Stanley Elkin - Boswell

“I lead them to the table,” Perry said, “but you, you sit down with them!”

Dr. Morton Perlmutter is not an archeologist. He is an anthropologist, and it was announced in Stockholm today that he has just won the Nobel Prize.

Last year I followed the campaign trains of both Eisenhower and Stevenson. I’d be there, right beneath the platform, as they came to the rear of their trains to address the crowds. (It was interesting. I used my strength to force my way through the crowds. Only the old ladies knew I wouldn’t hit them, whereas such is the illusion of continued virility in man that old men thought themselves vulnerable at eighty.) My technique was always the same. I would let the candidate make his opening remarks and then, as he came to the essence of his talk, I would begin to raise and unroll a banner I carried with me on two long poles. Carefully spreading the poles I would take up the slack gently until the unfurled banner was level with and just in front of the candidate’s face. The message was simple. If Eisenhower was speaking, it read “STEVENSON”; if Stevenson, “EISENHOWER.”

The campaign failed (I speak of my own). It cost a lot of money and a lot of time and it was silly. I had meant to gain attention with the strategy of schoolboys punching little girls on the arms. But though there were moments when I seemed to anger Eisenhower and made Stevenson wistful and perhaps a little sad, I realize now that mostly I must have appeared ridiculous to the two men. They expected such nuts and wrote us off beforehand, like a restaurant anticipating the “shrinkage” of its spoons. (I have since met Mr. Stevenson and when I reminded him of the incidents he recalled them vividly. He told me that they had seemed to him at the time symbolic, and that each time I showed up a little more energy had gone out of his campaign. He seems to think that if he could have maintained his confidence he might have gone on to win the election. Perhaps he was just being kind. I am naturally inclined toward for-want-of-a nail constructs anyway, but even if I were not I should want to believe this one. I have the hard-minded perversity of the humdrum and insist on influencing events, even if only negatively, and even — sadly — against my own and everyone else’s better interests. What the hell? If that’s the price, that’s the price. Everybody dies.)

I am the sort of person who is good at salvaging at least something from bad situations. They should put me to work reclaiming fresh water from the sea. I had made a fool of myself, had spent money wastefully, had disappointed or angered everyone with whom I had come into contact. Yet I came away from that foolish campaign with something of value; I formed a new impression of the great. Since then I have had it again in all its original force.

One summer afternoon in New York I was browsing in a bookshop. I was looking through the stacks of books with a deep concentration, not even thinking of my ferocious preoccupation with the great. Yet suddenly I was aware of another presence in the shop—“presence” is the very word. It wasn’t the bookseller, a typically dusty, foreign-looking man who padded back and forth between the narrow book-close aisles. It wasn’t any of the two or three other browsers; it wasn’t even anyone who had just entered the shop. The place had one of those bells above the door, and I had heard no ringing. I simply knew that someone great was in the shop with us, someone whom I had not seen before, who had been stooping perhaps in one of the dark corners when I entered the shop. I’m keenly sensitive to the great, of course, but I have no sixth sense; I see no visions, hear no voices. I am simply stage-struck to the point of sickness. I turned around. Behind me was Orson Welles. In other circumstances (if, for example, I had walked into the shop and come upon him) I would have invented some reason for talking to him. I admire Mr. Welles. We might even have had a successful gam. Now, however, all I did was confirm yet again the stunning validity of the impression I first had when I followed the campaign trains.

It is this. There is about great men a physical presence that always matches their symbolic one. They look like great men. They are like jewels set off against black velvet in a bright white light. But take away the black velvet of their deeds, the bright white light of their fame, and they are still like jewels, their worth as clear among broken bottles in an alley as in the jeweler’s case. Somehow, too, they seem smaller than they really are — like small, heavy bronze reproductions of famous statues. Like the reproductions, they have the air of impressive compactness. Their faces and bodies do not bleed into the surroundings as do our own; they preserve always a nimbus of self, of opaque and valuable and hard surfaces. I cannot account for the odd discrepancy between their reduced physical size and this clear impression of weight, except to speculate about the notion of solidity. There is something expensive about their queer compactness, their bronzy being. It is no wonder that we speak of men of substance. Mr. Welles is a big man, almost as large as myself, and yet, as he shuffled through the shop in his dark blue suit, the cigar he held between his fingers long-ashed but not burning, I had the impression that I could hold him in my hand.

The faces of the great are ruddier than ours, their strange health the physical manifestation, perhaps, of their symbolic immortality. Their bodies are fit. They are better tailored than we are, but that does not explain it. Nothing explains it, but I’m glad it’s so; it’s a confirmation of my way of life. No one need ever be ashamed of his expensive tastes.

Busy as I was following the campaign trains, concerned as I was for the success of my bad scheme, I saw all this in Eisenhower and in Stevenson. They were like heavy bags of precious coins, like treasure in firm caskets at the bottom of the sea.

(I have just thought of something. Perhaps cause and effect are somehow mixed up here. Perhaps we pick our leaders as we pick our actors — for their looks; perhaps the great are destined by nothing so much as their physical well-being; perhaps the world is all appearance. Is this the meaning of life? I may have stumbled onto something. I shall have to think about it.)

I was reminded of all this again last night when I met Dr. Morton Perlmutter.

Perlmutter was not yet at the Gibbenjoys’ when I arrived. When I am operating on a contraband invitation I take care to come after the other guests. In that way I am often unnoticed by the host, who, after all, doesn’t usually have any idea who I am. If you have to arrive at an affair late, it is important to be precisely as drunk as the other guests by the time you get there.

The Gibbenjoys were in the hall when I presented my invitation to their butler. I didn’t know they were the Gibbenjoys, of course. All I saw were some men and women in evening dress talking to each other, but I couldn’t take any chances. Indeed, it’s only logical that if someone is standing in the hall it’s probably the host or hostess. If I walked past without acknowledging them they might have blown the whistle on me immediately.

I walked by the group slowly and gazed warmly into their faces. It was my trickiest maneuver; with it I try to make it appear that I am personally known to all the group save the individual I am immediately looking at. It requires the nerves and timing of an acrobat. I look expectantly and just a shade blankly into a face, and at precisely the instant when recognition and intelligence must dawn or be abandoned, I flash a smile of recognition and overwhelming intimacy immediately to the person’s left. (Most people are right-handed so their peripheral vision is greater on their right than on their left side.) I may even wink. Frequently there is nothing to the person’s left except a statue or a piece of drapery. So precise and delicately off-center is this movement that even when someone actually is there he takes my look as intended for someone to his right. There are variations; sometimes I have tilted my head back, smiled, opened my mouth and exhaled an inaudible “Ah, there!” to pictures on the wall just behind and above the fellow in front of me.