now, if we eliminate all the fancy wording—if we assume that two-footed walking is walking more or less as we know it in this country, and that by limb is meant “foot”—I don’t think the claim is true. In all the walking I have done or seen, at least one foot is always on the ground. A photograph of the article’s author, John Hillaby, walking, shows portions of both his feet on the ground. Unless Hillaby springs straight up into the air for a moment after every step (and if he does I think he would have mentioned it), each of his feet must spend slightly more time on the ground than off it. That is nothing against him, in itself; in fact it contrasts favorably with the way he writes.

  However, that is not the language matter I have in mind. The same magazine carries an article entitled “Why Babies Cry,” in which it is stated: “Winding a baby may stop him crying, but….”

  W
ell, I am tempted to imagine a wife asking a husband, “Have you wound the baby?” But the context indicates that the i is short and that winding is a euphemism for burping. Another euphemism for burping.

  Do you know who else has found a polite term for this amiable exercise? Dr. Spock. Dr. Spock, in his no doubt otherwise great book, tells you how to “bubble the baby.” When I came upon that expression three years ago I quit reading Dr. Spock, except on the war. In the first place bubbling suggests inflation, which is the opposite of what is desired. But the big thing is that bubble is inadequate to denote something that sounds like the collapsing of a great log in the forest, or the broaching of a ripe watermelon.

  At a time when everything is done to make nakedness sound extravagant, we play down the pungence of babies.

  LIGHT VERSE

  You also write about things that an ordinary person would pass by, like the jump of a fish, or the movement of trees, or light.

  —Paris Review interviewer, to James Dickey

  Though it brings them more than TV does or ever might,

  Ordinary people pass by light.

  The poet takes it as a theme.

  You should see light beam.

  LOVE AND OTHER INDELICACIES

  Dowered, invested and endowed

  With every frailty is the poet—

  Yielding to wickedness because

  How the hell else can he know it?

  —The True Confession

  of George Barker

  YOU MAKE ME FEEL LIKE A NATURAL PERSON TO TRY AND COME UP WITH A TERM BY WHICH A PARTICULAR WOMAN MAY BE REFERRED TO FAVORABLY AND WITH FEELING IN TIMES SUCH AS THESE

  Woman is either political or merely generic;