“Tonight,” she said, “the speaker of the evening— This, by the way, is our third Friday night; last time, as you all remember, we all enjoyed hearing what Professor Moore had to say about agriculture in China. Tonight we have here, I am proud to say, the Russian-born, and citizen of this country, Professor—now comes a difficult one, I am afraid—Professor Pun-neen. I hope I have it right. He hardly needs any introduction, of course, and we are all happy to have him. We have a long evening before us, a long and rewarding evening, and I am sure you would all like to have time to ask him questions afterward. Incidentally, I am told his father was Dostoevski’s family doctor, and he has travelled quite a bit on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Therefore I will not take up your precious time any longer and will only add a few words about our next Friday lecture in this program. I am sure you will all be delighted to know that there is a grand surprise in store for all of us. Our next lecturer is the distinguished poet and prose writer Miss Linda Lacefield. We all know she has written poetry, prose, and some short stories. Miss Lacefield was born in New York. Her ancestors on both sides fought on both sides in the Revolutionary War. She wrote her first poem before graduation. Many of her poems—three of them, at least—have been published in ‘Response,’ a collection of a hundred love lyrics by American women. In 1922, she published her first collection, ‘Remembered Music.’ In 1924, she received the cash prize offered by—”
But Pnin was not listening. A faint ripple stemming from his recent seizure was holding his fascinated attention. It lasted only a few heartbeats, with an additional systole here and there—last, harmless echoes—and was resolved in demure reality as his distinguished hostess invited him to the lectern. But while it lasted, how limpid the vision was! In the middle of the front row of seats he saw one of his Baltic aunts, wearing the pearls and the lace and the blond wig she had worn at all the performances given by the great ham actor Khodotov, whom she had adored from afar before drifting into insanity. Next to her, shyly smiling, sleek dark head inclined, gentle brown gaze shining up at Pnin from under velvet eyebrows, sat a dead sweetheart of his, fanning herself with her program. Murdered, forgotten, unrevenged, incorrupt, immortal, many old friends were scattered throughout the dim hall among more recent people, such as Miss Clyde, who had modestly regained a front seat. Vanya Bedniashkin, shot by the Reds in 1919, in Odessa, because his father had been a liberal, was gaily signalling to his former schoolmate from the back of the hall. And in an inconspicuous situation Dr. Pavel Pnin and his anxious wife, both a little blurred but on the whole wonderfully recovered from their obscure dissolution, looked at their son with the same life-consuming passion and pride that they had looked at him with that night in 1912 when, at a school festival commemorating Napoleon’s defeat, he had recited (a bespectacled lad all alone on the stage) a poem by Pushkin.
The brief vision was gone. Old Miss Herring, retired professor of history, author of “Russia Awakes” (1922), was bending across one or two intermediate members of the audience to compliment Miss Clyde on her speech, while from behind that lady another twinkling old party was thrusting into her field of vision a pair of withered, soundlessly clapping hands.
1953
GEORGE S. KAUFMAN
ANNOY KAUFMAN, INC.
FOR some time now, I have suspected the existence of an organization whose scope and energies are so enormous that they stagger the imagination. I am not prepared to say with certainty that such an organization exists, but there are various recurrent phenomena in my life that can be explained only by the theory that a major plan is in operation— plan so vast and expensive that it is almost impossible to envision it.
The organization that carries out this plan must spend millions of dollars annually to achieve its object. It has—it must have—great suites of offices, and thousands upon thousands of employees. On a guess, I would put its running cost at ten million dollars a year; if anything, the figure may be higher. With some presumption, I have christened it Annoy Kaufman, Inc., though I will admit that I cannot find that title in any lists of corporations.
But the facts are incontrovertible:
First, there is the matter of going to the bank. Let us say that I have run out of money and am required to cash a small check. Now, no one knows that I am going to the bank on that particular morning. There is nothing about it in the papers. I am not immodest, and I know that, at best, such an announcement would get only a few lines on a back page: “George S. Kaufman is going to the bank this morning to cash a check. We wish him all success”—something like that.
But not a word is printed. No one knows about it. As a matter of fact, I have probably not made up my mind to go until about eleven o’clock. Yet the organization is prepared. It immediately arranges that half a dozen big companies should be drawing their payroll money that morning, and that each of them should send a clerk to the bank with a list of payroll requirements—so many five-dollar bills, so many dollar bills, so many quarters, dimes, nickels, pennies. Next, it is arranged that all these people should get to the tellers’ windows just a few seconds ahead of me.
Now, this takes doing. Remember, the organization has not known just which morning I was planning to go to the bank, so for weeks and weeks these clerks have been held in readiness somewhere. And suppose I stop to talk to a friend and arrive five minutes later than expected. Obviously, several relays of clerks must be kept in reserve in a corner of the bank, awaiting a signal.
Moreover, these are not people who are just pretending to be cashing payrolls; the bank would never stand for that. No, they are people from real companies—companies founded by the organization and kept in business for years and years, probably at an enormous loss, just so that their representatives can get to the bank windows ahead of me. And it is not always the same people who stand in front of me; it is different ones. This, in turn, means a large number of separate companies to maintain. These companies run factories, keep books, pay income taxes, hold board meetings, advertise on television, pension their employees. Surely this side of the enterprise alone must run to a pretty figure.
MY next example may sound like a simple and inexpensive thing to manage, but it isn’t. It has to do with the engineer’s little boy, Danny. Danny is six years old. In fact, he has been six years old for the thirty-five years that I have been making overnight train journeys. (I suppose that, actually, they keep on having an engineer’s little boy born every year, but even that takes planning.) Anyhow, for years and years Danny has been begging his father to let him run the locomotive some night. For years and years, his father has been saying no. Then, finally, the night comes. “Can I run the engine tonight, Daddy?” asks Danny, who is too young to know about “can” and “may.” And his father says, “Yes, Danny, boy. We have just got word that Kaufman will be on the train tonight, and he is very tired and needs a good night’s sleep, so you can run the engine.” So Danny runs the engine, the result being the neck-breaking stops and starts that keep me awake all night.
The organization has, of course, the incidental expense of maintaining Danny in Chicago or Pittsburgh or Cleveland, as the case may be, until I am ready to make the return trip. (Danny’s father obviously cannot wait over to take care of him; he must go back to running the engine properly on the nights when I am not travelling.) So the organization must keep branch offices in Chicago and Pittsburgh and Cleveland (and wherever else I may go), and provide someone to take care of Danny, and schools for him to go to, and somebody to make sure that he doesn’t practice, and so learn how to run the engine better, before I make my return trip. This seemingly small part of the business can run to fantastic sums over the years.
BUT the bank and Danny are, after all, relatively minor matters. Once done with, they are over till the next time. I come now to the major opus—the basic activity for which Annoy Kaufman, Inc., was founded.
Years ago, when I moved to New York, I noticed that a little man in a gray overcoat was watching me closely as I took the ferry fro
m Jersey City to Twenty-third Street. I don’t know why, but I think his name was Mr. Moffat. At all events, Mr. Moffat was the first person off the ferryboat when it docked. Hurriedly joining his pals in a midtown office, Mr. Moffat reported as follows: “Boys, he’s here. We can take out incorporation papers in Albany tomorrow and go to work. In a day or two, I’ll have all the dope for you.”
Now, you may think it arrogant of me to claim that the entire rebuilding of New York City, at present in full bloom, came about solely as a result of my arrival here, but I can only cite the facts. No sooner did I move to a given neighborhood than the wreckers were at work on the adjoining building, generally at eight o’clock in the morning. The pneumatic asphalt-ripper, with which we are all now familiar, was first used early one morning as a weapon against the slumber of none other than myself. The first automatic rivet came into existence to be the destroyer of my sleep. (All dates and names of streets are on file in the office of my attorney.) Naturally, I kept moving to new neighborhoods in quest of peace, but the boys were always ready and waiting. Can you blame me for feeling that it was I, and I alone, who unwittingly charted the course of the city’s onward sweep?
Only once, in all these years, did they slip up. Acting without sufficient research, they put up Lever House just to the south of me, unaware that my bedroom was on the other side of my apartment. Discovering their error, they, of course, bought the property to the north and went quickly to work. Well, sir, heads rolled in the office that morning, I can tell you. Mr. Moffat, I like to think, shot himself, but I suspect he was immediately succeeded by his son, and since then the organization has functioned so efficiently that I am now exactly thirty-seven years behind on sleep, with only an outside chance of making it up.
WITH all that on their hands, you wouldn’t think they’d have time for Congressional lobbying, too, would you? This ultimate move came to light during a visit of mine to Washington a few weeks ago. Having been made suspicious, over the years, by my dealings with the Internal Revenue people, I went to the trouble of looking up the original text of the income-tax law, as filed in the Library of Congress. Sure enough, there it was—Paragraph D, Clause 18—just as I had suspected: “The taxpayer, in computing the amount of tax due to the Government, may deduct from his taxable income all legitimate expenses incurred in the course of conducting his business or profession—except,” it added, “in the case of George S. Kaufman.”
1957
H. F. ELLIS
THE LAST REPOSITORY
OF the mental exercises, or fantasies, I indulge in to keep myself awake when I cannot sleep, perhaps the most useless runs as follows: I am the last adult left on earth, in charge of a huddle of children who will be the fathers and mothers of all future mankind. We are in some sort of safe place and have no immediate problems about survival or keeping out the rain. I don’t know how we got there and I don’t care, any more than I concern myself with the details of our daily life. I am too old now to picture myself as the kind of man who could carve fishhooks out of bones in an emergency. All that side of life is somehow provided for; nor am I answerable to anyone for a full explanation. If I were cooking up an imaginative novel, it would be different; fiction is sacred, fantasy is free. So, also, I am not compelled to account to myself for the fact that all knowledge has disappeared along with my contemporaries. All books, all instruments and apparatus, all drugs, vehicles, weapons, factories, pots, pans, and other relics of civilization have been destroyed or buried irretrievably under a thick layer of radioactive dust. I am the sole repository of the accumulated wisdom and experience of man, from pre-Sumerian times to the holocaust.
I feel the responsibility acutely, and often have to turn my pillow over to keep a cool head when I reflect that whatever I fail to pass on to my little band of orphans tumbling about so happily in the sun will be lost forever—or at best will have to be rediscovered by the slow and painful process of trial and error. It seems to me a terrible thing that the human race should have to wait another seven thousand years before safety matches are available again. I cannot bear to contemplate the repetition of the myriad ingenious fallacies and misapprehensions that have bedevilled the course of human history. It was some five thousand years after the dawn of civilization (which I take leave to date around the sixth millennium) before Empedocles produced the notion that earth, air, fire, and water were the four elements of which everything was composed, and got considerable credit for this error. More than two thousand years later, imponderables like phlogiston, caloric, and ether were still supposed to be at large in the universe, accounting for things. We do not want to plow our way through all that stuff again. And only I, tossing and turning in my lonely bed, can prevent it.
I must try to put my toddlers on the right lines about protons and neutrons, which is bound to involve some preliminary talk about electricity. And this again reminds me that I may not be spared long enough for their tiny minds to be ready for instruction about even so elementary a matter as winding wire around a magnetized iron core. I may be suffering from a touch of strontium 90, which could be a serious thing at my age. In case anything irremediable happens to me in the meantime, I ought to write these things down. I have paper and pencils in this fantasy, for I really cannot be bothered to improvise clay tablets at half past one in the morning. But what shall I write? Where shall I begin my task? The phrase “something irremediable” that came into my head just now is a pleasant Grecism for death and reminds me that the achievement of ancient Athens will be lost forever unless I put it down on paper. It is a question of time and evaluation. I find it extraordinarily difficult to decide whether Sophocles or safety matches should come first.
“Safety matches are a simple means of producing fire and are made by dipping thin pieces of wood into a brown mixture containing phosphorus,” I see myself jotting down for posterity. “When the brown end is rubbed against some more of this brown stuff, a flame results and the piece of wood burns. Phosphorus is found in bones, if I remember rightly, and you will just have to keep on trying until you learn how to extract it.”
This, to my surprise, is the best note I can write about the manufacture of matches without getting out of bed and consulting an encyclopedia. I should be sounder on Sophocles, I think, but it is hard to believe that a people still at the stage of rubbing sticks together would have time for Greek tragedy. I am constantly up against this problem of priorities. I desperately want, for instance, to give them a glimmering about airplanes, not caring to think about lives uselessly thrown away two thousand years hence in experiments with canvas frameworks attached to the arms. But it would be a long business, and at the end of it I doubt whether a machine made to my instructions would be stable in a high wind. How is it to be powered? I daresay I could set down the principle of the internal combustion engine in terms that would save time for these youngsters, once they had found out how to make steel, and I could add a footnote about jet propulsion for later on. It is the thought of the fuel that depresses me. When the whole human race is numbered in tens, or even in thousands, how does one present to them in an attractive light, as a worthwhile operation, the process of drilling tremendously deep holes in the earth on the off chance of finding a substance that is useless until you have cracked it?
I am up against much the same difficulty over drip-dry shirts. The truth seems to be that you have to have a population running into millions before anyone will take the trouble to make machines capable of producing millions of shirts. This is the kind of hard economic fact one comes up against around 3 A.M., when it begins to look as if the first essential step to be taken by my little group of survivors on the road back to civilization is to multiply as rapidly as possible. I do not feel, however, that I need give them any guidance about that.
SOMETIMES, at about this point in my fantasy, I half decide to concentrate on culture, eked out with a few simple conveniences made of wood. Aristotle’s definition of tragedy; whatever of Shakespeare I have by heart; the principle o
f the lever; the golden section, if I can be sure of it; a rough sketch of a wheelbarrow—that would not be a contemptible contribution to the future of the race. I could add an appendix stating a few scientific facts (the sun is ninety-three million miles away; water boils at two hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit) for them to make what they liked of. But I can’t be satisfied with it. There is a sense of waste, of irreparable loss. Before long I am stuck again with the old desire to give them all I know, convinced anew that I must take the long-term view, that in the long run the merest hint—a shadowy clue about the possibility of refrigeration, pneumatic tires, anesthetics, the telephone, dried milk—is better than the endless silence of the tomb. Am I to lie here like a hog, sheltering behind the lateness of the hour, and deprive millions yet unborn of the knowledge that trees cut up fine, boiled into a mash, and rolled out thin can be written on with ink?
I am now face to face with the appalling truth that I have no idea how ink is made. Is it conceivable that it is still harvested from deliberately frightened cuttlefish on extensive squid farms? If so, I shall never touch it again.
The danger of setting down information for a too distant posterity is that it may be disregarded in the meantime—even lost—or its purpose may be misconceived. I foresee, as the cocks begin to crow, the possibility that my notebooks, with their fragments of Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” their squiggled representations of sewing machines and teapots, the brave attempt at the binomial theorem, will within a few generations assume the status of legend, become the corpus of a world mythology. My notebooks may, though I rather hope not, found a new religion. My description of the random behavior of molecules in an expanded gas may be read out on feast days by some uncomprehending priest while the multitude prostrates itself in awe and terror.
Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker Page 35