Pieces of Soap

by Stanley Elkin

  And Jasper Johns’s flag series—White Flag like a plank floor, Two Flags like a wall of carelessly mortared bricks, and, for my money, the best of them, Three Flags, like a box for a board game. Well, I say “for my money,” but who’s kidding whom here? All that dough and no Hawaii or Alaska? Jasper Johns in a fallen world an easier target than Astaire or Garland, than Citizen Kane, than Gone With the Wind, though richer people take him more seriously, a desecration not of the flag but of money.

  (And once—this would have been in the middlish sixties, Baby Jane Holtzer was a Presence, People Are Talking About, Buzz Buzz and etcetera—I found myself in Frank Stella’s East-something brownstone—uninvited, unintroduced, it being a whimsy intentionally inflicted or a perverse, acceptable usage among certain groups never to make a devoir, as if one’s physical, accompanied presence in a place—He’s-with-Me understood—were a sort of moral vouchsafe or silent parole, like an obscure but flashy idiom of behavior redounding not so much to the credit of the schlepped as the honor of the schlepper, but no crasher either, given carte blanche like any real guest, special roaming privileges like a range chicken, to mosey, take it all in. I’ve never forgotten my first impression. Which was, there, surrounded by the astonishing furniture in the setlike rooms—chrome and leather, glass and steel—and several hundred thousand bucks worth of Stella’s frames and canvases, the paintings like patterns on bolts of fabric, the strangely shaped frames like exercises in bizarre carpentry, a realization that what I saw was visionary, but misunderstanding the vision, not recognizing in what was still merely the sixties that what I saw was basically only your expensive de rigueur restaurant decor of the seventies, eighties, and nineties, maybe even a first take on the higher mall motifs.)

  (And another time, years later, in Paris at the Rodin Museum, Stella confounded, inverted, in a different mode, on a different scale, some metrics of the monumental, translated really, their differences all there was to run them together in my mind and, miles from the ornamental now, beyond decor or the Wagnerian either, the Tristanic and Isoldic, heroism’s warp speeds, into cruel health like bloody organ meats on the redded-up floors of some human abattoir, those monumental sitters or loungers or drowners in their own stone, Rodin’s more-than-solid citizens, who can’t keep their hands to themselves, whose every pose—think The Thinker, think the vats and bone banks in The Gates of Hell, think Adam, think Eve, The Crouching Woman, I Am Beautiful, The Prodigal Son, Nymph Kneeling—suggests, whatever its title, not bodies so much as their functions. Rodin embarrasses finally. He embarrasses me. I get, I swear, the penis envy every time I see one of his improbably hung men, I want to sit in the laps of those ladies. Worse yet, and this is the war news, prefiguring, to me prefiguring—think of his statue of Victor Hugo—much of the totalitarian art of the last seventy-five years or so—Hitler’s, Stalin’s, Mussolini’s—the romantic, muscular graffiti of all those death trippers.)

  And, because a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do, The New York Times Book Review. Well it puts itself forward, bidding itself up and bidding itself up as the venue of masterpieces—the bourse of books. (Next slide. Quickly, quickly, for God’s sake!) Harvard. Grappa. Curries. The book of the month, the catch of the day. (Acquired tastes generally.) Rolls-Royce automobiles, Rolex watches, airports, the configuration of jet planes, all coach-class seating and any lavatory on every airplane. Into design now but, like the toilets on those planes or the tourists in those churches, anatomically incorrect. Talkin’ the truisms, talkin’ areas that ought to be taken for granted by now, basic highway design, say, or form-follows-function footwear; talkin’ the abhorrent, cryin’-out-to-be-filled vacuums. Like, why are the backs of TVs lopsided, or VCRs lost in a ganglia of connection? Why are cameras badly designed, unbalanced, weighted with topple and bristled with inexplicable dials and buttons as a camcorder or a fishing reel? (To my way of thinking, the last beautiful camera was the Speed Graphic.) How do you explain the anomalies? Why is it certain articles of men’s clothing (their hats, for example—I’m thinking of the fedora, I’m thinking of the Borsalino) make a higher fashion statement than women’s? Can anyone here say why cutlery is more handsome than dishes, stamps more agreeable to look at than coins, coins easier on the eye than bank notes? (It’s the focus of face, the joy of manageable scale.) Or why almost all jewelry, men’s or women’s, is unattractive? (Because it tries to mimic in metals or gems—in dead organics—natural forms, a vaguely frozen machinery of moving parts—insects’, the stars’.) And how, this late into time, this far into history, more than two dozen days now into the Mother of Battles (because I can’t concentrate, because I’m too old to be a soldier and too far away to be bombed, and because there are no priorities like the priorities of life and death and I can’t keep my mind on my business), does one explain the aesthetic downside of furniture?

  Compared to many forms that lend themselves to art or craft—drama, the novel, painting, the composition of music, even the interpretation of music, like, oh, say, singing the national anthem before the game, infinite other forms that seem to thrive, almost to wallow, in permutation, assuming new content, a mother lode of fresh ideas and differentiated styles as they’re taken up by one artist after another—it’s extraordinary how furniture is like most other furniture, as if furniture, alone among crafts, not only lived along the perimeters of some platonic ideal but had somehow actually managed to colonize it: an imperialism of the conventional. Except for a detail here, a detail there, inlay, marquetry, the pile-on of money, of pharaohs’ or aristocracy’s royal dispensations, a couch is a couch, an escritoire an escritoire. Beds resemble beds, tables and chairs are like tables and chairs. In domestic arrangements, form, bound to the custom cloth of human shape, really does follow function. The height of a table has to do with average lap tolerances. Chairs and beds are the hard aura of a strictly skeletal repose. Even so, something’s busted, I think, in the imagination of the furniture designers—I except the art directors of certain major motion pictures set in Manhattan apartments; talkin’ environment, the ecology of “life-style,” of plot and character, what the principals look like against the bookcase, propped among the furnishings; one must learn the script of one’s life and be able to afford it; because only in movies does furniture play well—all lamps and appointments, all cunning, edge-of-the-field doodad and inspired house-dower; one has at least the illusion one could live with this stuff, that it won’t vanish in a season like a Nehru shirt—something stuck in the vision, some sorcerer’s-apprentice effect, which permits to keep on coming and keep on coming with minimal variation, if any, what has come before. It isn’t anything elegant as highest math happening here, just lump-sum arrangement, ball-park figure, bottom line. It’s the fallacy of the assembly line, the notion that only costs get cut in such a wide sweep of swath. No, but really. Isn’t it astonishing that personality, surely as real as the width of one’s shoulders or the breadth of one’s beam, should be so infinite but attention to body so meager and hand-to-mouth that—chairs, say chairs, I know about chairs—there’s been less progress in the design of chairs than in the design of luggage. (I speak as a cripple full-fledged—chairs are a hangup with me—but set that aside.) It’s as if clothing came in a single size, pants like tube socks, every dress like a muumuu. And a rule of the chair seems to be that if it’s beautiful it’s rarely comfortable, if comfortable it rarely makes the cut to beauty.

  Indeed, there are so few contemporary “museum-quality” chairs one can almost list them—Marcel Breuer’s side chairs, his “Wassily” chair like a leather-and-steel cat’s cradle; Jacobsen’s “Egg” chair; Thonet’s bentwood rockers; Mies Van Der Rohe’s “Barcelona”; Saarinen’s molded plastic chairs on their round bases and tapered stems like cross sections of parfaits; all Eames’s ubiquitous plastic like stackable poker chips or the pounded, hollowed-out centers of catchers’ mitts, and as locked into a vision of the fifties as pole lamps, his famous lounge chair and ottoman that, like the Nehru shir
t, have become a cliché. A spectrum of vernacular chairs—soda-fountain chairs, directors’ chairs, black canvas camp chairs, those crushed—almost imploded—white or charcoal leather pillow chairs like soft fortresses or marshmallow thrones; some of the new ergonomic chairs that sit on you as much as you ever manage to sit on them.

  So I know about chairs and still have my eye out, never mind I’m sixty if I’m a day, for that evasive, lost-chord masterpiece of the genre, which, like love, I’ll know when I see like a sort of fate.

  Though maybe not. Not because I haven’t the imagination to cut my losses, or even the courage to finesse my life and choose to sit out the close of my days in desuetudinous splendor, but because it may not exist. The chair, my gorgeous prosthetic of choice, may not have been fashioned yet. Because oddly, strangely, ultimately, chairs are all attitude, molds of the supine or up on pointe, aggressive or submissive as sexual position. Occupied or unoccupied either, they are shadows, ghosts, signs of the been-and-gone, some pipe-and-slippers choreography of spiritual disposition, how one chooses to acquit oneself, highly personalized as an arrangement of flowers, and oh, oh, if one but had the body for it one would live out one’s days in Van Gogh’s room at Arles, eating up comfort and beauty and having it, too, there in one last fell binge of boyhood in the cane and wood along those powder-blue walls of the utile, of basin and pitcher, of military brush and drinking glass, of apothecary bottles clear as gin on a crowded corner of the nightstand, to be there on the feather bed, on the oilcloth-looking floor amid one’s things. All, as I say, you have to know is the script of your life. You wouldn’t even have to worry whether you can afford it. What, this poor Goodwill stuff, these nitty-rubbed-gritty YMCA effects of the weathered and flyblown pastoral? I could pay out my life there gladly, not so much a hero as a loving dilettante of idyll, using only the plain equipment of beauty. Substituting “the hard work of freedom” with the even harder work of contemplation, giving way to quietude, calm, doing the doldrums in study’s sargasso seas, all the light housekeeping of a stock-still ego laced with awe. There are worse character flaws than sloth. Nationalism, I think, patriotism, the too-forgiving love of tribe, maybe even of family itself. All the flaws of a restrictive loyalty, whatever makes us want to be part of a small idea, whatever makes us dangerous or allows us to entertain, even for a moment, the idea of a Mother of Battles. Much better to wait it out at Arles. Much better never to have seen the flashy dance steps from which we take our marching orders.

  And it’s the day before yesterday now. Joan and I are at the Shady Oak to see Mr. and Mrs. Bridge. And it’s five o’clock on Presidents’ Day, but that’s only irony. It’s the Rush Hour Show. Which is the one we always try to make. It’s half price at Rush Hour but that’s not the reason. We’re old, we’re old people, we get senior citizen whatever the hour. In spring and summer and some of the autumn it’s still light when the movie lets out. It’s important, that last bit of light. And anyway, though we know no one, we recognize everyone. Peers, birds of a feather, comfortable at the core as ourselves. We buy our tickets and go in. The lights are still up, enough to be able to see what I’m doing when I make the difficult transfer from my wheelchair to the theater seat. Joan folds the chair and parks it by the screen. “What could be better?” I ask automatically, but with absolute sincerity, as she slips in beside me.

  The lights go down and something happens that has never happened before. They’re playing “The Star Spangled Banner.” It’s for the war. An American montage like a little music video. American kids in American suburbs; transparent, billowy, slo-mo flag collages; purple mountains’ majesty from one shining sea to the next, fields, fruit—all Ma Nature’s starched summer dress whites. And they’re standing, they’re standing and singing! Card-carrying AARPers. It’s like, well, it’s like church is what it’s like. They hold, some of them, their hands over their hearts. I mean there they are, singing, or perhaps just lip-synching in the dark in some key of the common denominator, negotiating the difficult leaps and bounds of our national anthem. In the dark, singing to a screen as if it wasn’t Mr. and Mrs. Bridge they’d come to see but The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And not to any orchestra but to a sound track! And the Shady Oak is automated, so not even to a projectionist but to a machine. Which, by default, makes Joan and me the only audience at this odd performance. We’re embarrassed, but what embarrasses us, I think, is to be so far out of the loop. Hey, there’s nothing so convincing as an opinion.

  We can’t know this yet but G-Day is penciled in. Sunday, February 24, 3:00 AM Gulf time—two hours earlier at Arles—a ground war will begin that will last only 100 hours and make a name for this overrated masterpiece of a war. But still Saturday the 23, 7:00 PM Shady Oak time. When Rush Hour is winding down and the bigger spenders are lining up for the full-fare show. Who are on the cusp and, when the time comes, may or may not know just what it is they were standing for.

  STANLEY ELKIN, (1930–1995) was an award-winning author of novels, short stories, and essays. Born in the Bronx, Elkin received his BA and PhD from the University of Illinois and in 1960 became a professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis where he taught until his death. His critically acclaimed works include the National Book Critics Circle Award-winners George Mills (1982) and Mrs. Ted Bliss (1995), as well as the National Book Award finalists The Dick Gibson Show (1972), Searches & Seizures (1974), and The MacGuffin (1991). His book of novellas, Van Gogh’s Room at Arles, was a finalist for the PEN Faulkner Award.

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  “Performance and Reality” originally appeared in Grand Street, Summer 1983.

  “Plot” originally appeared in Sub-Stance 27, 1980.

  “Acts of Scholarship” originally appeared in Chicago, September 1987.

  “The Law of Average” originally appeared as “How Average Are the Fools in ‘Middletown, U.S.A.’?” in The Dial, March 1982.

  “What’s in a Name? (The 1987 Elizabeth and Stewart Credence Memorial Lecture)” originally appeared in Denver Quarterly, Spring 1987.

  “The First Amendment As an Art Form” originally appeared in Grand Street, Winter 1989.

  “The Muses are Heard” originally appeared in Harper’s, December 1988.

  “An American in California” originally appeared in California, February and March 1990.

  “At the Academy Awards” originally appeared as “In Darkest Hollywood: At the Academy Awards” in Harper’s, December 1989.

  “The Rest of the Novel” was originally an address to a 1990 conference entitled “The Novel in the Next Century” in Bellagio, Italy; and appeared as “The Future of the Novel: A View from the Eight-Seated Spaceship” in The New York Times Book Review, February 23, 1991.

  “Pieces of Soap” originally appeared in Arts and Antiques, November 1980.

  “A Preface to the Sixties (But I Am Getting Ahead of Myself)” originally appeared as the preface to Stories from the Sixties (New York: Doubleday, 1971).

  “Introduction to The Best American Short Stories 1980” originally appeared in The Best American Short Stories 1980 (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1980).

  “Foreword to Arthur Schnitzler, Plays and Stories” originally appeared in Arthur Schnitzler, Plays and Stories, edited by Egon Schwartz (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1982).

  “A la Recherche du Whoopee Cushion” originally appeared in Esquire, July 1974.

  “Introduction to Early Elkin” originally appeared in Early Elkin (Flint, MI: Bamberger, 1986).

  “Introduction to The Six-Year-Old Man originally appeared in The Six-Year-Old Man (Flint, MI: Bamberger, 1987).

  “Introduction to The Coffee Room” originally appeared in The Coffee Room (Louisville, KY: Contre Coup, 1987).

  “Foreword to Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers ” originally appeared in Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1990).

  “My Father’s Life” originally appeared in Chicago, June 1987.

>   “My Middle Age” originally appeared in TWA Ambassador, June 1981.

  “Why I Live Where I Live” originally appeared in Esquire, November 1980.

  “Where I Read What I Read” originally appeared in Antaeus, Spring/Summer 1982.

  “A Kinsey Report” originally appeared as “Alfred Kinsey: The Patron Saint of Sex” in Esquire, December 1983.

  “My Shirt Tale” originally appeared in Harper’s, April 1989.

  “Summer: A True Confession” originally appeared in Chicago, June 1986.

  “The Mild One” originally appeared in Esquire, June 1986.

  “My Tuxedo: A Meditation” originally appeared in Chicago, June 1986.

  “Three Meetings” originally appeared in TriQuarterly’s Nabokov issue, Winter 1970.

  “Some Overrated Masterpieces” originally appeared in Art and Antiques, Summer 1991.

  Copyright © 2016 Stanley Elkin

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.

  Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and Brooklyn, New York

  Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Elkin, Stanley, 1930-1995, author.

  Title: Pieces of soap / by Stanley Elkin.

  Description: Portland, Oregon ; New York, New York : Tin House Books, [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016020365 | ISBN 9781941040379 (alk. paper)

  ISBN 9781941040386 (eBook)

  Classification: LCC PS3555.L47 P5 2016 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016020365