Stanley Elkin - Boswell

When I tell Nate that I cannot come to some party of his or meet some celebrity, he is hurt. He thinks I’ve changed. Sometimes I see him look at me with a kind of awe. It is the way one looks at an old pal who has just announced he will take holy orders. This is touching, but Nate, who is made for awe, is nervous if it’s a certain kind. Still, he will never turn on me. His is a world, finally, of permanent loyalties. A commitment once made among men who do not yield their trust easily is a commitment for life. There is something sappy in this and sentimental and incredibly noble. Nate should smoke cigars, heel wards, play poker with appointees on the take. He has the soul of the tinhorn; he confuses graft with friendship, conspiracy with love. Perhaps this is why he is so fond of me. I am on the take. I take Nate’s meals, his introductions. I give him nothing at all in return, and this pleases him. Perhaps my gossip is an attempt at independence, an effort to even the score. I notice that Nate takes no pleasure in hearing it. He thinks I’ve changed, and he fears change. That is why he bothers to warn me; he is defending himself.

But I know what Nate cannot know. I have not changed.

Boswell is Boswell is Boswell. His truth is that the personality is simply another name for habit and that what we view as a fresh decision is only a rededication, a new way to get old things; that the evolving self is an illusion, fate just some final consequence. I have never surprised myself, come upon myself unaware. Always I know it’s me.

I do not want to have to pick between Nate and Lazaar — not because I would have to betray one or the other (I talk as though Lazaar were still alive), but because I need both. I am like some small businessman enough ahead of the game to open another store. If I have a new type of man in my collection it is not because I have changed, but because the old techniques have worked.

Lazaar is an instance. It cost me almost thirty dollars in long-distance calls just to get Lazaar’s name. I put in person-to-person calls to the chairman of eight Departments of Philosophy. (I will stint on lunches, wear old clothes, live in cheap, cheerless rooms, but a campaign is a campaign.) Before they came to the phone I had honed the precise edge of brassiness I wanted.

“Professor, this is Jim Boswell. I’d like to put you out on a limb for a second.”

“What’s that?” (Exactly. Confusion. Confuse and conquer!)

“Well, professor — say, what do I call you, sir? Professor? Doctor?”

“Either. None. Mister. It doesn’t make any difference.”

“How about that? Well, as I say, this is probably a toughy, and maybe you think it’s a silly question, but I’ve got my reasons. I’m not at liberty to say what those are just now, of course.”

“What is it?”

“I want to know who’s the best going?”

“I am invincible. Who can stand against me? Had I sounded less stupid the man would have been more guarded. But I came at him sounding like the world— vulgar, probably powerful. None of the chairmen even asked for my credentials. My name (I never falsify that) couldn’t have been more than a blur of sound, but it was enough. Nor did they ask my reasons. It is enough when someone who always has reasons comes at you. The long distance, the chairman was thinking. He was thinking endowments, chairs.

“What I want, Doctor, is the name of the king, the champ. Who’s the heavyweight in your bunch? I don’t know what you’d call him, the wisest man or something, but the guy who’s doing the best stuff.”

And Nate thinks I’ve changed, gone fancy. Nate is a fool. I do my imitations too. All time is prime time.

Almost all of them said Lazaar — and in under three minutes.

I branch out. I know more people. I use the universities extensively now. There is a big market for the famous in the universities. I add mathematicians, musicians, astronomers, biologists, historians, writers-in- residence. (See journal entries for months of February through May, 1955, for October 12, and October 23–30, 1956 and for December 2, 3, 7, 8, 1956, et al.)

There are ways. Oh yes, ways. A ninety-day excursion ticket takes me from the East Coast to the West Coast and back again. I know more campuses than a textbook representative. What do I need? My wardrobe serves. There’s a simplicity in it. You want? Take; the world is open. The frontier is all around us. Like the sky. Don’t talk to me about class, station, opportunities. Don’t make excuses. Show me a door — I will knock on it for you. Lead me to a gate — I will ring the bell. Walls? Don’t give away your age. There are no walls in a democracy. Something there is doesn’t love a wall. Boswell doesn’t love a wall, but in extremity it can be scaled. These are men, just men, even as you and I. Only men. Merely men. The ferocious declination of the infinitive to humanity. That’s how it is; I didn’t write the language. (Of course I don’t say it’s easy to do what I do. A few aren’t made for it. The lamb will not lie down with the lion.)

I rip through their campuses, smelling of streets and streetcars, smelling of the line at the check-out counter, of the super-marketplace, of the world. These people are no match for me. What do they know? They think Red China should be admitted to the UN. They believe in fairness, civics, rights — the closed shop, the Negro vote, the happy man. Utopians! Yet there is a deep democracy in me, too. It is the democracy of giving no man quarter. I will not patronize the enemy; I will empty both barrels into him every time. I will waste advanced techniques on him in a gratuitousness of slaughter.

This year I attended some lectures by a theologian in the Harvard Divinity School. An expert on God. A very big man in the field, influential, respected by atheists. I sat in the front. (I always sit in the front; the principle of no quarter again.) I let him have the first round. Then, ten minutes before the bell was due to sound for the end of the class, as he was describing the relationship of Man to God, I began to fidget and look uneasy. I have a way of looking disturbed (it’s my size) that is felt across continents. In that small room, among those rapt faces, my restlessness was like something out of the whirlwind. Nothing snotty, you understand — no vulgar mouth sounds or laughter or anything like that (though I have, on occasion, used laughter, too; one time, at the University of Chicago, I laughed like a hyena when a Nobel physicist wrote his formula on the blackboard). Just a kind of profound uneasiness as though I were wearing new underwear and hadn’t taken out all the pins. People next to me frowned. Some said shush (though I had made no sound). At last, inevitably, there was a look of helplessness from the lecturer himself.

“Is something wrong?” he asked innocently.

“Is something wrong?” I exploded (as though I might yet have kept silent had he not been the one to bring it up). And then, softly, remembering where I was and who I was and who he was and who He is, “Forgive me. I’m sorry, sir. Please forgive me.”

“Well,” he said, “you looked so—”

“I’m sorry,” I interrupted. “Please go on.” I held up my pencil as though what he said next had to be a note.

The theologian began to speak once more. I waited for him to make his first point before allowing my anguish to return. By this time he was lecturing directly at me. I produced my most difficult effect. There was pain; there was mute, martyred, superior knowledge; there was fear; there was sadness; there was the young man’s flushed squeamishness in the presence of senility. All this. Everything played across my face like an intricate sequence of waters in a fountain.