by William Tenn
SHEP CRIES “FOR SHAME!
BORAX MUST BATTLE ME—
OR BEAR COWARD’S BRAND”
The candidate and his advisors, realizing there was no way out:
MIBS-BORAX DUEL SET FOR MONDAY
HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMP TO OFFICIATE
PRAY FOR ME, BORAX BEGS MOM:
YOUR DEAR BOY, ALIVE OR DEAD
NOBEL PRIZE WINNER GETS NOD
AS BOUT’S ATTENDING SAWBONES
Borax and ten or twelve cigar-munching counselors locked themselves in a hotel room and considered the matter from all possible angles. By this time, of course, he and his staff only smoked cigars under conditions of the greatest privacy. In public, they ate mints.
They had been given the choice of weapons, and a hard choice it was. The Chicago Duel was dismissed as being essentially undignified and tending to blur the Presidential image. Borax’s assistant campaign manager, a brilliant Jewish Negro from the Spanish-speaking section of Los Angeles, suggested a format derived from the candidate’s fame as a forward-passing quarterback in college. He wanted foxholes dug some twenty-five yards apart and hand grenades lobbed back and forth until one or the other of the disputants had been satisfactorily exploded.
But everyone in that hotel room was aware that he sat under the august gaze of History, and History demanded the traditional alternatives—swords or pistols. They had to face the fact that Borax was skillful with neither, while his opponent had won tournaments with both. Pistols were finally chosen as adding the factors of great distance and uncertain atmospheric conditions to their side.
Pistols, then. And only one shot apiece for the maximum chance of survival. But the site?
Mibs had urged Weehawken Heights in New Jersey because of its historical associations. Grandstands, he pointed out, could easily be erected along the Palisades and substantial prices charged for admission. After advertising and promotion costs had been met, the purse could be used by both major parties to defray their campaign expenses.
Such considerations weighed heavily with Borax’s advisors. But the negative side of the historical association weighed even more heavily: it was in Weehawken that the young Alexander Hamilton had been cut down in the very flower of his political promise. Some secluded spot, possibly hallowed by a victory of the raw and inexperienced army of George Washington, would put the omens definitely on their side. The party treasurer, a New England real estate agent in private life, was assigned to the problem.
That left the strategy.
All night long, they debated a variety of ruses, from bribing or intimidating the duel’s presiding officials to having Borax fire a moment before the signal—the ethics of the act, it was pointed out, would be completely confused by subsequent charges and countercharges in the newspapers. They adjourned without having agreed on anything more hopeful than that Borax should train intensively under the pistol champion of the United States in the two days remaining and do his level best to achieve some degree of proficiency.
By the morning of the duel, the young candidate had become quite morose. He had been out on the pistol range continuously for almost forty-eight hours. He complained of a severe earache and announced bitterly that he had only the slightest improvement in his aim to show for it. All the way to the dueling grounds while his formally clad advisers wrangled and disputed, suggesting this method and that approach, he sat in silence, his head bowed unhappily upon his chest.
He must have been in a state of complete panic. Only so can we account for his decision to use a strategy which had not been first approved by his entire entourage—an unprecedented and most serious political irregularity.
Borax was no scholar, but he was moderately well-read in American history. He had even written a series of articles for a Florida newspaper under the generic title of When the Eagle Screamed, dealing with such great moments in the nation’s past as Robert E. Lee’s refusal to lead the Union armies, and the defeat of free silver and low tariffs by William McKinley. As the black limousine sped to the far-distant field of honor, he reviewed this compendium of wisdom and patriotic activity in search of an answer to his problem. He found it at last in the life story of Andrew Jackson.
Years before his elevation to high national office, the seventh President of the United States had been in a position similar to that in which Elvis P. Borax now found himself. Having been maneuvered into just such a duel with just such an opponent, and recognizing his own extreme nervousness, Jackson decided to let his enemy have the first shot. When, to everyone’s surprise, the man missed and it was Jackson’s turn to fire, he took his own sweet time about it. He leveled his pistol at his pale, perspiring antagonist, aiming carefully and exactly over the space of several dozen seconds. Then he fired and killed the man.
That was the ticket, Borax decided. Like Jackson, he’d let Mibs shoot first. Like Jackson, he would then slowly and inexorably—
Unfortunately for both history and Borax, the first shot was the only one fired. Mibs didn’t miss, although he complained later—perfectionist that he was—that defective sights on the antique dueling pistol had caused him to come in a good five inches below target.
The bullet went through the right cheek of the Congressman’s rigid, averted face and came out the left. It embedded itself in a sugar maple some fifteen feet away, from which it was later extracted and presented to the Smithsonian Institution. The tree, which became known as the Dueling Sugar Maple, was a major attraction for years and the center of a vast picnic grounds and motel complex. In the first decade of the next century, however, it was uprooted to make way for a through highway that connected Hoboken, New Jersey, with the new international airport at Bangor, Maine. Replanted with much ceremony in Washington, D.C., it succumbed in a few short months to heat prostration.
Borax was hurried to the field hospital nearby, set up for just such an emergency. As the doctors worked on him, his chief campaign manager, a politician far-famed for calmness and acumen under stress, came out of the tent and ordered an armed guard posted before it.
Since the bulletins released in the next few days about Borax’s condition were reassuring but cryptic, people did not know what to think. Only one thing was definite: he would live.
Many rumors circulated. They were subjected to careful analysis by outstanding Washington, Hollywood, and Broadway columnists. Had Mibs really used a dumdum bullet? Had it been tipped with a rare South American poison? Had the candidate’s mother actually traveled all the way to New York from her gracious home in Florida’s Okeechobee Swamp and hurled herself upon Old Shep in the editorial offices of the Hairy Chest, fingernails scratching and gouging, dental plates biting and tearing? Had there been a secret midnight ceremony in which ten regional leaders of Masculinism had formed a hollow square around Shepherd L. Mibs and watched Henry Dorselblad break Mibs’s sword and cigar across his knee, stamp Mibs’s derby flat, and solemnly tear Mibs’s codpiece from his loins?
Everyone knew that the young Congressman’s body had been so painstakingly measured and photographed before the duel that prosthesis for the three or four molars destroyed by the bullet was a relatively simple matter. But was prosthesis possible for a tongue? And could plastic surgery ever restore those round, sunny cheeks or that heartwarming adolescent grin?
According to a now-firm tradition, the last television debate of the campaign had to be held the night before Election Day. Mrs. Strunt gallantly offered to call it off. The Borax headquarters rejected her offer; tradition must not be set aside; the show must go on.
That night, every single television set in the United States was in operation, including even the old black-and-white collectors’ items. Children were called from their beds, nurses from their hospital rounds, military sentries from their outlying posts.
Clarissima Strunt spoke first. She summarized the issues of the campaign in a friendly, ingratiating manner and put the case for Masculinism before the electorate in her best homespun style.
Then the cameras
swung to Congressman Borax. He did not say a word, staring at the audience sadly out of eloquent, misty eyes. He pointed at the half-inch circular hole in his right cheek. Slowly, he turned the other cheek.
There was a similar hole there. He shook his head and picked up a large photograph of his mother in a rich silver frame. One tremendous tear rolled down and splashed upon the picture.
That was all.
One did not have to be a professional pollster or politician to predict the result. Mrs. Strunt conceded by noon of Election Day. In every state, Masculinism and its protagonists were swept from office overwhelmingly defeated. Streets were littered with discarded derbies and abandoned bustles. It was suicide to be seen smoking a cigar.
Like Aaron Burr before him, Shepherd L. Mibs fled to England. He published his memoirs, married an earl’s daughter, and had five children by her. His oldest son, a biologist, became moderately famous as the discoverer of a cure for athlete’s foot in frogs—a disease that once threatened to wipe out the entire French frozen-frogs-legs industry.
Pollyglow carefully stayed out of the public eye until the day of his death. He was buried, as his will requested, in a giant codpiece. His funeral was the occasion for long, illustrated newspaper articles reviewing the rise and fall of the movement he had founded.
And Henry Dorselblad disappeared before a veritable avalanche of infuriated women which screamed down upon Masculinist headquarters. His body was not found in the debris, thus giving rise to many legends. Some said that he was impaled on the points of countless umbrellas wielded by outraged American motherhood. Some said that he escaped in the disguise of a scrubwoman and would return one day to lead resurgent hordes of derby and cigar. To this date, however, he has not.
Elvis P. Borax, as everyone knows, served two terms as the most silent President since Calvin Coolidge and retired to go into the wholesale flower business in Miami.
It was almost as if Masculinism had never been. If we discount the beery groups of men who, at the end of a party, nostalgically sing the old songs and call out the old heroic rallying cries to each other, we have today very few mementos of the great convulsion.
One of them is the codpiece.
The codpiece has survived as a part of modern male costume. In motion, it has a rhythmic wave that reminds many women of a sternly shaken forefinger, warning them that men, at the last, can only be pushed so far and no farther. For men, the codpiece is still a flag, now a flag of truce perhaps, but it flutters in a war that goes on and on.
Afterword
This is what I wrote about “The Masculinist Revolt” when it was published in my collection, The Wooden Star (1968):
I have lost one agent and several friends over this story. A woman I had up to then respected told me, “This castration-nightmare is for a psychiatrist, not an editor”; and a male friend of many years put the story down with tears in his eyes, saying, “You’ve written the manifesto. The statement of principles for all the guys in the world.” My intention was neither castration-nightmare nor ringing manifesto; it was satiric, very gently but encompassingly satiric. I may have failed.
1961, the year in which the story was written, was well before the hippies created a blur between the sexes on matters of clothing and hair styles. The first few editors who saw the piece felt that 1990 was a bit too early for such major changes as I described. My own feeling now is that I was subliminally aware of rapidly shifting attitudes toward sexual differentiation in our society, but that what I noticed as an anticipatory tremor was actually the first rock-slide of the total cataclysm.
I would like to add now (2001) these observations: Apparently I picked the wrong sex, but I was right about the nuttiness either of the two could develop as it wriggled in the throes of gender-political militancy. I further thought that I clearly portrayed in my male leads, Old Pep, Old Shep, and Hellfire Henry, three different kinds of utter failures as men, but I have been assured—by the equivalents of Germaine Greers and Catherine MacKinnons in my own circle—that these characters are to most women the most typically typical of men. So what do I know.
I was between agents at the time I wrote this—because my then agent, among the top ones in New York at the time, told me she’d rather not represent me if I insisted on writing such vicious trash. So I sent it on my own to A.C. Spectorsky (he was, I had discovered, called Old Spec by his subordinates!), the editorial director of Playboy to whom I had been introduced by the minstrel-cartoonist Shel Silverstein. Spectorsky was kind enough to tell me at the time of the introduction that he had so much enjoyed my story “Down Among the Dead Men,” that he had memorized whole passages of it. He kept “The Masculinist Revolt” on his desk for a year and a half, calling me up from time to time to tell me that he was thinking of asking me to have it expanded so that he could devote an entire issue to it, a la The New Yorker and John Hersey’s Hiroshima.
I almost went mad during this time; I priced Mercedes-Benzes up and down the island of Manhattan.
Finally, some assistant editor or other (or, possibly Hugh Hefner himself) happened to read the story and went in to Spectorsky with the comment that the piece was a ringing satire on the Playboy empire. The story was bounced back at me by the next post.
All right, maybe it’s not the stuff of immortality, but I still think it’s pretty good and pretty funny. And, for readers who are generous and will tell me they liked it, I have this to say:
Blame it on E.B. White. His short piece, “The Supremacy of Uruguay,” is ultimately responsible for most of my stories of this type. It showed me that you didn’t need individual characters prancing about if you saw a story as a kind of pseudo-history—something told at a remove by a reasonably objective historian. It occurred to me, immediately upon reading “The Supremacy of Uruguay,” that the pseudo-history belonged above all in the literature of science fiction. And then, later, of course, I encountered Olaf Stapledon’s novels and was privileged to see how a really great science-fiction writer managed the form.
These have been a bunch of miscellaneous remarks. But just one more. Henry W. Sams, the great English Department head at Penn State, gave me a job, a teaching job, the only job I’ve ever liked better than writing. He actually hired me as a professor, after he read two stories of mine, “My Mother Was a Witch” and “The Masculinist Revolt,” despite the fact that I didn’t have the necessary doctorate.
(Of course, I also didn’t have—and Henry knew it at the time he put me in front of a university classroom—either a Master’s degree or a Bachelor’s. I did have, as my brother Morton, a real professor, is quick to point out, a high-school graduation certificate and an honorable discharge from the Army.)
Henry Sams, bless him, was the only member of the Establishment I have known who was in permanent revolt against the Establishment.
Written 1961/Published 1965
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