by John McPhee
When Little Rock Central High School entered the news, Sahl approached the subject from various byways, one of which was his fondness for sniping at President Eisenhower. A critic had said that if the President were really a man he would take a little colored girl by the hand and lead her through that line of bigots into the high school. “That’s easy to say if you are not involved,” Sahl said. “But if you are in the Administration, you have a lot of problems of policy, like whether or not to use an overlapping grip.” Wild laughter always greeted that one, but—with a nod and a nervous chuckle and a characteristic “It’s true, it’s true”—he would slide off into a skein of digressions, usually with an aside for interested conservatives, telling them that they could get the Chicago Tribune anywhere in the United States “flown in packed in ice.” Then, circling back toward Arkansas, he would press on to the famous line that put Little Rock into absolute focus. “I like Governor Faubus,” he admitted. “But I wouldn’t want him to marry my sister.”
While politics is always the trunk line, his humor ranges everywhere. Crazes craze him. His piece on the hi-fi ends with a family living in their garage and using the house as a speaker. Psychoanalytic clichés are seldom spared. Once, he says, a bank robber slipped a teller a note saying “Give me your money and act normal.” The teller replied, “First, you must define your terms. After all, what is normal?” Some of Sahl’s jokes are even more rarefied. Once, he began talking about a student in a statistical-analysis course who would never use sigma but preferred his own initials instead. When someone laughed, Sahl looked up in surprise, and said, “If you understand that joke, you don’t belong here. You had better call the government at once; you are desperately needed.”
Mort Sahl was born on May 11, 1927, in Montreal, where his father kept a tobacco shop. Although that might suggest a solid burgher background, Canadian citizenship, and perhaps a fall on the ice, Mort had none of these. His father had come out of an immigrant family on New York City’s Lower East Side with a strong will to be a playwright. Broadway and Hollywood gave him just enough encouragement to make him sure that he had the art, but his failure to make a living in his field turned him into a dark cynic, whose philosophy functioned in the tight spectrum between “It’s all fixed” and “They don’t want anything good.” Mort’s mother, on the other hand, was an intractable optimist. On this trampoline Mort was raised, an only child, soaking up skepticism and idealism, respect for creativity and contempt for show business. The family moved to Los Angeles, where Mort’s father found a job as a clerk for the F.B.I. From the age of two and a half, little Mort liked to stand behind the radio and shout through it his own version of the news. At eight, he hung around radio stations, picked up discarded scripts from the floor or out of garbage cans, and read them into a dummy microphone he had made for himself at home.
Living in Berkeley, unemployed, he became the academic equivalent of a ski bum. Auditing classes off and on, he drank a ton of coffee a month in all-night campus snack bars, argued art, social science, and politics into the abstract hours. He slept mainly in the back seat of his moldering Chevy, and ate cold hamburgers provided by a Nietzsche-soaked friend who worked in a short-order restaurant. From the wooden microphone of his childhood to the hamburgers with Nietzsche relish, he accumulated experience, intelligence, and enmity, until just one more shattering blow was needed to complete his training. He got it after a pain developed in his lower right side and a doctor at a Berkeley hospital referred him elsewhere because he lacked the four hundred and fifty dollars for an emergency operation. The doctor ran after him demanding ten dollars as an examination fee. Sahl’s appendix ruptured. He recovered in a veterans’ hospital, and the American Medical Association joined his repertory. His mildest joke about the medical world suggests that “the A.M.A. opposes chiropractors and witch doctors and any other cure that is quick.”
Late that fall (1953) he arranged an audition before a live audience in San Francisco, at the lower-case, lower-depths hungry i (for intellectual). On stage, Sahl began talking about the McCarthy jacket, explained that it was like the Eisenhower jacket except that it had “an extra flap to go over the mouth,” and added that “Senator McCarthy does not question what you say so much as he questions your right to say it.” No one even smiled. Then up from the bar came a muscular laugh—from Enrico Banducci, the proprietor of the hungry i—and Mort was in, at seventy-five dollars a week.
He built his original audience of students who came in from the University of California and other regional campuses. Soon his following increased to multitudes with no such common denominator. He calls his followers “my people.” Many have peach fuzz on their cheeks, and many have it on top of their heads. What they share is a fondness for articulate irony and a sense of being “in.” Now and again, someone gets up and walks out muttering “Communist.” Others think him too brash and offensive, a nihilist, a hater of everything. His people see him as the black knight of the implied positive—an idealist whose darkly critical moods really imply a yearning for perfection. They will all understand the words of a college freshman who says, “He has a cool way of digging deep.”
FOR THE GENERAL ELECTRIC PAVILION, architects turned a huge dome inside out, revealing a supporting lining of intersticed steel, so that the building’s over-all look suggested tripes à la mode de G.E. In the tops of metal trees, I.B.M. set what appeared to be a fifty-ton egg in a nest of plastic. Johnson Wax suspended a huge gold clam over a blue pool inside six slender white pylons that rose high and flared in unearthly petals. The General Motors Futurama was built around the idea that the human population—two-thirds of the way through the twentieth century—had ample room in which to explode, and proved the thesis with models of future machines and future cities, to be built in trackless wastelands. A G.M. machine a couple of hundred yards long would soon subdue the rain forest. Out in front of it, smaller machines would run around felling trees with laser beams. Blink, blink. The red beams sliced the trees and they toppled. The great mother machine now took over, moving forward to eat the trees and all the understory, meanwhile extruding four-lane highways from its distant rear. Cities sprang up in the bush to either side.
HE ONCE DESCRIBED HIS LIFE as “a succession of fortunate circumstances.” He was in his twenties then. More than half of his life was behind him. His memory of his mother was confined to a single image: in a blue corduroy bathrobe she stood in a doorway looking out on the courts and playing fields surrounding their house, which stood in the center of a Richmond playground. Weak with heart disease, she was taken to a hospital that day, and died at the age of twenty-seven. He was six.
It was to be his tragedy, as the world knows, that he would leave his own child when she was six, that his life would be trapped in a medical irony, as a result of early heart disease, similar to his mother’s.
His mother was tall, with long soft hair and a face that was gentle and thin. She read a lot. She read a lot to him. His father said of her, “She was just like Arthur Junior. She never argued. She was quiet, easygoing, kindhearted.”
If her son, by legacy, never argued, he also was schooled, instructed, coached not to argue, and as he moved alone into alien country, he fashioned not-arguing into an enigma and turned the enigma into a weapon. When things got tough, he had control. Even in very tight moments, other players thought he was toying with them. They rarely knew what he was thinking. They could not tell if he was angry. It was maddening, sometimes, to play against him. Never less than candid, he said that what he liked best about himself on a tennis court was his demeanor: “What it is is controlled cool, in a way. Always have the situation under control, even if losing. Never betray an inward sense of defeat.”
And of course he never did—not in the height of his athletic power, not in the statesmanship of the years that followed, and not in the endgame of his existence. If you wished to choose a single image, you would see him standing there in his twenties, his lithe body a braid of cables, his energy without
apparent limit, in a court situation indescribably bad, and all he does is put his index finger on the bridge of his glasses and push them back up to the bridge of his nose. In the shadow of disaster, he hits out. Faced with a choice between a conservative, percentage return or a one-in-ten flat-out blast, he chooses the blast. In a signature manner, he extends his left arm to point upward at lobs as they fall toward him. His overheads, in firebursts, put them away. His backhand is, if anything, stronger than his forehand and his shots from either side for the most part are explosions. In motions graceful and decisive, though, with reactions as fast as the imagination, he is a master of drop shots, of cat-and-mouse, of miscellaneous dinks and chips and (riskiest of all) the crosscourt half volley. Other tennis players might be wondering who in his right mind would attempt something like that, but that is how Ashe plays the game—at the tensest moment, he goes for the all but impossible. He is predictably unpredictable. He is unreadable. His ballistic serves move in odd patterns and come off the court in unexpected ways. Behind his impassive face—behind the enigmatic glasses, the lifted chin, the first-mate-on-the-bridge look—there seems to be a smile.
THE PUN ALSO RISES, even while maligned as the lowest form of humor. In good hands, words can be made to jump, molt, wiggle, shrink, flash, collide, fight, strut, and turn themselves inside out or upside down. Like many writers of light verse, Felicia Lamport is fond of creating new words by lopping off prefixes, but she does it better than most:
Many a new little life is begot
By the hibited man with the promptu plot.
Images glisten under her rhymes.
And what could be moister
Than tears from an oyster
Mocking the Age of Publicity in an essay which notes that where writers write has become almost as important as what they write (Thomas Wolfe scratched out his manuscripts on refrigerator tops; Jean Kerr worked in the front seat of her Chevrolet), Lamport tops them all with Elihu Linot, who always wrote on the backs of women, starting at the neck and working down. His editor eloped with a manuscript. There was no carbon.
NORTH AMERICAN MENSA, a club for people of superior intelligence, held its Annual Gathering the other weekend at the Biltmore. To join Mensa, candidates must prove, through tests, that they have higher I.Q.s than at least ninety-eight per cent of the rest of humanity. Mensa was founded in Britain in 1946. North American Mensa was not established until 1960, but it has become the largest subdivision of the organization, with more than ten thousand members in the United States and Canada. Mensa cannot be called leftist, rightist, uppist, downist, in, or out, for its constitution forbids any declaration of opinion on a Mensa-wide scale. Mensa’s aim is simply to bring together the brightest people in the world, so that their brains may interact to the benefit of themselves and humanity generally, and so that they may feel less lonely as they follow their otherwise separate paths.
Naturally, I felt complimented when I was invited to lunch with the Ms and FeMs at the Mensa A.G. Mensa people speak in a marvellously unbent, unfolded, unmutilated syntax that draws heavily on initials. An M is a Mensa member who is male. A FeM is a Mensa member who is female. There is a young-adult Mensa group called YaM. The A.G. is the Annual Gathering. And a sign at the entryway to the Palm Court of the Biltmore, under the clock, said, “This way if you have P.A.I.D.” I arrived at eleven-thirty, to find that a morning business meeting—closed to the press—was still in session in the Madison Room, next to the Palm Court. Explosive shouts were coming from inside. I learned later that S.I.G.R.I.M.—a Seriously Interested Group for Reform in Mensa—was in there hacking away at the parliamentary defenses of the Establishment. One of S.I.G.R.I.M.’s several grievances was that the leadership had denied S.I.G.R.I.M. the right to call itself a Special Interest Group, so S.I.G.R.I.M. had been forced to settle for Seriously Interested Group instead. I could not see into the room, but I heard one man bellow “Point of order!” five or six times and another propose a new faction, to be called S.I.E.G. H.E.I.L. A large man came out of the room looking exasperated and said, “Every nut in New York is in there. They voted on a resolution, and forty per cent of them don’t know what they voted for.”
Pretending not to notice, I began to look through a variety of Mensa publications that were set out on tables in the Palm Court. One fact sheet noted that there were ten thousand two hundred members, “of whom seven thousand five hundred and eight are male; two thousand six hundred and eighty-nine are female; and there is no information on the remaining three Ms.” In Charisma: The New York Mensa Literary Review, I read a poem called “Icelandia,” beginning “Iceland is a nice land to live in,” and a poem called “Interrupted Cliché,” which is here given in its entirety: “Of all the sorry works of men, the sadist.” A geographical breakdown of the Mensa membership listed Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island as the states of New England. Connecticut and northern Virginia were included in the Middle Atlantic category. (“Our statistical system is new,” an M later explained. “There are still a few bugs in it.”) I learned that fifty per cent of the Mensa members are college graduates. In the “Personals” column of the June, 1966, Mensa Bulletin, I read, “Avid Ray Walston fan seeks M support in all-out effort to save ‘My Favorite Martian,’” and an ad that said, “M—28, tall, lean, and considered handsome. Spent last few years travelling the world and I’m tired. College grad, athlete, loves all the beautiful things in life and is an incurable romantic. Is there a FeM somewhere in the vicinity who is good-looking, honestly sincere, and fed up with the average man?”
I wondered what was going to come out through that door when the business session ended and the group moved to the lunch, in another room. My first guess—angry, bearded, fistic geniuses—had given way to a vision of bleached poets. Then, suddenly, they came—something over two hundred and fifty Ms and FeMs, the assembled members of North American Mensa. There were men in cord jackets, women in pastel summer suits, pretty young girls with long, silky hair, people who looked to me like salesmen, engineers, students, housewives, schoolteachers. Unless one happened to know the truth, one would never have suspected that extraordinary reservoirs of intelligence underlay their familiar and reassuring appearance.
The lunch was served at large round tables—appropriately, for the name “Mensa” is meant to suggest that the group is a round-table society of equals. They came not only from New York but also from California, Wyoming, Virginia, Massachusetts, New Mexico. There was a carpet salesman from Louisiana, with his wife, and a woman who teaches English at Seton Hall University; an installer of computers; several computer programmers; two Canadian college students; several high-school students; an electrical engineer. On my left was a man who is the chief engineer of a rubber company in New Jersey; he is an M.I.T. graduate and recently moved east from Akron. On my right was a Yale sophomore, and next to him was a management consultant. The Yale student told me that there are Mensa activities going on in New York City almost every day—hikes around Manhattan, study groups in Esperanto and Chinese, a Mensa lunch in a different restaurant each day of the working week. On Thursdays, the restaurant is the Playboy Club. The consultant, who wore black-rimmed glasses and had a fine-line mustache, sensed the presence of a non-M. He turned to me and said, “Are you here in a reportorial capacity?”
“Yes,” I said, feeling my status plunge and go on plunging until it bottomed out at the twentieth percentile.
“This is a really heterogeneous group,” the consultant said. “The only thing we have in common is our intelligence level. You don’t meet anyone who’s weird. You don’t meet anyone who’s crazy. We are a giant conversational community. We talk about any idea, on any subject. We’re vociferous not only about internal Mensa problems but also about philosophy, mathematics, education, art, psychology, history, and religion. If you’re intelligent, your interests are not limited to one field. Mensa is the only organization that selects its members by a scientific process, but you wouldn’t know a Men
sa member if you passed him on the street. We are like everyone else. Intelligence doesn’t show in the face or the personality. I saw a man this morning in Grand Central who looked lost and dishevelled, and I said to myself, ‘There’s a real idiot.’ I saw him an hour later here at the Mensa meeting. He’s an M.”
I asked the consultant what had attracted him to Mensa.
“I saw an ad in a newspaper,” he said. “I have always had an aversion to joining organizations, because it is possible to get into one and six months later find it migrating to Moscow. But, constitutionally, that can’t happen in Mensa. Curiosity brings most people into Mensa. They wonder what it would feel like to go into a room full of intelligent people and hear them talk. Mensa people are very discreet about their I.Q.s. They never compare them. I feel that I myself would have done better if there had not been mosquitoes in the room when I took the test. The intellectual doesn’t have a place in society. He’s homeless. He’s rootless. Mensa is about the only home base for intellectuals, excluding the university environment. Some people use universities for the same purpose, or professional colleagues, but these sources are very limited.”
The keynote speaker of the day was Isaac Asimov, the Boston University biochemistry professor who writes science-fiction novels, and he proved on this occasion to be a first-rate stand-up comedian. The keynote was a series of jokes, some of which he told twice. He said he imagined that all the people in the room—put together—were brighter than he was. He explained evolution to them in fresh terms; it was really survival of the weakest, for the fish left the ocean not because they were ambitious but because they were crowded out.
