Pieces of Soap

by Stanley Elkin

  The old activists in John Sayles’s story, “At the Anarchists’ Convention,” team up at one last barricade:

  And when the manager returns with his two befuddled street cops to find us standing together, arms linked, the lame held up out of their wheelchairs, the deaf joining from memory as Bud Odum leads us in “We Shall Not Be Moved,” my hand in Sophie’s, sweaty-palmed at her touch like the old days, I look at him in his brown blazer and think Brickman, I think, my God if Brickman was here we’d show this bastard the Wrath of the People!

  Well maybe just two more.

  Barry Targan’s English professor in his story “The Rags of Time,” having escaped with his tenure intact after a reckless fling with a beautiful undergraduate, calms down in his office:

  When she was gone he sat quite still and let the first terror she had brought in with her subside. He let fade the jagged collage of public accusation and denial that had first sprung through him, the tumult of fear that he would lose . . . what? Everything? But what could that mean? No. The loss he had sustained would be a small one, something he would hardly notice in his life as it had been and would be lived hereafter. There would be no more chances.

  At last he was empty.

  And, finally, T. Gertler’s “In Case of Survival”:

  Helpessness settled on Harold with the steam from reheated potatoes. He opened his eyes and breathed in homely odors. The kitchen offered itself to him: burners, counter, sink, dishwasher, refrigerator, table, chairs, all vibrating against yellow-and-white-and-silver-foil wallpaper. The salt and pepper shakers danced on the tile shelf above the sink. His wife, in a blue kimono, presented him with a bowl of chopped vegetables. He sighed. Questions of guilt and innocence fell away; he contemplated instead his endless and enduring helplessness. The knowledge of it soothed him as the kitchen dipped, shuddered, grew still.

  (Some of the best stories are not exampled here, not because they don’t fit my category but because they don’t save their rhetoric, as some of those quoted do, till last.)

  I’ve cited eleven stories. In three of them—Weaver’s, Singer’s, and Gertler’s—visions quite literally occur. In Updike’s (“He saw all its meanings . . .”), and in “Speck’s Idea” (“He smiled at the bright wet streets of Paris as he and Cruche, together, triumphantly crossed the Alps”), and in Busch’s (“Schiff heard himself snorting, half-naked on the sidewalk. He touched at his burns. . . . Now he had to call his wife. . . . He had to tell her how he knew what to do . . .”), and in Targan’s (the character knows everything that will happen to him and everything that won’t for all the rest of his life), something very like a vision takes over. In an eighth story, Mavis Gallant’s “The Remission,” the language of magic (“It then happened that every person in the room, at the same moment . . .”) controls what the characters fail to think and say, liberating them from their connection to Alec for all time. In Sayles’s piece, the narrator’s emotion is running so high as he thinks of the dead Brickman that his age practically drops away from him and it is “like the old days.” A tenth story, “The Emerald,” is itself a vision.

  In all instances (those quoted as well as those that have not even been mentioned) we are dealing, at the end, with a kind of rhetorical sacrament. We are dealing with solace, the idea of solace, art’s and language’s consolation prize. The notion that the character needs bucking up. And the writer begins to play for keeps, laying on a from-now-on syntax that suggests, and powerfully too, that the conditions that obtain will somehow manage to sustain themselves forever. It’s something a bit beyond the conventional notion of epiphany, inasmuch as epiphany is usually some sudden, fellswoop blast of insight. This is epiphany that sticks to the ribs. “He saw all its meanings and knew that she would never stop gesturing within him, never”: the emerald is told twice—just as the word never is repeated in Updike’s sentence and helplessness in the passage from Gertler—that what is resumed is “the scrabble for existence.” Alec, in magical language already quoted, quite suddenly ceases to be, chased by Mavis Gallant’s incantation, and the characters are not only consoled for their loss but freed. “Because this one I am keeping,” Speck thinks, “this one will be signed.” (Again the repetition.) So, through repetition, magic, visions, inversion (“He let fade the jagged collage . . .”; “Dying, Hog looks . . .”; “Because this one I am keeping . . .”), or series (“This lapse, this inattention, lasting no longer than was needed to say ‘No, thank you’ or ‘Oh, really?’ or ‘Yes, I see’”; “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 . . .”; “The motion was eager, shy, exquisite, diffident, trusting . . .”) the rhetoric lifts subtly away from the story, its attention no longer really focused on the character’s problems so much as it is on a kind of conversion, on bottom lines from the heart. There is a solace in finality and a grace in resignation no matter what one is resigned to—death, helplessness, the end of chance, resignation itself. But life’s tallest order is to keep the feelings up, to make two dollars’ worth of euphoria go the distance. And life can’t do that. So fiction does. And there, right there, is the real—I want to say “only”—morality of fiction.

  Not much, is it? It’s all there is.

  Taste is a gift of condition. In my own instance it is for the disheveled, what the cat dragged in, the rumpled in spirit, the soiled of heart. It is for Lily and Peter in James Robison’s story, “Home,” and Delia, their thirteen-year-old daughter who doesn’t listen to them; for Lucas, the mourning biology professor of Robert Henderson’s “Into the Wind.” For senile Dr. Cahn, with his crippled vocabulary, in Richard Stern’s “Dr. Cahn’s Visit”; for Luther Glick in David Evanier’s “The One-Star Jew”; and for the married man in Curt Johnson’s “Lemon Tree,” who dates a room clerk in Cleveland. It is for Elizabeth Hardwick’s Dr. Z in “The Faithful,” always true to everyone in his fashion. And for Markowitz, everybody’s mark in Norman Waksler’s “Markowitz and the Gypsies,” a story structured like a joke and written in the idiom of one. I can’t help it, these are my people. I too wish this taste of mine were not so one-sided. I wish it were for Henry James types, impeccable at tea, whose crumpets don’t crumb, nobles of the middle class who know their way around a foreign language and can parse the value of another human just by the way his pocket handkerchief is folded; but that, Officer Krupke, wasn’t the hand I was dealt. So I take my taste—which is always lazy, which ever, like physical law, seeks least resistances—and convert it to a kind of affection, to rooter interest (and it isn’t even, all of it anyway, self-pity; my own pocket handkerchief waves like a little trapezoid above the breast pocket of my Harris tweed), to some low-down snatch of the sentimental (or what would be sentimental if the writers weren’t so skillful) till all losses are reconciled, till, that is, they’re underwritten by their authors with the beautiful cool comfort of a language that makes it all better, the soiled history, the rotten luck. My job in all this, as I say, is simply to lie back and enjoy myself, my sympathy floating the surface of these lives like fat in soup, I know what the characters can’t, what probably even the writers don’t, believe—that it won’t work, that it can’t last, that inversion and magic and series and transcendence and saying something twice aren’t enough, that in real life they would have to print a retraction. But I’m easy. I love my remote virtue. I’m moved by my morality. I enjoy my heart.

  Yet some of the best stories in this collection don’t do that.

  Peter Taylor’s long story, “The Old Forest,” must surely be a masterpiece, but in a way it’s almost sociology, and a sociology that isn’t even operative anymore—the stiff, cold codes of a Memphis of the mind. Never mind, that’s all art, you see, and has nothing to do with my taste or anyone else’s either.

  And if I read Leon Rooke’s story, “Mama Tuddi Done Over,” correctly, it’s about a woman my sentimentality couldn’t touch.

  And, finally, two stories are included here because
, quite simply, they are so beautifully written—Larry Heinemann’s “The First Clean Fact” and William Gass’s “The Old Folks.”

  Some note should, I suppose, be made of the fact that Mavis Gallant is represented by two stories in this collection. That also was a decision easily arrived at. What was tougher was the problem of whether to include a third, “The Burgundy Weekend. ” We decided not to because we—Shannon Ravenel and myself—figured it might be construed as showing off.

  About Shannon Ravenel. Anyone who has been keeping up with this annual for the last couple of years must surely know by now that Shannon does all the work. She reads everything. Fifteen hundred stories for this year’s collection alone. And that’s at the inside. (The guest editor is only required to read 125 or so.) I know that I’ve seen everything I should have seen, that very little, if anything, has fallen through the cracks. One has pals. One is under obligations. One asks, “What about So-and-so?” One says, “I don’t see Whoosis.” “So-and-so was a disappointment this year,” says Shannon. “Whoosis is in a slump.” “Please show one,” one says. “Sure, buddy, it’s your funeral,” Shannon says. And goes to her files. Which are exhaustive. And hauls out So-and-so, and hands one Whoosis. But she’s right. She lives, breathes, and eats short stories, and I am privileged to have worked with her.

  FOREWORD TO ARTHUR SCHNITZLER, PLAYS AND STORIES

  If I could come back it would be as a playwright. For the amiability of the thing, for the backstage and greenroom nexus and the gag telegrams on opening night. For the parties and endless, hopeful toasts and generally companionable, even intimate, round-robin life. To be collegial and pally. To be thick as a thief and bussed by the showgirls. To be part, I mean, of a small idea.

  But not for the art. Almost certainly not for the art. There is, I think, a natural constraint on playwrights, on drama, the form itself. For one, there is the constraint of time. The play—and movies and music, too—is essentially a social form, invented, maybe, as they tell you in the sophomore anthologies, to be performed on the back of the church truck, or in the amphitheater on the Greek high holidays, but that was social, too, of course, and we know in our hearts it’s done today, as it may have been done then, for the night-out of the thing, for its dinner-and-a-show aspects and ramifications, its birthday and anniversary ones—our own high holidays, I mean—theater, or at least going to it, a moveable feast, the sense we have of occasion. And the playwright’s commitment is as much to his audience as to any fancy notion he has of any fancy notion. The buses stop running, the subways. The baby-sitter has to be back by midnight, and the eight-thirty curtain is no accident, I think, but some cozy tie-in with the deli guys and restaurateurs—been to Broadway? the West End?—possibly even with the baby-sitters. There’s this mutual understanding that the playwright will get you in and get you out in something under two-and-a-half hours—Eugene O’Neill’s long nights’ journeys into days were windbag exceptions; Nicholas Nickleby was—and this whole business of time limitation opens the play up to its vulnerabilities. Indeed, it becomes its vulnerabilities—a format for one idea, often enough drawn out even at that, padded as togs about some kernel of Eskimo; knee-deep in time as in mud. Or the constraint of structure—why who-done-its (but all plays are who-done-its, Oedipus no less than The Mouse Trap, King Lear no less than Sleuth) run years—when structure (scenes, acts, the explosive lines that bring down curtains, the frozen moments and dimmed lights that end an act) itself tends toward form, almost genre, as Westerns are a genre, as science fiction is, and theater entertaining in relation, like Westerns, like science fiction, to how it rings the changes, how it presumes to do it this time, turning on itself, on expectation, with a twist and resolution like some closing couplet slamming a door in a sonnet. Or an excuse—this now, not then, other playwrights, not Schnitzler—for “production values,” how the thing is “mounted,” its hi-tech arrangements and willful media mixing—how plays try to burst their bonds and become, well, movies. Or the other excuse, not the well-made play so much as the well-acted one, “a vehicle,” voice and carriage a substitute for—well, two ideas.

  But finally those two-and-a-half hours that constrict playwrights, that hole-and-corner them into convention—theater is a smorgasbord of convention; even musical comedy, which, when it works, is possibly the most satisfying theatrical form there is, if only because of the presence of singers and dancers with their immediate access to the communal lyrical, musical theater’s marvelous ability to dispense with logic and go with little or no preparation for the jugular emotions, even musical comedy has its clichés and conventions, here masked by movement and melody, the distraction of pure and pointless energy—to close them off from an exploration of character and situation and story and even language—astonishingly, “language,” high rhetoric, I mean, finds no natural home in plays—the only proper considerations of fiction, forcing them into a kind of “issue dependency,” those hundred six minutes that make a false virtue of economy and an ironclad, no-loopholes law of Chekhov’s dictum that any gun hung on the wall in Act I must by and by be fired. Such “economy” is, of course, a sort of penny-wise, pound-foolishness, a mean and mingy, wasteful thrift. Because it clips the wings of possibility and seals, mint and airtight, what ought to remain open-ended. The theater, one cannot breathe there. (I’m thinking of plays like A Man for All Seasons; I’m thinking of plays like Amadeus, where all that’s allowed is the argument, some shuttlecock notion of confrontation, the obsessive back-and-forths of accusation and denial.) And because, finally, in drama it is always the literal present tense. Even in flashbacks it is the present tense for, unlike the novel, plays do not have the gift of tense. In a novel or short story all half dozen tenses are available to the writer all together all at once, and not just within a single scene, or even paragraph, but, if he chooses, within a sentence, within a single clause from simple past through all the perfect future, a pluperfect perpetual calendar of handled time. Do that in a play and you have reminiscence, a set piece, a speech.

  One goes to the theater then—or I do—as to a museum, as a conscious act of secular archaeology. And reads plays like Arthur Schnitzler’s as one might read an old newspaper. For an amusing account of the types and times. For the nostalgia, that is. To find out about the shopgirls and young men (Flirtations); the married ladies and cuckold husbands, the poets and chippies, housemaids and actresses, enlisted men, noblemen, and whores (La Ronde); to find out about the professional people, the professors and doctors, the priests, the lawyers, the journalists, and political comers (Professor Bernhardi)—to learn about Vienna at the turn of the century.

  But for all that a roll call of Schnitzler’s Vienna, with its immense cast of characters, suggests operetta, what he gives us finally is not operetta at all. His playboys and young officers depict nothing if not the dark side of the Chocolate Soldier, and his view, if not tragic—it isn’t; it’s streetwise and cynical—is at least afflicting. He writes about the wide flaws and crabbed comeuppances of silly people. In a way, his tragedy is venereal—you pays your money and you takes your chances—brought on not by love but urge, not conviction but dumb, even reluctant, obstinacy, not individuals caught up in their beliefs but in their culture’s practices, all of which make Schnitzler a sort of consummate playwright, for his scolds and pulpiteering are pitched at a collective audience in the snug snuffbox, safe and social circumstances of theater, and feed off a fixed, governing idea—the dramatic conceit—convention—of hypocrisy. Audiences are suckers for hypocrisy. They love all the easy discrepancies, all ducks-in-a-barrel morality and potshotted shortcomings. They love, that is, to lick the finger that points at them.

  Although Professor Bernhardi is not included in this collection, it is instructive to cast a glance at it. In Professor Bernhardi Schnitzler is working the tradition of what can only be called “integrity drama.” The trick is to present a character in a tight situation and turn all the screws, bring on all the big guns of circumstances. It’s man-aga
inst-the-lynch-mob theater, the theater of choices, of the protagonist in Kiplingesque “If-ian” contingency, where a hero absorbs all the mean-spirited low blows his enemies can dish out, takes all those rabbit punches to his integrity, and remains a man, my son. These are crises not so much of conscience as of punishment and, in Professor Bernhardi, had not Schnitzler meddled with his own premises, would reveal a character so smitten with his martyrdom that the play might almost have become a set-piece of heroically smug dimensions. What saves it, I think—and what saves a great deal of Schnitzler—is the subtle reversal that occurs at the end of the play, a reversal that suddenly introduces a real, and far more interesting, possibility—that we have been duped into philosophy, fooled into philosophy. Startlingly, we are presented with the idea that Bernhardi may have been wrong. The doctor, back from a two-month prison term to which he’s been sentenced on trumped-up, antisemitically motivated charges that he’d physically interfered with a priest come to grant absolution to a young girl about to die in the septic aftermath of an illegal abortion—Bernhardi had intended to allow the girl to die in a state of narcotically induced bliss, the sudden appearance of the priest, or so the questionable premise goes, needlessly forcing her down from her high to die in despair—has an interview with Councillor Winkler, an administrator with the Ministry of Education. Bernhardi is loaded for self-righteous bear.

  BERNH: . . . all at once it seemed as though the broadest ethical issues were at stake; responsibility and revelation, and finally the question of free will—

  WINKLER: Oh yes, you always end up with that if you dig down to the root of things. But it’s better to break off before you get so far, otherwise one fine day it may happen that you begin to understand everything and forgive everything. . . . Undoubtedly you were not born to be a reformer—