Pieces of Soap

by Stanley Elkin

  By law, there were no laws in this corner of the state. There was no conspiracy. There was no arson. There was no murder. There were not even any courts, and the jail, unused for years, was only another curiosity on the tour. As honorary as Maurdon Legurney’s titles, as emptily symbolic as the badge the sheriff still wore. So they had to lynch them.

  Who knew if, in defense of what they’d done—the domestics were all dead; they had no defense—the claim of the citizens of Norbiton and Chapel County, that The Thicket had merely been “salted,” was true? That they’d dug up the graves of white men and Negroes already legitimately dead and slowly, careful as puppeteers, lowered their bones into The Thicket? There could be no lawsuits so nothing was ever proven. And, at the time, the records were simply unavailable to the hordes of yellow journalists who descended on Norbiton to investigate what had happened. Indeed, they didn’t even know if there were records.

  For the record, there were records.

  Here is a partial list of slaves encouraged to believe they could escape into The Thicket:

  The Emmas Woodhouse and Bovary. The Harrys Morgan, Bailey, Angstrom, and Lime. Tom Jones. John Jarndyce. Phil Esterhaus. Dick Diver. V. K. Ratliff. Dorothea Brooke. Flem Snopes. Becky Sharp. A Titus and a Hamlet. A Cricket and a White. C3PO. A Dobbin. Someone else, whether male or female has never been ascertained, known as J. R. A Tulkinghorn. A person named Gatsby, initial J. Henrietta Stackpole. Elizabeth Bennet, Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale. A Babbitt, a Toots, a slave girl named Leia. A group of blacks probably from the Caribbean. Julien Sorel. Swann, Casaubon, Vautrin, an old man known only as Goriot, and all the members of the Guermantes family. Hazel Motes, Angel Clare, Hyacinth Robinson. Uncle Toby.

  I’ve not told you yet about that Director of Admissions named Louis Paul Pelgas, and my hour is just about up. You will be thinking, of course, that he is descended from the Louis Paul Pelgas who led his fellow domestics to torch the wall. And probably have surmised that because he studied American History at the University of Minnesota and did his doctoral dissertation on the terrible incidents of the commonwealth turned state, that he accepted the Directorship of Admissions in order to exclude whites and turn Clifton College into what, under his tenure, would probably have become an all-black school. But you would be wrong. This particular Louis Paul Pelgas is white and no relation. Coincidence. Nothing but coincidence. Because of his name and the associations it has for the people of Norbiton, you might suppose he takes a lot of ribbing. He doesn’t. The fact of the matter is, he’s not all that interested in administration. He’s looking for another post, has sent out several dozen letters, half a hundred curricula vitae. No takers so far, though he’s promised his wife he’ll keep trying. Well it’s the job market. The job market stinks. It’s a lousy time for historians. And he hasn’t published.

  Gee, I haven’t told you that much about names at all, have I? Unless detail functions, as perhaps it does, as a kind of noun, and a menu of proper names as a sort of register of fact. What I suppose I’ve been talking about is connection. Connection, invention, and all the enumerate, lovely links, synapses, and nexuses of fiction.

  Oom boom!

  Esmiss Esmoor!

  Only connect!

  Thank you, drive carefully, and goodnight.

  THE FIRST AMENDMENT AS AN ART FORM

  Anyone here still believe in the sweet as-we-know-its? Presume, I mean, upon the steady-state across-the-boards? Play in the unified fields, strum, that is, the broad base?

  Here’s what I think—

  That democracy does harmony in, that faction and the partisan are relatively new political developments, that Genesis had it about right and And-then-there-was-light precedes And-then-there-was-spectrum and the fine distinctions. I except courtiers and discount attendants, hangers-on, entourage, and all the houses and roses of the Shakespeare wars, and even understand that Guelphs and Ghibellines may have been this kind of ur Democrat, this sort of echt Republican—bloodline’s oldest money and the known forks of the chosen.

  Because who in old times ever held anything so uncalled for as an opinion? (Maybe the Persians, maybe the Ming, maybe cloudy dynasties of the ancient French, primal régimes of the German and the ruined lost tribes of Poland.) Or, getting bread, achieving soup, conquering cloth, had even just (granting They’d let them, given They’d grant it, letting them give it) that first seed cent toward a whole two cents’ worth of attitude?

  Because history, history really, was, still is, the agenda of activists. The rest of us, you, me, the rest of us, are mere fans of a world view and use the news like theater—episodes, chapters in some Sabbath soul serial. (Which is why Sunday papers are thicker than daily ones, why Meet the Press, Face the Nation, and This Week are shown only on weekends.) Let George do it? Let him? Try stopping him! Still even if we don’t have the gift for effecting change, we have the solace of criticism, and those who ain’t shy may freely speak. (It’s impossible to talk to other people.) And wasn’t the first thing I called for after my quadruple bypass surgery—not knowing I hadn’t actually made a sound, unaware of the tubes in my throat, the heart/lung apparatus I licked like deep candy, the full complement of all those strings of the medical (the endotracheal tube, the naso-gastric one, the IV feeder and A-line in my wrist, the penile and Schwann-Ganz catheters) that pulled my life, that loaned me breath and handled my suctions, my autonomics and bodily functions on automatic pilot, virtually as in vitro as any test-tube babe, the first thing, when I came to in the intensive-care cubicle which, through the French farce that is illness, I misapprehended as my room, the first thing, after the formalities—the Welcome Back kiss from my wife and kids—my portable radio?

  Why wouldn’t they listen, damn it? It was on the nightstand when they took me down that morning. (I say down, it might have been up, it was certainly away. I hadn’t realized the operation had already happened, didn’t know I was already well.) Or my son approach when I held up my hand for him to hold? (More contretemps, more hitch and thwart and mazy skimble-skamble: my wrists, unbeknownst, were tied to the bedrails.)

  Don’t get the wrong idea. This isn’t like that. This isn’t any eyewitness account. This isn’t harrowing. This isn’t some mortality affidavit. One man’s struggles with the cancer and poison ivy. I bring in the catheters, the tubes, and invasives for an instance, to shed light, to show the lengths. It’s the strictly beknownst that’s of interest here, I’d become caught up in the hospital, catching up on my call-in shows like a shut-in on soaps. This public-opinion rooter. (Though I myself never called one.—Well, once. A few years ago. Erev Mother’s Day. The host wanted to hear from the oldest mom in the audience. Women in their seventies called, crones in their eighties, pie chefs, grandmas of dozens. I called. “I’ll be one hundred twenty-four my next birthday, Mr. Baker,” I said in any man’s normal voice. “Oh?” “A hundred twenty-four, yes sir.” “My,” Baker said. “Oh yes,” I said, “one hundred twenty-four years young in September.” “Imagine,” Bob Baker said, “blowing out a hundred twenty-four candles.” “A hundred twenty-five, Mr. Baker,” I said. “Oh?” Baker said. “Sure,” I said, “one to grow on.” And went on, before I lost my nerve, to tell him how it was a sad time for me, Mother’s Day, the children being dead and all.) My baser instincts up, you see, a tropism for the notions of foes, a thing in the heart for the aversions of others, to hear them spelled out, sounded, feeding on all the virulence of the anti, the country’s contempts and hatreds—for minorities and welfare artists, or, in the politician’s famous phrase, “A Black, a Jew, a woman, and a cripple,” like the staples of poisonous food groups. Adrenalinized—“Die, fuck,” I shout at the radio—by all mean-spirited outlandishness, as though a man’s opinions were his character. (And could never understand the absence of opinion, the Don’t Knows on polls, who had, once I saw—or on the radio heard—which way the wind blew, an opinion on everything and for whom a neglected stand and tenet were not so much signals of an incompetence of argument as t
he collapse of the knee jerks, a failure of actual gait. Because ain’t polls what we do, even when our responses aren’t specifically solicited? Because ain’t such spectator/sideliner stuff, even though most issues enjoy only this brief, short growing season, like certain melons, say, the only national game in town in a free country?)

  So no wonder I reached (metaphorically reached, reached metaphorically) for my radio.

  Once I had this peer vision, the notion, when I was a kid, that everybody had just about what everyone else had. For a long time I was an only child. Brothers and sisters were exotic to me. Hell—we were a Butternut household—Silvercup bread was exotic to me. (Unfamiliar breakfast cereal, soap not Lifebuoy, soap not Lux, everything not a Pontiac, anything but Philco, everyone unrelated by marriage or blood. Because brand names are maybe the beginning of politics, the insinuation, or, rather, the plunked down of the familiar and accustomed into one’s world, some lifelong seduction of one’s turf, the beginning of taste, and security, too, merchandise known early enough, like an imprinting in nature. Because all we ever wanted is not just to know where we stand but to stand there forever, locked into safety like a mouth around a pacifier. Doesn’t, to this day, my colleague’s mother call from New York before she makes a visit, to discover what treats she may bring, whether there’s rye bread, whether there’s lox?) But, hey I was a kid. And had the kid’s farm-boy hick imagination. Kids are peasants and can’t hold in their heads the simplest things. Their souls go ooh and ahh, I mean, run off with new information like thieves hauling the silver, making ado over the tall buildings and fixating on the dinosaurs. Because all we ever really learn is awe; dread, I mean, and wonder, what keeps us put and freeze-frames—Rosebud! Rosebud!—the inclination of our hearts. Give us, say the Jesuits, a kid, and he’s ours forever. No big deal.

  So my radio’s found (a G.E. in the $15 to $20 range, about the size of a pack of the 100-mm cigarettes that put me here, low-tech despite its carry-cord, its jack for where the earphone goes, its AM/FM capabilities; low-tech despite its capacity to focus sound waves or decode electricity), and I’m flat on my back (who, resting, ordinarily takes to his side like a swimmer loafing, in the browse mode, say, some Sunday driver of a guy copping the sights, or a fellow on lunch break sidesaddle on benches, your day-game gent, your afternoon-movie one—and how did such a laid-back chap ever get into this position anyway?), and maybe my wrists were still strapped to the bed rails, I don’t remember, maybe I even had to ask the nurse to tune it for me. (Why not? I don’t put it past me. Because maybe what makes me such a terrific patient is my no-holds-barred willingness to ring for the nurses, to turn my bodily functions over to them, let them in on my every anxiety—ill health’s poor sport.) So my radio’s found and I’m flat on my back, afraid even to think about turning over (all those wires and leads, the signals they send of my heart’s blow-by-blows—why, I’d become a sort of radio myself!—and there’s good old Bob Baker giving out call letters and phone numbers and welcoming me back to a telephone call-in show he hosts—“Give us a honk,” he says, “on the old kazoo”—and the thought occurs, Why, I really am cured, I really am, soothed by his tenor’s sweet voice, musical, accentless, but which I think of anyway as a noise in the key of brogue. You wouldn’t—though the program is called The Party Line—hear this kind of show in Russia.

  Because the nature of good dialogue is confrontational, some Friday-night-fight-nite ring to things, or no, better, quotes from the weigh-in, a suggestion of the dangerous, the barely contained, a hint of hidden, menacing agenda, a whiff of lunacy, of the fine line between grudge and show business. Hemingway’s killers, for example, their tough talk in the lunchroom in Summit when Al asks George what people do there nights and Al’s friend says, “They eat the dinner. They all come here and eat the big dinner.” Just that scant increment of restraint like the harsh moderations of Geneva Conventions, courtesy and civilization reduced to the blindfold they give you, the final cigarette, what’s on the menu at the last supper, whether they deliver your mail. The grudging proprieties I mean, what really goes on in the parts of speech. (And once, at high table in a college at Cambridge, the guest of a visiting, adjunct American pal, myself and my wife—so Americans; possibly, in this bird’s eye, Colonists already twice removed, maybe, counting our adjunct friend, even thrice—offered brandy after dinner in the Senior Common Room and this perfectly Edwardian Englishman asshole extending fruits on a tray, things I didn’t recognize—a fair distance from Butternut, let alone Silvercup—and, pausing, I nervously chose the grapes, knowing it wasn’t positively de rigueur to peel and cut them, that I could probably pick them off their stems and get away with it, and the Master said, “Oh good, we were all a bit nervous of the persimmon,” and I didn’t know why, or even quite how, only that I’d been roughed up, told off, taken down a peg, killed with his kindness.) The measured, careful, Mexican banditry—for its softly spoken ominosity, the big unseen sticks it carries—a language of toughs and bullies I’d love to know how to speak myself.

  Because it ain’t the found art, the occasional “anti-Arctic” you hear that gets you. It ain’t malaprops, bad grammar, or other, merely wayward spoonerisms of the head. “Anti-Arctic” is only a mistake. There’s no intent to injure. (And when, at the beginning of the school year, a T.A. in grad school, I, with other T.A.s, thirty or forty of us perhaps, working two to a desk in this, well, academic boiler room in Lincoln Hall, reading the themes of incoming freshmen, to wheat and chaff them, magisterial as Customs agents or guards at Ellis Island, say, to size them up—fun with the greenhorns—and “place” them in the freshman rhetoric course we deemed—at thousands of themes at thirty or forty readers two to a desk—commensurate with their skills, and we came across something particularly infelicitous and shared it, or, as the day wore on, and we grew less particular, and called out, “Hey, hey listen, hey you’ve got to hear this one!” shouting all the innocent double- and triple-entendres, all the solecisms of all flawed—fun with the greenhorns—language, screaming even misspellings finally, bidding up our offended sensibilities, our pretend outrage—fun with the greenhorns—hectic, antic, and frenzied as actual traders on some Bourse of Usage, I lost my taste for faux pas, for an entirely accidental trayf linguistics—even, I think, for jokes; I don’t enjoy jokes, their stand-in, small-talk essence, the soft conversational purposes they serve—as if it were impossible to talk to other people.) Just this momentary clumsiness and lapse, of no more significance, finally, than a jarred glass. What’s wanted is character, consistency of vision, inspired Pavlovian pattern, conditioned or not, natured or nurtured. What’s wanted, I mean, are the hermetic, locked-in obsessives of art.

  During the last days of the 1987 National League pennant race, St. Louis had to beat Montreal to stay in contention, and Virginia McCarthy, another host on The Party Line, remarked to a caller that it wasn’t fair that foreign countries be allowed to play major-league baseball—and the caller agreed. Beautiful, I remember thinking, typical. Because doesn’t someone have to be there to mediate and pass judgment? What was ever the point of preaching to the converted, and who enjoyed Mrs. McCarthy’s remark more, me or the caller? Because all her caller got from it was reassurance, and, on that famous scale from One to Ten, reassurance always comes lower than judgment and disapproval. (Which is why it’s more fun to read letters to the editor in the Daily News than letters to the editor in the Times—for distance, for insular scorn, for all the beaming solace of critical discount and the goose it gives to pride. This is where I want to be, I think when I hear them, the hosts on The Party Line, the folks who call in, talking history, current events, Bitburg to Bork, Ollie to the bombing of Philadelphia, this is where I want to be, right here, provided and snug beneath the blankets of distance while the world outside threatens like rough weather, war, and its rumors like rain on the roof.)

  And can’t wait till the next disaster. Not the earthquakes. Not the floods and not the fires. Not even the serial killings or gra
nd heists and pestilentials. (There’s no call on the call-ins for these. Everyone is at peace with fury.) But the scandals. Because it’s the world that makes the best gossip, and only a madman would take sides in a hurricane. (Catastrophe has interest only if it’s man-made.) So it ain’t, as I say, mere spoonerism that serves my purposes, any of the accidental “anti-Arctics” of found art, however foolish. (Though foolishness, ignorance, and stupidity, if habitual, are at least along the approaches to the approaches, somewhere in the foothills of character and personality.)

  You hardly hear of it anymore, but a year or so ago a good deal was made in the papers about something called “shock radio.” St. Louis, where I live, doesn’t do shock radio. It’s more a New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago sort of thing, blood-sport programming for your anything-goes towns, but I’ve heard it and it ain’t much. The formula is perfectly obvious. It is, quite simply, to be outrageous. Outrageous, say, as a professional wrestler is outrageous, or some caged dunk-me artist above five feet of canned water on a narrow plank on a boardwalk. Outrageous for money, I mean, so a little pathetic even at its nastiest, as Joe McCarthy was a little pathetic because no one could really believe that crap, all that top-of-the-voice, sky-is-falling geschrei, all that trained pitchman’s get-’em-while-they’re-hot, get-’em-while-they’re-hot-here.

  Once I tuned in. It’s nothing, just show business. They don’t mean it, they’re only fooling.

  Howard Stern was ridiculing a man about his weight, not even a man who’d called in, just some fellow New Yorker he’d read about in the papers. The man weighed, as I recall, over 1,000 pounds. There may have been a question about his eligibility for welfare. And I seem to remember something about blankets, that the fellow didn’t have enough blankets. It wasn’t, the blanket part, metabolic or anything, that once your body weight hits four figures something physiological takes over and you require extra covers. He didn’t, I think, have enough covers to begin with. Maybe it had something to do with the Welfare. Who knows? I live in St. Louis where much of your goings-on are blacked out. But, anyway, there was Stern, making fat jokes, carrying on, when an astonishing thing happened.