Pieces of Soap

by Stanley Elkin

  But now it’s not only after the MS was first diagnosed, but after the canes were prescribed, the walker and wheelchair, after the bath bench, the raised commode, the custom footbrace and special shoes, after the stair glide; after the slow slipping of my balance, my giving way, it sometimes seems, to the very air, eddies of inclination in the room unfelt by others, after the special courses of prednisone which are a little less effective each time I take them, after the new symptoms, my fatigue during the day, my lengthening insomnia at night, the slow capsize of the long habits of my body, after the piecemeal diminution of my strength, since I have forgotten not only how to swim but even how to float, since I can barely stand upright in water even with the assistance of the woman who comes to exercise me three times a week.

  And I have actually had thoughts of who I will, who I can, leave it to—my joke collection, my toy treasure, my thousands of bars of pack-rat soaps.

  Recently, only this past April as a matter of fact, Joan and I went to a conference in Italy on the novel in the next century. I’d had, as I notice I’ve had for perhaps two years now, second thoughts. Separation anxiety not only about leaving my city, my country, but my area, the second floor and, more specifically, the bedroom and office where I most comfortably spend my time. So I’d had second thoughts, third, about undertaking such an extensive journey, even to speak on such a silly, improbable topic. (The novel in the next century indeed! Just that past week I’d been to the doctor. It was all I could do, and with assistance at that, just to get up on the examining table. In his office afterwards he was describing to me some of the promising research on multiple sclerosis, that they would certainly have a cure for it within ten years. “Ten years?” I said. “In ten years you can fuck multiple sclerosis.”)

  I’m not a particularly brave man and, most certainly, not in the least a reticent one. I publicly whine, I mean. I don’t keep myself to myself, which is where, in all probability, I probably belong.

  So I was up to third thoughts about leaving my area. Three planes. The difficulty of maneuvering my walker down the planes’ narrow aisles to the toilets. The alternative difficulty of, walkerless, swinging my way along the seat tops, like some ruined and grounded Tarzan. The three planes. The extensive journey. From St. Louis to Kennedy. From Kennedy to Rome, where we’d have a twelve-hour layover. From Rome across Italy to Ancona on the Adriatic. From Ancona by car to Macerata, better than an hour away.

  In the end it wasn’t Joan who talked me into going. She was no more eager, I think, for that long trip than I was, and had been having second and third thoughts of her own. It was me. Surely the soaps I’d have coming to me had something to do with it. (The three planes, the Rome hotel where we’d lay over for much of the afternoon, wherever it was they’d be putting us up in Macerata, wherever we ended up after the three-day conference was over. A trip to Europe, a trip to Europe could be worth 100, 150 soaps to me.) In the end I brought back something like fourteen. So if the soaps had something to do with it, it couldn’t have been much. It ain’t over, they tell us, until the fat lady sings. But one is the fat lady, and if I ain’t heard nothing yet, it may be because of that same old superstitious anal greed, shtupping as much life as I can into what I still have for a body as once, under the gun, I’d stuffed the deep inside pockets of my sport coats. Working fast now too, higher pressured than shoplifting, “Return to Cabin” flashing redder than ever, redder than hell. But hey, all events have their degree of difficulty.

  I still steal soap. I get out less often than I used to to do it, and, increasingly, the accumulation builds more by contribution than by my own efforts, but that was never the point of the exercise anyway. And something else has happened. I have begun to use the soaps, a different one every day. (What was I saving them for, a rainy day?)

  Searching out scent like a lost chord. Because we’re a long time dead and I mean, in my queer, reduced circumstances, to lather and unguent myself, poking about, stirring the pungencies, the macho savories and aromatics, the dim remembered love musks and the neutered, bracing scent of sweat. Perhaps as bought-into an illusion—we are what we smell, the sweet smell of success—as an ad for an aftershave, loading my skin with the odor of health, the higher cleanliness, whatever God-proximate order and arrangement flesh is heir to, seeking this soft and easy low-end high, the reflexive, passive passions, mechanical, available, and automatic as contagion or a contact rash, my body in quickest fix subsumed, transmuted, transubstantiated in some coated hotel heraldries of smell, a few minutes of four- and five-star stink, all the expensive, windy pomanders. Which too soon blow over, evaporate, are gone, compromised by one’s laundry, by breakfast, the morning paper, by almost anything (but which live longest in the mustache and the grasping hairs of my chinny chin chin) and, like a kind of Midas manqué, gilding the lilies, covering everything I touch, at least for a while, in lively, lovely, twenty-one-karat shadows.

  A PREFACE TO THE SIXTIES

  (But I Am Getting Ahead of Myself.)

  I was in the army and my wife had a birthday coming up. We lived off-post, a mile or so north of Petersburg, Virginia. Not only off-post, but off-highway, too, literally alongside U.S. 1. In a defunct motel. We hadn’t much money of course—I was a private, or perhaps a private first class—and although Joan worked, whatever cash we had, that was left over, that didn’t go into rent or food or Brasso for my buttons, went into Richmond restaurants—seventeen miles north—into champagne cocktails in the John Marshall Hotel. To give us—me—the illusion that there was no United States Army and that even if there was I wasn’t in it, that we didn’t live in an old tourist cabin—you know the type, buildings like the mysterious structures put up along railroad sidings, red tarry shingles you can strike matches on, yet vaguely classic, the classic house, like a kid’s drawing of one—to comfort us with style, which is the only way some people can be comforted. And I had saved five dollars, the gift of the Magi, but rather than buy something that she would have to return—I’m no good at sizes and this is astonishing to me, for I hang pictures with a surveyor’s instinct, I mean I center them, have the professional’s eye for margins, a natural bent for whatever it is that is the geometer’s equivalent of perfect pitch (I’m a hangman, it’s a gift)—I told Joan what I had to spend and asked her what she wanted. “What I want,” she said, “what I want is the five dollars.”

  The incident gave me the idea for a story I wrote called “Fifty Dollars”—the official rate of exchange between art and life is exactly ten to one—about the five thousandth customer to enter a supermarket the week it opens. My character is given a prize of fifty dollars and is urged to spend it in the new multimillion-dollar shopping center of which the supermarket is a part. Her financial situation, like ours, involved a getting and spending that always, helplessly, came out even, a double-entry life. The fifty dollars put her ahead of the game and though she tries—in the story I take her shopping—she cannot bring herself to give them up. They become “her fate, and she needed them, all together, all at once, until she didn’t need a fate any more.” It wasn’t a good story, but it should have been.

  Or the time, later, we were going away the next morning and Joan asked if I had canceled the paper and stopped the milk, and I had the idea for a short story called “The Guest,” about a middle-class couple anxious to start their vacation who suddenly realize on the Sunday morning they’re to leave that they have not stopped the paper and suspended the milk. Almost as they’re closing the door behind them, Bertie, a professional deadbeat they knew in the old days, shows up to ask if he can sleep over for a couple of nights. The husband, seeing Bertie as an opportunity to make the apartment “look lived in, to keep off the thieves,” invites him to use their home while they’re gone. He even gives Bertie spending money. Bertie, who hasn’t led a normal existence in years, accepts the invitation and goes on a spree of exploration of the square world represented by the apartment that ultimately destroys it.

  Another day, apropos of
absolutely nothing at all, I found myself wondering what would happen if a person, not unlike myself, decided to see exactly what he was worth and undertook to convert everything he owned back into cash. His clothes, his appliances, his geegaws and coat hangers, back into cash. He surrenders his phone and gets back the twenty-five-dollar deposit; he sells his furniture, his sheets, and his pillowcases. He converts his policies. He dumps his car, pulls his savings out of the bank, and sells his postage stamps back to the post office, everything must go. I called the story “I Look Out for Ed Wolfe,”and what I’m talking about is the Muse. I’m praising the Muse. I want her to know what I think of her, that I believe she is real. You are. There’s no Lady Luck and I question the Furies, but you, Muse, are a different story.

  I believe, that is, in inspiration. (Genius, they say, is 90 percent perspiration and 10 percent inspiration. They’re wrong. In the hottest climates even.) Inspiration is real. It’s real as digestion. Indeed, it is digestion. Of a sort. It’s the metabolism of decision, conclusion, the brain’s bum’s rush, its whooshed fell swoop. Because stories come at once or not at all. A student of mine, James Goldwasser, told me about a marvelous idea for a story he wanted to write. A reasonably high placed and relatively well educated man takes an I.Q. test one day—a new policy his firm has instituted for its employees. He gets the results and discovers that he’s really rather stupid. It changes his life. Now here’s what Goldwasser really said: In his version it’s a freshman in college who finds out his test scores. (Writers usually work with protagonists a year or two younger than themselves; to arrive at a writer’s age you add one to two years to a character’s age. We call this Carbon 14.) The student, shocked by his classification, drops out of school but continues to live in his dorm and even to sign up for courses and buy the books for them. Had the Muse given me the story it would have been in the first terms I outlined. I’m trying to show that the Muse is always personal, the custom tailor of the goddesses.

  Situation—what the Muse says—precedes style, precedes plot, precedes everything. (Though style, plot, and everything are implicit in situation.) The lawyer-narrator in Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” asks his law clerk to proofread a document the lawyer has prepared. The clerk replies “I would prefer not to,” and everything that happens in the story happens as a consequence of his response. Indeed, everything that can happen in the story happens as a consequence of it. Though Bartleby doesn’t refuse to do the lawyer’s bidding until ten pages into the story, Melville must have begun with that. All the conditions of the story are prescribed, all the conditions that are not the story are proscribed. (Well, not all the conditions that are not the story. A writer must breathe. Best to forget Poe and his loose talk about “unity of impression.” Although, admittedly, historically, that has been the direction of the short story, but only because Poe has been calling the shots for a hundred and twenty years, not because of the form itself. The form is blameless.) What the Muse gives us, then, is situation, possibility’s hothouse, fate’s, fiction’s genetic structure. (It’s an odd circumstance of aesthetics, however, that while short stories must have situations, novels frequently dispense with them. Perhaps this is because novels are about character and character is ubiquitous in human beings, while stories are about character in crisis—acute character.) If a situation is good it will have gravitational pull. Event falls. (We say, don’t we, that such and such an event befell a character, or that things so fell out that this or that happened? This is the classic language of the tale. Idiom knows.) It is lowered from level to level like ships in locks.

  I mean it when I attribute to the Muse what others attribute to imagination. The imagination is perhaps not so much a process of invention as it is of recognition. (Perhaps talent is simply the ability to recognize the virtues inherent in the situation the Muse has given us; perhaps, that is, it’s a critical faculty at least as much as a creative one. Here’s a point. What’s wrong with the fellow who tells you at a party of a story he’d write if only he had the talent isn’t his ignorance of technique or the limitations of his vocabulary so much as the poverty of his critical judgment. Invariably the situation he gives you is impossible, awful. It couldn’t work had you or he all the “talent” in the world.) The major difference between situation and metaphor, for example, is that situation—not plot: Plot is to situation what battles are to history—is recognized, received in a Mt. Sinai sense, and metaphor invented, scientific trial and error, practice makes perfect. (Consider the look of a manuscript: What’s changed, what gets into margins and goes between lines, what’s penciled or penned or clipped to the page, are bits of metaphor, pieces of language, a palimpsest of image and vocabulary. Almost never elements of plot and never situation. Stories and novels are abandoned, perhaps, but they are never revised. Revision is committee, conference—play doctors looking at Broadway shows in Philadelphia from the back of the house, the leading lady’s love song spliced from the second act and the hero’s rival given jigs to dance. It is professionally editorial, intended to bring material into line with policy rather than aesthetics. The notion, for example, of “comic relief” is not the author’s but the director’s or editor’s.)

  Details, too, are recognized—pins with colored plastic heads like tiny lollipops in men’s new shirts; the dusty collection cans for obscure charities on the tops of meat cases in delicatessens; drawers in kitchens stuffed with owner’s manuals—as is, I think, scene—a Big Ten football coach circulating at a cocktail party for the parents of his players, apologizing that their sons have to play with colored boys—and even landscape. (We are talking of high art, high. We are talking of art to give you the nosebleed. Not of fiction of the fifties or sixties. The real fiction of the fifties or sixties you wouldn’t care to read. I mean the fiction of statistical incidence. For a time all blurbs on novels, including one’s own, came with an obligatory rubric rhetoric, a code fixed as Morse. Humor, for example, was “wild” at the same time that it was “deadly serious.” There was something vaguely federal about it, like the warning on a pack of cigarettes. Hopefully the stories reprinted here are not stories of the sixties, though they were all written back in those days.) Situation and landscape and detail are either uninventable or they are grotesque, for truth may not be imagined. No one makes up the sky. Who invents California?

  On the other hand, it seems to me that fiction moves by means of two elements, an almost pharmaceutical mix of the learned and the inspired. Writers depend upon a sort of vocabulary—learned—of preexistent alternatives. I mean the big traumatic givens of literature, mistaken identity, poverty, adultery, a special assignment or, more pertinently, love at first sight (Curley’s “Love in the Winter”), bad news from the doctor (Tillie Olsen’s “Tell Me a Riddle”), a widow trying to make a new life (Calisher’s “The Scream on 57th Street”), a challenge (Albert Lebowitz’s “The Day of Trials”)—all things that have their source neither merely nor necessarily in “life” but in prior literature, large, dependable displacements that put the heat on the characters. By “inspired” one means not so much the unique as the spontaneously generated, things that have no counterparts in literature, the wonderful courtship in the men’s lavatory in Alfred Chester’s “In Praise of Vespasian,” the hilarious “Bravo. Hey, Harry. Bravo,” in Targan’s “Harry Belten and the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto.” The point is that in all first-rate fiction a delicate balance between these two very different sorts of plot elements is maintained. In bad fiction, where the action is all “learned,” the result is melodrama; in bad fiction where the action is all “inspired,” the result is chaos.