Pieces of Soap

by Stanley Elkin

  As the population shifts, as the Sun Belt is let out, there are fewer people in fewer places I can patronize. I may not say, as New Yorkers or folks in L.A. say to me, “Why do you live there? What do you do there? Are there escalators? Is there color TV? Do you live indoors? Do you get weather? Are the cats and dogs tame?”

  When I was young, people believed in the exotic more. It was a staple of double bills, the travelogue common as the cartoon or the coming attraction. Margaret Mead took anthropology to the South Seas. Now, of course, the South Seas are paved, darkest Africa lighted bright as Broadway, and it’s America all over the place. Even in America it’s America, and the exotic is as endangered as Poland. How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen the moon? (Indeed, how you even gonna get ’em to look at the moon after they’ve seen the rings of Saturn, Mars’s red ice and ruby distances?) Name three astronauts who’ve gone the distance. Ah, but I can’t, though I could tell you the explorers. (Who explores today? No one. Well, sure, geologists with their oil sticks poked in the earth to see whether the planet is down a quart. But no one else, no one else, exploration taken over by technologists, by NASA. Houston control on the blower to its men in the moon buggy, feeding remotely controlled direction—“Hang a left at the Sea of Dreams, a right at the Marsh of Sleep. It’s a straight shot to the Crater of Plinius. You can’t miss it.” Explorers? They could be Sunday drivers.)

  So we turn inward, inward, looking for the center. Pay dirt, mother lode, and the gift of truth. And even Middletown never got as far as Connecticut. It’s Muncie, Indiana, taking the fall for America. Common denominator our rule of thumb, our weight and our measure. The documentary as picture book, family album.

  Joe Loewenstein, a colleague of mine, has pointed out the strange format of the TV quiz show Family Feud. Contestants score points not when their answers are true but when they conform to answers supplied in advance by the audience. Truth by consensus, by statistical decree. They grade on the curve, boring as a poll. Because polls are boring. One is not unmoved by the issues but by the numbers, all interest residing in how one’s opinions stack up, whether one is in the majority or the minority, attention riveted—the word’s too strong—not even, exactly, on the self but on some version of the self, the projected, extrapolated self, the self as it occurs, say, in horoscopes in the newspaper, in insurance underwriters’ charts listing ideal weights for some highly invisible categorized population—I am male, large-framed, six foot one, fifty-one, and overweight—as it flirts above or below the median income for a family of four, bottom-line stuff from the Census Bureau—the price of my house, the number of rooms there . . .

  So, if I have difficulty watching Family Feud, I could look at Peter Davis’s Middletown series forever.

  Because persons—the proper study of mankind is “persons”—is where the action finally is, and I could exist happily ever after in sidewalk-café connection to the world, satisfied with my Peeping Tom appetites and privilege, my Via Veneto vision dear to me as curiosity, pleasant as overhearing the neighbors, as reading their mail or knowing their portfolios. What a show such as Middletown does, what television at its best does, is to supply one with ringside license, snug as my parking space for the handicapped, and permit one to pig out on details. (In the first episode, “The Campaign,” about a 1979 mayoralty race in Muncie, I saw the Republican hostess beam, pushing her goodwill, some lasered love intense as a handshake in Rush Week, while her Democratic counterpart, perhaps needing the work more, is a little embarrassed by it all.) And if it’s not sociology, and I don’t know if it is or it isn’t, it’s something better than sociology. It’s voyeurism lifted perhaps to art, certainly to superior home movies, some one-on-one with strangers, a thing done with mirrors, like the viewing rooms at police lineups, the self safe and distanced behind the arras, privy, protected as a Polonius guaranteed immunity. Excitement riskless as a home video game, bloodless as a good coup. Because we love these facts, these details dense with other peoples’ specific gravity, and the charm of such programs is precisely the charm of history. The feast of the judgmental it affords—details, gossip, the aloof stance of God.

  MIDDLETOWN DATES

  1924—New York sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd go to Muncie, Indiana; begin to study it.

  1929—Middletown, the Lynds’ name for Muncie, is published; becomes classic sociological text.

  1937—Robert Lynd publishes update on first study, called Middletown in Transition.

  1977—Theodore Caplow, of the University of Virginia, and research team begin third Muncie study, known as Middletown III.

  1976—Muncie is setting for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, although location photography is done elsewhere.

  1979—Filmmaker Peter Davis begins shooting six nonfiction films in Muncie, to be aired in 1982 on public TV as Middletown.

  1982—First volume of Caplow study is published (in April) as Middletown Families: 50 Years of Change and Continuity.

  WHAT’S IN A NAME?

  (The 1987 Elizabeth and Stewart Credence Memorial Lecture)

  Professor Adams, thank you for your kind introduction. You’re very generous.

  Chancellor Jones, Dean Smith, members of the faculty, students, ladies and gentlemen . . .

  As Professor Adams has already told you, my name is Stanley.

  Could you be mugged by a Stanley? Could a Stanley rape you? Tops, I might molest your kid, but you’d never know it, and neither would she. What, a little suntan lotion rubbed along the bottom of her swimsuit like a piping of frosting around a birthday cake? What, a spot of spilled tea on the sunsuit, my finger in the bespittled handkerchief moist from what it wouldn’t even occur to you was drool before it was saliva, and vigorously brushing across what won’t be breasts for another half dozen years yet, my grunt the two- or three-tone gutteral hum of deflection, nervous and oddly dapper as the tugs, pats, and twitches of a stand-up comic, distracting as the shot cuffs of magicians and cardsharps, all random melody’s tangential rove? Because how could you ever even guess at my intentions and interiors, my inner landscapes and incisor lusts, the thickening at my throat like hidden shim, the ponderous stirrings of my ice-floe blood, deep as resource, buried as oil in my gnarled and knotty groin, my clotted sexual circuits? Could put it past you plenty, believe me, holding the kid’s shoulder, the little girl’s, for the leverage, drawing her within the fork of my white old thighs, a pervert like a master artisan, fixing her there like a piece of carpentry. Or violating her in absentia, my eyes on her kindergarten picture, my snoot in her laundry, in her eight-year-old grimes. All contacts troubled, gone off, amok but deceptive, accidental, clever as a pickpocket’s.

  Protected by reputation, see, my triumph of the human spirit, that heart of gold that I don’t possess but people attribute to me anyway, mistaking cholesterol for karats, hypertension for love, innocence by association, by stereotype, dismissing me finally, all the world waving me through Customs like that guy in the audience at the nightclub whose lap the chanteuse sits in, kissing his bald spot, pinching his cheek, and telling folks what a good sport he is, leading the applause.

  Protected finally by all my grotesque cuddlies—the limp, the cane, my toothless, grampsy ways, my fatty’s belly and threatless aura, my ducky’s waddle and feeble’s klutz, my Stanleyness on me like a wimp heraldrics. Hey, I’m kidding. Only offering credential here, only flashing badge, showing my hand, franked under the ultraviolet like a kid’s at the dance.

  Stanley is as Stanley does and you are what you’re called.

  Stanley is your brother-in-law, your C.P.A., your cousin in Drapes. He collects stamps, washes his car, belongs to Triple A, and keeps a weather eye on the gas mileage. He is, that is, as all of us are, the fiction of his sound, all his recombinant glottals, labials, fricatives, and plosives. He’s his flaps and trills. He’s his spirants, I mean. He is, I mean, the vibrations of his name.

  For great characters demand great names. (Of writers I adm
ire, only Henry James—itself a fine name—lumbers his characters with bad ones. I’m thinking of Henrietta Stackpole, I’m thinking of Ralph Touchett, of Fleda Vetch and Milly Theale. I’m thinking of Madam Merle, of Casper Goodwood, Pansy Osmond, and Hyacinth Robinson. I’m thinking of Margaret Thatcher.) Here’s a roll call for you. Beowulf and the Wife of Bath. King Lear but not Titus Andronicus. Hamlet not Garp. Snow White, Pinocchio, and Mary Poppins but not Cinderella. Peter Pan but not Captain Hook. R2D2, Han Solo, C3PO and Obi-Wan Kenobi but not Princess Leia. Leopold Bloom but not Stephen Daedalus. (Who can explain it, who can tell you why? Fools give you reasons, wise men never try. Rodgers and Hammerstein but not Weber and Rice.) Harry Morgan, Harry Bailey, Harry Angstrom, Harry Lime. J. R. Phil Esterhaus. Babbitt. Mr. Toots. John Jarndyce. Mr. Tulkinghorn. Flem Snopes. Will Varner. V. K. Ratliff. Dick Diver, Jay Gatsby. My Uncle Toby. Dorothea Brooke and Mr. Casaubon. Jiminy Cricket. Tom Jones, Humphrey Clinker. Hazel Motes. Becky Sharp. Captain Dobbin like a reliable horse. Emma Bovary, Emma Woodhouse, Julian Sorel. Swann and the Guermantes. Vautrin. Hans Castorp. Levin. Father Zossima. Bartleby. Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale. Angel Clare. Old Goriot, Elizabeth Bennett and her four sisters. All the not-to-be-pronounced names of God.

  I want to speak to you this evening about Louis Paul Pelgas, the first Director of Admissions at any school in the Thirteen Colonies Conference, but before I begin it will be necessary to provide you with some sometimes dense, and often apparently trivial, historical background.

  Clifton College is, as many of you know, a small liberal arts college in what are, quite literally, the outer edges of Pennsylvania. It is out of the way even for Norbiton, Pennsylvania, even for Chapel County. Look at a map. Surrounded on two sides by West Virginia in the extreme southwestern corner of what—it’s that close to the West Virginia line, that close to the Ohio one—is referred to by its inhabitants as the “state” rather than the “commonwealth” of Pennsylvania (possibly to lend a little aura of the average to what is uncompromisingly an atypical part of the nation), Norbiton, like a heel in an old shoe, exactly snugs the perfect right angle in the tight corner where its western and southern borderlines meet.

  This tiny portion of Pennsylvania had been unofficially a “state” since antebellum days when, feeling itself both physically and spiritually closer to the gravitational pull—Chapel County was the only county in Pennsylvania where it was legal to keep slaves although, due to the impossibility of cultivating crops in its harshly alkaline soil, except for the handful of “house niggers,” exchanged as a sort of gag gift between one local merchant and another, there was never any appreciable slave population there—of its Virginian and West Virginian anti-abolitionist neighbors than it was to Harrisburg, three hundred fifty-seven miles distant, or Philadelphia three hundred sixty-nine miles off, or even to Pittsburgh, which though less than one hundred miles away was, for eighty of those hundred, accessible only through what John James Audubon himself has described in his notes as “. . . wilderness so cluttered and remote that its very sky is uninhabitable by the birds of the air, wilderness so cluttered and remote that that sky is itself wilderness.” “A dry hole,” he remarks in an 1847 journal entry, “which for all its varied vegetation, succulent berries, meaty nuts, and abundant fruit, is as zoologically lifeless as the moon. I cannot sketch there. My inks, oils, and watercolors go off like stale milk and lose their ability to congeal or adhere to paper. My pencil leads liquefy and my lines melt and run. There is a liquorish rifeness in the air so profound it lasts the autumn and can burn holes in the snow, or make—so viable is the half-life of the fermented spirits of all its fierce flora, its growth and undergrowth, its leaves and barks—an illusion of its ‘frozen’ streams and lakes, of ice apparently two and even three inches thick which is not only impossible to stand up on but worth your hat to set down on its obdurate-seeming surface. It is a wilderness so impregnable that no jack rabbit, dog, possum, coon, turkey, or even insect, let alone any animal as fragile and exotic as a bird, could possibly get close enough to it to thrive.”

  Nor is any of this typical John Audubon hyperbole. After a failed late-nineteenth-century attempt to survey the thousand or so square miles of this “queer, thick country”—Audubon’s phrase—Phil and Pembler Roberts released foxes, dogs, and other small mammals at the margins of The Thicket. (“The Thicket” at the Chapel County end, but called “The Woody” at the Pittsburgh one, recalls Pembler Roberts’s famous comment: “Viewing the unspoiled, unnibbled trees, leaves, and grasses in ‘The Thicket’ is as different from viewing them in ‘ordinary’ nature, a sylvan woodland or forest, say, as gazing at the defined, beautifully articulated stars in the country is from looking up at them in town.”) Seeing them founder and return to their release points, they seemed, in Phil Roberts’s analogy, “like confused, guilty hunting dogs who have lost the scent.” (The experiment has been successfully repeated for seventeen years in Professor Roger Barr’s Psychology 101 classes. Julia Rayburton, while still a junior at Clifton College, devised a variant of the Pembler and Barr experiments. Wishing to test the very letter of Captain Audubon’s 1847 journal entry, Ms. Rayburton stood at the edge of The Thicket—now, with the advent of bulldozers, trenchers, and the introduction of other heavy earth-moving equipment, reduced to a plot no larger than a decent-sized park in a medium-sized city—and scattered kernels of white corn, the favored food of all agrarian birds, into it in full view of three hungry bluejays who’d been kept in cages and deprived of food for more than eight hours. The jays, who had carefully and even rather slavishly followed the short trajectory of the corn—Rayburton is left-handed but tosses corn with her right hand—were unable to retrieve any of the kernels. They flew up and around but never entered the air space above “The Thicket,” thus offering proof of Professor Barr’s speculations regarding “Density theory,” the psychological-cum-sociological postulate that “All bodies repudiate areas smaller than the space required to provide their egress.” The implications this has for America’s crowded prison system are, of course, immense. Professor Barr’s and Julia Rayburton’s findings have already been cited in four court rulings and are sub judice in who knows how many more.)

  If this isolated and somewhat remarkable edge of the commonwealth had unofficially chosen to think of itself as a state since, you’ll recall, the mid-nineteenth century, it ought to be said that no one really knows why the citizens of Chapel County preferred one designation over another. (What’s in a name, eh?) Even as late as 1837, when Chapel and Green counties split off from each other (for reasons, incidentally, that had more to do with the close identification of The Thicket with the town of Norbiton than they did with slaver or anti-slaver sentiments), the term commonwealth, not state, was the legal nomenclature in each of the seventeen articles of incorporation. In fact, Chapel County has only officially been designated part of the “state of Pennsylvania” since Maurdon Legurney, both mayor of Norbiton and County Supervisor, was chosen to represent Chapel County at the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention of 1878, about a year after the Congress of the recently Reunited States of America had put an end to the period of Reconstruction. The Convention, referred to in the newspapers of the day—even Horace Greeley sent a correspondent to cover it for the old New York World-Examiner—as “The New Reconstruction,” was convened at the instigation of the people of Chapel County but was equally the brainchild of Legurney’s political protégé, Governor Lamar White, a native of Norbiton who, when Legurney put his name into nomination at the Democratic Convention in St. Louis in 1882, was the first politician ever referred to as a “favorite son,” though his family had removed from Norbiton when White was only two years old.

  Reconstruction had been, of course, a time of ad hoc law, a period of makeshift legislation when some of the most bizarre laws in the history of this or any other nation were passed, almost, it seemed, as a kind of willed whim. It’s largely forgotten now, but from 1865 to 1877, when this odd chapter in our history closed, Congr
ess forbade the raising of orchids and carnations. It prohibited the sale of calves’ liver in quantities under three pounds and made it a federal offense, punishable by a mandatory seven years in prison, for women to fish from a pier. The statute was vaguely worded, perhaps deliberately, and in the five years it was on the books, no one was actually sent to prison. Ironically, it was the vagueness and unenforceability of the law that gave rise, during the period, to its public flouting and introduced the term fishwife into the American vocabulary. (Less whimsical, but far more dangerous, was a peculiar law of evidence introduced just after the Civil War. This, of course, was the infamous “Mixed Race Witness Rule” which, when crimes were alleged against persons of one race by persons of another, made it obligatory for prosecutor and defense alike to produce witnesses of both races to the crime. The rule was obviously directed against the defeated South—it did not apply in nonslave states on the dubious grounds that Negroes were less populous in the North—by a piqued, if victorious, Union. What is perhaps more astonishing than the rule itself is the fact that during the dozen years before its repeal, it was five times sent up to the Supreme Court for “challenging” and five times adjudged constitutional!)

  As indicated earlier, the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention was convened in 1878 by a governor who, though he’d been a mere toddler when he left and had never been back, was born in Norbiton. As also indicated, this was barely a year after the nation had junked the notion of Reconstruction, the queer period of back-scratch law when all that was necessary to get a law passed was a quorum of cronies who would do unto each other what they would have each other do unto them. As in all periods to which there is an inevitable reaction, that reaction, when it finally came, was a lulu. What were demanded now were unarbitrary and entirely righteous rules of order, logic, and sequentiality—a return, if you will, to 1837, when Chapel County quietly signed seventeen articles of incorporation, each of which designated the new county as continuing to belong to the “Commonwealth” rather than to the “State of Pennsylvania.” (That people in Chapel County held slaves was merely a fact of home rule, of little more significance at the time, really, than the local option that governs the sale of alcohol or is responsible for the blue laws.)