Pieces of Soap

by Stanley Elkin

  One thinks of directors scouting locations with those little hoosies hanging from their necks, lifting them to peer through or, crouching, making frames of their hands in a gesture like a piece of sign language. If one were a director one would shoot in subways with cameras hip-high in turnstiles, or in drugstores perhaps, what the convex mirror saw, or through the TV camera above the teller’s cage, jerky as a battery toy. Oblique angle, off-center prospect, steep vision like a goat’s purchase. For, finally, point of view is art—Barth’s “Menelaiad,” the narrator at the still center of the turning town in William Gass’s “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country”—what the Muse, speaking always in the tongues of personality, tells me. It is fiction itself, in some special, synecdochic, part-for-the-whole sense, for all stories drive all other stories out as surely as all music drives out all other music, or all consciousness all other consciousness. The individual fiction precludes fiction (the very concept of this anthology is a paradox), precludes the world, precludes time (the apparent gift of fiction, its essential trait, the thing it has that no other form has, is tense, yet in great fiction it is always—philosophically—the present) and, watch it, even the reality of your own existence. I’m your uncle, I like you, come home and I’ll take you to the ballgame and get you a hot dog. Listen. Don’t read if you would retain a sense of your life. Or read for meaning, quibble with a story’s issues and themes and ideas. Those are its least important aspects anyway, there only as technique, integument, art’s artificial gum base. All writers have only one of two things to say. They say yes or they say no, or shades of yes or shades of no—the binary substructure of vision. Stick to that, venture beyond and I promise you an envy like the toothache.

  INTRODUCTION TO THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 1980

  Most fellows, they put together a collection like this, they go all humble on you. Or they break out in qualification, they’re all over themselves with conditions, strings, all the head’s fine print, all the heart’s crossed fingers. Or they’re quibbled as an Oscar winner. (Do I fetch it myself or send the surrogate? Am I in Paris on a gig? Is it Tuesday, my night for the sweat bath, my day at the races? Or am I actually disruptive? What is the mode for eleventh-hour reservation, qualm, the brain’s butterflies?)

  Or they’ll tell you how hard they worked to reach a decision. The pains they took, all invigilate, watchdog scrupulosity and fastidiousness. With pointers accusing the relief map, the sifted minefields, the sluiced ores. (“Here the mind went ginger. Here judgment went two rounds with will.”)

  Not me. I have no qualifications.

  And my decisions were a breeze, easy as falling off a log.

  Because these are, quite simply, the very best short stories published in American magazines in 1979, and they declared themselves to whatever sense I have of the wonderful as succinctly as so many logos.

  Because we’re talking about taste, the buds of judgment. And of course there’s an accounting for taste. This is an attempt to account for mine.

  Only the flat-out hero—I mean the medalist, the beribboned, the campaigner; I mean the champ, the Heisman winner, the MVP—is valued for his deeds. The rest of us are esteemed, or not, for our opinions, judgment calls, the soul’s favorite tunes. Even men of the world wheel and deal in mood, the artifact of temperament. We tend to take people at their word, extend credence like credit, and lead an ipse dixit sort of life. (We cash their checks. The woman in the coffee shop accepts on faith that we are guests and rarely asks to see the room key. Tape recordings are inadmissible but an eyewitness will do you in. Some fuddled soul can’t tell you three things that are wrong with this picture, but if she picks you out of the lineup you’re done for. Any lawyer will tell you: One implication is worth two inferences. See? I made that last bit up, but you’d already cashed my check. For all you know I might not be registered in this hotel and may just have charged breakfast to some other guy’s room.)

  Walter Cronkite says that after yesterday’s Florida primary Reagan is the frontrunner, and so, in fact, he seems to be. Republicans are steamed. The budget is unbalanced. Chase Manhattan’s best customers can get better terms from a loan shark by the docks than they can from the prime. America is everywhere on the defensive. Afghanistan. Colombia. The Mideast. The hostages have been in Iran 130 days and the commission has come back without even seeing them. Mary, called “Mary,” in her guerrilla’s chador, is making monkeys out of us paper tigers. What this country needs, it is claimed, is a return to sound fiscal principles, to principle itself. A beefed-up military. A trimmed-down bureaucracy. A conservative Republican frontrunner. But what did Mr. Reagan ever actually do that was conservative? When he was governor of California? What did he actually do? The point is, I think, that conservatism is only another opinion, only, that is, a kind of taste, as liberalism is, or fascism too. And, like all taste, it proceeds from a view in equilibrium, the prerogative of an essential disengagement—a question of druthers, of all else being equal.

  Taste is the luxury of abeyant claims and occurs, like Wordsworth’s poetry, in a kind of tranquillity, a repose of soul, when the mind (or not even the mind), like a pointer on a Ouija board, lurches simplistic alternative. It is an ideal, the choice we make when we have no choice, what we might look like when no one is looking, what we might look like invisible.

  Taste is, finally, a series of first impressions, lodestar aesthetics that last a lifetime. A man’s character is his taste, and he is as much a victim of it as the pictures, foods, music, films, books, furnishings, and clothes he chooses are the subjects of his necessity. It, taste, may even be one of the famous drives, like sex or appetite. And it has always a quality of aspiration, its eye on the next step up forever. My mother-in-law would be incapable of furnishing a living room without slipcovers, and, for her, the development of clear plastic was a technological breakthrough, a hinge event in science, up there with washable mah-jongg tiles. Because we’re talking, in my mother-in-law’s case, about cleanliness, lifelong shmutz-dread, that first impression she must have taken as a little girl in Russia of actual biological traif, fear of the Gentile, some sense of caste deeper than a Hindu’s, a notion, finally, of order. Which is all that taste ever is. (I, who, like you, feel I have perfect taste, am no better. It ain’t the Gentile I fear, it’s everybody, everything. The germs on pennies, people coughing, the shit on dogshit.) Not the niceties and not notions gleaned from study, education, the great books. (The idea of an educated taste is absurd. You might as well speak of educating your need for shelter.) Taste can’t, I think, be heightened, sharpened. It comes with the territory, is fixed as birthmark. Indeed, it is birthmark, what the gypsy wishes for us in the crib, the customized, bespoke astrology of the self.

  Here is a little of what the gypsy whispered to me:

  Delicatessen and the midnight nosh. Lox, whitefish, sturgeon, rye. Scrambled eggs and onions, corn bread, butter. Cel-Ray tonic, Philadelphia cream cheese. Milk, chopped liver, corned beef, rolls. Cheesecake, coffee, coleslaw, fruit. (Because taste is also nostalgia, see? It’s love, staying up late, some stroked sense of privilege. It’s being where the adults are, boon and holiday and overhearing shoptalk. It’s unearned and not to be counted on and never to be expected. It strikes like emergency, but emergency in reverse. Someone has free passes, somebody has samples. It’s sentimental.) And to this day a freezer case in a deli stops my heart. Not just the speckled food, the flecked pastrami like a meat confetti, the bins of bagel and the sesame lint, but the little engine itself, like a Scotchtape dispenser, which pokes out your number, bespeaking order, crowds, prosperity.

  The Brooklyn neighborhood where my mother’s folks lived, the Bronx one where my dad’s did. I was raised in Chicago, we moved from New York when I was three years old. When we went back east in the summer it was to a bungalow in New Jersey. Since the time I lived in those neighborhoods, I’ve spent maybe five months of my life in them. But taste is nostalgia, first impressions struck like a coin, and no tabula is ev
er not rasa, and we’re all cases of arrested development with arrest records long as your life. So a sweet tooth for cities, for some hustle-bustle un-Nature, though I live in a house across from a park in a suburb sedate as Connecticut.

  The first grown-up books I ever read were Marion Hargrove’s See Here, Private Hargrove!, Elmer Rice’s plays in Pocketbook—Street Scene is the one I recall best—Kaufman’s and Hart’s in Modern Library, and Whit Burnett’s This Is My Best, quite possibly the finest anthology ever published. (Or quite possibly not, but only the first one I read.)

  The films—we’re getting on now; I’m no longer in the crib but am still impressionable; maybe I’m twenty; what the hell, it’s all crib—of Robert Mitchum. (Since this is an attempt to clarify my taste, there, right there, may be the paradigm for it. I have no patience with detective stories but will line up around the block to watch Robert Mitchum play Philip Marlowe. Mitchum in a trench coat is what men ought to look like. There should be his rumpled statues in our parks.)

  But, in truth, my taste has less to do with aromas and neighborhoods and Modern Library editions and the projected vision—that’s just the sweet side of nature, my suckered ethnics recollected in tranquillity—than it does with that bungalow in Jersey, my dual sense of myself as a kid midwesterner come east in summer and a would-be New Yorker laid over in Chicago the rest of the year. (I can’t help it if it’s silly. All pasts are silly.) My pals in New Jersey were from New York. They lived, they said, in the city. Their fathers were sign painters for Schulte’s Cigar Stores. They were cab drivers, elevator starters, or, orthodox Jews, they simplified their names and opened furniture stores in Boonton, New Jersey, miles from the minyan. They were cutters in the garment trade. They sold Ship ’n Shore blouses out of suitcases. And they seemed—and their kids, my pals, too—to me real, much realer than myself, than my father who made more money, who wore custom suits and traveled great distances in airplanes, who played gin for money he would not accept when he won but insisted on paying if he lost, who kept a room in a good Manhattan hotel the entire summer and came to camp—we called it “camp”—only on weekends. Who had orchestra seats he bought from the scalpers. Who picked up checks all around and took it badly when others didn’t. Who was, at last, a snob with a heart of gold who had no patience with the dross tickers (my father had several heart attacks between his first one and the one that finally killed him seven years later in low season in the good hotel) he suspected in others. He was this geologist of the heart, my dad, no alchemist but the true fortyniner, a panner of other people’s instincts, an assay artist. “Four flusher,” he’d say of this one or that, and never make his case, withholding details. So I looked for myself, New Jersey this side show, midsummer night’s dream. And came away with my taste for worried men. (Mitchum a variation on a theme, bulk a signal of grace, like fat men dancing.)

  What’s wanted then, unless voice or invention override, is this quality of nice guys in trouble, troubled. (I didn’t know this about myself, I wouldn’t have suspected it from my own work, but then that’s taste for you—the left hand that doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. It’s an emotional no-man’s-land of neutralized pressure, the head and heart weightless and the soul in free-fall, the will not so much sidetracked as simply not at issue, on holiday, gone fishing, if you will.) There is a distance between one’s slumbrous, unsuspected tastes and one’s expectations for oneself. It’s the difference between saying “I know what I like” and “I know what I like to do.” Something a little hypocritical at either end of things, the receiving and the working. Taste is circumstantial, there’s something windfall and passive about it. It smacks of the high-summer hammock condition, and we take our pleasures stretched out, our hands behind our heads. (While there isn’t a story in this collection I wouldn’t have wanted to write, there are several I would have wanted to write differently. And would’ve wound up perhaps with stories I wouldn’t necessarily have wanted to read.) This accounts for the allowances nearly all of us make, for our serious friend who devours mystery stories, for “Auld Lang Syne” and the Bert Parks fuss and the Super Bowl—all those stock gems of pop culture like some rhinestoned Las Vegas of the gut, our Whitman’s Sampler appetite. There is, that is, something peculiarly indulgent about our real tastes. Which is why our real tastes are so often, if we have any stake at all in the intellectual or artistic life, our best-kept secrets, right up there with our sexual fantasies and that yen for the salami sandwich at the gourmet dinner. Sometimes this becomes a guarded theme in some of our most demanding literature. All Aunt Rosa’s demon lover, Thomas Sutpen, in Absalom, Absalom!, ever wanted was a son, to be a family man is all.—Rosebud, Rosebud!

  What is wanted then is sadness. (We’re talking literature, not life. We’re talking Kenny Rogers’s chipped and country voice, not music.) This, it seems to me, is the absolute, ideal humor for respectable men. Sadness, mind you, not grief. Or grief under control, made courteous, deferential, the keening and lamentation practically inaudible, indistinguishable but unextinguished in the generalized white noise of the world. A sadness like a mourner’s button on an M.C.’s lapel. There for the weight, the sharp ballast it lends to tumult. Sadness like an intelligent conviction, like a badge of bearing—a short cut, you see, a short cut and a convenience. (So many of the characters in these stories are widowered—it’s a man’s world—so many are divorced.) Sadness like documents, the heart’s papers, what these characters show us or what we find on them at borders to prove they’re serious.

  And if the sadness is suddenly mitigated, or even retracted, so much the better. If it is mitigated by some unscrupulous vision—I mean when the deus in the deus ex machina is actually God, or when the character, acting on his own, sublimely lets go, or when the sadness is not repudiated at all but actively embraced in some higher emotional game of razzle-dazzle performance and shellgame dexterity, so much the better yet. (If the story can only hang on till the ending . . . Endings tend to be wonderful . . .) Isn’t reprieve literature’s last act anyway? Isn’t it some notion of acquittal or deliverance that off and on vouches for our condition and cosigns our lives? (It’s precisely the off-and-on nature of our visions that makes them unscrupulous, but now we’re talking life, not literature.)

  Anyway, most of the stories in this collection (though not consciously picked for these qualities, which I discovered afterwards, and this introduction a sort of apologia for criteria I had not realized were even operating) aim, consciously or not, for just this sort of justification of the character’s life. They conclude with an overview, however partial, and some suggestive illusion of the vision’s continuing momentum. Perhaps it’s a concession to realism that causes several of the writers to have their characters lie down, literally or figuratively, on deathbeds. (Bellow has a character in The Adventures of Augie March wonder, How do you keep the feelings up? Well one way is to make the protagonist terminal, foreshortening the time he has to sustain them.) It’s what Frederick Busch does in “Long Calls” and what Singer does in “The Safe Deposit” and what Gordon Weaver does in “Hog’s Heart.” But, in a way, it’s what most of them do. There is usually something summary and terribly final about the concluding rhetoric—the ringing long-range long view of language. Consider this piece of business from the end of John Updike’s story, “Gesturing”:

  The motion was eager, shy, exquisite, diffident, trusting: He saw all its meanings and knew that she would never stop gesturing within him, never; though a decree come between them, even death, her gestures would endure, cut into glass.

  Or Donald Barthelme’s “The Emerald,” at the point where Moll’s strange offspring asks its mother what happens next:

  We resume the scrabble for existence, said Moll. We resume the scrabble for existence, in the sweet of the here and now.

  Mavis Gallant’s “The Remission”:

  Escorting lame Mrs. Massie to a sofa, Mr. Cranefield said they might as well look on the bright side. (He was still speaking abou
t the second half of the 1950s.) Wilkinson, sitting down because he felt sick, and thinking the remark was intended for him, assured Mr. Cranefield, truthfully, that he had never looked anywhere else. It then happened that every person in the room, at the same moment, spoke and thought of something other than Alec. This lapse, this inattention, lasting no longer than was needed to say “No, thank you” or “Oh, really?” or “Yes, I see,” was enough to create the dark gap marking the end of Alec’s span. He ceased to be, and it made absolutely no difference after that whether or not he was forgotten.

  The same author’s wonderful “Speck’s Idea”:

  Because this one I am keeping, Speck decided; this one will be signed: “By Sandor Speck.” He smiled at the bright wet streets of Paris as he and Cruche, together, triumphantly crossed the Alps.

  As Schiff, in Busch’s “Long Calls,” on the sidewalk lies dying:

  Schiff heard himself snorting, half-naked on the sidewalk. He touched at his burns. The klaxons were close. Now he had to call his wife back, now, he had to. He had to tell her he knew what to do—save things, place long calls—in emergencies at least.

  Isaac Bashevis Singer concludes “The Safe Deposit”:

  Although he was aching, he felt a rest he had never known before—the sublime enjoyment of fearing nothing, having no wish, no worry, no resentment . . .

  And Gordon Weaver writes, “Dying, Hog looks into the glare of the sun, finds his death is not pain or sweetness but totality and transcendence.” Hog goes “into such light as makes light and darkness one.”

  One or two more and I’ll explain what I’m trying to mean.

  Grace Paley’s “Friends” ends when the narrator tells us, “He was right to call my attention to its suffering and danger. He was right to harass my responsible nature. But I was right to invent for my friends and our children a report on these private deaths and the condition of our lifelong attachments.”