Stanley Elkin - Boswell

I was impatient with the doctor’s insistence on giving me the details, though I understood that it was simply the logical consequence of his function, as though his job was finally advisory, admonitory, his position that of a man who explained death rather than of one who could cure it or hold it off.

The others at the funeral were, I supposed, fellow lawyers and one or two of my uncle’s strange, pathetic clients. Perhaps some were the few mysterious friends he would visit sometimes in the evening. (I remembered, guiltily, how glad I had been to come home and find my uncle gone.) They were the raggle-taggle crew even the loneliest of us can claim, irrelevant to our existences but solidly there in our lives despite that. (I think of all the hotel clerks whose faces are familiar to me, of all the elevator operators.) They were the supernumeraries with whom finally we spend more time than with those we dream of, as though the landscape of our lives has always to be filled with people, crowds, masses, populations, the tradesman who brings the bread, perhaps, the man who waits with us each day at the bus stop, those yeasty populations of the unknown, there by accident, to whom we talk and talk and talk. They are legion. How many words, I wonder, can have passed between us? How many gestures of affection or civility?

Someone said my name. My uncle’s minister was beside me. “When I’ve prayed, Jim, I’d like you to speak.”

“I couldn’t. What could I say?”

“You’re his only survivor,” the minister said. “Just offer a few words for the repose of his spirit.”

“Wait. I wouldn’t know what to say.”

But the minister had already gone up to the side of the grave and opened his Bible. I barely heard his prayers; my mind was full of the things I might say. Though they all seemed hypocritical, there was something pleasant, even thrilling, in the idea of speaking there. It was like being a guest of honor, or the best witch at a birthday party. Nevertheless, I didn’t know what I could say about my uncle, and I looked down before the minister could catch my eye.

“I’ve asked Myles’ nephew, Mr. James Boswell, to address his thoughts to this sad occasion,” the minister said finally.

Someone touched my arm and I moved up beside the grave. “I’ve been asked to speak,” I said. “I didn’t know this was a custom. I’m unprepared.” I felt silly. Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I thought giddily.

They watched me. No one there, including myself, had loved my uncle; I knew this as if it had been a fact of nature. And we had been as supernumerary to him as he had been to us. It came to me that the major relationship between people was a kind of reciprocal indifference. It was comforting. I realized that no one ever had much to lose. Strangely moved, I began to speak.

“My uncle and I didn’t understand each other,” I said. “He’d be surprised to know that I am delivering his eulogy. We always postponed as long as we could answering each other’s letters.”

They looked at me stonily, but having that audience gave me a strange confidence. I might have been addressing a ship’s company, or men before battle. I had a sense of heightened opportunity; it was now only a question of finding out what I needed to say.

“Well, what can I say about him?” I asked seriously. “He had very few friends,” I began. “Truthfully, I don’t think I recognize more than two or three of you., You couldn’t have been close to him — I wasn’t close to him myself. Yet he’s dead and we must all have felt something because we’re all here to watch his funeral. Well, I feel something. I do. Jesus, I really feel something right now.

“We didn’t get along. Finally I had to leave his house.

“Some of you probably knew him better than I did.

“I remember one thing. He belonged to a lot of clubs. Now maybe you think that was a defense against his loneliness, but I don’t think so. He took pleasure… Look, this is a little ridiculous, I hardly knew the man—” Suddenly I felt myself coming close to my theme. I had broken off to address the minister, warning him. He smiled and waited for me to go on. It was out of both our hands now.

“Well, he seemed to get pleasure out of certain things even if he couldn’t have them himself. It was okay with him just as long as somebody had them, just as long as they existed to be had. I don’t understand that.”

I looked again at the minister and he was still smiling. Even if he weren’t, it was too late; he’d had his chance. Now the power was on me. Hallelujah! I turned back to the small crowd around the grave.

“He lived a lousy life. His life was shit. Let’s understand that. But he made allowances and he had his defenses, his way of dealing with it. He should have been on the other side. He was sick, even when he was a young man. He had the shakes. He stuttered. He was always poor. He should have been on the other side! His resentments should have been against the well and the strong and the rich. But they weren’t — they never were. My uncle thought like a banker. His sympathies were all with influence, with prestige, and he hated men of hard luck as though they had sinned against God, as though misery were illegal.

“Jesus, he was a snob! I went to a class breakfast once, given by one of the rich girls in my high school. She lived on an estate. She was very rich. There were footmen, butlers. My uncle never tired of hearing abut it, of having me tell about it. He was proud that some people still lived like that. He was proud of me for being so clever as to be invited there. It was crazy…

“Well, it was a comical thing, to live like that, in the ballrooms of the mind. In the heart’s formal gardens…

“He took taxis. Sometimes he’d have the driver drop him off in front of some bank downtown. He didn’t even have an account there. You know?

“But you know what was wrong with my uncle? He was a coward. All of that respectable crap, that was just fear. He didn’t even have a dream — he had an outline for a dream. And all the things he did, all the notions he had, they didn’t help at all. He was the sort of Peeping Tom that Power needs to have outside its windows. But what the hell, he’s inside his box now. See him? So what he was a snob? I write it off. I forgive him. His death takes care of that. He just didn’t go far enough.” I pointed to the coffin. “Ah, sap! Ah, jerk! CORPSE!”

The minister cleared his throat as though he meant to interfere, but I raised my hand, silencing him. When I had started I had been speaking haltingly. Now the words poured out; I said them without having to think about them. Something was clear.

“Some of you may know about me. About my lousy life. Anyway, that’s the way my uncle would tell it. I’m on the make for the great. Well, you know something? He was crazy not to understand that. We were on the same side. We were on the same goddamn side. He should have had my anger!” I was crying.

Something was clear. I wanted to wail, to let it out, to moan and scream, to stand there and never leave, to hold this moment of my clear, strident grief, to make it my life, grow old with it and die when it began to wane. I felt a deep relief. It was like the climax of some fierce and mounting anger, when for a moment one is freed of all thought of consequence, when for a fraction of a second one is the equal of the world and the will soars like a bird in some passionate whirling flight. It was a moment of hard and infinite ruthlessness, of triumph, in which any end at all was justified by any means at all. I floated deliriously buoyant in a sea of self, with some blank check of forgiveness, forever beyond guilt or crime or folly or reality, having all future like a gift, like a prince, all choice underwritten.