Pieces of Soap

by Stanley Elkin

  It’s not so much the theme of the play that interests me now—though I still believe in its essential truth, believe, like Mingus, that “frankly no one gets past the age of forty without going at least a little crazy. . . . We repeat ourselves like the tides”—as it is NPR’s initial premise—that by signing up writers with no expertise in dramaturgy we were likely to reinvent the wheel. I like my script, am still excited by a lot of the language, am still amused by many of the jokes, yet I see that the form of what I wrote was, and is, conventional. Indeed, it might almost serve as a sort of blueprint for modern theatrics. Since, oh, I don’t know—O’Neill?—the traditional play—Long Day’s Journey into Night, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, That Championship Season, etc.—has largely consisted of placing people in a room and letting them talk to each other, the conversation shifting from small talk to accusation to confession. Secrets are surrendered and given up as if theater were burlesque, a sort of noble verbal striptease. These are, I think, the old and ultimate tropes of drama, and though I know I said they’re a fact of modern drama, it seems to me that they probably really go back to the Greeks.

  I’m not even certain that that’s such a bad thing, or a bad thing at all. It’s the nature of the wheel to be circular, just as it may be the nature of theater—I mean stage shows, I mean radio plays, I mean movies, I mean operas—to be the high but natural occasion for all aria, spoken or sung, the snug platform of human speech and good talk.

  FOREWORD TO CRIERS AND KIBITZERS, KIBITZERS AND CRIERS

  For reasons not in the least clear to me, Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers has turned out to be my most enduring work, if, by “enduring,” one refers not to a time scheme encompassing geological epochs or, for that matter, scarcely even calendrical ones, but to those few scant handfuls—twenty-four since it was first published by Random House in hardback in 1966—of years barely wide enough to gap a generation. Not counting downtime, when it was out-of-print, or the peculiar half-life when it was in that curious publisher’s limbo known (but never entirely understood, at least by this foreworder) to the trade as “out-of-stock,” it has been in print under sundry imprimaturs (Berkley Medallion, Plume, Warner Books, and, until I actually looked it up in Books in Print where I couldn’t find it, I had thought Dutton’s Obelisk editions, and, now, Thunder’s Mouth Press), oh, say, eighteen or nineteen years. Set against the great timelines of history this ain’t, of course, much, not in the same league with astronomy’s skippy-stony’d light-years certainly, or even, for that matter, the same ball park as the solar system, but we’re talking very fragile book years, mind, which are to life span approximately what dog years are to the birthdays of humans. At a ratio of seven-to-one (seven doggie years equaling forty-nine bookie years), that would make my criers and kibitzers, depending on how the actuaries count that half-life, either eight hundred eighty-two or nine hundred and eleven years old. A classic, antique as Methuselah—the test, as the saying goes, of time.

  In addition—more new math—two of these stories, “Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers” and “The Guest,” were adapted for and produced on the stage. “Criers” has been a radio play on the Canadian Broadcasting System—and one, “I Look Out for Ed Wolfe,” was bought for the movies, though it never made the cut. (“Ed Wolfe,” published in Esquire in 1962, was my first mass-market sale and put me, quite literally, on the map. Well, at least Esquire’s rigged 1963 chart about America’s “Literary Establishment,” where I found myself in shameless scarlet, short-listed among a small, arbitrary bundle of real writers—realer, in any event, than me—in what that magazine deemed to be “The Red Hot Center.” [Just Rust Hills and Bob Brown kidding around.] It thrilled me then, it embarrasses me now. Had I had more sense it would have embarrassed me then, too. God knows it angered a lot of important critics who wrote letters to the editor, columns, even essays about it, a short-lived tempest in a tea bag not unlike the one old John Gardner provoked when he made his pronouncements about moral fiction. Not art for art’s sake but hype for hype’s. Like the PENs and Pulitzers, NBAs and National Book Critics Circle Awards, and all those other Masterpieces of the Minute that might not last the night.) “A Poetics for Bullies” was recorded on an LP by Jackson Beck, the radio actor and famous voice of Bluto in the Popeye cartoons, and somewhere loose in the world is a cassette tape of “The Guest” that I recorded for an outfit called The Printed Word. Oh, and eight of the nine stories in C & K—“Cousin Poor Lesley and the Lousy People” is the exception—have been anthologized, a few of them—the criers, guest, Ed Wolfe, and bully stories—several times—almost often. “Criers” and “Ed Wolfe” were in The Best American Short Story annuals back in the days when Martha Foley was Martha Foley. Indeed, for many years during the late sixties, the decade of the seventies, and into the eighties (it’s starting to fall off), the stories have provided me and my family with a kind of widow’s mite, a small annuity—“sky money,” I like to call it. I regard myself as a serious writer, even a professional one, but deep in my heart I think of most of the money I receive from my writing as essentially unearned. This isn’t, as you may suppose, a poetic wimp factor kicking in—I’m no art jerk—so much as the heart’s quid pro quo, all ego’s driving power trip, the rush, that is, many writers get out of their almost sybaritic wallow in the unfettered luxury of their indulged imaginations. (What, they’ll pay for this? I may be a badass, but I’m an honorable badass.) Anyway, it, the money on the stories, all sources, never amounted to that much. I come cheap, after all. Maybe, top-of-the-head, all-told, thirty or thirty-five thousand dollars since 1966, my going rate for having passed the test of time. Nothing solid as a fortune, I admit, but tighter than loose change, something like the cumulative yield on a small CD, say.

  What isn’t clear to me, though, is why. Why this book, why these stories? Surely I’ve written better books. Surely I’m a better writer now than I was when I wrote these stories. (Five of them, including the title story, one of my favorites, were written when I was still back in graduate school, for Christ’s sake, and only three, “The Guest,” “A Poetics for Bullies,” and “Perlmutter at the East Pole,” were published after I’d published my first novel and before I’d written a second one.) So why? Why, really? I’d like to know.

  One thing, certainly, is the accessibility of their style and (not behind that—indeed, quite the opposite—in absolute hand/glove relationship to the relative simplicity of the style) plain speaking’s package deal with realism, time’s honored literary arrangement between ease and verisimilitude. Here, for example, is Feldman, the butcher, returning to his store after a quick trip to the bank for change for his cash drawer. (In the story, had I been a better stylist in the realistic tradition, I would have used the word silver.)

  The street was quiet. It looks like a Sunday, he thought. There would be no one in the store. He saw his reflection in a window he passed and realized he had forgotten to take his apron off. It occurred to him that the apron somehow gave him the appearance of being very busy. An apron did that, he thought. Not a business suit so much. Unless there was a briefcase. A briefcase and an apron, they made you look busy. A uniform wouldn’t. Soldiers didn’t look busy, policemen didn’t. A fireman did, but he had to have that big hat on. Schmo, a man your age walking in the street in an apron. He wondered if the vice-presidents at the bank had noticed his apron. He felt the heaviness again.

  There’s something comforting, almost soothing, about realism, and it’s nothing to do with shocks of recognition—well it wouldn’t do, would it, since shocks never console—or even with the familiarity that breeds content, so much as that the realistic world, in literature, at least, is one that, from a certain perspective, always makes sense, even its bum deals and tragedies, inasmuch as it plays—even showboats and grandstands—to our passion for reason. The realistic tradition presumes to deal, I mean, with cause and effect, with some deep need in readers—in all of us—for justice, the demand for the explicable reap/s
ow benefits (or punishments), the law of just desserts—all God’s and Nature’s organic bookkeeping. And, since form fits and follows function, style is instructed not to make waves but merely to tag along, easy as pie, taking in everything that can be seen along the way but not much more and nothing at all of what isn’t immediately available to the naked eye.

  My point, then, is that the stories in Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers are right-bang smack-dab in the middle of realism. I may get things wrong or even silly—as I do in the improbable scene in “In the Alley” when my protagonist, top-heavy with incurable cancer, checks himself out of the hospital to wander the city and goes into a bar to die in an unfamiliar neighborhood, or, in red-hot-centered “I Look Out for Ed Wolfe” where, ending the story, as stories never should end, with a gesture, I have Ed throw his money away—but most of the stories have conventional, realistic sources. Only “On a Field, Rampant” and “A Poetics for Bullies” owe less to the syllogistic, rational world—though they’re not experimental, none of my writing is; I don’t care for experimental writing and, in my case at least, experimental writing would be if I did it in German or French—than they do to some conjured, imaginary one and, sure enough, only in those stories am I more preoccupied with language than I am with realism’s calmer tropes. I offer the battle of the headlines from “On a Field, Rampant”:

  “‘DOCKER WOULD BE KING,’” a man said, reading an imaginary headline. “‘IMMIGRANT CARGO HANDLER SAYS HE’S RIGHTFUL MAJESTY!’”

  “‘PRETENDER HAS MEDALLION WHICH TRACES LINEAGE TO ANCIENT DAYS OF KINGDOM.’”

  “‘“AMAZING RESEMBLANCE TO DUKE” SAYS DUKE’S OWN GATEMAN.’”

  “‘DOCKMAN DEFIES DUKE, DARES DUKE TO DUEL!’”

  “‘MAKE-BELIEVE MONARCH.’”

  “‘CARGO CON MAN CLAIMS KINGDOM!’”

  “‘KHARDOV CREATES KINGDOM FOR CARGO KING.’”

  “‘WHO IS KHARDOV?’”

  And the abrasive, brassy up-frontness of the opening paragraph in “A Poetics for Bullies”:

  I’m Push the bully, and what I hate are new kids and sissies, dumb kids and smart, rich kids, poor kids, kids who wear glasses, talk funny, show off, patrol boys and wise guys and kids who pass pencils and water the plants—and cripples, especially cripples. I love nobody loved.

  The point here is that a “higher” or more conscious—if not conscientious—style is not only less realistic than the sedate and almost passive linears of the butcher’s quiet street but much more aggressive and confrontational. (Only consider the two operative words in the titles of those two stories—rampant, with all its up-in-your-face fore-pawardlies and dug-in hind-leggedness, and bullies—and you’ll take my meaning.) In fiction and style not formed by the shared communal linkages between an author and the compacts, struck bargains, and done deals of a reasonable, recognizable morality—my law of just desserts—it’s always the writer’s service. Whatever spin, whatever “English” he puts on the ball is his. It’s his call. He leads, you follow. He leads, you play catch-up. (It’s that wallow in the ego again, selfs flashy mud wrassle.) Obviously this makes for difficulties with which most readers—don’t kid yourself, me too—don’t much care to spend the time of day, let alone hang out with long enough to pass any tests of time.

  Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?

  Damn near everyone.

  Now I don’t know how true this next part is, but a little true, I should think. I’m trying to tell what turned me. Well, delight in language as language certainly. (I’d swear to that part.) But something less delightful, too. It was that nothing very bad had happened to me yet. (I was a graduate student, protected, up to my ass in the ivy.) My daddy’s rich and my ma is good lookin’. Then my father died in 1958 and my mother couldn’t take three steps without pain. Then a heart attack I could call my own when I was thirty-seven years old. Then this, then that. Most of it uncomfortable, all of it boring. I couldn’t run, I couldn’t jump. Because, as the old saying should go, as long as you’ve got your health you’ve got your naïveté. I lost the one, I lost the other, and maybe that’s what led me toward revenge—a writer’s revenge, anyway; the revenge, I mean, of style.

  One final word about the stories in this collection and I’m done. I’m particularly fond of at least four of them, “Perlmutter at the East Pole” for its main character and the curses he invents, “The Guest” for its situation and humor, “Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers” for its situation and humor, and the truth, I think, of its perceptions and characters, and “A Poetics for Bullies,” for its humor and energy and style. I like the “Ed Wolfe” story a bit less but I like it—for the imagery in the opening paragraph, for a lot of its dialogue, and for a reason no one could guess. Remember Polish jokes? I could be absolutely wrong about this, but I think I may have invented them in this story. It was published in the September 1962 issue of Esquire. In August of that year I went off to Europe to write my first novel. Up to that time I’d never heard a Polish joke, but when I returned to America in June 1963, they were all the rage. Everyone was telling them. A serendipity, of course, like penicillin or certain kinds of clear plastic, but my serendipity. What a claim to fame—to have invented the Polish joke. But it proves my point, I think, the one about the distance to which a writer’s ego will stoop to have, whatever the cost, to him, or to others, its own way.

  MY FATHER’S LIFE

  All children’s parents are too complicated for them, certainly my father was too complicated for me. Love, like an obstacle, gets in the way. We know them too early. Then they die.

  What he left me—I was going on twenty-eight, he on fifty-five—wasn’t money so much as a pride in money, its powers of ratification, its green nod, all its Checkpoint Charlie majestics and corroboratives, all its gracious, sweet safe-conducts. The rich were all right in his book, as they are in mine, as, finally, he is in mine. (What he left in me broken, distorted, lapsed, the wear and tear of capital. To this day I am too much in awe of them, the really moneyed, not jealous but deferential, my tied tongue like the submission signal of some forest animal.)

  My father earned around $50,000 a year in the 1940s. (There’s nothing to astrology, its cusps and houses, its star swirl like thumbprint or snowstorm, astral influence like the pull of a tide, but people have their prime times, I think, their cycles, their seven-fat, seven-lean-years menses and runs of luck. The forties were my father’s decade. He looked like a man of the forties. The shaped fedora and the fresh haircut and the shined shoes. He was handsome, I mean. Like an actor in a diplomat’s part, a star-crossed secretary of state, say. Phil looked romantic. The noblesse oblige of his smile and the faint melodrama of the poses he struck in mirrors. His soft silver hair, gray since his twenties; the dark, carefully trimmed mustache; the widow’s peak; the long, patrician features; his good cheekbones like drawn swords. The vague rakishness of his face like a kind of wink.) He was a traveling salesman, a rhinestone merchant, purveyor of costume jewelry to the trade. He worked in the Chicago offices of the old Great Northern Building at State and Jackson for Coro, Inc., which, in its time, was the largest manufacturer of “junk” jewelry in the world, and his territory was, well, immense, most of the Midwest—Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, the Dakotas. Michigan but not Detroit, Illinois but not Chicago, Indiana but not Indianapolis, Missouri but not Kansas City or St. Louis. Some odd-lot, under-three-flags arrangement of compromised spoils he had with Coro’s New York headquarters like the divvy of armies of occupation. It was big enough, at any rate, to keep him on the road two months out of three—though he often managed to get home weekends—and when one heart attack too many forced him to slow down in the fifties, he had to hire three men to cover the ground for him while he stayed in the Great Northern in Chicago and worked the phones.

  Calling the buyers, calling them darling, calling them sweetheart, calling them dear. And how much was schmooze and how much traveling salesman’s protocol and how much true romance I really can�
��t say. Though some was. Some must have been, I think. He must have been irresistible to those Minnesota and Indiana ladies. Wisconsin farmers’ daughters, the girls of the Dakotas, the Michigan peninsular. Though maybe not. He didn’t frequent bars; would have looked, and felt, out of place in the rough taverns where farmers and fishermen and hunters traded the time of day and did the shoptalk of field and stream, the gauge of a shotgun shell, the test of a line. Would have hesitated to ask for rye, his drink and bread of choice. So not only can I not really say; I don’t really know. He was no Willy Loman. I never asked him, “What happened in Philly, Philly?”

  Nor would those farmers have understood his shoptalk—the spring and fall seasons something different to them than they were to him. Nor understood his enthusiasm for costume jewelry, interesting to him as treasure chest, pieces of eight—the paste pearl and glass gem, all the colored chips and beads of his trade, amorphous as platelets seen under a microscope, all the crystalline shards of the blood’s streaming, what the kaleidoscope saw, the bright complicated jigsaw of the toy realities, random and patchwork as a quilt.

  Proud of how much money he earned, proud of his wit, his Hester Street smarts.

  The price of admission to the movies when my father was a kid was three cents, two for a nickel. He would range up and down the line calling, “I’ve got two cents; who’s got three? I’ve got two; who’s got three?”

  Here are more traveling salesman stories.

  When he first went on the road for Coro at the beginning of the Depression, my father worked out of New York City on a $35-a-week draw against commission, was given the clapboard and red-brick small towns of upstate New York for his territory. One day Mr. Rosenberger, the firm’s president, called him into his office and told him that he was into the company for $200 or $300.