Pieces of Soap

by Stanley Elkin

  BERNH: Reformer—? My dear sir—

  WINKLER: As little as I—We are not prepared, deep down, to follow up our principles to the final consequences—to stake our lives, if necessary, for our convictions. And therefore the best thing, in fact the only decent thing, is for men of our sort—to leave such matters alone—

  BERNH: But—

  WINKLER: No good results from meddling. What end would have been attained after all, my dear Professor, had you spared that poor creature a last shock on her deathbed? . . .

  BERNH: . . . I simply did what I held to be right in one specific instance.

  WINKLER: That is where you went wrong. If we always did only the right thing, or rather started off one day at breakfast time, without further reflection, to do only the right thing all day long, we should certainly land in jail before supper time.

  BERNH: And shall I tell you something, Councillor? In my place you would have acted exactly as I did.

  WINKLER: Possibly. Then I should have been—you’ll forgive me, Professor—just such an ass as you—

  Curtain

  This is the curtain speech and opens the play’s ends, as it were, permitting if not genuine ambiguity then at least a sort of theatrical counterpart—textual double take.

  Which—opening ends, fiddling dramatic form—Schnitzler, though I think his strong suit was fiction, may have had some real interest in. Despite the fact that his plays remain chiefly, well, charming and conventional, there is the feeling in Arthur Schnitzler’s work that he was at odds with his countrymen, with the Vienna that may have been, at least for him and at least symbolically, almost as much the city-state as the Venice to which his worn out Casanova returns under the humiliating terms of his lifted exile, a sense of odd man out, of exclusion, a rift as deep as the sexual one between men and women that pervades his plays, that, indeed, is largely the subject of them. Yet his plays are conventional—La Ronde is certainly an exception, if only for its pas-de-deux arrangements—and it is an interesting exercise to count the convenient encounters between characters in the entrances and exits in a given play. They seem, in their dependable comings and goings, scheduled as trains. The second act of Flirtations is simply an example.

  Christine is dressing to go out. Katharine enters. They talk. Christine’s father, Weiring, enters. All three talk. Christine leaves. Katharine and Weiring talk. Mitzi, Christine’s friend, enters. The three are talking (mostly about having to leave) when Christine enters. Weiring and Katharine leave together. Mitzi and Christine talk. Fritz, Christine’s lover, enters. Mitzi leaves. Fritz and Christine have, for this act, at least, a longish talk. (A little about the picture on Christine’s wall, “Parting and Return.”) Theodore, Fritz’s friend, enters. The two friends whisper together while Christine “busies herself at the window” (the stage direction) until she “is near them again” (another stage direction). The three talk together. Theodore and Fritz leave. Christine, “uneasy, remains standing, then goes to the door left ajar. She is subdued,” calls Fritz. Fritz enters and holds her. He says “Farewell.”

  Six characters appear in this brief act; there are seven separate entrances; two characters leave individually, two others exit together. While important information is obviously exchanged, much of the dialogue—since Schnitzler, not even excluding the deliberate experimentation of La Ronde, is essentially a realistic, even a naturalistic, playwright—is necessarily small talk, the Hi’s and How-are-yas of ordinary life. (And much talk of weather and, since characters leave as well as come on board, there is leavetaking, not only a Hello for each Goodbye but regards to the wife and all the polite conversation of primarily civilized people.)

  What we’re talking about here is plot by conversation, some Aristotle-grounded Law of the Off-Stage; life in the wings. (Here La Ronde is an exception, though, at least in reading the play, one gets an impression—all those asterisks where the good parts go—of staging by ellipses, of the partners going to the shadows to do their business.) Because what we’re talking about finally is melodramatics, soap opera, the peculiar pulled punches of all distinctly social art forms.

  And yet—And yet—And yet there is his fiction.

  Schnitzler’s use of stream-of-consciousness in Lieutenant Gustl, though certainly innovative, is, on the face of it, clumsy, his use of the “I” in his silly, blustering young officer’s interior monologue unfortunate, probably impossible (rather like trying to sustain in even so short a piece of fiction as the short story the second person point-of-view).

  How much longer is this thing going to last? Let’s see what time it is . . . perhaps I shouldn’t look at my watch at a serious concert like this. But no one will see me. If anyone does, I’ll know he’s paying just as little attention as I am. In that case I certainly won’t be embarrassed. . . . Only quarter to ten? . . . I feel as though I’d been here for hours. I’m just not used to going to concerts. . . . What’s that they’re playing? I’ll have a look at the program. . . . Yes that’s what it is: an oratorio. Thought it was a mass. That sort of thing belongs in church.

  People do not think to themselves syntactically; they don’t remind themselves—“That was funny a week ago when she was at the Gartenbeau Café with him, and I was sitting opposite Kopetzky; she kept winking at me”—of what they already know. The effect is not only unnatural, it is insane, as talking to oneself is supposed to be insane. Yet in Schnitzler’s remarkable novella all sense of the innate falseness of the point-of-view drops almost immediately away, and it is as if the author had invented for this particular character in this particular situation a diction and tense and viewpoint entirely, and distinctively, and perfectly, his own, as if Schnitzler were taking the affidavit of Lieutenant Gustl’s soul. Indeed, that seems to be precisely what he’s doing, giving the reader privileged information to another man’s character. The effect is extraordinary and very powerful, for Gustl, with his straight, humorless failure of perception and highfalutin’ notions of himself, makes a terrible witness and becomes, before our eyes, a sort of witless, unforgivable Falstaff, unregenerate and unforgettable. That this is a consequence of the very clumsiness of the point-of-view in hand-glove relation with Gustl’s measly character is almost certainly the case, granting the reader not only his inside information about Gustl (and advancing, incidentally, the difficult technique of the “unreliable narrator”) but a kind of licensed omniscience, and not only creating, within the small compass of a brief book, a memorable character but turning his voice into what is possibly a unique trope in literature.

  Schnitzler’s Casanova, in Casanova’s Homecoming, is an even greater achievement, if for no other reason than that he has a more interesting mind than Gustl and finds himself in a more interesting situation, Casanova’s problems being “real,” while Gustl’s are only made up, self-inflicted, the product of a locked-in imagination engined by an unrelenting egoism. But there are other reasons.

  The character of a great man, now aging, whose deeds are “by degrees passing into oblivion” is not an unfamiliar one. Movies have rendered him for years: broken-down sheriffs and old gunfighters, all the worn-out spies come in from the cold, all the drunk docs called to draw upon depleted skills in times of crisis, have become stock stick figures in the literature. What Schnitzler has going for him in Casanova’s Homecoming is the conception of using a legendary character—though this isn’t new either; Shaw had recycled Don Juan; Joyce Odysseus—with whom we’re already familiar, so that neither the protagonist nor the other characters have constantly to remind us how the mighty are fallen. We know because he is in our heads. What he has going for him further is that Casanova isn’t called upon in emergency and, further still, that his particular depleted skills are only personal, and that all Casanova wants is to have a last fling and go home. The “only personal” is, of course, the best and most difficult situation of all, not more valuable to literature than its great other half—going home, coming to terms, resignation and acceptance—not more valuable because, fina
lly, they are the same.

  If the cliché about novelists not making good playwrights is true, as I think it is in the case of Arthur Schnitzler, it isn’t because talent lapses or undergoes some radical sea-change as the writer turns his attention from one form to the other but because of something in the nature of the forms themselves—that, broadly and vastly oversimplified, theater is public and political—an actor’s lines are even called “speeches”—an occasion, while fiction, with its disregard for time—or at least length—and its concomitant gifts of extension and an almost holographic ability to project in the round, is essentially private and personal, an occasion, too, of sorts, but lonelier, no occasion at all, really. Which is why, if I could come back, it would be as a playwright.

  A LA RECHERCHE DU WHOOPEE CUSHION

  Paul Smith owns that mail-order company we remember, the Johnson Smith Company, candy-butcher of Joy Buzzers and Whoopee Cushions to the world. There is nothing Phil Silvers about him, nothing top banana in the patter or handshake. If he hadn’t been his father’s son he would probably be doing something else now. He is an inheritor and has about him, even after all these years, the vague, shuffling quality of the stand-in. When his brother, Arthur, retired in 1967—what can one say?—all this became his. And he can hardly wait to retire.

  “Why?”

  “Well, frankly, I have other interests.”

  “What?”

  “Philosophy.”

  “Philosophy?”

  “To some extent I’m interested more or less in keeping up with various things that are going on.” To some extent he is blowing smoke. He means it but would not be saying it if he hadn’t been asked. “I believe we’re in an evolutionary culture. What interests me mostly is what you might call positive motivations of people. In other words, inspirational, creative aspects, if you want to call it that, and since I’m science oriented, my feeling is it’s learning more about the unknown.”

  “The occult?”

  “No, not the occult. For me the most interesting thing about living is solving problems. When the dynamics of a business is gone—I don’t rate my ideas about life or about business very highly—I feel compelled to read and to try to learn as much as I can.”

  “Who do you read? What philosophers?”

  “Buber. Teilhard de Chardin. Proust. Proust isn’t a philosopher, but I read him. Wodehouse is my favorite author. My eyes are—”

  There is something wrong with his eyes. He blinks, rubs them. He carries two pairs of glasses and changes them frequently. Sometimes he wears neither pair, allows his eyes the air as one would walk barefoot. I like him.

  “What will you do?” I know that he majored in math and physics at the University of Wisconsin. “Will you take up your physics again, your math?”

  “It’s all changed. I don’t think I can even do calculus now.” He pauses, brooding over his ruined calculus. “We’ll travel. We’ll travel a lot.”

  He looks a little like Dean Jagger, the actor of executives, and he wears the calm, off-dark, handsome clothes of the conservatively dressed. He speaks quietly, in Jagger’s sprung rhythms, a flat, faintly archaic American at distinct odds with the copy he has written all these years for the Johnson Smith Catalog. Great Lakes English. For some reason even his description of what Johnson Smith sells—“hobby merchandise, unusual rings, self-improvement books, electrical and scientific kits, fortune-telling, magic, novelty jokes and tricks, practical gadgets, time-savers”—sounds anachronistic, the dead diction of his father’s faded spiel. What is there about the terms “hobby merchandise,” “unusual rings,” and “novelty jokes and tricks” that sounds, well, imported, faintly road show?

  Alfred Johnson Smith founded the Johnson Smith Company in Australia in 1905. Following some homeopathic instinct, he brought it to Chicago in 1914. Chicago was the headquarters of Sears, Roebuck, another mail-order house. He published his first catalog there and stayed on until he moved the business to Racine, Wisconsin, in 1923, and then to Detroit in the late thirties. Three years ago Paul Smith built a new office and warehouse in a small industrial park in Mt. Clemens, Michigan, so that everything could be on one floor. Always near the shore of one Great Lake or another, good, honest place, Green Bay Packer country, locatable on maps, and not just this P.O. Box or that Drawer Something Something of ordinary mail-order arrangement. Smith has a theory that a mail-order business should have hub-ness. Trust and patience—it can take weeks to receive what you’ve sent away for—diminish exponentially with distance. Johnson Smith has always drawn most of its business from Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Toledo, and Detroit—its freshwater-port nexus and the proximities of trust.

  The items are a blur to him, he’s seen so many, but he loves the catalog. A dozen exotic catalogs, opened and unopened, ride his desk like a convoy. Thousands, in love with their childhood, doing as adults that self-reflexive ancestor worship that is nostalgia, dote on their memories of the money they spent, the decisions made so carefully, the items chosen deliberately as first furniture. Smith loves the catalog and he can parse it like a scholar.

  “Almost all Sears catalog illustrations were woodcuts. This was before photographs and halftones came in. I knew most of the fellas who made the woodcuts for us. We’d send the article to the woodcut maker and he’d reproduce it. You’d be surprised. It would have more detail than a photograph. Most of the great woodcuts came from Chicago. One fellow in Chicago and one in New York were the last fellas to do the woodcuts. I think they’re still being made, but they’re prohibitively expensive. They cost twenty-five to thirty dollars when we stopped having them made. The trend was toward photography and halftones. Now this, I think, is the perfect way to illustrate an item. You show the item and then you show what it does.”

  We are looking at #2753 in an old Johnson Smith Company catalog—the Rubber Coat Hanger. I think the man still in his coat and leaning forward on his cane is related to the man whose hat is falling. For one thing, their hats are alike, and they both have canes. They may have injured their legs on an earlier visit. I don’t know who the fat man is.

  I know what he is, however, Smith tells me.

  “A lot of our practical jokes came from Germany. Before the war, our main source was Germany. The Rubber Coat Hanger is a German item. I would say all the items on this page are German.”

  “The Whoopee Cushion, was that a German item?”

  “I would guess that the Germans had it. Whether they had it first I don’t know.”

  Whether they had it first. One thinks of the Whoopee Cushion Race, of Whoopee Cushion Capabilities, Whoopee Cushion Gaps. Smith continues to point out page after page of German practical jokes. “There’s an element,” he says, “of sadism in almost any practical joke. A leveler. My way of bringing you down to my level, or at least pricking your bubble if you’re too pompous. To an extent humor is retaliatory. A leveler. To my mind I guess I’m not a practical joker.”

  German. Germany. German. The funny little men whose rubber heads you pressed to make water squirt from their cigarettes—all Germans. All the fellows smiling benignly into trick kaleidoscopes that blackened their eyes as they ground their vision against the belly dancer. All the sneezers, their eyes squeezed tight as children’s waiting to be shown a surprise, their faces distorted in the perfect way to illustrate an item, their mouths open in “ah!” and collapsed in “chow!!” And Germans too the scratchers, fingers mining their itches, prospectors of their own persons in a desperate pantomime of greed and relief. As German as the nose holders—four out of five in the illustration oddly left-handed—pinching their schnozzes like men fixing the crease in fedoras, their jaws like clamps and the line of their mouths in puey’s down-angled disdain.

  I read the copy—“We also have PERFUME BOMBS. These are identical with the ANARCHIST STINK BOMBS excepting that the odor from the Perfume Bombs is more agreeable than that from the Stink Bombs. Perfume Bombs can be sent by parcel post. Stink Bombs are not mailable and are shipped only
by Express”—stare at the illustration, for despite the lockjaw, closed-for-the-duration position of their mouths, these men are speaking. Dialogue balloons from their heads as in any deodorized comic strip.

  “WOW PU.”

  “-R-R.”

  “This way out. The street for mine.”

  “My. Oh my. What the—! smells so bad.”

  “SAY BOYS SOMEONE HAS A LIMBURGER HERE.” (This remark unattributable, floating balloonless over all, the thrown voice, perhaps, of someone who has mastered the secrets of ventriloquism on another page.)

  And from the sixth who walks among them. “That’s an awful smell, boys.” The speaker does not pinch his nostrils and he alone is smiling. I think he’s the anarchist. Why doesn’t he suffer? Has he been on the game so long? Has he realized that you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs? Does he like Limburger? Is the stink bomb an acquired taste? Whatever, there is a quality of “What’s Wrong with This Picture?” throughout the Johnson Smith catalogs, particularly the older ones, as if the lacunae are planted, a necessary touch of the awry and askew to get you to look twice.

  But all that was in the raw old days, times when Johnson Smith could call a spade a spade and worse. Since then the company has climbed down from true, gone soft on victims. Explosive matches and exploding cigars and auto scare bombs have given way to gift-wrapped pop boxes, and even the copy puts “explodes” in quotation marks. Illustrations make clear that all one is getting for one’s $1.59 is a sort of modified jack-in-the-box. (“When the dynamics of a business is gone—”) Nader’s Raiders are abroad in the land, and ride childkind.

  “Occasionally we’ll get a letter from a parent who takes exception to an item. We’ve dropped itching powder and almost everything applied to the skin or taken internally. Five or six years ago the Food and Drug fellow came through. . . . There’s been an increase in product-liability suits all over the country. Settlements are quite high. Until twenty years ago we didn’t even carry product-liability insurance. Now our premiums compare to a doctor’s. The company has become cautious. Our catalogs are submitted for inspection to the authorities. Fifteen or twenty years ago you could advertise indiscriminately. We subscribe to the Comic Code.”