Stanley Elkin - Boswell

“So she took the kid which she had put down on an empty chair beside her — she never once fed that baby a thing — and she got up to go. ‘Signora,’ I said, ‘please. I’ve given you all my money. You’ve eaten my lunch. You’ll have to pay the check.’ Well, she didn’t listen to me any more than the others had listened to her. She just got up and got the hell out of there. In the end I had to run off without paying. What are you laughing at? All right, I can see the joke, too, but please try to understand the point. Be adults, for God’s sake.

“That night, without being invited by anyone, I made my first speech. In the open air, in the Piazza di Spagna. Then, the next day, I made the same speech in St. Peters’—in four languages, Italian, French, German and English. I was a guest of the government, you understand. I was there as an exchange professor at the University of Rome, and it wasn’t for me, but everywhere I went until they threw me out of the country I made that speech. Later I dropped the French and German and English because I realized I wasn’t there to put on a show, but to get things done. The trench coats! Everywhere you looked. I tell you, whenever I see trench coats I know that Fascism is the next step!

“My speech was as follows:

“‘My Italian friends. There is poverty in your country. That is not my concern. In all countries there is poverty. What troubles me rather is your indifference to it. I have seen beggars ignored. Ignored. As well to cause poverty, to bring about another’s misfortune oneself, as to ignore it when it happens. You are a morally culpable people. So advanced is the brutalization in your society that the poor themselves have become brutalized. I have seen beggars ignored, but what is perhaps worse, I have seen the giver ignored by the beggar. I do not blame him — it is you who have caused this.

“‘I demand a change.

“‘You think there is safety in indifference; there is none. You think there is forgetfulness in the turned back; there is none. Or, if you are one of the few who give, you think there is remission in alms; there is none. There is none. In the altered condition only, in the revolutionized circumstance only, in the new beginning only is there the chance for grace. I address the remnant of your Catholicism — I mean to stir that.

“‘Revolt! Revolt!

“‘In Africa, among the Rafissi people, there is a tradition. When there is a crime, it is the chief who is punished. He is dragged from his king’s hut to be humiliated and dismembered. Modern intelligences balk at this practice. How barbarous, they think! And yet I hasten to assure you that there is no lack of candidates for chieftain. There, among the Rafissi people, evil is a risk they run. Though I do not advocate indiscriminate violence, I see in this practice a wise deal. Who is to blame for a crime if not the father? All kings are fathers. Why, the very texture of their reign is determined by primogeniture, by the ability to make heirs. If there is crime those heirs are not well made.

“‘Italians. Throw off your chains. Begin again. Reform! Reject! Revolt!’

“I told them that — in St. Peter’s, in my classes, everywhere. Until I was stopped.

“Well, in Nebraska, in 1933, I was worse. I was a firebrand, not a cautious person. And it didn’t help that my chairman was a jealous man. We split a section. Mine had a larger enrollment than his and he found out through his network of classroom spies that I wasn’t sticking to the syllabus— his syllabus, I might add. Well, why should I? What was anthropology in 1933? The tolerance level of an Ur-culture toward its missionaries? Artifacts? Snapshots of people with bones in their noses? How many serious people were there in the business in 1933? So, to my eternal credit, in 1933 I taught my classes what I had experienced myself about mankind and about life. That was the syllabus.

“Now, though I was a Communist in those days, I believed in God. The God I believed in was a Jewish-Brahmin-Zen-Buddhist mystic who wore a yarmulke and squatted in a room filled with art treasures, telling his beads. You prayed to this God and he turned a deaf ear. He was supposed to, you understand. Acceptance of fucking suffering was what he taught. He bled in four colors over the art treasures and posed crazy riddles. He answered all questions with questions. Revelation was when he said, ‘The meaning of life is as follows,’ and he’d pick his nose with his little finger. Profound? Bull- crap, my young friends who still believe in such a God, a tongue-tied God who is not so much indifferent as bewildered by life. Go ask him questions? Go talk to walls. You can’t give in to him — give in to him and you’re dead. I wish I had them here now, those old students from Nebraska in 1933. I would take back everything I told them. Everything. I would use the chairman’s syllabus, rotten as it was.”

In the dim light I tried to watch Morty’s eyes. In the dark, smoky room they seemed singed, unable to focus. “Marry six wives,” he was saying. “Take women in adultery! Spin theories! Write articles! Write books! Win through!

“I’m not like that God I told you about. I’ll tell you what it all means. I’m fifty-six years old and I’m a dying Jewish anthropologist and the other day one of our leading philanthrophists called me a little Yid and threw me out of his house and I know what it’s all about. It’s mistakes! It’s learning not to accept. Accept nothing— there’s no such thing as a gift. It’s learning to make mistakes. Make lulus. Make lulus only. Don’t crap around with errors, don’t waste your time on faux pas. Go for the lulus. And if you’ve got to believe in God, you young people who have got to believe in God, try to picture him as some all-fucking-out lulu maker who wouldn’t have your heart on a silver platter.”

Suddenly Morty stopped, and rubbed his hand across his forehead. What had seemed like freckles on his thin young face appeared as liver spots on the backs of his old man’s hands.

“What about the chairman of the department, Morty, and the network of spies?” someone asked.

“What about him?” Morty said, revived. “The chairman of the department hated my mystic-Eastern-Bolshevik-Jewish guts, and his network of spies were two kids, one a moronic football player from Omaha, the other a fantastically busted coed from a farm outside Benton, Nebraska. She appears in my book, The Flatlands, if you care to know further what she was like. She and the football player kept a perfect stenographic record of everything I ever said in that class. As a matter of fact, they did me a favor; two thirds of my book came from those notes. The girl herself told me what they were up to when I had the class over for coffee once. I think she had fallen in love with me. I think she liked me a lot. Well, it made me sick to find out about it, just sick. What was it, Hitler Germany? Anyway, I wasn’t rehired for the second term, and by the time I found out what was happening it was too late to get back into the Columbia night school, so those bastards out there cost me a half of a year. Seriously, the State of Nebraska is a very bad place.”

Two of the dancers had sat down and were embracing in one corner of the room. Billie Holliday was singing “Sophisticated Lady.” When she came to my favorite part I sang along with her softly.

I was propped against a wall, my legs out in front of me, like someone sitting up in bed. A girl beside me kept filling my glass. My hand was in her lap, though neither of us seemed conscious of this.

“Those are stupendous lyrics,” I said to the girl. “Is that what you really want?” I sang. “Stupendous.” I chuckled to myself. I jiggled my behind forward a few inches and leaned back lower against the wall. Above me the last dancers moved dreamily to the music. My face was beginning to get that stunned, flushed feeling it always has when I’m drunk. As the couple danced by I could see the girl’s garter straps. I watched these happily until her partner suddenly turned her and moved her back toward the other end of the room.