Stanley Elkin - Boswell

“What the hell,” he said, “it was a life. If you waste it you waste it.”

“You didn’t waste it. You’ve got the Nobel Prize.”

He laughed.

“You’ve got the Nobel Prize, Morty.”

“For work I did eighteen years ago,” he said. “Anyway, what has that got to do with it?” One prize. I’m a man of appetite. I need committees in all the world capitals; I need clamor.” He called the waitress over. “I’ll have some more tea, please, sweetheart,” he said. His elbow was against her thigh. “Have you read my books?” he asked me.“ The Proper Study of Mankind. Chicago University Press. Four volumes. Six ninety-five each. The proper study of mankind. I failed, do you know that? Don’t breathe a word to Stockholm. I failed. I tried to get at their savagery, their violence. Somehow it all came out sweet. The worst things sounded like the acts of naïve, unsophisticated children — like those cartoons in The New Yorker where the cannibals roast the missionaries in big kettles. I’m a satirist. No one understood that. Have you read my books?”

“No, Morty, I haven’t yet.”

“‘A popularizer.’ That’s what the professionals call me. ‘Not serious.’ The Journal of International Anthropology said that. ‘Not serious.’ I’m serious, I’m serious.

“Of course,” I said. “I’m serious too.”

“It’s the impulses,” he said. “I’ve lost my energy in impulses, but even the impulses never interfered with my seriousness. It was what I really saw in the jungle. They could do it… I don’t know… gracefully. They made impulse seem calm. Not me. I still had the other thing— the civilization, the good manners at the last minute. Still, I have leaped before I have looked. I have pounced on my life,” he said bitterly. “Now I pay. I pay and pay.” He groaned.

“Morty?”

“What is it?”

“What is the proper study of mankind?”

“It’s man,” he said. “At his worst.”

“No,” I said. “It’s men at their best. I’m a kind of anthropologist, too. Morty, you’re a great man.”

“I am not finally a public person,” he said.

The waitress brought our check and this time Morty didn’t even look at her. He poured the last of the tea into his cup and smiled. “Look at me,” he said, “I won the Nobel Prize less than a week ago and I’m sitting in a fly-specked café drinking tea with some kid I don’t even know. Always I get the kids. What’s your name? I don’t remember your name.”

“It’s Boswell,” I said.

“‘A popularizer.’ Well, maybe so. I’ve always been very interested in the education of the sorority girl. Maybe all my professional life I’ve been writing to the chubby knees in the first row. None of my wives have been Jewish, do you know that? I mean, what the hell kind of a record is that for a man who can’t hear a dialect story without getting sick? Christ, what am I doing here, Boswell? I should never have left that party.”

I moved uneasily in the booth. “We had to get out of there. After what Gibbenjoy said, how could you stay?”

“What Gibbenjoy said. I didn’t even hear him. Impulse. Always impulse.”

“Morty, he’s nothing.”

“What do you know about it? He’s a rich, generous man.”

“He called you a little Yid.”

“What am I, tall?”

“Morty.”

“Forget it. I’m persona non grata now.”

I was a little alarmed. I couldn’t understand why he seemed so worried about Gibbenjoy. This wasn’t a third wind; it was a fresh wind in a new race. “What difference does it make?” I said.

“No difference,” he said. “No difference. It’s finished. Impulse. Again impulse.”

He pushed the teacup away from him suddenly. A little brown tea spilled over onto the table. “What happens to my project now?” he said wearily.

“What project, Morty?”

“It was my opportunity. I won the Nobel Prize. Now I could have earned it.”

“Morty, what project? What is it?”

“Gibbenjoy was going to give me thirty thousand dollars,” he said.

“What? Why? What for?”

“For my project. Before it’s all changed. I was going to show the UN what they were really dealing with. It’s finished,” he said.

I couldn’t think. I had cost the man thirty thousand dollars. “The prize money,” I said. “You’ve still got the prize money.”

“Alimony,” he said hopelessly, “a few lousy suits.”

When we left Morty insisted on paying both checks.

Yesterday and tonight, the strangest thing.

Morty called the night before last and I went with him to a party in his honor at the apartment of one of his grad students. Almost everybody except myself was from the University, and almost everybody except Morty was as young or younger than myself. Kids. Mostly grad students but some undergraduates and a handful of freshman girls.

I had the impression that none of them, though they call him Morty and not Dr. Perlmutter or Professor, really like him. They are embarrassed, I think, by his friendship, and out of some queer propriety disapprove of him both as a teacher and as a man. Morty does not deal with people professionally. After seeing him at that party I can imagine him striking up morbidly personal relationships with the very savages he had gone to study. I can hear him referring, in the manner of the very rich or the very old, to intimate situations, to his four brothers and their wives, to his days as a student, to his love affairs, using always first names, as though the natives might be expected to respond as he himself had responded. I don’t know what Morty’s stories would sound like in the savage babble of some South Seas or African or Indian tongue but I know that he would be able to put into them all his absurd, vulnerable humanity.

“These are good friends,” Morty insisted to me as we watched them dance in the dim apartment. “They’re my students and my friends. I like young people.”

“Do you, Morty?”

“Certainly,” he said. “I like young people. I like everybody who hasn’t made it.”

I had told Morty my story when I went to his apartment the night after I had met him. I had wanted to tell him about the trouble I had caused him, about my lie, but he was so resigned and even pleasant about his loss that I never did. For all his volatility, Morty is apparently an optimist, with that solid, purblind sort of faith that defies all the bad breaks. One wants to shake such people, to rub their nose in their troubles. (I can barely abide so profound an advantage as my clearer vision over my friends gives me.) The temptation always is to defile, to mar sublimity with some deft slash. How many times in museums, when the guard is not looking, do we seek to touch some ancient painting, to press our thumbnail into a dry crack and shatter some vulnerable square inch of the painter’s immortality? I have left my finger marks on the shellacked surfaces of masterpieces; I have unraveled the corners of priceless tapestries. It is a constant temptation to record obscenities in our neighbor’s wet cement. It is the same with opposite conditions. We lie to the sick man, puff some friend’s failure. We are exterior decorators.

All of us had a lot to drink. Morty, who is a slight man, does not hold his liquor well, though in many ways he is keener drunk than sober, quicker to sense offense, more concerned with people’s reactions to him. He began to talk, first to individuals and then to the room at large. Morty does not have to force people to listen to him. He knows so much and despite his naïveté has experienced so much that one is eagerly a part of his audience. Only when he talks about his concern — himself — does the interest of others flag. Yet he seems to sense this, for he brings out his subject in a subtle, almost deceitful way, and only after he has finished do we realize that what we had thought was a professional anecdote is really a revelation about Morty himself, a confession.