Pieces of Soap

by Stanley Elkin

  INTRODUCTION TO EARLY ELKIN

  I was no prodigy. The three pieces in this collection are, in some early, fugitive sense, the real thing—“A Sound of Distant Thunder,” “The Party,” and “Fifty Dollars”—are not, I’m afraid, very good. Indeed, with the possible exception of “Fifty Dollars,” they are no good at all. They are not, that is, promising. I hear no voices struggling to get out, no themes, here muted, that I would return to later on when I was better equipped to handle them, and, while I welcome the opportunity to have them published again, I don’t think you can guess why. So I will tell you.

  It’s because, assuming you know anything at all about my work, they demonstrate some up-from-nothing quality about life that says a good word for human possibility. This is my book from the sidelines, pepper talk, my teacher-cum-coach’s two cents worth of exemplum. I was, I mean, down there, and now—please, don’t get me wrong; I’m not as full of myself as this sounds—I’m up here. Bill Bamberger is willing to put this stuff between covers. I sign fifty copies of the press run and—at least that’s the assumption—a few dozen people will be willing to pay a small premium to have it in their libraries. I’ve arrived, I mean. Me. Little me. Little old me. Who was no prodigy. Who was already twenty-seven years old when Baxter Hathaway, in what must have been a dry season, decided to permit “A Sound of Distant Thunder,” the first story I ever published, to appear in Epoch. So, as I say, this, at least for me, is the point of the enterprise. Rally! Go, team! Take courage! Stand fast!

  Because—I’ve read the stories, I’ve gone over the galleys—all I had, I see now, was resolve and patience. All I had was the desire to write. That isn’t always enough, I know, but it’s at least as much as talent.

  Now, before we get down to cases, let me just say that in putting this book together there was never any real temptation to revise the stories, or tinker with them, or even to touch up obvious discrepancies. In “The Party,” for example, Rose Harris, the grandmother’s niece, is described as being almost as old as the grandmother. Indeed, for the grandson, Stephen, who makes a big deal out of it, the notion of one old woman calling another old woman “Aunt” seems to be one of life’s major anomalies. Yet only a few paragraphs further on, Hymen, Rose Harris’s husband, is said to be a student at C.C.N.Y. This, however, goes entirely unremarked. Maybe Hymen’s her son. The story certainly doesn’t make it clear, and I’m damned if I know. I’ve let it stand. As I have, too, even the idiosyncratic punctuation. Here’s an exchange from “A Sound of Distant Thunder”:

  “Listen, Ben; you’ll be over for Friday night supper tonight?”

  “. . . Yes, well, look kid; I suppose the wife is expecting us?”

  I was puzzled by the semicolons in those two sentences until I remembered that I wrote that story for Randall Jarrell’s fiction-writing class at the University of Illinois in 1954. I was a T.A. at the time, and we were required to lower the grade of any paper that committed any of the ten basic mechanical errors. One of these, of course, was the incorrect use of the semicolon. Semicolons, I was taught to teach, were used to separate two independent clauses, and in my book “Listen, Ben” was one independent clause and “Yes, well, look kid” was another. And if I meant it that, at least for me, the point of this enterprise is to show my very humblest origins, then of course I have to admit these stories and all the bad things in them as grist and artifact for my little awful Elkin museum.

  Another thing about this stuff is that for all the ersatz ethnicity of these early stories, they are, in a peculiar way, autobiographical. I tell my students to avoid their lives and invent their texts, but how, I wonder, did I get so smart? For years I was hung up on the blandest correspondence between art and reality. In “The Party,” for example, the incident about the captain of the ferryboat and the episode about the Four Questions were plagiarized from my own life. Similarly, my grandmother (a Feldman, like Stephen in two of the stories here) used to buy her fish from exactly the sort of fish kisser herein described. The reference to her glass cabinet and to Dubowski (my grandmother’s maiden name) are also “real,” as is the basic generative fact of the story—the notion that Stephen, like myself, lived in Chicago but felt he came alive only when visiting his relations in New York. It seems strange to me that I can recall all this yet can’t recall the slightest thing about the details of the composition of “The Party.” (Though I remember rewriting it. It was in an army hospital, down with the symptoms of something like mononucleosis, and Donald Fiene of Views wrote to say what no editor ever says, that he’d publish it if I made it a little longer.)

  There are other similarities. My wife and I were subjected to a spiel very like the one Mr. Feldman gives Krueger in “A Sound of Distant Thunder.” If “A Sound of Distant Thunder” has any redeeming social value at all—I mean reflexively—it must surely come in Feldman’s sales pitch about his china. Crude as it is, it is, I think, the source for all the arias my characters often give themselves over to in my work. “That’s a common fallacy. The biggest fallacy in the world that you can judge china by what is lighter”—exactly the words the salesman used on us—may be the two most important sentences I’ve ever written. (Even the situation in “Fifty Dollars” is, at least seminally, autobiographical. When I was in the army back in the mid-fifties I’d put together five dollars toward a birthday present for my wife. Because I’m a particularly unimaginative gift giver, I told Joan what I had to spend and asked her what she wanted. She said she wanted the five dollars.)

  The stories collected here—“Fifty Dollars” was published in 1962 but was written in the fifties—are from and, in the case of the reading memoir, about, the fifties, those long-gone, almost ancient, days when I actually was early Elkin. “The Graduate Seminar,” published in 1972, I include because, well, one, I like it, and, two, I think it feeds into what I hope has been my theme here—some vaguely Newtonian notion of salvage and the conservation of energy.

  John Leonard had asked me to write a retrospective review of Anthony Burgess’s novels for the Sunday Times Book Review. The efficient cause was the publication, in 1971, of Burgess’s novel M/F, and what I had to do was read all Burgess’s novels. What I gave Leonard was everything—and much that’s been dropped from what appears here—that Professor says about Mr. Burgess’s book, and what Leonard gave me was his blessing and a $250 “kill fee.” That spring, Mark Mirsky telephoned to ask if I had a story he could use in Fiction, his new magazine. As a matter of fact I didn’t, but I told him sure. Knowing the minute I said it that what I’d do was simply recycle the Burgess review, put quotation marks around my remarks in that piece, which assumed, of course, not only a “Professor” but a class, which itself assumed students, classmates. Classmates suggested a field trip to me and a field trip a museum, kids misbehaving, acting up at the water fountain, everything that happens in “The Graduate Seminar.” It came, as I say at the end of “Fifty Dollars,” “all together all at once.”

  The rest, Elkin watchers, is history. But this is early Elkin and, alas, it’s all history.

  INTRODUCTION TO THE SIX-YEAR-OLD MAN

  A guy called long-distance.

  He was this producer, he said, and Columbia had given him some development money to get some original screenplays from writers who normally didn’t write for the movies. Was I interested?

  Was I!

  Yeah, well, the guy said, he’d get back to me in a few days, see did I have any ideas.

  Only much, much more charming. Here a compliment, there a pretty speech, a gallantry someplace else. Believe me, butter wouldn’t melt. Trust me.

  Then, before we spoke again, I happened to see the copy on the Anchor paperback edition of Donald Barthelme’s story collection, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, where I misread the following words:

  The narrator is 35 years old, 6 feet tall, with the logic and reasoning of an adult. He is in the 6th grade where Miss Mandible, his teacher, is frustrated in her desires to have an affair with him because, officially,
he is a child!

  “How funny! A six-year-old with a six-year-old’s sensibilities who looks thirty-five.” (This was my muse speaking, talking dyslectic tongues.)

  So, when I read the story and saw that Barthelme’s fellow was actually an adult, in sixth grade for reasons best known to himself and his school district, I realized I’d have something to say to the guy when he got back to me to see did I have any ideas.

  Comedy, if it’s to amount to anything, should be grounded in logic. Disruption, chaos, and misrule may come along afterwards, of course, but only if the foundation is sound. (This is why the Marx Brothers never worked for me, why the Three Stooges didn’t, Abbott, Costello; why I found them merely silly when they were not flat-out deranged.) I wanted Paul, my six-year-old man, normal in all the important ways, in, I mean, the habits of the head. Probably the hardest thing for me was to work out the math. There had to be some ideal numerical symmetry to the given if I was to believe in the premise. This had to do with the problem of his weight. (Not his size, I could always finesse his size. Kids, after all, can twerp it out one year and shoot up the next.) Well, if he weighed 5 pounds at birth and doubled his weight each year that would put him at risk as a ten-pound two-year-old but might still not make him threatening enough to his dad, who ought to be able to take him as a 160-pound six-year-old. On the other hand, if he weighs in at 7 pounds his first year and goes 224 in his sixth, his very size would give him an entirely different set of problems. No, if you’re going to be a six-year-old man you almost have to weigh 6 pounds your first year, 12 your second, 24 your third, 48 your fourth, 96 your fifth (normal until your fifth, you see, chubby, even glandular, but essentially normal), and 192 pounds when you’re six years old. Because this is the point: at six years, at six feet, at 192, Paul is at the top of his form, at some perfect juncture and pitch of age and flesh. He is, I mean, at the peak, completely and entirely ripe, and thus in a position for his decay to amount to something. So that was the given. But what was the premise?

  That—forget his size and weight—he’s more six-year-old than six-year-old man, that he needs a baby-sitter, that his parents, if they’re to come through this marriage intact, have to get out once in a while, that—remember his weight, remember his size—they need a baby-sitter! (Which is why, if you discount inflation, one of the funniest jokes in the script occurs early on, during the telephone conversation with the potential sitter, when Stu keeps urging his wife to tell the kid what they pay—$2.50 an hour. If I were writing the script today I’d probably make it $17.40 an hour and maybe throw in benefits—Blue Cross, a pension plan. Which points up, I think, one of the weaknesses in The Six-Year-Old Man—that it’s dated. I wrote the screenplay in St. Louis during the fall of 1966, and its revision, the version printed here, in California—while I taught summer school at UC, Santa Barbara—in 1967. Too many of the jokes depend upon the style and aberrant behaviors of those days. Paul’s encounter with the hippies is an example; Eleanor’s sexual timidity is. Another weakness in the script, of course, is that it’s way too long. I’d never written a screenplay, I thought I had to put in all the camera angles, tell the actors what the expression on their faces ought to be, how to speak the lines. But the major flaw in The Six-Year-Old Man is that often the farce is simply too much—I’m thinking particularly of the scene in the second “lovenest”—and has to be pulled back, toned down. Twenty years later I see that and am astonished at the mistakes I made, but what astonishes me even more is that so much of it works and how easy it would be to make it all work.) So the premise of the story is that Paul’s never stayed by himself before, and when he’s abandoned by his terrified baby-sitter he’s so terrified on his own behalf he’s willing to undertake his dreadful odyssey and go in the dark to look for his parents.

  Makes sense to me.

  Foundations the mishegoss in logic, I mean, so all else follows—disruption, chaos, misrule—as the night the day.

  I worked on The Six-Year-Old Man, I recall, from a little after 9:00, when my class was over, until about 4:30 or 5:00 in the afternoon. Never before did time spent writing go by so quickly for me, never did I have more energy. That I was dieting at the time and wrote the movie on a prescription for amphetamines that ultimately put me in the hospital with what was probably a heart attack—they said diverticulitis and to cut my meat in tiny pieces and not to chew great boluses but I know what I know—may have had less to do with my diet pills than with the high excitement I felt at finally learning how to plot, for if The Six-Year-Old Man taught me anything, it taught me that—the close cause-and-effectness of fiction, its obligatory, mandatory logic, all its if-this-goes-here-then-that-goes-there’s. (Farce is the best lesson in plotting there is.) And something else. Until I wrote this piece I had believed in a sort of Tom-and-Jerry principle of comedy—that it may have no bad consequences, that no one dies in a joke, that the cat falls off that building and shatters into a million pieces in one loop, he’s brand-spanking whole and new and sound again in the next. (As a matter of fact, after the guy got back to me to see did I have any ideas and I told him about the six-year-old man and he said alright it’s a go and I wrote the first draft for him in which I actually killed Paul’s parents off in an accident and he said no way! what, are you nuts? this is supposed to be a comedy, you think it’s funny a kid suddenly comes up an orphan! not in America it’s not, and you put those folks back together or you’ll never work in this town again—only much, much more charming, here a compliment, there a pretty speech, a gallantry someplace else, elsewhere a trust me—I thought to myself, you know, the guy’s right, and I merely crippled them for life in the revision—and let them find what they find when they get home.)

  Because it certainly didn’t make me rich and famous. Even if it was a long-distance call. The movie was never made. Columbia’s development dough wasn’t all that terrific anyway, nor the time I spent in the hospital in California. And when Esquire magazine ran a much shorter version of this—and in a radically different form—in its December 1968 issue, the guy wanted the money for it, and only Bob Brown, the fiction editor at the time, was able to talk the guy into letting me have it. After it came out I got a few calls, one from the actress, Stella Stevens, on Thanksgiving, when we were all just sitting down to dinner. She’d read it in Esquire, she said, and wanted to buy it from me. I told her I was sorry but it belonged to the guy. She even called a second time. The guy, I told her, I signed this contract, it’s the guy’s. (I saw a squib in a column one time, that Stella Stevens had a property called The Six-Year-Old Man.) And, later, ran into him, the guy, in New York, and he told me Hey thanks. Hey what for? Well Stella had called. The figure I remember is seventy-five thousand dollars; my wife recalls it was only sixty. But I’m the number magician in this family. Hell, ain’t I the one figured out what that damn fool six-year-old kid weighed on his third birthday? But let’s round it off, let’s say it was sixty. Because if we say it was sixty thousand that narrows the “screwed gap” by a factor of fifteen thousand. I’m automatically fifteen thousand dollars ahead of where I’d be if Stella Stevens had offered the guy seventy-five thousand for it. It must have been only an option she bought anyway. Because when the guy found out Bamberger Books was bringing it out in a limited edition he demanded my $250 advance. My God, this guy’s Jackie Cooganizing me! I’m being Stephen Foster’d, Little Richarded!

  And you want to know something? The check’s in the mail!

  INTRODUCTION TO THE COFFEE ROOM

  I undertook to write The Coffee Room on commission from National Public Radio for their old “Earplay” series. They paid $2,000.00 per script and promised a first-rate production with important actors. (The actors, Edward Herrmann and Fred Gwynne, were in it—I have a tape—though there is no good evidence that the show was actually broadcast. KWMU-FM, the local NPR station in St. Louis, produced the play with myself in the role of Leon Mingus in November of 1985. There’d been such a delay between the time I wrote the script and its 1985
production that I had to raise all references to character’s salaries in the play by thousands and thousands of dollars, thus confirming, at least to my satisfaction, my single economic theory—that inflation is kinder to workers than management and unions combined.) They were looking, they said, for fiction writers who’d had no experience in working in either the theater or radio drama and hoped thereby, by getting people with few preconceptions, to reinvent the radio play. John Gardner had agreed to do a script. Donald Barthelme had.

  It would have been during most of the summer and a piece of the fall of 1978 that I worked on the script, on my patio and poolside, by the remains of my breakfast—the scooped-out cantaloupe and yolked toast crusts and hardening dregs of sugared coffee. I remember this. Composing in a bathing suit in the serious sunshine. I remember smiling a lot and feeling outdoors like the sort of writer I never felt like inside. Feeling, I mean, pro as some sandaled, sockless, gold throat–chained guy in Hollywood. Ready to go for bagels. Ready to spring for lox.

  The idea for the show came to me all together at once. I had been sitting in the real-life coffee room just off the main office of the Washington University English Department when one of my colleagues popped in and said something familiar (familiar in the sense that he’d said something like it before). Then another did. Then another. And it occurred to me that it is impossible for anyone—I don’t exclude myself—to say anything that is “out of character” and that, at least in a way, it’s what we’re likely to say to each other—the anecdotes we tell, the complaints we complain—that constitutes character in the first place—that we speak, are compelled to speak, a sort of déjà vu lingo, repetitive and crazed.